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

by Rob Sheffield

1989 Taylor Alison Swift is born in Pennsylvania, on December 13. She grows up on a Christmas tree farm. Absurdly on brand, right from the start.

2004 The Swift family moves to just outside of Nashville, so Taylor can pursue country music. At fourteen, she signs her first professional songwriting deal, with Sony/ATV.

2005 Taylor plays a gig at Nashville’s Bluebird Cafe, singing her original tunes. The first tune she plays is called “Writing Songs About You.” She signs her first record deal, with new label Big Machine.

2006 She makes her self-titled debut album with producer Nathan Chapman, during her freshman year of high school. Writes or cowrites all eleven tracks. Her first single, “Tim McGraw,” a song she began in math class, reaches number six ...

2006–2007 On tour, as opening act for George Strait, Brad Paisley, Rascal Flatts, Faith Hill, and Tim McGraw. (Yes, she plays “Tim McGraw.”) Sings George Michael’s “Last Christmas” on her Holiday Collection. “Our Son...

2008 Her Beautiful Eyes EP appears in March. Drops her second album, Fearless, in October. The hits include “Fifteen,” “You...

2009 Her first headlining tour, for Fearless. She plays herself in Hannah Montana: The Movie, with Miley Cyrus. At the MTV Video Music Awards in September, she gets interrupted by famous rapper Kanye West, who literally takes the mic out of her hand. Beyoncé wins Video of the Year and brings Taylor onstage. She hosts Saturday Night Live in November, with her “Monologue Song.” The media talks about her boyfriends.

2010 Fearless wins the Grammy for Album of the Year. She appears in Valentine’s Day, her first time acting in a movie. She releases Speak Now, the first (and last) time she writes all the songs solo. The hits include “Mine,” “Mean,” and “Back to December.” Everybody agrees there’s no way she will ever top it. The media talks about her boyfriends. 2011 The Speak Now tour. Surprise guests join her for duets: Nicki Minaj, Usher, Hayley Williams of Paramore, T.I., Kenny Chesney, Tim McGraw. Closes the tour with James Taylor, quoting her mom to the crowd: “You were kinda named after him!” She adopts her first cat, Meredith. 2012 Taylor releases Red. The hits include “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together,” “I Knew You Were Trouble,” and “22.” Everybody agrees there’s no way she will ever top it. The media talks about her boyfriends.

2013 The Red Tour. Taylor plays the Grammy Awards doing “All Too Well.” A male country music DJ in Denver gropes her backstage, during a photo, then later sues her for talking about it. She buys a house in Rhode Islan...

2014 On 1989, a drastic sonic change-up, she goes for zippy synth-pop with producers like Max Martin and the up-and-comer Jack Antonoff. The hits include “Shake It Off,” “...

2015 The 1989 tour. Taylor battles Spotify and Apple Music over royalties for songwriters. Shows up in the gossip columns with her “Girl Squad” of friends, including Karlie Kloss, Lena Dunham, the Haim sisters, and sundry actresses and models. Taylor and then-BFF Kloss appear together on the cover of Vogue (“Inseparable, Unstoppable, Adorable”). She appears at the MTV VMAs to give the lifetime achievement award to “my friend Kanye West.”

2016 1989 wins the Grammy for Album of the Year. Taylor becomes hugely unfashionable after West releases a song attacking her. A famous reality-TV star calls her a snake on social media. Everybody agrees her reputation is ruined forever.

2017 Reputation drops in November. The single “Look What You Made Me Do” makes people expect an album of celebrity shade, but it turns out to contain nearly all love songs. The hits include “Call It What You Want,” “. . . Ready for It?,” and “Delicate...

2018 The Reputation tour, featuring gigantic snakes. Her contract with Big Machine ends, and she...

2019 Lover is released in July, with hits like “Lover,” “You Need to Calm Down,” and “The Man.” She announces the Lover Fest tour. Her Big Machine boss sells her catalog to Scooter Braun, Kanye West’s manager, with whom she has bad blood. She responds by announcing plans to rerecord her albums. Everybody assumes it’s a bluf...

2020 The documentary Miss Americana debuts in January. Taylor announces a new album, with less than a day’s notice, in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic. Folklore is her biggest musical surprise yet, full of stark acoustic tales. Does the same thing in December with Evermore, saying, “We just couldn’t stop writing songs.” In November, she debuts Folklore: The Long Pond Stu...

2021 Folklore wins the Grammy for Album of the Year. Her first rerecorded album, Fearless (Taylor’s Version), arrives in May, followed in October by Red (Taylor’s Version), both blockbuster hits. Red’s “All Too Well,” in its expanded ten...

2022 She gets an honorary doctorate from NYU and gives the commencement address, telling the graduates, “Learn to live alongside cringe.” Dr. Swift speaks at the Tribeca Film Festival, showing her “All Too Well” short film. When Midnights drops in October, Taylor has all ten songs in Billboard’s t...

2023 The Eras Tour begins. In April, she announces her split with Alwyn. Gossip about her single life reaches DEFCON “Blank Space” levels. Two more number one Taylor’s Version remakes: Speak Now and 1989. “Cruel Summer,” a Lover deep cut...

2024 Taylor invades the NFL, dating Kansas City Chiefs star Travis Kelce. She attends the Super Bowl with Lana Del Rey. Right-wing conspiracists accuse her of a psy-ops plot, rigging NFL games to claim the New World Order. She becomes the first artist in Grammy history to win Album of the Year four times, breaking the record set by Frank Sinatra, Pau...

