The winter of 2014 was painfully cold in New York City. The sidewalks were frozen with slicks of ice, an inhospitable grid of accidents waiting to happen. But stamped across bus stop shelters and plastered across subway billboards, one simple catchphrase kept cropping up: Welcome to New York. The person behind this message was Taylor Swift, the city’s newly-christened “global welcome ambassador.” “Welcome to New York” also happened to be the title of the opening song on Swift’s fifth studio album, 1989, which was released to instant fanfare and chart success on Oct. 27 of that year.

It was a perfect marketing campaign: New York, capital of all things cool, meet Swift, America’s country-pop queen. By association, Swift made it clear she was entering a new pha…