Taylor Alison Swift is an American singer-songwriter. She is known for narrative songs about her personal life, which have received widespread media coverage. At age 14, Swift became the youngest artist signed by the Sony/ATV Music publishing house and, at 15, she signed her first record deal.
Her 2006 eponymous debut album was the longest-charting album of the 2000s in the US. Its third single, "Our Song", made her the youngest person to single-handedly write and perform a number-one song on the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart. Swift's second album, Fearless, was released in 2008.
Buoyed by the pop crossover success of the singles "Love Story" and "You Belong with Me", it became the US' best-selling album of 2009 and was certified diamond in the US. The album won four Grammy Awards, and Swift became the youngest Album of the Year winner.
Taylor Swift namedrops The Blue Nile on ‘Tortured Poets Department’ track ‘Guilty As Sin?’
nme.comTaylor Swift has namechecked the cult Scottish indie band The Blue Nile on a track on her huge new album ‘The Tortured Poets Department’.On the album’s ninth track ‘Guilty As Sin?’, Swift sings: “Drowning in The Blue Nile / He sent me Downtown Lights / I hadn’t heard it in a while / My boredom’s bone deep / This cage was once just fine / Am I allowed to cry?”‘The Downtown Lights’ was the band’s biggest song, reaching the Top Ten on the American Modern Rock Tracks chart in 1989, famously also the year that Swift was born.Listen to the two tracks in question below:Aside from having similar themes to Swift’s new album – navigating difficult relationships, the aftermath of heartbreak – the reference to the song also appears to be another nod to The 1975’s Matty Healy, with whom Taylor was romantically linked for a short period of time in 2023.Healy once told Vulture that The Blue Nile were his “favourite band of all time”, and he has named ‘Hats’, from which ‘The Downtown Lights’ is taken, as his favourite album of the ‘80s.
He has also stated that his song ‘Love It If We Made It’ is like “The Blue Nile on steroids”.Led by singer Paul Buchanan, Glasgow’s The Blue Nile have a devoted underground following, and are praised for their elegant, melancholic melodies and restrained, patient synth and guitar arrangements.
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