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November 12 - November 23, 2024
She introduces herself with the words, “I was hoping it would be cool with you if I stood here and told you a few of my stories.”
They’re here to see Taylor sing her life, and hear their lives get sung.
I can’t stop thinking, I can’t WAIT until all these girls grow up and start bands of their own. So many kids falling in love with music as something they can be a part of. So many young fans hearing Taylor tell them that girls have stories, and these stories deserve telling.
In the 2020s, Taylor is a cultural obsession. She’s the messiest, most fascinating figure in pop music, a red-carpet celebrity whom supposedly everybody knows, the most public of artists, yet also the most deeply weird and mysterious.
A global phenomenon. An emotional agent of chaos. An activist in the cause of feminine loudness. An enabler of hyperemotional excess. A born rock star.
She will be so many different Taylors, way too many, and they’ll all want the microphone all the damn time.
She will find the drama in any situation, no matter how trivial or ordinary it might seem. She will change how pop music is made, heard, experienced. She will bait. She will switch. She will be a terrible role model for anyone trying to lead a calm and sensible emotional life. She will jump into every feeling with the certainty that it’s the last one she’ll ever have.
Taylor’s always a songwriter before she’s anything else, even when it’s the last thing anyone wants to notice. But she’s always had a unique flair for writing songs in which people hear themselves—her music keeps crossing generational and cultural boundaries, in the most mystifying ways. She sang to her original teen fans, yet she was never willing to stop there—she wanted the world to hear these songs. You could always hear that—she’d studied her idols, learned their tricks, learned how to put her own spin on them. Even as a kid, she had a scholarly sense of music history and a brash sense of
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Taylor’s hubris, her way-too-muchness, her inability to Not Be Taylor for a microsecond—it’s a lot. It’s totally understandable that she drives people up the wall.
You can’t fully appreciate her without appreciating the wide range of visceral reactions she brings out in people. It’s part of what makes her Taylor—you can always start an argument about her. Many people often find Taylor infuriating and exhausting. So does Taylor Swift.
One of the central paradoxes of Taylor Swift—and this woman is nothing BUT paradoxes—is how she writes songs about the tiniest, most secretive agonies, the kind you wouldn’t even confess to your friends, except the only way she knows how to process these moments is turning them into louder-than-life stadium scream-alongs.
The Eras Tour is a journey through her past, starring all the different Taylors she’s ever been, which means all the Taylors that you’ve ever been.
What is Taylor’s biggest contribution to the pop music landscape? What makes her different from any other young hustler who ever wanted to rule the world when she grew up? She has taken the pop girl and made her the center of music—not a genre, not a style, not a fad. She reinvented pop in the fangirl’s image. In the 2000s, when she began, a young girl writing her own hit songs about her own feelings was rare. Now that’s just what pop is.
Taylor loves to lure people in to read her songs autobiographically while always keeping her deepest mysteries to herself. People love to speculate about Taylor the celebrity, Taylor the myth, Taylor the tabloid staple. That’s the nature of the game, and that’s part of the fun—I love playing that game as much as anyone does (though not as much as she does). But the most fascinating Taylor will always be the one in the music. She’s the one none of us will ever understand—a jigsaw puzzle that turns out to be a mirror.
Taylor creates a narrator that many people feel like they know. When we talk about Taylor, sometimes it’s the Taylor in the song, sometimes it’s the real-life Taylor who wrote the song, sometimes there’s confusion between them, and sometimes she’s the one confused. It’s like The Divine Comedy, where we have Dante Poet (the author) and Dante Pilgrim (the narrator). Taylor Songwriter may or may not be Taylor Pilgrim, Taylor Lover, Taylor Pathological People Pleaser, Taylor Mirrorball, or Taylor Hi I’m the Problem It’s Me. She likes to keep cryptic about that.
She holds on to her conviction that her moods are the universe and expressing them is why the universe exists. A great conviction for a songwriter, if more dubious for the rest of us. But whatever she’s feeling, in any song, she throws herself in all the way.
She’s always presented herself not just a witness but the author in her life story, turning all her worst experiences into songs. Yet she’s always done it in a way that makes these experiences public property, to the point where she makes the world think of her as a character.
I know her much better as a songwriter than I ever could as a person, and have an infinitely deeper connection with her music. When I say “Taylor” I’m talking about the Taylor who creates the music, and the Taylor she creates in the music. She’s the one I actually know.
I compared her to Morrissey, my own personal teen idol of angst and melodrama. From a Smiths fanatic like me, the ultimate compliment. The Tay/Moz connections go deep—he sang, “The sun shines out of our behinds,” she sang, “People throw rocks at things that shine,” but they were coming from the same place.
