In hoping to write entertainingly about Taylor Swift, sometimes it seems like the best option is just to quote her lyrics at length and then hope some of the filler in-between benefits from some reflected wit. But this has never been a problem that’s been faced by Rob Sheffield, who has long been not just one of the most authoritative journalists writing about Swift’s music but almost certainly the wittiest. It helps to have a way with words in covering pop’s most excerptible lyricist, and Sheffield has proven himself over time with his Rolling Stone columns and reviews — and now a book about the superstar, “Heartbreak Is the National Anthem: How Taylor Swift Reinvented Pop Music,” which has both bon mots and depth to spare.
Saying his book is “about the superstar” should probably be amended to “about the superstar’s work,” since Sheffield makes no bones about the fact that he doesn’t care much about Swift’s private life. “Heartbreak Is the National Anthem” is a thoroughly engaging portrait not of Swift herself but of her song catalog, if a discography can be said to have its own biography. If you’re even a medium-grade Swiftie, delights await you from this writer who took on the Beatles, David Bowie and Duran Duran as some of his previous book subjects, and all the more if there is no musical rabbit hole of Swift’s you aren’t eager to take a mutual dive into.
And if you’re a Swift skeptic… consider reading the following Q&A anyhow, to see how the other half lives … but do be warned that there is some enthusiastic Swiftie-on-Swiftie dialogue here between her respective Rolling Stone and Variety advocates that could be triggering. (The following interview has been edited for length, clarity and physical limits on how many Swift bonus tracks can be discussed in one story.)
How did writing this compare to your books about classic rock figures?
My last couple books were about Bowie and the Beatles, and those were stories where I was writing about the afterlife; those were stories where they had an ending. And it’s really funny how with Taylor the story goes in 12 different directions a day, every day, because she can’t be pinned down at any level. Over the weekend, I was watching clips and livestreams, and at one point on Friday night, my nieces and I were watching the Miami livestream and she’s doing “This Is Me Trying” with “Daylight,” and she does these things every night that change the songs for me. She’s determined to make it a story that’s constantly in motion.
Tell me just about the impetus for the book. Obviously you are up there as one of the world’s foremost reputable Swifties, and a go-to for people with things like your ranked list of every song she’s ever released. How did you decide you wanted to write a book?
Well, I wanted to take her on her own terms as an artist who was very determined to be part of music history and determined to bring herself and her audience into music history. It’s weird when we think about it now, but when she appeared in the late 2000s, she was a novelty. Like: Huh? A young girl with a guitar, writing songs about her own life, writing her own songs about her own feelings and her own stories? And now, that’s what pop music is. You know, Sabrina Carpenter was just headlining Madison Square Garden. We look at her and Chappell and Billie and Olivia and everything that’s happening at the top of pop music this year, and this is a world of Taylor Swifts. Whatever her relationship with them is, these are the artists who are pop music. So I just wanted to attempt to capture her place in music history. From the very beginning, she’s always someone who studied history very deeply and listened to a lot of music, while she was learning to make it. And that’s something that I wanted to do justice to in a book like this, really placing her in the story of pop music. Not as a celebrity and not as an icon, not in terms of gossip or boyfriends or fashion, but in terms of her music and her art.
As people who have appreciated her since the very beginning, or close to it, we didn’t necessarily have a lot of company in the journalistic or critical community. Do you think there was a definite turning point when that sort of older, critical audience got onto the bandwagon?
It sure was slow, wasn’t it? And a lot of setbacks along the way. It was funny to go back while writing this to see what was written about her at the time. I was constantly reading stuff that was talking about her as a precocious kid — “not bad for a kid” — or that word “promising” would always come up. I’m like, even by the time of “Speak Now,” I’m like, “She could retire now and she’d have one of the all-time great songbooks — and people are still talking about her as ‘promising’” … Even “one of the great pop talents of her generation” — I’m like, where was the Taylor Swift of my generation? She’s just a unique thing in history. For journalists like us who were writing about her from the very beginning and recognizing the level that she was aiming for and reaching, it’s really funny to go back and see like how much of it is just people writing about her boyfriends.
That has been the eternal dilemma, and even some of us who were very early adopters may have fallen on the wrong side of focusing on who the songs were about. That trivializes the songs, in its extreme, and yet you can say she invited it in those earliest days when she was capitalizing certain letters in the lyric sheets to provide blatant clues as to who and what they were about. Anyway, to your credit, you have resisted writing very much about the real-life aspects of the songs. You name names a few times in the book, sometimes for a comical aside, but mostly you shy away from it.
