click this link tell the same stories of America for different generations. Taylor Swift is the millennial Bruce Springsteen. If there were any doubts concerning this, they should have been dispelled by her most recent discharge: the haunting Folklore, which filter systems the exact forms of story-songs Springsteen excels at through Swift’s contemporary, orchestral-pop aesthetic. The album offers been one of the best-received of her career, but, the response to essentially everything she’s produced since her 2010 album Speak Now has involved critics grudgingly getting dragged toward having respect on her behalf skills. The overlaps between millennial Swift (30 and born in 1989) and baby boomer Springsteen (70 and born in 1949) - both of whom are among the best songwriters alive right now - are significant beyond their songwriting prowess. But comparisons, by necessity, must start there. Both musicians love songs about a kind of white Americana that’s never really existed but that the central personas of which feel compelled to chase anyhow. They use those tunes to inform stories about those people and the places they live. They’re terrifically good at wordplay.

Both are fascinated by the techniques adolescence and thoughts of adolescence continue to have incredible power for adults. Both are perfect at crafting bridges that consider already good songs to some other level. And both compose music offering fictional people whose lives are sketched in via small, intimate details that stand in for their whole selves. Similarly, the starting lines of Swift’s “All As well Well” (“I walked through the door with you, the air flow was cold / but something ‘bout it felt like home in some way and I / remaining my scarf there at your sister’s house / and you still first got it in your drawer actually now”) tell you everything concerning this doomed relationship and the nostalgia both people involved in it still experience, compressed right into a tiny little stanza. Springsteen released “Thunder Street” when he was 25; Swift released “All Too Well” when she was 22. Both songs continue steadily to stand as touchstones for who the artists were at that time in their lives.

But leave this comparison apart for a moment. Springsteen and Swift each entered the music market as young wunderkinds with lots to prove. Springsteen’s first album - the loose and rambling Greetings from Asbury Recreation area, N.J. He was expected to become an acoustic folk singer in the vein of Bob Dylan, at the same time when the music industry was uniquely preoccupied with locating the “following” Bob Dylan. Springsteen quickly flaunted those anticipations, assembling a group of musicians who would go on to be known as the E Road Band, in the name of creating a sound that captured an enormous, orchestral blast of rock. Springsteen would finally perfect this audio on his third album, 1975’s Born to perform, and he’s been a worldwide superstar ever since, even years after achieving his pinnacle with 1984’s Born in america. Swift’s rise was somewhat more meteoric. She released her debut album, Taylor Swift, when she was just 16, and it highlighted songs that she wrote as a freshman in high school.

Swift broke in to the industry via nation music, and her country-ish second album, 2008’s Fearless, won her the Grammy for Album of the entire year. Just simply because Springsteen shirked folk in the name of rock, Swift’s sound quickly shifted away from the girl-with-a-guitar nation archetype and even more toward pop. By her 4th album, 2012’s Crimson, she had generally left country music behind. A fun game: If you fall into line Swift and Springsteen’s album releases approximately by how old they were when they documented them, you’ll find surprisingly similar career trajectories. The two artists’ backgrounds are quite different, which may explain the different ways that they’ve understood American political divides. Springsteen grew up in a blue-collar family in NJ, while Swift may be the child of a former Merrill Lynch stockbroker who could afford to go the entire family members to Nashville, Tennessee, when his child showed a talent for songwriting.