Red is the fourth studio album by the American singer-songwriter Taylor Swift. It was released on October 22, 2012, through Big Machine Records. Inspired by a breakup that left behind emotional tumult, Swift framed Red as a breakup album that chronicles the aftermath of a failed relationship.
The songs on Red depict the complex and conflicting feelings ensuing from lost love. To convey those sentiments through music, Swift enlisted new producers to experiment with styles other than the country pop sound of her past albums. She produced Red with Nathan Chapman, Dann Huff, Max Martin, Shellback, Jeff Bhasker, Dan Wilson, Jacknife Lee, and Butch Walker. Regarded by critics as a primarily pop record, it incorporates eclectic styles of rock, folk, and country, featuring both acoustic instruments and electronic arrangements of synths and drum machines. Swift promoted Red as a country album, although music critics debated its genre classification and questioned her identity as a country artist.
Swift supported the album with the Red Tour (2013–2014) and seven singles; "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together" and "I Knew You Were Trouble" peaked at numbers one and two on the Billboard Hot 100 and in the top 10 in several countries; and "Begin Again" and "Red" were US country top-10 singles. Red topped the charts and received multi-platinum certifications in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. In the United States, it spent seven weeks atop the Billboard 200—making Swift the first artist since the Beatles to have three consecutive albums with over six weeks at number one—and was certified eight-times platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America.
Initial reviews of Red mostly praised Swift's songwriting for showcasing mature perspectives and sharp details, although the pop-leaning production divided critics who deemed it either bold or inconsistent. Red was nominated for Album of the Year and Best Country Album at the 56th Annual Grammy Awards. Retrospectively, critics have regarded it as a career-defining album that reflected Swift's maturity and pushed her songwriting to greater heights. Rolling Stone placed the album at number 99 on their 2023 revision of "500 Greatest Albums of All Time". Following a 2019 dispute regarding the ownership of Swift's back catalog, she released the re-recorded album Red (Taylor's Version) in 2021, and acquired the original album's master recording in 2025.
Background Taylor Swift's third studio album, Speak Now, was released by Big Machine Records on October 25, 2010. She wrote the album entirely herself and produced it with Nathan Chapman, who had produced both of her previous albums. Speak Now expands on those albums' country pop sound with a more aggressive influence of crossover pop that was also characteristic of Fearless (2008) and incorporates rock styles including pop rock, arena rock, and new wave rock. Speak Now registered in the 2010 Guinness World Records as the fastest-selling digital album by a female artist and was nominated for Best Country Album at the 54th Grammy Awards in 2012.
After Speak Now, Swift continued working with Chapman on her next album. By October 2011, she had written around 25 songs. Although executives at Big Machine felt that the materials were sufficient and congratulated her for finishing work within one year, Swift felt that her creativity was diminished because she had been repeating the same songwriting process. She sought to collaborate with other producers to venture outside of her "comfort zone" of writing songs alone. While Swift viewed the solo-written Speak Now as her statement as a songwriter, she envisioned her fourth studio album as a statement of her "thirst for learning". She reworked the new album while touring on the Speak Now World Tour from 2011 to 2012.
Writing and production Swift recalled working on her fourth studio album within two years—she wrote songs by herself and produced them with Chapman within the first year, and engaged other producers within the second year. According to Swift, she recruited producers with whom she had not worked, but whose works had instilled curiosities in her. While experimenting sonically, she prioritized conveying emotional sentiments through her lyrics over what particular sounds she should pursue, as with her typical approach. On songs that Swift co-wrote, she first presented her co-writers with the feelings she had been going through, played a rough version of her song on guitar, and asked for their ideas on ways to better convey the story. Each track's production corresponded to the emotion it portrayed, to which Swift attributed the album's "eclectic blend of music".
Production sessions took place in between stops of the Speak Now World Tour during 2011–2012. The first song that Swift wrote was "All Too Well"; during a February 2011 rehearsal of the tour, she ad-libbed lyrics written after a broken relationship while playing a four-chord guitar riff as her touring band spontaneously played backing instruments. Swift told Rolling Stone that this relationship caused "a few roller coasters", and she channeled the tumult into the songs. She continued writing tracks like "Red" and "State of Grace" and produced them with Chapman in her creative base of Nashville, Tennessee. "Red" was a critical point during the album's formation; Big Machine's president Scott Borchetta overheard the production and suggested a pop-oriented sound. After several failed attempts at the desired outcome, Swift asked Borchetta to recruit Max Martin, a Swedish producer known for his chart-topping pop songs. Swift travelled to Los Angeles to work with Martin and his frequent collaborator Shellback, who produced the songs "22", "I Knew You Were Trouble", and "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together".