I guess that’s because I started writing about it at a time when that’s pretty much all anybody would write about. Certainly if there was an adult audience, they felt they were gonna get judged by their adult audience if they went online and said that there was some actual talent or a sense of history going on in this artist. So, there was this almost built-in sort of condescension, when she was an artist who always had this really outspoken ambition to be on a historic level, as somebody who’d studied history and had studied the greats and wanted to be among them and who definitely was aiming high for what she wanted to do artistically. And so for me it was always really kind of maddening with people who always talk about her boyfriends — even when she was the one talking about her boyfriends. It’s almost like the Travis (Kelce) era is where I had to say, “OK, I can’t overreact against this, because this is part of her artistic statement.”
There may be a part of the fandom that really cares about her personal life, and then there’s somebody like me who could really care less about her personal life — except for how it’s expressed in the songs, and then it becomes everything, because the details in the songs seem to verify that she is writing from her real truth, which gives it more of a charge than something you feel has just been imagined. Even though she made a point of saying with “Folklore” that she was turning to fiction for the first time. Anyway, you have some fun with it, occasionally. You have a joke in the book about how Jake’s sister probably used the missing scarf to mop up a stain or something.
Well, for all the attention that people paid to them at the time, she doesn’t have a lot of interest in making these boys the characters of the songs. It’s always the girls in the songs who are the characters. Really, the boy is just there to get her from one end of the song to the other — just there to get a song started. Even from the very first one I heard, the one that made me a fan, my origin story as a fan:“Our Song.” The song ends with her actually writing “Our Song,” and then we know we’re never gonna hear about this boy again. He’s served his purpose! He’s helped her become a songwriter, and she’s got the song and she’s moving on. We see that all through these things that the boys are just there for the girls to have this kind of self-discovery process, that the boys are really just blank spaces for the girls to find their own identity in. When people used to say “Taylor writes songs about boys,” I would sometimes say — to be a bit flippant a bit — she never writes any songs about boys. It’s always about the girl in the song and whatever project for her the boy represents. She just doesn’t have that much interest in male characters at all.
That’s hilarious. Maybe it’s not accidental that, on the Era Tour, one of the lines that gets the biggest sing-along or shout-along from the ladies is a line from the latest album: “Who the fuck was that guy?” She doesn’t look to the antagonists in her songs as somebody whose psyche it was her mission to crack. She’s curious and puzzled sometimes, but she’s not into giving away her power. It’s about what she learns.
I mean, I was someone who always just flat-out did not care who the songs were about, and I was like, “I probably haven’t heard of this guy anyway. He’s probably in some Disney show that I’ll never see.” At the time that she was writing songs about Joe Jonas, I could not tell the Jonas Brothers apart. I could tell Hanson apart, but I can’t tell the Jonas Brothers apart. If he were the whole point of the song, the song would be nothing, but I was like, “I listened to ‘Back to December’ — I can’t tell you anything about that ‘Twilight’ guy. All I know is, he and her have the same name.” It doesn’t depend on him at all. The song is about her and these emotions that she’s having, and he’s almost just the excuse for that.
I paid more attention to and probably wrote more about those things, for better or worse, than you did. But I do remember a moment where I was like, “I feel invested in where her songs come from, but I hope I don’t have to learn very much about Calvin Harris.”
Fortunately there wasn’t a lot to learn there, but anyway….
In your book, you’re mostly writing from the point of view of what her music means to the world, but you do have personal moments. You get very personal with “The Archer” and talking about how “Lover” was a grief album for you, because of a death you were grieving at the time. It speaks to the differnt ways we sometimes experience the same music, depending on the time that it comes in our lives — we form individual as well as collective attachments.
And that’s her thing, right? That she writes these songs that feel super personal, even almost bizarrely personal, and yet makes them feel universal…. She always had that just astounding eye and ear for the really tiny, prosaic detail to put in a song. And whether it’s a scarf or a slamming screen door, she can take these trigger little details and make them feel gigantic. And so I have a lot of these personal connections to these songs, and I think, like most people who love Taylor Swift had that experience with a lot of these songs, of hearing a song at a particular moment and saying, “How did she know exactly what I was going through?” I’ve had so many conversations with friends where they say, “How did she write this song about being in your 40s, being divorced?” You know, she wrote “This Love” when she was what, like, 22, 23? I mean, I think a song like that is a song about a relationship that has been going on for years — ups and downs, hot parts, cold parts. I think of “This Love” as a song that somebody married at least 10 years would’ve written.