Yes! I've always been a HUGE fan of Rob Sheffield's Tay/Moz connection and I'm so glad it made it into the book <3
I have wondered if the father who leaves in “Cardigan” is the careless man who leaves his careful daughter in “Mine,” and if he’s even the same father who sticks around and haunts his daughter’s miserable childhood in “Seven.” The traumatizing fathers on Folklore are a plotline in themselves.
Fans love their stories as much as they love the songs. Sometimes I even wonder if we keep going back to the songs because we just want to create more of the stories. But it’s more like this: we go to these songs because they tell us our stories. We tell our secrets to these songs, and they scream our secrets back at us. We bring our questions to these songs, the way Taylor asks the streetlights, “Will it be okay?” And the streetlights give her the exact same answer that Stevie Nicks got from the mirror in the sky, all those years ago: “I don’t know.”
Taylor has these kinds of fans because she’s terrible at settling arguments—what she’s really into is starting new ones. She has kept trying on different musical and emotional identities all through her career. She leaves her Old Taylors behind, but she never really gives up on any of them, so she just keeps collecting New Taylors. Country Taylor, Goth Taylor, Pop Glitz Taylor—she takes them all along with her, which is why listening to her albums often feels like eavesdropping on them while they argue.
She makes it sound like someone putting their all, every feeling, every love, every hate, into the one song they have in them, like this song has to contain all the other stories they won’t get to tell. This is my first song, my last song, she seems to say. I’m not holding back a thing for any next song. This is it.
She was still in her teens when she told Glamour, “I remember seeing girls crying in the bathroom every Monday about what they did at a party that weekend. I never wanted to be that girl.” It’s ironic because Taylor invented crying in the bathroom—nobody has shed more tears in more facilities since indoor plumbing was invented. She owns the concept, whether or not she’s done it in real life. Vowing not to be that girl was a guarantee she’d go on to epitomize that girl.
Please picture her at fifteen, making her way in the music biz, when most people figured she had hit her peak just by releasing an album. She was already romanticizing the woman she would become. Too scared to jump in? Least of her problems.
“All Too Well” isn’t a hit—not even a single. Definitely not one you’d hear on the radio. Just a deep cut cherished by her most ardent fans. After the Red Tour, she won’t sing it live again for years. This song is strictly for the hardcore, a note passed in secrecy from fan to fan, kept as an oath. If it’s your song, that means you’re in the inner circle—probably a hopeless case. You can’t get rid of it, because you remember it.
It set a new record as the longest number one hit in history, dethroning “American Pie.” (The courtroom was adjourned; the scarf was not returned.)
But each version feels like it’s all her, because this isn’t really a song about a boy—never was. It’s about a girl, her piano, her memory, and her refusal to surrender her most painful secrets, even when it’s tempting to forget.
Both songs with a payoff at the end: she’s so weary from the solitary burden of memory, she decides to stop lugging it. In the final line of “Dear John,” she switches from “I should have known” to “YOU should have known.” In “All Too Well,” she goes from “I remember it all” to “YOU remember it all.” The feminist rage is there in her voice, as she recalls a certain trauma, unsure if she will be believed or even taken seriously. Her older self checks in on her barely younger self and insists that she really saw what she saw and she really felt what she felt and it all really happened.
As another great poet of teen angst, Steven Patrick Morrissey, would say: there is a refrigerator light that never goes out.
Morrissey reference #2
her stories keep on telling themselves, long after she’s finished writing the song. “All Too Well” keeps evolving, expanding, beyond anything she could have imagined. It’s a song to get passed around until it comes back as something new. Maybe this thing was always going to be a masterpiece. But it can’t turn into a masterpiece until she tears it all up.
these songs aren’t really about boys at all. They’re about girls, the topic Taylor has pursued more relentlessly than any other pop artist in history. She’s written more songs about girls than anyone, even Paul McCartney, and like Paul, she has nearly no interest in male characters. The boy in a Swift song is usually just a mirror for a girl’s experience of self-discovery and self-figuration. He’s the blank space where she writes her name.
“Fearless” will always be my favorite, with those guitars blazing away. This is a girl who feels visible, safe, free to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free, a star even if her audience is just the boy and the rain. A classic car/girl rock anthem, the kind that actual rock stars were way too cool to write by then. It’s crafted with a pro’s precision, but she makes it sound like it’s all spilling out of her. “I’m not usually this way,” sings the girl who is always this way. She is the glow off the pavement.
Matt Nathanson, who later complained that she stole a line from his song “I Saw” for “All Too Well” (and she did, “I forget about you long enough to forget why I needed to,” good one), and declared, “She’s definitely a fan . . . and now she’s a thief.” Strong words, but maybe misunderstanding how the folk process works, because sometimes they’re the same thing—that’s part of how people pass on songs. Music, like poetry, survives by inspiring people to steal it, either in the way they hear it or the way they create it. Music dies when nobody steals it. Love is theft.
