Just some thoughts from a fan.
I don’t hate Taylor Swift. I don’t hate her music. Sure, I wish she’d be more vocal about her politics, but overall, I’d consider myself a fan, if not a Swiftie. If you asked me in 2021, though, what I thought about Taylor Swift, I’d probably start gushing about how she’s a genius, a Romantic poet of today’s era, and, originally, a slightly lyrically sharper pop diva whose full genius wasn’t truly unleashed until her magnum opus, Folklore. That album and Evermore were on constant rotation my first two years of high school, with Red (Taylor’s Version) accompanying them shortly after. The experience of going to high school and getting my heart broken was augmented by those albums; it helped me cope with the pain I was feeling and appreciate it on some masochistic level. I’ll never be fifteen or sixteen again, crying in my room over some guy, so I might as well appreciate it while it’s here.
Which brings me to today. Taylor Swift has just married Travis Kelce, football player for the Chiefs (I can’t be bothered to look up his role on the team, much less understand what it means), and is presumably living it up in Cleveland Heights, baking sourdough bread and fawning over him. Her artistic output in this era has not been to my taste. People have been arguing lately that there is no such thing as objectively good or bad art…I respectfully disagree. While we don’t need to have a strict Dead Poets Society academy of measuring if something is good, there are lyrics that are simply sharper than others. Say you’re at a fancy restaurant; all the food has different tastes and flavors, with none necessarily superseding the other, and none having an objective best flavor, but they’re all better than McDonald’s. Taylor Swift’s The Life of a Showgirl and The Encore are McDonald’s. Beyond the complete lack of relatability, they’re trite, contrived, and all ruminating on the same sort of message: I love my hubby and haters can die.
Now, if Taylor Swift somehow reads this article and never wants to talk to me because of it, I’d understand. It’s a shame, though, because in some fantasy world, I’d love to get a coffee with her. I’d love to pick her brain for how incredibly she’s strategized her career, how seamlessly she can change her aesthetic, and which of her own albums she prefers and for what reasons. I love how adaptable she is to different aesthetics and moods. But the glitz of 1989 contrasting with the melancholy of Evermore isn’t necessarily a case of one being better than the other. Is Evermore more poetic? Yes. Does Evermore have better lyrics? Yes. Do I prefer Evermore? Yes. But listening to 1989 isn’t an assault on the ears, and there’s not a lyric I cringe at.
“Shake It Off’ utterly dominated the radio when it came out; the lyrics are extremely cheesy, and the melody extremely catchy. But it’s fun to the point of euphoric. The cymbals, the drumbeat, the horn, the sizzle, and the repetition all add up into a song that carries you aloft, that shakes you around, and encourages you to get up and dance and sing as loud as you can. “Cleveland” just feels like something you overhear on the Target speaker, something a cop wife plays while driving her kids to school, the backing electronic jingle bells giving shallow corporate Christmas ad mixed with The Office theme. These are the exact same writers and producers as “Shake It Off.” Yes, she’s not a 24-year-old New Yorker anymore, and we all outgrow things. But both songs are about shutting down the haters and being happy, and yet only one really resonates.
The hyperspecificity of “Cleveland” is too autobiographical. While we mostly know who her other songs are written about, there’s still a lyrical ambiguity, so that a girl listening to Swift in her bedroom can feel “All Too Well” is just as much about the guy who broke her heart as it is about Jake Gyllenhaal. One of my favorite songs of Swift’s, “Forever Winter (Taylor’s Version) [From the Vault]”, deals with the narrator begging a friend struggling with his mental health to keep living, even when it feels tough. I could hear that song and apply it to friends and family who I worried about, and it felt like it wasn’t just Taylor’s voice begging on the other end of the phone for them to stay, vowing to be the sunshine for them, but also mine.
My favorite Taylor Swift song ever is “betty.” It’s an apology song from a clueless 17-year-old to the girl whose heart he broke after he ignored her for a “summer thing.” The song is frankly beautiful. It starts with a plaintive acoustic guitar, my favorite of all instruments, followed by a homey harmonica, evoking summer breezes, parked bicycles, and footsteps on porch steps. The narrator is naive, clueless, and a little accidentally insulting. But his earnestness, the key change on the final chorus, the two reckless strums after “standing in your cardigan” and “kissing in my car again”, and the final reverberation as the song slowly fades out, all contribute to such a perfectly executed story that feels so much grander and more beautiful than the very basic story it’s telling. When I listen to that, or when I listen to “seven”, a song about a girl who is too little to understand her best friend is being abused, or “happiness,” about a couple going through a divorce and trying to have an objective perspective through the torrent of emotion, I ask myself, “What happened?”
I used to imagine Swift during this era, braided hair and minimal makeup, penning songs of such beauty while sitting by a frosted window by candlelight, Joe Alwyn sitting in the corner musing (that is, acting as her muse). She’s clearly well-read, and capable of staggeringly beautiful songs. I could go on and on about “the lakes”, “dorothea”, “champagne problems”, “the 1”, and “Sad Beautiful Tragic”, but we’d be here a while.
I don’t think an artist needs to be mentally ill or tortured to write something good. As 1989 proves, you can make very enjoyable, happy music. But part of music is writing a lyric in the hopes that someone will hear it and think, “I know exactly how that feels.” But when you write a lyric and all someone can think of is Travis Kelce, it might be good to take a step back.