What do an indigenous rock guitarist, a Norwegian opera singer, and Tchaikovsky have in common?
Taylor Swift
Welcome to The Influencers.
I’m Lisa Robbin Young.
I LOVE music and I love knowing the stories behind the artists that shape our lives. And now I get to share those stories with you! With the help of music historians, educators, journalists, and fans, we’ll trace back hundreds of years to find the earliest influences that helped make Billionaire pop sensation Taylor Swift who she is today.
Some will be obvious:
“Max Martin and Jack Antonoff are just huge names in pop production now.”
But who else will we find along the way?
“Yes and Rush and Emerson, Lake and Palmer”
Hop into the musical wayback machine with me as we create a mixtape for the ages. Together, we’ll climb Taylor’s musical family tree and find out…
Who Influences the Influencers?
If you ask any die-hard Swiftie, they’ll tell you that Taylor’s early interest in music came from hearing her Grandmother sing in church. Marjorie Finlay, Taylor’s Grandmother on her mother’s side, was a coloratura Soprano and a celebrated Opera Singer in Singapore and Thailand.
We’ll learn more about this fascinating woman later in the show. For now, listen closely to this track and you’ll hear strains of Marjorie’s voice in the haunting echo at the end of Taylor Swift’s tribute to her grandmother, the song, Marjorie.
Taylor Swift: Marjorie
I’m Lisa Robbin Young and this is The Influencers - where we connect the dots of popular artists of our time to artists of the past hidden in their musical family tree. As you’ll hear me say in every episode of The Influencers, there’s no way we can talk about every musical influence in the time we have. Visit WFIU.org/TheInfluencers if you want to see ALL my receipts: Taylor Swift’s tree, research links, playlists, and full-length interviews with our guest experts. I go where my research takes me to find the stories and connections that you might NOT know even if you’re a super fan. The stories that make this tree come to life and give us a bigger view of what happened in the past that made today possible.
But maybe you know something I couldn’t find! Share it with us on our website and it might end up in a future episode!
A singer, songwriter, director, and businesswoman - the first musical artist to become a billionaire primarily through their music - Taylor Swift is one of the world’s biggest selling artists of all time - and she’s just getting started! For us to get a handle on things, we’re going to start with a look at Taylor’s early inspirations, then her turn in the Country music world, and finally, her newer “Era” of Pop.
We want to see how young Taylor Alison Swift was inspired to become a musician and parlay that vision into the multi-media empire that she’s built in the decades since.
During her tour in 2011, Taylor shared with her audience how she got her name:
(QUOTE) I came home one day and my mom was talking to me and she said, how are you liking Chorus class?"
And I said "you know, I don't like any of the songs that we're singing in Chorus class. There's just one… that makes me love it. …this song, is probably one of the most fantastic, amazing songs I've ever heard in my life…it's called Fire and Rain by a guy named James Taylor.”
“It's really funny that you say that because you're kind of named after him.”
…and that was the first time I was ever told that I'm actually named after James Taylor. (END QUOTE)
Here’s James Taylor, singing that very song…Fire and Rain
James Taylor - Fire and Rain
By age 11, Taylor Swift was already knocking on doors on Music Row in Nashville, passing out her demos - cover songs of Dolly Parton and other women of country music, including Leann Rimes, who had a similar path to country stardom. Rimes signed a record deal and released her first single, Blue, at age 13. The tune from Bill Mack won Rimes a Grammy for Best Female Country Vocal Performance, and gave Mack a Grammy for Best Country song nearly 40 years after he wrote it.
Leann Rimes: Blue
Taylor: Tim McGraw
That was Taylor Swift’s first single, Tim McGraw. Taylor signed with Big Machine records as one of their first artists when she was just 16. She later revealed that the song that inspired her to pen that single was her favorite Tim McGraw song, Can't Tell Me Nothin’. Let’s hear it now.
Tim McGraw: Can’t Tell Me Nothin
Taylor: I knew you were trouble
Taylor’s 4th country album, Red, gave us the pop-oriented hit, “I Knew You Were Trouble”. But what she calls her first “official” pop release was her fifth album, 1989 - named for the year she was born. We’ll hear more about Taylor’s transition from Country to Pop in just a minute. And later, I’ll tell you about a love connection hidden in Taylor’s tree that connects her to Tchaikovsky. I’m Lisa Robbin Young and you’re listening to The Influencers.
This is The Influencers: a show that traces the musical lineage of today’s popular music. I’m Lisa Robbin Young. Today we’re looking at the musical influences of Taylor Swift. We’ve been looking at her Country roots. Now, let’s turn toward her pop transformation.
In a 2014 interview from On-Air with Ryan Seacrest, Taylor talked about why she made the transition from pop to country in the first place. Red didn’t win album of the year at the Grammys. Taylor was writing songs for her next album while she was on tour promoting that one. Taylor said that anything she wrote that sounded like 'Red' wouldn't make it onto the new album -- no matter how good it was.
Then she continued…
"With my last album 'Red,' I kind of had one foot in pop and one foot in country, and that’s really no way to walk and get anywhere. If you want to continue to evolve, I think eventually you have to pick a lane, and I just picked the one that felt more natural to me at this point in my life."
During the writing and recording of 1989, Taylor was listening to a lot of music from the late 80’s…particularly Peter Gabriel, Annie Lennox, and Madonna. In a 2014 interview, Taylor Swift called Madonna’s Like a Prayer “one of the greatest pop songs of all time.”
