How to Build an Empire (Taylor’s Version)

To Tom Ewing’s knowledge, only two prominent musical artists have publicly used the phrase “imperial phase”: Neil Tennant and Taylor Swift.

Tennant, the taller half of British synth-pop duo Pet Shop Boys, coined the term in his notes for a 2001 reissue of the group’s 1987 album, Actually. Ewing helped popularize it in a 2010 piece for Pitchfork. And Swift completed the trifecta last December, when she invoked the concept in an interview for the cover story that accompanied her selection as the first entertainer to be named Time’s Person of the Year. As the author of the piece, Sam Lansky, wrote: “She went full-throttle pop for 2014’s 1989, putting her on top of the world—‘an imperial phase,’ she calls it.”