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50 pages 1 hour read

Rob Sheffield

Heartbreak Is the National Anthem: A Celebration of Taylor Swift's Musical Journey, Cultural Impact, and Reinvention of Pop Music for Swifties by a Swiftie

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2024

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Chapter 22-EpilogueChapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 22 Summary: “Cruel Summer”

“Cruel Summer,” was designed to be a summertime hit when Swift released Lover in 2019, but that possibility quickly died when the global pandemic prevented her from going on tour in the summer of 2020. Swift had opted to make “ME!” the lead single for Lover, even though “Cruel Summer” was widely regarded as the better choice for a lead single, and the better song overall. In a strange turn of events, it became a smash hit in 2023, rising in the charts at the height of the Eras Tour, eventually hitting number one in (ironically) January. Sheffield calls it her “ultimate window song,” comparing her treatment of secretive desire to the way John Keats handles the same subject (see poems like The Eve of St. Agnes).

Chapter 23 Summary: “The Lead Single”

“ME!” is the most notorious in a long line of “bad” lead singles Swift has released. Sheffield insists that this is an intentional choice on Swift’s part, the purpose of which is to mislead fans and critics who are trying to discern the tone of her upcoming album. “The first song Swift debuts from a new album is always an outlier,” he writes, “It’s a big thematic statement addressing her public image; it talks about the celebrity Taylor, rather than the personal one” (147). “Look What You Made Me Do” from Reputation is the clearest example of this trend, and Sheffield remarks that it turned out to be too effective in its misdirection; people remain convinced years later that Reputation was purely about Swift’s feud with Kimye. He also traces this lead-single tradition back to Michael Jackson’s chosen lead single for Thriller, “The Girl Is Mine,” which left listeners entirely unprepared for “Billie Jean.”

Chapter 24 Summary: “I’m Not Asleep, My Mind Is Alive: Lover”

Sheffield begins his discussion of Lover by describing a video of Swift that was taken by her mother in the rough period while she was recording the album, after the singer had undergone LASIK surgery. Under the influence of anesthetic drugs, Swift cries over a bunch of bananas, and refuses to admit that she is sleepy, exclaiming “I’m not asleep, my mind is alive.” Sheffield treats this remark as an informal motto for the Lover era. Swift adopted a new sound and visual aesthetic yet again, more summery and colorful than ever before. It was the first album, he asserts, that she made with the intention of pleasing as many people as possible. Sheffield spends the last section of the chapter analyzing a detail from the music video for the title track, “Lover” that has always bothered him: a plate of cranberry sauce paired (inexplicably) with pasta, placed on the dining table of the video’s main characters, a deeply-in-love couple. After mulling over why cranberry sauce would possibly be included in the meal, he concludes, “Maybe the definition of romance is a sad little plate of cranberry sauce, sitting forlorn on the table, that you don’t even see because you’re just so in love” (153).

Chapter 25 Summary: “Folklore”

Lover was followed quickly by Folklore, an album many (including Sheffield) have deemed Swift’s best. He claims that what earns it this top spot in her discography is the depth of the album’s universe, “the way the songs keep evolving the longer you live with them” (154). It was an album that managed to impress even her most stubborn detractors. Swift wrote and recorded Folklore while quarantining during the COVID-19 pandemic, never expecting any of the album to be performed live. This unique circumstance allowed her to drop all concerns about marketability, letting her imagination take over. Inspired by Victorian aesthetics, Folklore has a distinct “goth-folk” sound, and a cast of fictional characters whose stories are told from Swift’s perspective. Of these characters, three reappear: a teenage love triangle (James, Betty, and Augusta), with each member getting a song told from their perspective. “Betty,” the song sung from James’ perspective, was the first song Swift recorded explicitly in a male voice. While Betty and James end up together, Sheffield deems Augusta the coolest member of the trio, and the one who most closely resembles Swift herself.

Chapter 26 Summary: “Mirrorball”

“Mirrorball,” the sixth track on Folklore, gets its own chapter. Sheffield uses the song as a vehicle to discuss The Long Pond Studio Sessions, a live album of all the Folklore songs that Swift released just weeks before dropping her eighth album, Evermore. He writes that the Long Pond recording of “Mirrorball” is his favorite version of the song: “She evokes this maudlin bar scene… turns into the disco ball looking down on the dance floor, wondering why everybody else is having such a good time and wondering what that’s like” (160). The recording took place when she, Jack Antonoff, and Aaron Dessner, who had created the album together long-distance because of the pandemic, met in-person for the first time in months to play the songs together for the first time. “Mirrorball,” as Sheffield interprets it, reflects the overwhelming social anxiety of the time period.