Madonna: Like A Prayer
That was “Like a Prayer” by Madonna.
1989 was produced with Max Martin, who also worked on Taylor’s album, Red, and Jack Antonoff, front man for the band, Bleachers.
“Max Martin and Jack Antonoff are just huge names in pop music production now.”
Kyle Adams is a professor of music theory at Indiana University and a fan of Swift’s music, though he doesn’t identify as a Swifty. He explained more about Antonoff.
“She is very good at assimilating pop styles and folk styles and EDM, you know, electronic music. A lot of that I think is Jack Antonoff, who… her producer and collaborator. I think he's very good at taking a bunch of different styles and, and assimilating them.”
You can watch my entire interview with Dr. Adams on our website, WFIU.org/TheInfluencers.
Antonoff cites “Call It Off” by Tegan and Sara as one of the songs that’s most shaped him as a songwriter. The twin sisters toured with fellow-Canadian Neil Young and signed to his record label in 2000. Here’s “Call It Off”:
Tegan & Sara: Call It Off
The Mynah Birds: It’s My Time (From The Complete Motown Singles, Vol. 6: 1966)
That’s “It’s my time” from one of Neil Young’s earliest groups, The Mynah Birds. They were a short-lived R&B group from Canada that signed to Motown in the 1960’s, but never released an album. The Mynah Birds included Neil Young and a draft dodger named James Johnson. You might know better by another name - Rick James of “Superfreak” fame.
One of Neil Young’s early musical influences is Link Wray, an indigenous artist who pioneered rock music. He’s ranked by Rolling Stone as one of the greatest guitarists of all time.
The hit that made him famous - or should I say infamous? - was the instrumental, Rumble. A song that was banned on several stations because they thought it glorified juvenile delinquency.
Link Wray: Rumble
Moving from one infamous artist to another, Taylor Swift left Big Machine in 2018 when her contract expired. The label was eventually sold to Scooter Braun - who sold all the rights to Taylor’s music masters and videos to a holding company that belongs to The Disney Family - for more than he paid for the entire music label. Taylor tried and failed to buy her rights back. So, during the pandemic, she began making “Taylor’s versions” of all her old recordings.
During this transition, Swift also continued to write and record new music, and her 10th studio album, Midnights, opened up a new world of old-school sounds. Again, Dr. Kyle Adams:
“...on the Midnight's album, there's a whole bunch of weird stuff going on there. Like there's this, you know, The electronica influence is huge on that album. she or Antonoff, one of them uses a Moog synthesizer. And that is a direct callback to, like, progressive rock of the 1970s. So then we get like influences from, like, Yes and Rush and Emerson, Lake and Palmer and all these, like, prog rockers from 40 years prior. I mean, again, anybody hearing a Moog synthesizer is going to, is going to pick up on that immediately. And there's the song … Midnight rain. So that's the one that uses the Moog really heavily… Other than her or, or Antonoff listening to a lot of that music. I don't know where that influence would have come from, but nobody's used a Moog synthesizer for like 40 years. It's like just disappeared from the pop landscape. So, when she comes out with that in midnights, I'm like, okay, somebody in her studio is listening to 70s progressive rock and they're like enjoying it and wanting to wanting to create that sound.”
Have a listen to the weird and ruminating, Midnight Rain.
Taylor: Midnight Rain
Kirsten Flagstad: When I Have Sung my Songs (Ernest Charles)
That was Kirsten Flagstad, with When I have Sung My Songs, an American art song composed by Ernest Charles.
Taylor’s Grandmother, Marjorie Finlay, was also an opera singer, she also spent nearly 18 months as the host of a variety show in Puerto Rico in the 1960’s. But it was at the advice of Edwin McArthur that she studied music in the first place.
Who’s this Edwin I speak of? He was the long-time accompanist and occasional musical director for Kirsten Flagstad, a noted Wagnerian Soprano who is one of only TWO Norwegians to get a star on the Hollywood walk of Fame. Figure Skater Sonja Henie is the other.
Kirsten made her U.S. debut at the New York Metropolitan Opera in 1935, but she was performing years before that. Kirsten came from a musical family. And it’s THIS branch of the tree that gets us back to Russian composer, Tchaikovsky, in a very interesting way.
Through Kirsten’s mother, we find a musical ancestor, Désirée Artôt [are-toh], a Belgian soprano (initially a mezzo-soprano), who found her fame in Germany. She was engaged at one time to Tchaikovsky. He dedicated Romance in F Minor to her. Let’s hear it now.
Tchaikovsky: Romance in F Minor, Op5.
Tchaikovsky’s Romance in F Minor, performed by Bruce Liu.
We’ll hear more about Tchaikovsky in a future episode, because he also has ties to Billy Joel.
I LOVE how music connects us all!
As I said at the beginning, we’ve only scratched the surface here. To unpack more of Taylor Swift’s musical family tree, including our references, extended interviews, and show playlist, point your browser to WFIU.org/TheInfluencers.
The Influencers is part of the educational mission of Indiana University and produced by the small but mighty team at WFIU Public Radio in Bloomington Indiana. Our Executive Producers are Eric Bolstridge and John Bailey. Special thanks to our Program Director, Aaron Cain, and Dr. Kyle Adams for their contributions to this episode.
I’m Lisa Robbin Young reminding you that you never know what kind of an impact you make on the world around you. Who influences you?