One thing that bothers me when I hear it from older people is when they think they’re being generous by saying, “It’s fine for her audience, the demographic it’s written for. It’s not aimed at me.” How do you feel like something great is not aimed at you? Not all but most of the catalog is pretty relatable across age ranges.
When she came up, there was so much stigma attached to the fact that she was so young and the fact that she had a young female audience, and people just had a lot of built-in contempt for that. And that’s how you got that sort of condescending “She’s so good at marketing.” And I’m like, OK, a lot of fucking people are good at marketing. Only one of them wrote “New Romantics.” Only one of those people wrote “The Best Day” or “Holy Ground.” These are really singular achievements, and that people were so eager to file it away as “This is kid music for kid people.” And so it was always weird for me to hear these songs and think, you know, I’m an adult, I’m not in high school, and yet, why do I feel like “Fifteen” is about being 35?
I went to see the Eras Tour at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey, and she’s beginning the “Fearless” segement and she says, “OK, New Jersey, are you ready to go back to high school with me?” And I screamed loud enough to pop an eardrum. And I did not go to high school with those songs. I was in grad school when she was born. I checked my diary the night that she was born: I was staying up all night to write an essay about the Wallace Stevens poem “The Owl and the Sarcophagus.” I was already a tortured poet in a tortured poets department in grad school when she was born. And yet she says, “Are you ready to go back to high school with me?” and I was like, Yes, absolutely. And of course I’m seeing people around me who are 12, 14, 16, or even 6, 7, 8, and they’re all screaming they’re ready to go back to high school. People older than me, younger than me, people with all sorts of different past experiences, life stories, and everybody’s ready to walk down that high school hallway.
But for me, definitely seeing her live early in her career was a turning point. I thought, this is like when I was a teenager and going to punk all-ages shows, seeing the Replacements or Husker Du or the Minutemen, Sleater-Kinney or Bikini Kill. It was like that direct connection between the performer and the kids in the crowd, including the kids in the crowd who happened to be old people who just became those kids when she was singing to us.
Do you have a favorite song from “The Tortured Poets Department”?
It’s really weird what a long, messy, complex album “Tortured Poets” is. And for an album that’s such a just jaw-dropping blockbuster success, I mean, it’s weird. I feel that album is like really like spookily underrated. There’s a lot to say about that. I think it’s really interesting how the fact that she released so many songs in one night almost got these really derisive media responses. … “The Prophecy” is a great example of a song that’s kind of hiding in plain sight, if you listen to it isolated and you’re not thinking, “Oh, it’s on the new Taylor Swift album, which is part of the discourse, and there’s Matty Healy stuff on this album, and is she really a good role model, and what’s her political impact?” — all the baggage that people bring to that album. If you listen to that song, just three minutes of a woman with an acoustic guitar, she’s singing in this really kind of creepy way that’s very unusual for her vocally. The guitar playing is very much like Leonard Cohen’s guitar playing, and who the hell ever thought like you’d be a song where what you imitate about Leonard Cohen is his guitar playing? It’s such a spooky, eerie, really kind of disturbing song for me. The way she sings the line “I feel unstable” and just kind of stammers on the words a bit, that to me is like a top 10 Taylor line delivery. And I think of that song as incredibly underrated, and yet it’s on this album that is so popular that it is not just the number one album of 2024, but it’s bigger than the other nine albums in the top 10 combined.
A lot of songs that album that I’m still catching up with just because there’s so much going on in that album. “I Look in People’s Windows” is a song that I really just sort of came back to in the last few weeks and thought like, good lord, what a deeply weird song this is for the most famous person in the world to release.
A lot of older songs I think of as underrated when you talk about underrated favorites. A song like “Ours” is a very famous song. You wouldn’t necessarily call it an obscure song. It’s a song that big Taylor Swift fans know. It was never a hit, it was never a song for casual listeners. But I think of that song as a giant part of pop history in the 21st century, and that’s another song that presents itself as high school romance stuff, that nonetheless, to me listening to it as an adult when I heard it for the first time, I was like, well, she is writing this song about my life, in my 30s. And it’s got so many funny details in it. I love that line where she sings “Any snide remarks from my father about your tattoos will be ignored,” and of course, I think of that song now because it connects in so many ways to the song on “The Tortured Poets Department,” where she’s talking about Matty Healy’s tattoos, or at least the male character’s tattoos. With “Ours,” for most artists, if that were their best song, that would be the perfect career-capping song for a legendary career. But for most people, that isn’t even one of their favorites. I don’t know if it was even on your top 50 list, was it?
