Yes, I love Taylor Swift. She is one of my absolute heroes. If you have a problem with it, well, I can’t help you…

Quotes from the book

Rob Sheffield on His First Impressions of Her 1989 Album: “The songs were great—they were Swift songs—but each one made it harder to comprehend why she was depeching her mode.” That may be one of the greatest lines ever in music criticism.

Rob Sheffield on How Music is Like Poetry: “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.”

Rob Sheffield on How Tay Tempts People to Read Her Songs for Clues : “…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 mystery and the detective. It’s how she keeps her hold on us.”

Rob Sheffield on How Tay Treats Fandom as an Art Form: “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.” (From Heartbreak is the National Anthem)

Rob Sheffield on Tay’s Moods: “She holds on to her conviction that her moods are the universe and expressing them is why the universe exists.”

Rob Sheffield on “All Too Well”: “In the Swiftian universe, any lost scarf is a ticking time bomb that can take tears to explode into a song. No scrap of the past is safe from showing up again—no snow globe, no snowmobile, no snow or beach. She’s a detective who never files the cold cases away.”

Other notes

I see Tay as the ultimate audiophile. I love it. She also has more than a bit of Emily Dickinson in her too. (They’re like sixth cousins or something.) As Rob says, Taylor is the world’s greatest music geek, and yet it’s the most underrated part of her story. I figured that out on my own and that’s probably my next to favorite thing about her, second only to her songwriting. She’s also a big literature and film geek as I’ve discovered.

It’s funny how Rob describes “normal people” as those enviable folks who have “never had their lives ruined by a Taylor swift song…”

Taylor has crafted, and still is crafting, one of the most epic poetic narratives of all time in popular music. And somehow, we can look at these songs and somehow they become mirrors, showing us sides of ourselves we’ve forgotten or don’t want to remember or claim don’t really exist. Surely, she’s got plenty of secrets left to hide.

The day Taylor was born, December 13, 1989, the number one hit was “We Didn’t Start the Fire” by Billy Joel.

Yes, she was named after James Taylor but they gave her an androgynous name to help her in the business world. Hilariously, it kind of worked. Also hilarious is that in all the plays she was in as a kid she was the lead and the C academy ended up going out of business… because the parents got sick of Tay getting the leads. No one is surprised now about how theatrical she was…

It may sound like Taylor writes the same songs over and over again—but this is a feature of her songwriting, never a bug. It certainly doesn’t bug me. Like me, she’s not afraid to go back and evolve an old idea into something new and worthy of its own praise. Heck, when I first listened to tortured poets, I listened to it on shuffle. This may sound odd but with 31 tracks, I wanted to see if each track stood up on its own. And at the time, the vast majority of them did, and a couple others grew on me later.

Tay really is all about hooks and bridges. I suppose she should be a fly fisher.

Did Taylor Swift literally save the guitar in pop music? Starting in 2010, acoustic guitars started outselling electric ones for the first time in a long time. And the industry leaders weren’t happy that girls were now outnumbering girls in guitar classes. Andy Mooney of Fender called Tay the “most influential guitarist of recent years” but not as a compliment. He was pissed, just like most guys in the industry were. Of course, electric guitars came back strong, especially post pandemic. But why did all those girls want to emulate this silly Barbie doll looking girl with an acoustic guitar? Because of what she DID with it! Taylor may have literally saved pop music, just by being herself and sticking it to the man. Even if you don’t like her or her music, you have to admit Taylor has been overall a very good thing for music.

Back in 2006, an interviewer asked Taylor hat she’d be if she weren’t a singer. Her answer was a CSI.

Great point that Rob picked up on. Taylor uses the word “nice” an awful lot. It’s a word so many people hate, but obviously Taylor is owning it. She’s reclaimed it, as Rob says, “a word scorned for its girlyness.” Glad, George Carlin wasn’t around to hear all this “nice” talk!

I disagree with Rob that leaving “New Romantics” off the proper album was a product of indecisiveness. That’s not a Taylor thing to do. Fact is, she later released it as a single, as he says, and made it a highlight of that album’s tour. I think it was entirely planned out that way. She is not shy about holding back songs to tease people, or drop 15 tracks two hours after 16 of them… (see, Tortured Poets Department: the Anthology.) Taylor lives in her own world and plenty of people are more than happy to be living in it. Enough to make her a billionaire in her mid-thirties.

I think “Heartbreak” was a great investigation of Taylor’s career overall. It’s far from being the best of his books I’ve read, though.