Taylor Alison Swift is an American singer-songwriter. She is known for narrative songs about her personal life, which have received widespread media coverage. At age 14, Swift became the youngest artist signed by the Sony/ATV Music publishing house and, at 15, she signed her first record deal.
Her 2006 eponymous debut album was the longest-charting album of the 2000s in the US. Its third single, "Our Song", made her the youngest person to single-handedly write and perform a number-one song on the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart. Swift's second album, Fearless, was released in 2008.
Buoyed by the pop crossover success of the singles "Love Story" and "You Belong with Me", it became the US' best-selling album of 2009 and was certified diamond in the US. The album won four Grammy Awards, and Swift became the youngest Album of the Year winner.
Add Jennifer Vanilla to your ’80s alien-pop playlist
thefader.comAs Jennifer Vanilla, ex-Ava Luna singer Kye Grant can be a million things at once. They’ve described their extraterrestrial alter ego as “a noun, a verb, and an adjective all at once”; “an all-purpose, multi-use substance”; and an “entrepreneurial fantasy vessel and avatar-cultivation experiment LARPed into reality.” Glancing at these descriptors in 2023 inspires an automatic eye roll at post-post-modernism gone mad, but Vanilla’s music justifies the nebulous phraseology surrounding it.
The project’s unlikely origin story may not ameliorate the skepticism inspired by Grant’s lofty labels, but it does provide some depth to the persona: As the story goes, Vanilla is a “sexless humanoid alien” with a “quintessentially ’80s name (the decade of [Grant’s] birth)” who “opened a portal to the eastern coast of the United States” and used a “magical braid” to entangle Grant’s essence with their own.
The Jennifer Vanilla experiment has always used the ’80s as its control group. 2017’s This Is Jennifer, the listening public’s patchwork introduction to the phenomenon, was reflexively self-conscious of its debt to the decade, resulting in a flavorful but soupy meta-pastiche.
Castle In the Sky, Vanilla’s debut studio LP, still owes its tongue-in-cheek technicolor sheen to the false consumerist fantasies of the Reagan/Bush era, but the character’s scope is expanded here.
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