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

by Rob Sheffield

The closest parallel is Bruce Springsteen. Along with Taylor, he’s the most extreme case of a star whose charisma is so niceness-adjacent. In his early days, he earned a rep as freakishly nice, beyond the demands of manners or decorum. Fairly or unfairly, people expect Bruce to be that guy. The Boss doesn’t get any bitch days off.

“I just felt kind of ‘Bruced out,’” he said. “I was like, ‘Whoa, enough of that.’ You end up creating this sort of icon, and eventually it oppresses you.” Taylor knows how that story goes. She’s been there too, a few times. When a star is so obscenely wealthy in the currency of Nice, they might wonder, like Bruce, Is this really me? Am I this icon? Would I exist without it? Am I really a kind, loving, honest person, or am I just Nice? Could I leave the prison of Nice behind me, just go free, for just one day??

It’s the new beat as she needs, as she starts up a new career in a new town. This song sums up everything she’s trying on 1989, and everything about the new kind of romantic she’s bursting to become.

subtle Bowie reference ("A New Career in a New Town")

She established her adult sound with Red. It set her up for an adult country-pop run she had no interest in pursuing. If she wanted to pack stadiums for the rest of her career, all she needed to do was stand onstage with an acoustic guitar. This is not what she chose to do.

“New Romantics” is all about mutation, all about transition, about setting a wobbly stiletto on a dance floor where you have nowhere to hide. It’s a song that’s very easy to ridicule and a song that invites ridicule. Adam Ant sang, “Ridicule is nothing to be scared of,” Taylor sings, “I could build a castle / Out of all the bricks they threw at me,” but it’s the same sentiment.

New Romantics were very eager to be seen as outraging traditional notions of sexual identity and masculine authority. They tended to be the Bowie kids from their towns, they tended to grow up targets of homophobic violence, and New Romantic style was their way of claiming that and flaunting it.

To be a New Romantic is to be always becoming, always mutating, always overtrying, with a heart of glass or a heart of stone. To be a New Romantic is to be always leaving Nashville. Welcome to New Romantic. It’s been waiting for you.

The controversy had nothing to do with the actual award, as Best Female Video is a prize that nobody has ever sincerely cared about. Who won Best Female Video the year before Swift, or the year after? Hell, who won it last year? (Nobody did—MTV axed the whole category years ago, and no one even noticed.)

Beyoncé’s erasure is curious on a lot of levels. She was the wronged party here—it was her night, yet Kanye ensured she went down in history as a loser. Nobody remembers anyone winning a VMA, but she’s the only star who famously lost one. She was the one with a right to hold a grudge—but she’s Beyoncé, and she had other shit to do.

Years after she already won this war, she couldn’t just walk away the victor. If Taylor were the emperor of Rome, she’d be standing over the smoking ruins of Carthage saying “oh, and another thing” in Latin. After being vindicated in public, Taylor couldn’t just walk away a winner. She had to jump back in the ring. She might yearn to be the Instead of Answering girl. However, she is the Answering girl. This conflict will give her no peace as long as she lives.

at its heart, “Delicate” is a story about a girl in her room, hearing an electro beat that lures her to go seek some scandalous adventures in the city lights. In other words, the entire story of pop music, in one song.

But then she actually did it, album by album, adding vault tracks to each new edition. As you know, this plan was wildly successful on a creative and commercial level that even she (maybe? for a hot minute?) couldn’t have imagined. If she says she can do it, she can do it. She don’t make false claims.

subtle Bowie reference #2!!! (from "Queen Bitch")

THAT’S A KEY PART OF BEING TAYLOR: THE CONSTANT REVISING of the self IS the self. She will go on rewriting her songs, remaking her albums, revisiting the Taylors she’s already been, sometimes giving them a little compassion, sometimes going to them for forgiveness. She will keep looking back at her old stories from her changing perspectives, the way adults do, reflecting on former relationships as cruelties or even crime scenes, or recognizing former catastrophes as cosmic jokes. That’s clear from her songs and her long-running musical evolution. This is just the most outrageously giant-scale example of how she’s constantly remaking herself, constantly revising her younger self, constantly rewriting the story of her life.

autotheory

When Morrissey started singing “How Soon Is Now” for the first time in many years, he made an excellent change, dropping the line about standing on your own and wanting to die. Now he sings, “You go and you stand on your own / And you leave on your own / What a biiiig surrrrrpriiiiiise!” I like the song better that way—a lot better—but I get you if you think that’s a loss for the song or a betrayal of an adolescent bond you felt with it. Yet there’s no law saying that as an artist you have to go on singing words you don’t mean. But on another level—is this CHEATING? Well, yes, of course it is. So what? It’s very Swiftian to keep tinkering with her past. Anything less would be betraying the girl she used to be.

another Morrissey reference, and also "It’s very Swiftian to keep tinkering with her past. Anything less would be betraying the girl she used to be." - !!!!!!

