But what’s even more atypical is how that ubiquity is critically received. There is no demographic she does not tap into, which is obviously rare. If a record as comparatively dominant as 1989 had actually existed in the year 1989, it would have surpassed the sales of Thriller. The scale of her commercial supremacy defies parallel-she’s sold 1 million albums in a week three times, during an era when most major artists are thrilled to move 500,000 albums in a year. With the (arguable) exceptions of Kanye West and Beyoncé Knowles, she is the most significant pop artist of the modern age. If you don’t take Swift seriously, you don’t take contemporary music seriously. Every extension of who she is and how she works is (indeed) “so crazy,” and what’s even crazier is my inability to recognize just how crazy it is. But then I remember that Swift is 25 years old, and that her entire ethos is based on experiencing (and interpreting) how her insane life would feel if she were exactly like the type of person who’d buy a ticket to this particular concert. Why wouldn’t Justin Timberlake want to perform with the biggest entertainer in America, to an audience of 15,000 people who will lose their collective mind the moment he appears? I’d have been much more surprised if he’d called to turn her down. It actually seems like the opposite of crazy. Now, inside my skull, I am thinking one thought: This is not remotely crazy. Justin Timberlake?” Her surprise does not seem artificial. The display panel says the incoming call is from J TIMB. Just as she tells me this, her cell phone rings. Antonoff’s nickname for Swift is Dead Tooth, a reference to a minor dental mishap. Such as marketing.” She returns to her phone and starts scrolling for an old voice memo she sent to Jack Antonoff of the band Bleachers while they were co-writing songs for 1989. “But I would have gone to college, and I would probably be involved with a form of business where words and ideas are at the forefront. “I would still be involved with music in my spare time,” she says. I ask what she imagines might have happened if they’d never moved and if she’d never become an artist. When she was about that same age, Swift’s family moved from Pennsylvania to Nashville, to jump-start her music career. (It’s about a mother who wants a son but instead has a girl.) If she released it today, it would immediately be the best-selling YA novel in the nation. But her memory of the plot is remarkably detailed. I ask her what it was about, assuming she will laugh. Swift mentions that she wrote a non-autobiographical novel when she was 14, titled A Girl Named Girl, and that her parents still have it. We chat a little about Ryan Adams and a little about books.
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