No, but I did have “Ours” on a list of her 25 best bonus tracks. I remember singling out the “people throw rocks at things that shine” hook as one of her most memorable lines. So that’s where I snuck “Ours” in there. But it was funny doing a best-bonus-tracks list, because people are like, well, does “New Romantics” really count as a bonus track after being considered part of the main album for so long?
“New Romantics” is one of my very, very, very favorites. And that’s kind of why I wanted to quote that for the title of the book, partly because that song is such a huge personal favorite for me, but also because it’s a song that started out as like, “Here’s a bonus track, cut from the album,” and it ends up being a song that people really prize and hear themselves in. To me, that line “Heartbreak is the national anthem” sums up how she takes these really intensely personal, lonely emotions and this community gathers around them, and there’s this tribe that has these heartbroken songs as a national anthem. That sums up what she does as a songwriter, which is to take these really private and furtive emotions that most of us try to hide in our lives, and they become the basis for a proud tribal identity. It’s never not weird for me to hear “New Romantics” in a public place. And I love that bonus tracks list, because she’s so famous that it’s like, are any of these songs really bonuses? Aren’t these all kind of famous songs on the same level?
I have to ask about your attachment to “Bad Blood” as the worst Taylor song, and you’ve rearranged your list a number of times, but you keep that in last place. You definitely have fun, snarky things in the book, at least acknowledging that you can be cynical about something about Taylor Swift, but it’s all in a spirit of fun. Obviously, being the huge advocate you are, you feel like it’s still OK to say something that might offend a fan who has that as their favorite song or something?
Well, something I love about this fan community: they love to talk about the ones they hate. This is not one of those precious fan communities where everything is solid gold. There’s this understanding that this is the kind of community where you really love the ones you love and you really hate the ones you hate. And you can always have a fun argument in a bar about your least favorite Bob Dylan songs, your least favorite Paul McCartney songs. That’s same thing with Taylor Swift: the bigger fan you are, the more you react against the ones you don’t like. And that’s part of why it’s a fun songbook. Whatever else kind of role Taylor Swift has in pop history, she’s the all-time most fun artist to argue about. If you can’t start an argument about Taylor Swift with someone, you’re just not trying hard enough.
You can plop down in any random bar, any random airport, any random waiting in line at the DMV and you can just start talking about Taylor Swift songs you like and Taylor Swift songs you don’t, and you’ll be in an argument in 10 or 15 seconds. No artist in history has ever — on purpose — tried to be fun to argue about the way Taylor Swift does, and the way she encourages those kinds of arguments. So I don’t think there are any Taylor Swift fans who would ever say, “Oh, you can’t say anything is your least favorite.” In my experience, Taylor Swift fans are the people who are most passionate about the ones they hate, the ones that they think are overrated, the ones they think are underrated, the ones they think nobody understands except them. And also the ones where they think, “This song is so famous, but it’s trash.” The first time I did my list of the greatest Taylor Swift songs, I had “We Are Never Getting Back Together” in my top 10. I love that song; massive hit. And that was the first time I found out that there’s lots of Swifties in the world who think it’s her watered-down pop hit. And that just cracked me up because I was like, wow, the only people in the world who hate this song are the hardcore Taylor Swift fans!
I’ve been a pop fan for many, many years — my entire life, which is at this point, not a particularly short life — and it’s really funny that arguing about pop music has been one of the consistent joys of my life ever since I was old enough to talk or walk. I remember being in kindergarten talking about “American Pie” and arguing about what this or that was about, what it meant. We didn’t necessarily know the history that went into that song, but it was a fun song to argue about with other little kids. And it cracks me up that Taylor Swift set out from the very beginning to be just absolutely the most fun argument-starter in pop music history. I think that’s a huge achievement that people will recognize. It’s always fun arguing about the Beatles, too. You can always start an argument about the Beatles, but people don’t disagree about the Beatles as much as they disagree about Taylor Swift. You still get people who just are flat out “No, she’s garbage, she’s bubblegum,” down to people who are like, “OK, ‘Folklore’ and ‘Evermore’ are great, but come on — ‘Lover’? So cheesy, so pop, so pink.” And you get lots of people who are really into whatever their era is, and to the point where they’re super-defensive and aggressive toward other eras because their era is their favorite.
