Entertainers of the Year: Taylor Swift

by Julian Spivey

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Nobody in the music industry has had as stellar and as historic of a year as Taylor Swift and none of it was really planned at the beginning of 2020. Swift had planned on touring behind her 2019 album Lover but like with most things in the entertainment industry in 2020 the COVID-19 pandemic put an end to that. But Swift didn’t just sit back and relax – she went to work creating songs with a different sound than anything she’d ever recorded before with a more mellow, indie-folk vibe and more of a third-person perspective than the mostly first-person perspective she’d used before. The resulting album was folklore, released as a surprise to her fans and the entertainment world on July 24. It immediately took the music world by storm going to No. 1 on the Billboard 200 and had many critics saying it was the best album Swift has ever released. When the 2021 Grammy Award nominations were announced in late November, Swift’s folklore was one of the biggest honorees gaining nominations for Album of the Year, Best Pop Vocal Album, Song of the Year and Best Pop Solo Performance for the track “Cardigan” and Best Duo/Group Vocal Performance for “Exile,” her collaboration with indie folk artist Bon Iver. She’s likely the favorite to win Album of the Year, which would be the third of her career and make her the first female artist to ever win the award three times, something only Frank Sinatra, Stevie Wonder and Paul Simon have ever accomplished. If that wasn’t enough to make her the talk of the music world in 2020, she surprised fans once again on December 11 with the release of evermore, a companion album to folklore, featuring the same type of sound. Evermore recently went to the top of the Billboard 200 making Swift the first female artist to ever have two No. 1 albums in a calendar year. 
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Taylor Swift used the sudden downtime in her life as a result of the pandemic better than perhaps anybody else in the entertainment industry and gave her extensive fan-base and the world two critically-acclaimed albums showcasing her ever-changing artistry … that is why she is one of The Word’s Entertainers of the Year.