Another Way of Thinking About Taylor Swift

Maybe we’re thinking about Taylor Swift all wrong.

Instead of sifting through her songs for clues about her love affairs and digging for the “easter eggs” she has planted as if music were a kind of scavenger hunt—instead of wondering what her songs say about the singer, maybe we should think about what her songs say about the listener.

The purpose of popular song is not to provide glimpses into the celebrity mansion behind the walls and bodyguards. We don’t spend our time and money on pop music because it’s the sonic equivalent of a gossip tabloid sold at the grocery-store check-out line. We don’t listen to better understand Prince or Bob Dylan or the latest K-Pop idol or Tik-Tok virologist. We listen to better understand ourselves.

It doesn’t matter who Taylor Swift is or isn’t sleeping with at the moment; they’re never going to invite us to lunch. That’s irrelevant to our daily lives. What is relevant is who each of us is or isn’t sleeping with and how that’s working out. What is relevant is who our family and friends are sleeping with, because we’ll probably have lunch with them very soon and have to make sense of what they’re saying.

And Swift, like other gifted songwriters, can help us make sense of that. When she gives us a musical example of how to “Shake It Off,” what’s important is not the bad experience she’s shrugging off (musically as well as verbally); it’s the bad experiences we should be shrugging off. It doesn’t matter who the ex-lover is in “All Too Well,” perhaps her greatest song; what matters is how the song clarifies how we process our own lost loves. It demonstrates the value of acknowledging both the joy and the pain, both the need to mourn and the need to move on.

We don’t have to live Elvis Presley’s life nor Beyoncé’s life, but we do have to live our lives. And that’s not an easy thing to do. We have to negotiate inevitable loss and unexpected love, short-lived triumphs and enduring injustice, betrayal by those closest to us and the kindness of strangers. We have to understand not only our own lives but also the lives around us. What do they really mean when they say this or do that? Nothing clarifies those situations quite like a sparkling rendition of a great song.

Sure, psychologists and sociologists, politicians and philosophers, can analyze these problems in greater depth and at greater length. But they are handicapped by trafficking only in ideas about observable, external behavior. But songs, which employ both words and music, can reveal both external circumstances and internal reactions, can examine both ideas and feelings. Because our greatest challenges in life involve both thoughts and emotions, the best aid for those trials must include both as well.

What first bonds each of us to any great musician is the way a specific song reverberates with our own situation. That resonance may shed light on a particular problem of ours or a problem that someone close to us has. Sometimes it’s helpful to just gain some perspective on the situation by hearing it in someone else’s mouth and not our own.

Swift hints at this in the title track on her latest album, The Tortured Poets Department, when the narrator tells her latest ex, “You’re not Dylan Thomas; I’m not Patti Smith. This ain’t the Chelsea Hotel; we’re modern idiots.” In other words, she’s arguing that we can’t live our lives vicariously through our heroes, past or present. We have to live in the here and now, the modern day, and face up to our own idiocy when it comes to love. If she shouldn’t pretend that she’s Smith, maybe you, the listener, shouldn’t pretend you’re Swift.

“The Black Dog” refers to a singles bar where the narrator knows her ex is now hanging out. She imagines him dancing with some girl too young to know the Starting Line, the indie-emo band that the narrator and ex had danced to 20 years ago. The narrator’s mood swings between insults like this and confessions of a despair so deep that she’s burning all her clothes and hiring a Catholic priest to exorcize the demons.

Like all good poets, tortured or otherwise, Swift has grasped the counterintuitive truth that specific details make a poem or song lyric more universal, not less so. In the album’s title track, she mentions that her ex still uses an anachronistic typewriter, lies in her lap like a golden retriever, and shares secrets with her friend Lucy that he won’t tell the singer.

Maybe you don’t know anyone who still uses a typewriter or rotary phone; maybe your lover isn’t the least bit like a big dog; maybe you don’t have a friend like Lucy. It doesn’t matter. You identify with the story even more, not because you’ve encountered the exact same examples, but because the details make the story more real. Our lives are lived in the particular, not in vague generalities. As listeners, we can’t believe in a story, can’t learn anything from it, unless it is grounded in those minutiae.

Those details don’t have to come from the scene being described; they can be metaphors. But that works too, as long as the image is fresh enough and sharp enough to create a focused picture in the listener’s mind. In “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived,” for example, Swift’s narrator accuses an ex of hanging her on the wall like a butterfly collection with a pin through each specimen. She’s not implying that they indulged in acupuncture foreplay, but she has given us a crystal-clear picture of a man who collects women to show off to his friends.

And it’s not just with words that Swift reflects our lives back at us. Her music boasts the kind of story-propelling rhythms and dizzyingly emotional melodies that pull us in and put us in the mood for each narrative. On this new album, she co-produced a dozen tracks with the Bleachers’ Jack Antonoff, four with the National’s Aaron Dessner and one with both of them. Synthesizers still dominate the soundscape, but this time they’re designed not so much to push us onto the dance floor or into a sob fest but to create a kind of emotional weather. Dessner’s a-cappella-choir intro to “So Long, London” evokes the spinning vertigo of a final break-up’s mixed feelings even before we hear any lyrics. Antonoff’s rubbery bass line, set against a high, nasal synth motif on “Down Bad,” sets us up the can’t-get-out-of-bed depression that follows.