It’s funny you mentioned fans dissing “We Are Never Getting Back Together,” because I experienced that too when we first ran a 50 Greatest Songs list, with that in the top 10. And at that time I put “You Belong With Me,” partly because “All Too Well” — which you have always led the charge on — felt too obvious by that point. Subsequently, expanding it into a 75 Greatest Songs list, I gave in and moved “All Too Well” to No. 1. But anyway, on Twitter, fans were outraged at my love for “YBWM” and “WANGBT.” I felt like, wait, are you really a Taylor Swift fan, that you are defending her against my ignorance by claiming these two hits are garbage? But by the same token, fans do like it when you point out what they consider the underdog material. So there were a few kind tweets for my putting “Right Where You Left Me,” a bonus track, in her all-time 10 best. Which, of course, is a song that you have the good taste to devote a whole chapter to in your book.
“Right Where You Left Me” is exactly that kind of underdog song that has really got a fanatical cult. My niece who’s 19, that’s her favorite song. And to me, that’s another one where I think, “How do you love this song so much, when that’s not a young person’s song?” That’s somebody who is old and bitter and has lost and has stayed up all night seething over regrets from earlier in their life. It’s mind-blowing to me that Taylor Swift wrote this song when she was just turning 30, but it’s also mind-blowing to me that this is a song where so many people from all different stages of their life hear their own story in it. To me, that’s a terrifying song, in the same way that “The Prophecy” is chilling. These are scary songs about people who are trapped in parts of their life, not sure if they’re just going to keep repeating that pattern forever, and they end the song not knowing. The way she sings those songs… don’t get me started about how people underrate her as a singer. Even now, people will acclaim her as a songwriter, an album crafter… but just as a singer, what she does vocally in those two songs is different from the rest of her singing. She sounds really scared. She sounds like she is trapped, but really insistent and obsessively continuing down this really dark and dangerous spiral for this character. She has those precise details of singing with breath control…
Part of the fun of the community is that Swifties can kind of convince each other that a song they’d overlooked among the 300-plus she’s put out is a great one. You advocate so strongly in your book for certain songs, it’s like you’re evangelizing for them a bit.
It’s such a fun community to be part of as a fan because literally almost every day, counting social media, I learn something about her songs from other Taylor Swift fans, despite having listened fairly obsessively for her entire career. … I’m sure you have examples of songs that you think are great that don’t even have a cult following, that nobody just seems to agree with you about. One of my very favorites, I would say a top 20 Taylor Swift song for me, is “Labyrinth.” And boy, nobody likes that song. We just had the anniversary of “Midnights” coming out two years ago, and so online, I was seeing lots of people doing their “Midnights” rankings, and “Labyrinth” is still at the bottom of every list. It’s the least streamed song on that album. It’s one of her very least streamed songs in her entire catalog. And I do not convince anybody to agree with me about that song! And even though I feel history will vindicate “Labyrinth,” it’s still really funny that we can have these kind of arguments where I’m like, “I guess maybe I’m just wrong. Maybe this song just sucks and I just like it too much.”
You are not alone. My daughter kept arguing that I should have “Labyrinth” on my list. So there’s one fellow vote. But I also have songs I alone like. When I was doing the Greatest Bonus Tracks list, “Girl at Home” was in the running at one point. And I ran it by some Swifties and, to a person, they said, “You need to lose ‘Girl at Home’ or you will be universally mocked.” Apparently every Swift fan thinks that’s the absolute worst song. But it has such a fantastic hook.
That’s funny. People do hate that song, it’s true. That might be more hated than “Labyrinth.” Yeah, for sure. I can’t defend “Girl at Home,” though.
On the younger end, what is hard to quantify right now is whether Taylor Swift is a singular artist or has almost created a genre. You can’t hear a lot of young artists now who are breaking through in a big way, like Gracie Abrams, and not realize that there is something in their style or intonation that was introduced into the lexicon by her, even if they’re doing something original and not imitating her.
Look at Dylan — people at the time probably thought of Paul Simon being like Gracie Abrams to Dylan’s Taylor, and Neil Young as, like, Renee Rapp or whatever… All these people who, after Dylan came along, were thought of as imitating Dylan, people that seem now to us like these gigantic, legendary, original artists in their own right. And the Gracie Abrams comparison is a great one, this artist who clearly does what she does because Taylor gave her this language to work with, and she’s doing really original and bold things in this language. It’s a fascinating alternate universe speculation — could this exist without Taylor Swift kind of establishing this language?
Is there anything beyond that that has ended up being surprising about her legacy?
I think of her as having changed the way people hear Joni Mitchell. You think of like the fact that Joni is so big right now, the fact that Stevie Nicks has never been more worshipped in her entire career than she is right now, and Kate Bush, same thing — it seems like part of Taylor’s ripple effect is that she’s not just an artist who influences how pop sounds now, but she is teaching people how to hear these great female voices from the past.
