Heartbreak Is the National Anthem: How Taylor Swift Reinvented Pop Music

by Rob Sheffield

What makes Folklore her best album? It isn’t just “August.” Or even “Mirrorball.” It’s the way the songs keep evolving the longer you live with them. It’s the way she builds her most labyrinthine fictional universe. The way “This Is Me Trying” shrugs off the despair with the hilariously tight-lipped punch line “I have a lot of regrets about that.” The way your ears perk up at the piano intro to “The Last Great American Dynasty,” then you realize this is the kind of album where the closest thing to a lighten-the-mood bop is the one about the lonesome widow who spends her nights pacing the rocks on the beach, after her party guests have drunk all her champagne and left her behind. It’s the guitar on “Illicit Affairs.” The strings on “Seven.” The Wordsworth trip of “The Lakes”—six years after “New Romantics,” she goes Old Romantic. All three “try”s in “All I do is try, try, try.” The way her usual stories about sneaking around and hiding secrets hit so different in the pandemic, when the shame of craving other people’s company felt like a scarlet letter. The way she enters her thirties with an album that dusts anything she did in her roaring twenties. But more than anything, it’s the giddy moment at the end of “August,” when it sounds like the song is over, you think she’s finally going to drive away with her head held high, but she can’t stop herself from circling back for just one more “Get in the car!” Okay, fine—maybe it is “August.”

This is straight up a copy-and-paste from an old review that Rob Sheffield wrote about folklore, but you know what? This is one of my favorite passages written about Taylor Swift, it was not for nothing that I immediately recognized it popping up in this book, and I'm glad it's included here. What he writes about "august" here is crucial in discussing Taylor's "and another thing"-ness.