Who’s afraid of Little old Me?
Why there’s more to Swift’s songs than you might have realised.
If you’ve been labouring under the impression that the ubiquitous, biggest pop star in the world has nothing to offer you – what with your superior, in-depth love of rock’s proud canon and all – and is “only” for young women, it may be time to shake it off. Taylor Swift has layers and layers within her work, and to paraphrase another American icon of verse, Walt Whitman, “contains multitudes”.
Having moved through country, pop, hip-hop and indie folk, she finds the peak of her matchless fame arriving just as her records have established themselves as consistently “alternative”. Yet the genre she works in is secondary to the personality using it. Her music, a wash of wilfully repetitive, minimalist, synth-based throbs and hums chosen for their unobtrusive ability to frame her latest lovelorn/lovestruck narrative, has been deeply influenced by her collaborations with the likes of The National and her fondness for The Blue Nile. And as a confessional lyricist, Swift is now as heart-on-sleeve over-sharing as Joni Mitchell was around the time of Blue and Court And Spark. Only with more frequent use of the F-word. You only need to hear latest album, The Tortured Poets Department, to catch such lines as, “I was a functioning alcoholic, till nobody noticed my new aesthetic” or, “Your wife waters flowers – I want to kill her”. These are not asides you’d find on the machine-tooled bank-statement pop of Dua Lipa or Charli XCX.
Swift’s clued-up references to The Chelsea Hotel, Patti Smith and Dylan Thomas have been much remarked upon, but in following those with the so-ironic-it’s-sincere “we’re modern idiots” she’s actually closer in spirit there to Bowie and Iggy hanging out in Berlin than to New York. Joni (on The Same Situation) sang, “Got a long list of ex-lovers, they’ll tell you I’m insane”. Taylor, whose use of her boyfriends as muses is a standard thread of Swiftology, has offered, “I’m a nightmare dressed as a daydream”. Joni wrote songs about Sam Shepard, Graham Nash, James Taylor; Swift has every right to skewer or eulogise her partners. “I love the players,” she winks, “and you love the game.”
Like Lana Del Rey, a key slice of whose sad-is-beautiful persona Swift cleverly co-opted then fused to some strains of Jane Siberry as she moved into the ruminative, melancholy Folklore and Evermore albums of 2020, she’s hardly a typical dancing queen. (Though she retains that weapon in her arsenal, as her live shows demonstrate). She relishes her songs being scrutinised, seriously, as were Joni’s, Dylan’s, Paul Simon’s. 2011’s epic ballad, All Too Well, arguably her first “grown-up” masterpiece, is the kind of thing that’s had Carole King singing her praises. (Swift has, in turn, hailed King as “the greatest songwriter of all time”). There are also plenty of drink and drugs references in Taylor’s stuff, if that’s what you require for a dated kind of “authenticity”.
And while her earlier era of sugar-rush career-making hits was both fun and valid (she was covering Tom Petty’s American Girl 15 years ago), the work of this lefty, pro-choice feminist, Trump criticising billionaire as she’s evolved has pulled off a remarkable reinvention. Collaborations with everyone from Kendrick Lamar to Post Malone, from Bon Iver to Phoebe Bridgers and, yes, Lana, have been conscious grabs at cred which have paid dividends and transcended their initial motivation. Bear in mind that The National, whose sonic clothes she now usually wears, are a band often compared to Joy Division, Radiohead, Interpol, Depeche Mode or Leonard Cohen. It’d be a ludicrous stretch to say Taylor is the new Lenny, but the dry humour, cynicism and self-mockery of some of her songs has been sipping from a similar stream. “I’m of the firm belief,” announced Swift as her latest album emerged, “that our tears become holy in the form of ink on a page”. You don’t get that kind of manifesto from Rita Ora.
Dig deep into the fearless red midnights, Rorschach-test blank spaces and fresh-out-the-slammer alchemy of Swift’s songs. You just might find the star-maker machinery behind the popular song has let her escape unfettered and alive.
Chris Roberts has been writing about music for four decades.