As the reputation track plays in the background, the singer unfolds a piece of paper to display a handwritten message reading: “‘Delicate’ Music Video World Premiere Sunday, March 11. iHeartRadio Music Awards.”
“Delicate” will be the fourth track off of Swift’s latest album to get the music video treatment. The clip for “End Game,” featuring rapper Future and Ed Sheeran (a.k.a., the other half of “Sweeran”), dropped in January, while the videos for “Look What You Made Me Do” and “…Ready for It” came in the fall.
If Taylor Swift’s sixth album was all about her fighting for respect, the money is on her side. According to Billboard, the singer-songwriter’s Reputation became the first album in the past two years to sell 2 million copies in the United States. The 2017 release, which sold 700,000 copies on its drop date last November, was pushed over the milestone last week. The last album to accomplish this feat was Adele’s 25 in November 2015, which was able to hit 2 million sales in just three days.
As Billboard notes, album sales have slowed considerably in the past few years. Released in 2014, Swift’s previous album 1989 was able to hit the 2 million mark in just three weeks, while Reputation took 18 weeks of sales. Only two albums released in 2017 passed the million-sales mark: Reputation and ÷ (Divide) from Taylor Swift’s BFF Ed Sheeran.
You'd think Taylor Swift had just posted a video of herself torching a Bible or dropping a flour sack full of puppies into the East River from the social media firestorm that erupted surrounding her latest release.
Instead, it's the "Reputation" singer and songwriter's acoustic version of Earth, Wind & Fire's 1978 Top 10 pop-R&B hit "September" released April 13 that's causing all the fuss.
Swift has reconfigured the original dance floor anthem into an introspective ballad built on banjo and acoustic guitar backing, and her vocal that emphasizes the song's lyric rather than EWF's "ba-dee-yah" singalong chorus.
"My Nana did not play Earth, Wind and Fire's 'September' in the house when I was growing up for Taylor Swift to come along and ruin it," wrote Julia Craven, who covers race issues for the Huffington Post, going on to describe Swift's rendition as "blasphemous."
"She has morphed one of our culture's greatest songs into one of them acoustic covers white women who frequent coffee shops love so much," Craven added.
The 28-year-old singer's album reputation was named as Billboard 200's Top Album of the Year, marking the third time the international superstar has achieved the honor.
The only performer to ever win it three times was Adele, who did it in 2015 with her album 25, and in both 2011 and 2012 with her album 21.
The Billboard 200 calendar begins in early December of a given year; the Grammy-winner first released the record November 10, 2017 at which time it debuted in the top spot, and remained there for the next three weeks.