Heartbreak Is the National Anthem Quotes

“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.”
― Rob Sheffield, Heartbreak Is the National Anthem: How Taylor Swift Reinvented Pop Music

“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.”
― Rob Sheffield, Heartbreak Is the National Anthem: How Taylor Swift Reinvented Pop Music

“She's always lived up to "Fifteen", written when she was still south of her twenties, speaking live and direct to her fellow teenage girls, insisting that even the most ordinary girl had a story to tell. Their stories mattered; their secrets were valuable and their friendships real.
An entire generation of listeners has grown up in a world where music's biggest star is also the one insisting that every girl has a song in her heart and a right to sing it.”
― Rob Sheffield, Heartbreak Is the National Anthem: How Taylor Swift Reinvented Pop Music

“She will jump into every feeling with the certainty that it's the last one she'll ever have.”
― Rob Sheffield, Heartbreak Is the National Anthem: How Taylor Swift Reinvented Pop Music

“An eternal law of pop music: anything halfway cool that’s ever happened is because teenage girls made it happen.”
― Rob Sheffield, Heartbreak Is the National Anthem: How Taylor Swift Reinvented Pop Music

“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. Taylor designs each tour to be the best night of your life, but she designed this one to be the best night of all your lives, with every era you've ever lived through. It's a celebration of all the holy ground she and her audience have traveled together over the years. There's no experience like being part of the world she creates.”
― Rob Sheffield, Heartbreak Is the National Anthem: How Taylor Swift Reinvented Pop Music

“It is so weird to sing My Tears Ricochet with 60,000 people with Taylor swirling in a goth priestess gown, leading a funeral procession of black hooded mourners. The moment when Taylor gets to the almost hidden line "when I'm screaming at the sky" (and she really does scream it at the sky) is cathartic. No matter how well you know these songs, its' different hearing them in a crowd of blood hungry swifties, all here for that communal rapture, that ecstatic release, that catharsis in the dark.”
― Rob Sheffield, Heartbreak Is the National Anthem: How Taylor Swift Reinvented Pop Music

“Taylor is incapable of saving anything for the next song. That "leaving like a father" line in "Cardigan" sneaks up at the end - it's almost finished, then she drops that "leaving like a father" and moves on. 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.”
― Rob Sheffield, Heartbreak Is the National Anthem: How Taylor Swift Reinvented Pop Music

“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.”
― Rob Sheffield, Heartbreak Is the National Anthem: How Taylor Swift Reinvented Pop Music

“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.”
― Rob Sheffield, Heartbreak Is the National Anthem: How Taylor Swift Reinvented Pop Music

“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.”
― Rob Sheffield, Heartbreak Is the National Anthem: How Taylor Swift Reinvented Pop Music

“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”
― Rob Sheffield, Heartbreak Is the National Anthem: How Taylor Swift Reinvented Pop Music

“but women—if they feel like screaming, they do it.”
― Rob Sheffield, Heartbreak Is the National Anthem: How Taylor Swift Reinvented Pop Music

“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.”
― Rob Sheffield, Heartbreak Is the National Anthem: How Taylor Swift Reinvented Pop Music