Taylor Swift Is The First Musician Ever To Be Named TIME’s Person Of The Year

Every year since 1927, TIME magazine, an institution that still exists, names its Person Of The Year — the one figure who has influenced the year’s events more than any. (In 1927, it was Charles Lindbergh, and that would not be the last time a fascist sympathizer earned the distinction.) Sometimes, TIME gets cute, giving Person Of The Year to groups of people or vague concepts like the Computer (1982) or the Endangered Earth (1988). This morning, TIME named Taylor Swift as its Person Of The Year. It’s the first time that a musician has ever earned that distinction.

There are some caveats here. First of all, Taylor Swift has already appeared on a Person Of The Year cover. In 2017, she was on the magazine’s cover as one of the Silence Breakers — the group of women who called out men for abuses. (The story was mostly centered around the #MeToo movement, and Swift was in there for winning her legal battle against a DJ who’d groped her.) Bono has also been a Person Of The Year, sort of. In 2005, he and Bill and Melinda Gates were on there as the Good Samaritans. (The history of TIME‘s Person Of The Year is, among other things, a fascinating glimpse at the evolution of middlebrow American insanity.) Occasional EDM producer Elon Musk was Person Of The Year in 2021, and Bill Clinton, who plays the saxophone, is a two-time POTY, but those guys are more famous for non-musical reasons. Also, TIME selected “You” as Person Of The Year in 2006, and maybe you play an instrument, I don’t know.

Anyway. Taylor Swift. TIME unveiled its Person Of The Year shortlist a couple of days ago, and Swift beat out Hollywood strikers, Xi Jinping, Sam Altman, the Trump prosecutors, Barbie, Vladimir Putin, King Charles III, and Jerome Powell. It’s wild to think that Taylor Swift has earned a distinction that eluded Elvis Presley, the Beatles, and Michael Jackson, but that’s where we are now. Taylor Swift is currently the world’s most successful musician by orders of magnitude, and her Eras Tour rivals Barbenheimer weekend as the year’s biggest pop-cultural event. She’s a billionaire now, and her fans still comport themselves as a cult. She’s an avatar of some new monoculture. It makes sense.

Taylor Swift being named Person Of The Year also means that we have a new Taylor Swift magazine profile, and that hasn’t happened in a long time. In the accompanying feature, Swift tells writer Sam Lansky about training for her Eras Tour: “Every day, I would run on the treadmill, singing the entire set list out loud — fast for fast songs, and a jog or a fast walk for slow songs… Then I had three months of dance training, because I wanted to get it in my bones. I wanted to be so over-rehearsed that I could be silly with the fans, and not lose my train of thought.” She also talks about recovering from those marathon shows: “I can barely speak because I’ve been singing for three shows straight. Every time I take a step, my feet go crunch, crunch, crunch from dancing in heels.”

On the notoriously expensive and hard-to-get Eras Tour tickets, Swift says, “[Fans] had to work really hard to get the tickets. I wanted to play a show that was longer than they ever thought it would be, because that makes me feel good leaving the stadium.” Elsewhere in the story, Swift addresses things like her long feud with Kanye West. In the wake of the famous Kim Kardashian phone-call leak, Swift says that she thought it was “a career death… Make no mistake — my career was taken away from me.” She continues:

You have a fully manufactured frame job, in an illegally recorded phone call, which Kim Kardashian edited and then put out to say to everyone that I was a liar. That took me down psychologically to a place I’ve never been before. I moved to a foreign country. I didn’t leave a rental house for a year. I was afraid to get on phone calls. I pushed away most people in my life because I didn’t trust anyone anymore. I went down really, really hard… I thought that moment of backlash was going to define me negatively for the rest of my life.

On her feuds with West and Scooter Braun, Swift says, “There’s no point in actively trying to quote unquote defeat your enemies. Trash takes itself out every single time.” She also talks a bit about her new relationship with Travis Kelce:

This all started when Travis very adorably put me on blast on his podcast, which I thought was metal as hell. We started hanging out right after that. So we actually had a significant amount of time that no one knew, which I’m grateful for, because we got to get to know each other. By the time I went to that first game, we were a couple. I think some people think that they saw our first date at that game? We would never be psychotic enough to hard launch a first date.

The TIME features includes secondary quotes from luminaries like Shonda Rhimes, Greta Gerwig, Stevie Nicks, Kenny Chesney, and Phoebe Bridgers, who says, “Beatlemania and Thriller have nothing on these shows.” You can read the full feature here.