Swift and Chapman produced the final version of "Red" with Dann Huff, and the three produced two more tracks: "Starlight" and "Begin Again". She engaged Jeff Bhasker because she was intrigued by his drum production, citing "We Are Young" (2011) by the indie band Fun as an example. Bhasker produced two songs: "Holy Ground" and "The Lucky One". She wrote "Everything Has Changed" with the English singer-songwriter Ed Sheeran and produced it with Butch Walker, and Dan Wilson co-wrote and produced "Treacherous". "The Last Time" is a collaboration of Swift with the Irish-Scottish band Snow Patrol: Gary Lightbody co-wrote and featured as a guest vocalist, and Jacknife Lee produced it. Swift named the album Red, denoting the color to which she associated the tumultuous and extreme emotions that she was experiencing—"intense love, intense frustration, jealousy, confusion". By the time recording began, Swift had written more than 30 songs, and 16 of which made the final cut of the standard edition; Swift was the sole writer of nine tracks as well as two tracks of the three new tracks from the deluxe edition.
Composition Music Red incorporates various styles of pop, rock, and folk, namely dance-pop, indie pop, dubstep, Britrock, pop rock, and arena rock. The arrangements of its songs include acoustic instruments, electronic synths, and drum machines. Calling Red her "only true breakup album", Swift said that the diverse musical styles were a "metaphor for how messy a real breakup is". Its first half consists of country and pop songs intertwined with each other; "22", "I Knew You Were Trouble", and "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together" have a pop production that incorporates electronic vocal processing and hip-hop-influenced bass drums. "State of Grace", "Red", and "Holy Ground" expand on the 1980s arena-rock stylings of Speak Now, while "All Too Well", "I Almost Do", "Stay Stay Stay", "Sad Beautiful Tragic", and "Begin Again" feature the country sound of Swift's earlier music.
Critics were divided on the album's genre classification. Jon Dolan's review for Rolling Stone appeared in the magazine's column for country music, but he described its musical foundation as "post-country rock". Some reviewers commented that Red blurred the divide between country and pop, while others called it a straightforward pop album with contemporary influences, deeming it Swift's inevitable move away from country into mainstream pop. Jon Caramanica of The New York Times regarded Swift as a "pop star in a country context more than a country star" and argued that Red was the culmination of a gradual progress since her debut album to expand beyond the limitations of country music. In his article for Grantland, Steven Hyden argued that Red's broad musical styles made it a country album as much as a pop or rock one. Some retrospective reviews labeled Red as country pop, pop rock, arena rock, country rock, and synth-pop.
Lyrics
Swift's songwriting influences on Red include the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda and the Canadian singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell. In the album's physical booklet, she quotes a line from Naruda's poem Tonight I Can Write The Saddest Lines, "Love is so short, forgetting is so long." She was inspired by Mitchell's 1971 album Blue for how it "explores somebody's soul so deeply". Several journalists opined that Blue also influenced the cover artwork of Red, which shows Swift looking downward with her face partially shadowed from her brimmed hat. In The Atlantic, Brad Nelson argued that Swift's songcraft uses details and narrative devices that resemble the styles of rock and roll musicians such as Steely Dan, Bruce Springsteen, and Leonard Cohen.
Using autobiographical songwriting, Red is about the aftermath of an intense breakup, detailing loss, pain, abandonment, and regrets. According to Swift, most of the album was inspired by an ex-boyfriend who later contacted her after listening to it and described the experience as "bittersweet ... like going through a photo album". Whereas her previous albums contain fantasy-driven narratives with happy endings, Red explores the uneasy reality of how a relationship can painfully end; Caramanica wrote, "Almost everything here is corroded in some way." Each song is contained within a fixed scene and narrative with defined characters, informed by the storytelling aspect of country songwriting.
Reflecting Swift's personal experience, Red details her recurring themes of love and heartbreak, but from a more complex perspective gained from her early-20s adulthood. Nelson wrote that Red sees Swift no longer putting the blame solely on ex-lovers and instead viewing heartbreak with "ambiguity", while Emily Yoshida from Vulture opined that there are moments of vulnerability that "feel wise beyond the 22 years Swift was". There are allusions to sexuality on tracks like "State of Grace", "Treacherous", and "Stay Stay Stay"; writing for NPR, J. English regarded this new theme as Swift's coming of age and her first-hand experience and exploration in womanhood, a departure from her past albums which had hinted at sex but from an outsider's perspective.
Songs