Taylor Swift has a habit of breaking chart records. Some have even described it as her raison d’être. Either way, the American pop and country singer is at it again with her new (old) album, Red (Taylor’s Version).
The new release – a complete re-recording of Swift’s 2012 album, Red, plus bonus tracks – became Swift’s tenth no. 1 album on the US Billboard 200 albums chart. In terms of equivalent album units sold (the current metric determining chart placements), Red (Taylor’s Version) fell just behind Drake’s Certified Lover Boy for the biggest opening week of the year—not bad for a re-recording of a nearly-decade old album.
The original album also topped the chart upon its release in October 2012 and stayed at number one for seven weeks. Swift is now just the second woman to have had ten or more albums reach number one in the US, following Barbra Streisand, who has 11.
Perhaps an even more impressive statistic in these days of boomer moaning about degraded attention spans is the fact that the ten-minute version of the Red classic, ‘All Too Well‘, has gone to no. 1 with a bullet on the Billboard Hot 100. According to Pitchfork, at 10 minutes and 13 seconds, it’s the longest song to reach number one on the Hot 100, besting Don McLean’s ‘American Pie’ from 1971, which clocked in at 8 minutes and 42 seconds.
A jaw-dropping total of 26 songs from Red (Taylor’s Version) are currently positioned in the Hot 100, which is the most simultaneously charted Hot 100 entries among women in the chart’s history. Swift broke her own record from September 2019, when she had 18 songs in the Hot 100.
