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,” Well, um, I listened to the tortured poets department. That’s my life ruined times thirty-one!
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. But no one is surprised about how theatrical she was… um yeah.