Who will take home Grammy's biggest prize?
The Nominees: Alabama Shakes | Kendrick Lamar | Taylor Swift | Chris Stapleton | The Weeknd
?Back in the '80s, artists like Madonna, Bruce Springsteen, and Janet Jackson would release blockbuster albums where nearly every track was a single and even the ones that weren't felt like they could be. Taylor Swift is too young to remember those days -- she was born the year this album is named after -- but she gets the idea.
For 1989, her big pop coming-out party, Swift largely ditched the one-woman singer-songwriter persona of her early country days and collaborated with Top 40 hitmakers like Ryan Tedder ("Welcome to New York"), Jack Antonoff ("Out of the Woods"), and of course, Swedish chart- master Max Martin, who had a hand in seven of these tunes. The LP debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 and spent its first 53 weeks in the Top 10 (and 58 nonconsecutive weeks in the top 10 so far). It’s sold more than 5.7 million copies in the U.S., earned critical raves, and inspired loads of think pieces on everything from "poptimism" to whether Swift is a good feminist.