It’s not like Swift is modeling good behavior for her listeners. Instead she tells the stories of over-the-top reactions: break-up despair so deep that every day feels like a Monday in February, or break-up anger so ferocious she wishes him in prison, or the giddy infatuation of new love that refuses to consider that this song might end up like those unhappier ones. But, you know, it’s not her job to be a role model. As long as listeners find themselves in such irrational states, she’s right to illuminate them in song. She’s not saying this is how you should behave; she’s saying this how you could behave—and foretold is forewarned.

And it doesn’t matter if you’re in Swift’s target demographic: all those girls and young women who embrace the description Swifties hang on to her every mood. Anyone of any gender, any race, any age, any sexual orientation can empathize with these songs if they’ve ever been in a bewildering romantic relationship. Even this writer, who has a son older than Swift, who would as willingly listen to Willie Nelson as Swift (and vice versa), is a product of decades of relationships that are echoed in her songs.

The one legitimate criticism of Swift is the narrowness of her subject matter. A single person’s romances are an important part of human experience, but so are money, marriage, work, childhood, parenthood, war, politics and death. Great songs have been written about all these topics, and one longs to hear a songwriter as talented as Swift tackle them. Yes, she’s very good with the subject matter she zeroes in on, but why doesn’t she stretch?

The one thing that got me through all the awards shows last spring was the knowledge that sooner or later the barstool-sitting Billie Eilish and her piano-playing brother Finneas would perform “What Was I Made For?” from the Barbie soundtrack. This song is riveting not because it tells us anything about the Eilish siblings’ existential crisis or because it tells us anything about a plastic doll turned biological in the form of Margot Robbie. It’s transfixing because we’ve all had moments of self-doubt that sound just like that.

You might say the lyrics are simple or you might say they’ve been whittled down to their essence. You might say they provide the lens that focuses the music’s flood of light into a narrow, sizzling beam. The piano chords rock back and forth between major and minor chords, much as Eilish’s voice rises in hope and collapses in doubt over and over again. When she sings, “Looked so alive, but I’m not real,” she’s singing about a doll, yes, but she’s also singing about any of us who’ve ever wondered if the Matrix myth might be real. If we’re genuine, why does it so often feel as if we’re going through the motions, as if we’re running someone else’s program?

Eilish’s first album since Barbie is this year’s Hit Me Hard and Soft, even leaner than the siblings’ past efforts. Finneas often strips the arrangements down to two instruments, builds the sound up and then cuts everything to the bone again. This puts the weight on his sister’s voice to carry not only the words but also a large share of the music. Billie does this brilliantly. If Swift is the better lyricist (better with details and rhyming, certainly), Billie is the better singer. She has that breathy, bruised tone that sounds like heartbreak.

The album’s first single, the top-10 hit “Lunch,” seems to defy this essay’s thesis that songs should be about the listener, not the singer. This ode to cunnilingus is Billie’s coming-out-of-the-closet confession, according to the interviews she’s given. But I would argue that the song’s power lies not in how it updates her Wikipedia page, but in how it captures the thrill and trepidation of any unprecedented sex—first time, new partner, new gender, new position. It helps that it’s the funkiest recording the siblings have ever made, putting the bass’n’drums part from the Rolling Stones’ “Miss You” to new purposes.

The album’s second single, the follow-up top-10 hit “Birds of a Feather,” an unapologetic valentine in the earworm tradition of Carole King, Norah Jones and Sara Bareilles. The lyrics are predictable professions of love, but the song’s voltage comes from the giddiness of Billie’s bubbling soprano and Finneas’s chiming synths. We sing along to songs like this one, not because we’re glad for the singer’s good fortune, but because we’re glad that we once felt that way—and might feel that way again.

The album’s most interesting song is “L’Amour de ma Vie,” which is ostensibly an apology to an ex-lover for a painful break-up. It begins with minimalist music and a whispery vocal but gradually builds into a jaunty, Broadway-like number, where the attempt at atonement edges into revenge. Billie sounds anything but regretful as she inserts the knife and twists it: “I was the love of your life, but you were not mine.” If you’ve ever been on the giving or receiving end of such a mixed message, this song demonstrates exactly what’s going on.

Almost as good is “The Diner,” sung in the persona of a rabid fan stalking a celebrity. Finneas’s eerie, funhouse synths and heavy echo make the vocal sound even more demented as it describes how she climbed over her idol’s fence and made herself a snack in the kitchen. The song is a warning of what can happen if one tries to live vicariously through a musician, what can happen if one misunderstands the dynamics of popular music and assumes it’s all about the artist, when it’s actually all about the listener.