Taylor Swift - The Life of a Showgirl (October 3, 2025) • Page 32

my favorite

 

Too inconsistent for me to call it my favorite album, but it has a lot of her best material

 

I think objectively her best is Folklore. But Red and Rep both clear it for me personally.

 

Folklore my pick for sure

 

Yea it’s folklore.

 

Legally, the GOAT Taylor album must have some bangers, and folklore has no bangers. Ergo, it’s Red.

 

Folklore then 1989 for me

 

this guy doesn't think August is a banger

 

“August” is amazing, but it’s a melancholy end-of-summer heartbreak song. I would never in a million years call it a “banger.”

 

Red is the best by the smallest of margins over Folklore, because it is a perfect time capsule of showing what Taylor was as a songwriter then, and where she was going as a pop megastar in the future.

 

update: just heard a clip of it and it's unsurprisingly boring. no surprises there. only one song called Ordinary worth caring about...

 

As a counterpoint, I submit:

 

I truly don’t care for “The Last Time” and probably never will. “Starlight” has not aged well at all.

With those two statements I would still say that Red is her magnum opus. At that point it was her perfecting the sound from her first three albums and giving us a glimpse of how she could handle the “pop” sound. The first 8 songs perfectly encapsulate the feeling of falling in and out of love with someone in your early 20s.

 

speaking of front to back bangers

 

Red is easily her most inconsistent record for me, with a good chunk of her absolute best material and probably more skips than any of her other albums.

It was the album that got me into her though so I'll always appreciate it for that.

 

I personally would’ve submitted invisible string as the headliner for me, but point taken. Still, both of those songs slap if not bang, and I’m content enough to say this many top tier slappers can get you goat status.

 

I typically think of a banger as a "big, euphoric, high-energy pop song," which is such a huge part of the Taylor Swift "thing" to me that I think her best album should have some of them. folklore, a deliberate downshift of an album, doesn't go to that place. Which is fine! It's a great record/probably still my second favorite from her. But Red has a little bit of everything that makes Taylor great, IMO, in addition to having most of my favorite songs. It's a more representative pick, in other words.

 

I definitely agree with the sentiment of what a banger is, I’m just saying I don’t need an album to have em to still be my favorite or the best if the songs are good enough.

Red probably sits 4th in my ranking, but ironically the big demerit of that record for me is the 3, well, bangers, which imo don’t sonically fit on the record. But I’ve made that point before so I don’t mean to re-debate it, just to emphasize where my perspective that a goat album need not go in that direction comes from.

 

I think folklore is her best “front to back, coherent, consistent vision” album, but my favorite songs are on 1989.

 

if red had like 11 songs it would be her best album but she loses me around stay stay stay. i think folklore is her best followed by reputation.

 

This is me. It's hard to say which one is my "favorite", but you got it right here.

EDIT: Red and Rep flip for third/fourth place for me.

 

Some of the songs on Red that people don't dig really just make that record for me. Taylor goes Snow Patrol? I fucking love Snow Patrol, so count me in. Taylor goes Mazzy Star, for a ballad that wears all the exhaustion of a long-distance relationship on its sleeve? Genuinely one of my favorite songs of hers. The one and only Taylor Swift song produced by Butch Walker, with arguably the best-ever utilization of Ed Sheeran on a song?! IMO, it was her best duet up until "Exile." And the oft-derided "Starlight"? Swooning, romantic pop bliss, if you can just ignore that it's about RFK's kid.

Some days, I love the back half of that album more than the front half. Today is one of those days.

 

The Last Time is her worst song.

 

Steve. Thank You Aimee exists.

 

Irrelevant statement