Taylor’s Version goes way beyond the corporate intricacies that spurred her into it. Indeed, the Scooterific backstory already seems like a footnote to a major creative project. The TV phenomenon symbolizes Swift’s unwavering commitment to creative autonomy—a refusal to let external forces define her artistic narrative. By revisiting and rerecording her early albums, Swift not only reclaims ownership but also offers a nuanced reflection on the way her music has evolved over the years—the way she has.

She packs so much bittersweet pop lust into three minutes, creeping out the window for a secret rendezvous, until she’s crying in the back of the car. For the first ninety-eight seconds, it’s merely a perfect Taylor Swift song. Then for the bridge, she takes off into a deranged greatest-hits album’s worth of choruses from songs she hasn’t written yet. She feels ashamed of her secrets, yet proud of how ashamed she is, until she yells her dirtiest secret out loud: “I love you, ain’t that the worst thing you ever heard?” But make no mistake, she loves her secrets more than she’ll ever love this paramour.

"Cruel Summer" receiving the respect it deserves

“Cruel Summer” is her ultimate window song, and not just the way she sings “Killing me slow, out the window.” There’s so much mystery in the erotics of windows in Taylor’s song—she’s got a Keatsian obsession with the kind of desire that doesn’t dare use the door. Heading out the window, she feels a rush that she doesn’t feel when she gets wherever she’s slithering off to. These lovers keep it on the hush, but that’s the attraction, the sub-rosa thrill. She’s seduced by the window, more than by anything on either side of it. She sings, “I don’t wanna keep secrets just to keep you,” but she’s drawn to thresholds, gates, liminal spaces, any portal to a forbidden place. Windows are for tapping on, tossing pebbles, hiding in the curtains. Doors are for confessions and transitions. She loves sneaking into gardens, weddings, yacht-club parties, and beds. There’s so much breathless excitement in how she sings “I snuck in through the garden gate / Every night that summer just to seal my fate.” The rock & roll philosophers might have warned her that windows are for cheaters, winners use the door, but she prefers the window every time. Whatever’s on the other side, she’ll take her chances. Devils roll the dice, angels roll their eyes.

the erotics of windows!!!!! thresholds!!! gates!!!! liminal spaces!!!!!! any portal to a forbidden place

Keep in mind: the first song Swift debuts from a new album is always an outlier. It’s a big thematic statement addressing her public image; it talks about the celebrity Taylor, rather than the personal one.

But when she takes that vow of eternal devotion in “Lover”—with every guitar-string scar on her hand—the soul mate she’s really embracing is her chaotic self.

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.

All these brooding ballads. All these lost, haunted, broken characters. This was an entire album of Track Fives. Most of all, the album is full of outcast women. So many heroic witches, widows, crones, mad-women, on Folklore, lurking in haunted houses, hiding in the attic.

“Betty” even kicks off with a harmonica solo straight from Bruce Springsteen’s boy/girl/car classic “Thunder Road”—a song that begins with the slamming screen door where Taylor began her own story in “Our Song.” She’s all three of these lovers, and they’re all her. For the big climax, James shows up at her party, ready to beg for forgiveness.

I'm so so glad that Sheffield noticed the same Swift/Springsteen slamming-screen-door parallel that I did (as a reminder, this is not the first time that slamming screen door is brought up and analyzed in this book. very important)

The way Swift sees the story, Betty ends up getting back together with James. But even if Betty might get the guy, Augusta gets the song, and that’s a win for Augusta. The triangle ends with Augusta stranded at the mall, still waiting in her car. But she makes that parking lot behind the mall sound like the most romantic getaway on earth.

She premiered The Long Pond Studio Sessions over a Thanksgiving weekend when most American families (like mine) were separated by the pandemic. It was also exactly ten years after the cozy flannel Thanksgiving that gave us “All Too Well,” and for any viewers who might not pick up on that detail, she spends much of the sessions wearing plaid shirts, while she and her two guitar boys get lost upstate, surrounded by the autumn leaves. She soaks up the rural ambience, talking on the porch or in the yard beside the barn.

Like Folklore, Evermore is all cathartic beauty, an album full of ghost stories and haunted houses. But the most heartbreaking moment is “Marjorie,” Taylor’s tribute to her late grandmother. It’s not just the centerpiece of a stunning album. It’s a song that ties up all her favorite obsessions into a story of love, death, and grief. It’s one of the best things she’s ever done. It’s a new peak for her as a storyteller, with the key line “What died didn’t stay dead.”