The arm lyrics were physical graffiti, a detail that most in the crowd probably wouldn’t notice, but one that made each show different. She had music history etched right on her skin. It was a fan gesture that signified the joy of being a fan—wearing your heart on your sleeve, without the sleeve. It was also a way of locating her and her fans in the wider story of pop music—they were all part of this tradition. The night I saw her on that tour, she wore one of her own lines: “May these memories break our fall,” from “Long Live.”
I would very much like to be included in this narrative
I relate more and more to Taylor the fan. It might be the part of her I identify with most. I identify as a romantic, as a weeper, as a believer in true love, all that stupid old shit like letters and sodas, as someone who hears the music in slamming screen doors and recognizes it as her life story. But damn, I really feel the kinship as a music devotee, someone who listens to everything, but always listens for herself in it.
See the slamming screen doors in Bruce Springsteen's "Thunder Road" and in Joni Mitchell's "Big Yellow Taxi"
She treats fandom as an art form. That’s why she writes the kind of songs she writes. Taylor the fan is the truest Taylor; everything else comes from that.
This fandom-as-art-form relates to Taylor's autotheory. As she writes and rewrites her self, she's engaging with other artists who have done the same and also engaging with her own fans who interpret and re-interpret her texts
Speak Now is a batch of conspicuously unedited songs; nobody in the room was saying, “You’ve made your point, let’s move on.” She rambles wildly, like she never did before or would again.
She was controlling her own narrative, telling her coming-of-age story in real time as it happened—strumming her fate with her fingers, singing her life with her words. But the guitar was also a shield. She arrived in the post-Britney era, a time when pop girls were relentlessly sexualized and objectified, when the bare midriff was a standard part of the image. The guitar was a barrier against the camera’s gaze.
Like most of the album, it’s a song about having secrets that you kid yourself you’re doing a great job of hiding, when they’re written all over your face. The woman in “The Archer,” she believes she’s making a bold confession, unaware that her intimacies are already obvious.
I kinda disagree with this interpetation of "The Archer" because the repeated "they see right through me" is a haunting, rising confession that she KNOWS that they all already know. It's a double meaning, though: she's transparent, exposed, can hide nothing. But she's also transparent, invisible, not truly known by anyone.
The girl in “The Archer”—she is full of secrets everybody already knows. When she sings, “I never grew up, it’s getting so old,” she thinks nobody has ever noticed this. When she admits that she has a history of turning her friends into enemies, she’s absolutely certain she is the first to mention it, as if her friends and enemies don’t laugh about it together. She cannot stop marveling at how skilled she is at hiding her feelings inside, as they dance merrily across her forehead and embarrass the fuck out of everyone else. She’s the archetypal cool Eighties friend who comes out to friends who
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It’s time the tale were told. She’s breaking the silence, confessing her weaknesses, revealing her terror of being trapped alone with herself.
No wonder Taylor grew up dreaming about writing songs like that, wondering, why can’t every line be “clouds in my coffee”? What if you wrote a whole songbook out of lines that sharp? She was that stuck-up chick. She wanted those chords. She wanted those clouds.
It might seem comical to picture the teenage Taylor fantasizing about chasing crooks and busting perps. But her detective daydream is about solving mysteries, like Sherlock Holmes, Nancy Drew, Olivia Benson, or Lieutenant Columbo. She wants to be the sleuth, the mastermind. Instead, she became the artist-as-detective, luring the audience into listening like detectives and searching for clues to crack the case along with her.
she tempts people to read the songs autobiographically while always keeping her deepest mysteries to herself. In classic Swiftian form, she wants to be both the mystery and the detective. It’s how she keeps her hold on us.
Nobody wanted her playing it safe. Nobody wanted to hear her second-guess what they wanted to hear. Her crazed faith in the audience was totally justified. David Bowie said that every artist’s fantasy was the same: “Crash your plane, walk away.”
1989 was her first album with a real sense of place, set in a New York City of constant romantic intrigue, where the lights and boys are blinding, a metropolis full of Starbucks lovers. She didn’t want to play the Sad Girl now.
The underrated “This Love” is her only solo composition, a hushed ballad where she gets down on her knees and sees her own ghost. 1989 is the first album where Taylor encounters ghosts. She’d be meeting more of those.
Does Taylor keep getting pulled back to “nice” because it embodies these fucked-up gender clichés? Is it the demand for female niceness, the way “nice” divides and defines women? Is she reclaiming a word scorned for its girliness? Fighting to liberate the twee? Or just making the best of a trite platitude? It’s a trinket of a word, a cheap piece of tinsel, yet she pins it to her lapel and wears it proudly.
It’s a gender-coded trap for any woman in the public eye, but she was sixteen, facing the world with an invincible Will to Nice. She was so aggressively the Nice Girl, she raised suspicions that this meant she was Not Really That Nice.