The archetypal Taylor Swift heroine is the shy girl trying to cop an attitude, talking tougher than she actually is, trying to fake it till she makes it.

But I leave the room even more excited for the future I can already see coming. 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. They’ll learn to play guitar. They’ll write their novels, paint their paintings, live their lives. I can’t shut up to my friends about it. Ten years from now, my favorite music will be coming from these girls. The ones who saw this show or heard these songs on the radio, heard this voice tell them, “Drop everything now.” They heard her and decided they needed to do it themselves. As it turns out, that’s exactly what happened.

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.

In the first half of 2024, The Tortured Poets Department was not just the biggest-selling, most-streamed album, it outsold the rest of the year’s top ten combined. And five of the top ten were her albums.

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.

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.

No matter how well you know these songs, it’s different hearing them in a crowd of blood-hungry Swifties, all here for that communal rapture, that ecstatic release, that catharsis in the dark.

The Fountain Pen songs are the most direct. “Most of my lyrics are ‘Fountain Pen’ lyrics,” Swift said. “They’re modern personal stories, written like poetry, about those moments you remember all too well where you can see, hear, and feel everything in screaming detail.” The Quill songs are designed to “make you feel all old-fashioned, like you’re a nineteenth-century poet crafting your next sonnet by candlelight.” The Glitter Gel Pen is the party girl. “Glitter Gel Pen songs have lyrics that make you want to dance, sing, and toss glitter around the room,” she said. “Glitter Gel Pen lyrics don’t care if you don’t take them seriously because they don’t take themselves seriously. Glitter Gel Pen lyrics are the drunk girl at the party who tells you that you look like an angel in the bathroom.” Quill Pen Taylor is my favorite, the one who reigns on Folklore and Evermore. But she wouldn’t be the same without the others. She needs to be jostled and irritated by Glitter Gel Pen. And they both need Fountain Pen. They’re all so needy, elbowing each other for more of her attention as well as yours.

But all these different Taylors sound like the real thing, because they’re all part of the same difficult-but-real woman. As she said in 2022, her music includes, “My friends and my fiercest fans and my harshest detractors and everyone who entered my life or left it. Because when it comes to my songwriting and my life, they are one in the same. As the great Nora Ephron once said, ‘Everything is copy.’”

Taylor has a mystique about her Track Fives. On any given album, it’s the emotional bloodbath. “All Too Well” is the most famous of all Track Fives, but they never fail. “My Tears Ricochet” on Folklore. “White Horse” on Fearless. “Delicate” on Reputation. “The Archer” on Lover. “Tolerate It” on Evermore. “Dear John” on Speak Now. “So Long, London” on The Tortured Poets Department. “You’re on Your Own, Kid” on Midnights. (“Cold as You” on the debut passes the test, but not the bouncy “All You Had to Do Was Stay” on 1989, which feels more like a track nine.)

The “All Too Well” short film begins with an epigraph from the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, one she has relied upon before, having quoted it in the prologue of Red in 2012. “There’s an old poem by Neruda that I’ve always been captivated by, and one of the lines in it has stuck with me ever since the first time I read it. It says, ‘Love is so short, forgetting is so long.’ It’s a line I’ve related to in my saddest moments, when I needed to know someone else had felt that exact same way.”

She pivots to Film Geek (Taylor’s Version), in a Q & A with indie director Mike Mills. “I love this John Cassavetes quote,” she says early on, “where he says, ‘I’ve never seen an exploding helicopter. I’ve never seen anybody go and blow somebody’s head off. So why should I make films about them? But I have seen people destroy themselves in the smallest way.’ Whoa—I felt that.”

Fearless introduced Taylor Swift as we know her—it created the image that made her a star, the image she’s reacted against in so many ways since. It was her world-building album, with all her favorite tropes: cars; windows; pebbles; dresses; rain, so much rain, buckets of rain; photo albums; tears; doorways.

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 is full of these vibrant girls she’s spent her life creating.

But this is mere arithmetic. Some of us love the calculus of Petty Taylor. Here’s Taylor speaking at the Tribeca Film Festival, 2022: “People often greatly underestimate how much I will inconvenience myself to prove a point.”

In 2010, she makes a music-industry journalist named Bob Lefsetz eternally famous with her song “Mean,” replying to a negative review in his newsletter, a review that about twelve people would have read if Taylor hadn’t given it the oxygen of publicity.

Yet for some reason, Rodrigo sends a personalized copy of her album to Kim Kardashian. “I just adore you,” her note says. “Sending you & ur fam so much love.” Kardashian shows her support by posting the note on social media, on May 28, which is a Friday. By sheer coincidence, Taylivia instantly goes from “put a ring on it” to “see you in court,” with no explanation from either side. The world buzzes over the mystery of how this friendship ended. All anyone can do is speculate. But Olivia’s next album has a song that goes, “I have nightmares each week about that Friday in May / One phone call from you and my whole world was changed.”

My mom had a saying: You don’t have to attend every argument you’re invited to. Taylor doesn’t roll that way (and honestly, neither did my mom). She doesn’t wait for an invitation—she barges in, without a single doubt that she will make the room shimmer.

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.

“Snow on the Beach” is the highlight: weird but fucking beautiful—the ultimate Taylor combination. It’s got Quill Pen, Fountain Pen, Glitter Gel Pen—so many Taylors, there’s barely any room for Lana Del Rey.