I'm so glad "Marjorie" is getting its due attention here

Just as Evermore is a sister album to Folklore, this is a sister song to “Epiphany,” the stark ballad of her grandfather Dean and his World War II combat experience on Guadalcanal. (Like “Epiphany,” “Marjorie” is placed at track thirteen.) Dean was her father’s father, Finlay her mother’s mother, but they’re immortalized in songs about living with the dead as you grow older and feeling their spirit in your bones.

The night Taylor dropped Evermore, she wrote to a fan on YouTube, “I have about 50 fav lyrics but right now it’s . . . ‘Never be so kind you forget to be clever. Never be so clever you forget to be kind.’” That’s the advice her grandmother gives her in this song. She wishes her adult self could have learned even more from this wise woman. But that’s part of grief—the work is never done, and there’s never a resolution to the story. (Even if the album had “Closure”—the least Swiftian of concepts.)

Like so many songs on Folklore and Evermore, “Marjorie” is about living with memories, learning from the dead, carrying on with the hard work of grief.

Elsewhere on the album, Swift sings, “My mind turns your life into folklore / I can’t dare to dream about you anymore.” But on Folklore and Evermore, turning the lives of our loved ones into folklore is how we keep them alive—it’s how we ensure that like a folk song, their love will be passed on. “Marjorie” is about communing with someone you’ve lost and trying to hear the story they always wanted to tell you. It’s about holding on to the memories so they will hold on to you.

Not a pretty scene—mascara running, glass shattering. A long time ago. But she’s still trapped in that moment, paralyzed in the past. Everybody moved on. She stayed there. She can hear what people whisper at the other tables. “Did you ever hear about the girl who got frozen?” they ask each other. “She’s still twenty-three, inside her fantasy, how it was supposed to be.” Every time she wails, “You left me noooo,” she sounds more desperate, over Aaron Dessner’s obsessive banjo hook. The banjo keeps urging her to get out of there, but she can’t move. It’s the only Swift song with an actual cry for help—twice—and it’s a powerful sound. Scary shit.

from communing with ghosts in "Marjorie" we move to embodying the ghost in "Right Where You Left Me"

She knows people can see her—that’s a crucial part of the experience. She loves that people are gossiping about her, fork-pointing behind napkins, saying, “What a sad sight!” She needs witnesses.

Most of the time, when I hear “Right Where You Left Me,” I’m sitting at that table, collecting dust. Other times I’m the other people in the restaurant, witnessing the scene, as we do when we hear the song. Embarrassed spectators, trying to eat dinner, hoping they never turn into her. But sometimes I’m the banjo. While she sits frozen, the banjo tries to warn her, telling her it’s not too late to escape, plucking that riff like it’s tugging her sleeve. Let’s go. Let’s move on. Grab the check and never come back. Run for your life. Get moving while you still can. The song ends, and we have no idea if she ever listened.

So many of her obsessions come together on Midnights. “Mastermind,” “You’re on Your Own, Kid,” “Bejeweled,” “Midnight Rain”—she can’t stop building her own lavender labyrinths and getting lost in them. She’s too in love with the things that haunt her in the middle of the night. A mastermind brilliant enough to lie awake and keep designing her complex emotional cages. Never brilliant enough to stay out of them.

She did the bridge of “Illicit Affairs,” the “Don’t call me ‘kid’” chant—a song about sordid meetings in parking lots, just an hour after “Fearless,” about a different couple in a different lot, but maybe the same girl a few years down the line.

Just one of the threads woven throughout the Eras Tour show

It’s strange how Eras Tour feels so forward-facing, even as Swift rummages through the past. It’s a pop history that’s so rich and deep and multilayered, but one she’s still rewriting before our eyes.

All over the album, they’re two poets who only want love if it’s torture. In the excellent title song, she rages, “You’re not Dylan Thomas / I’m not Patti Smith / This ain’t the Chelsea Hotel.” It’s the small-town teen romance of “White Horse” (“I’m not a princess, this ain’t a fairy tale”) updated for the big city. (And as Taylor knows, that’s where Dylan Thomas drank himself to death at his favorite Greenwich Village bar, which happened to be called the White Horse.) Patti Smith loved it.

This book was literally announced the day before The Tortured Poets Department was released. So it makes sense there's not much in it about ttpd, and I wasn't expecting it. Nevetheless, it is clear that the book was updated and that things were added very close to publication. ttpd songs are referenced throughout, and Sheffield's love for this album shines through

We’re a big loud Irish family, we love to argue about music, and you do not want to be near us in a pub when these songs come on, but Taylor Swift’s music has kept us fed. Happy are we who are called to her supper.

from the acknowledgements <3