It’s been quite a year for Taylor Swift.
In March, a nearly six-years-long battle ended: She announced that she bought back her masters from Shamrock Capital. (The private equity investment firm purchased them from Scooter Braun’s Ithaca Holdings in 2020, who owned them through Braun’s acquisition of Swift’s former label Big Machine Records in 2019.)
“To say this is my greatest dream come true is actually being pretty reserved about it. To my fans, you know how important this has been to me — so much so that I meticulously re-recorded and released four of my albums, calling them Taylor’s Version,” she wrote at the time in a letter on her website. “The passionate support you showed those albums and the success story you turned The Eras Tour into is why I was able to buy back my music.”
After lying low professionally most of the summer, by August she made more headlines. Swift hopped on her then-boyfriend Travis Kelce’s podcast with his brother Jason, to reveal her 12th studio album – The Life of a Showgirl – would make its curtain call in October.
About two weeks later on Aug. 26, she broke the internet with the news: “Your English teacher and your gym teacher are getting married,” she captioned the Instagram post of her engagement. (Later, we’d learn, thanks to her interview on The Graham Norton Show, Kelce popped the question the same day the pair recorded New Heights.)
Then October arrived and with it, The Life of a Showgirl earned the modern-day record for equivalent album units sold in its first week, ultimately spending eight non-consecutive weeks on the top of the Billboard 200 and taking the No. 1 spot on that year-end chart for 2025. Meanwhile its lead single “The Fate of Ophelia” spent eight straight weeks on top of the Hot 100.
But she wasn’t done. Swift released her tour docuseries The End of an Era along with The Eras Tour: The Final Show, just one day before her 36th birthday, which is today, Dec. 13.
So let’s celebrate Swift and all her accomplishments with 13 triumphant lyrics about life, love and perseverance from her catalog.