Chapter 27 Summary: “Marjorie”

Evermore is Folklore’s sister album, released in the same year, and dealing with many of the same themes. Sheffield names his chapter on the album after “Marjorie,” the thirteenth track, written in tribute to Swift’s late grandmother, Marjorie Finlay. Finlay, a successful opera singer who made her career in Puerto Rico in the 1950s, was one of Swift’s earliest musical role models. On “Marjorie,” Swift speaks to Finlay’s ghost, wishing that she was still present. At the song’s climax, Swift samples a recording of Finlay singing right after the line, “If I didn’t know better/ I’d think you were singing to me now.” For Sheffield, “Marjorie” perfectly sums up the central themes of Folklore and Evermore, namely how people communicate with those who are no longer in their lives, and how mythologizing those figures can serve to sustain their presence.

Chapter 28 Summary: “Right Where You Left Me”

Sheffield designates another song on Evermore, “right where you left me,” as noteworthy. The song tells the story of a woman sitting at the café table where her ex broke up with her, unable to leave. Sheffield imagines the narrator in conversation with the narrator of the following track, “it’s time to go,” a much more emotionally mature version of Taylor who believes in the importance of moving on. It is unclear which of the narrators wins out in the end.

Chapter 29 Summary: “Midnights”

Midnights is the final Swift album that Sheffield reviews comprehensively in Heartbreak. He calls it “her album of insomniac misery,” and asserts that Swift released the album during the third-quarter of an NFL game in order to make sure that fans listened to it late at night, as deprived of sleep as possible (170). This marketing strategy reflected the premise of the album: each song takes place during a different late night throughout Swift’s life. Highlights from Midnights include “Anti-Hero” (a typically Swiftian satire on herself), “Karma” (which Sheffield admits to having disliked initially), “Labyrinth” (a personal favorite of Sheffield’s), and “Snow on the Beach,” which he deems the very best track.

Epilogue Summary: “Finale: Forevermore”

The book’s epilogue returns to where the prologue began: summer of 2023, when Swift’s Era’s Tour is dominating global pop culture. Sheffield attends three consecutive Eras dates in New Jersey, and recalls feeling overwhelmed by the scale of the production and seemingly never-ending set list. “It’s strange how Eras Tour feels so forward-facing, even as Swift rummages through the past,” he reflects, “It’s a pop history that’s so rich and deep and multilayered, but one she’s still rewriting before our eyes” (175). When Swift released a screen adaptation of the tour in October of the same year, Sheffield attended a screening near Cornelia Street in New York City, where the fans were just as ebullient in the theater as they had been in the stadiums. Another few months after that, she announced the imminent release of another new album, The Tortured Poets Department at the Grammys.

All the while, her personal life had completely transformed: after breaking up with her boyfriend of six years, Joe Alwyn, she entered into a new relationship with NFL player Travis Kelce. Unlike any of her previous boyfriends, Kelce seemed to embrace Swift’s megastardom, and Swift made an enthusiastic entry into his world of professional football. Yet The Tortured Poets Department surprised everyone when it didn’t focus on either Alwyn or Kelce, but rather a completely different man (Sheffield leaves him unnamed, but is likely referring to Matty Healy), who Swift had a brief fling with in between the two more serious relationships. And still, the Eras tour continued. In summer of 2024, terrorists made a threat against Swift’s Vienna shows, forcing her to cancel them. Sheffield’s sisters were among the thousands of fans who had traveled to Vienna for the shows, and instead of feeling defeated, they celebrated in the streets with their fellow Swifties. Watching their resilience in the face of a very scary threat, Sheffield feels certain that Swift’s fears of fading into oblivion are unfounded; her cultural impact seems firmly eternal at this point.

Chapter 22-Epilogue Analysis

Sheffield’s analysis of Swift’s music becomes more fragmentary in these chapters, focusing more on individual songs than whole albums  (four out of nine chapters are devoted to single tracks, the highest concentration of this kind of chapter anywhere in the book). This mode of analysis allows Sheffield to examine Swift’s narrative voice on a highly detailed level, making some of his most forceful arguments for her Pop Persona as Paradox. He is also able to discern aspects of her character that were seemingly invisible in earlier periods of her songwriting, indicating that Swift has not run out of selves to explore just because she is a seasoned veteran of pop stardom at this point.

Sheffield devotes a three-chapter stretch to analyzing four distinct Swift incarnations across Folklore and Evermore: “Mirrorball” Taylor, “Marjorie” Taylor, “right where you left me” Taylor and “it’s time to go” Taylor. Treating these narrators as distinct characters with their own universes and personalities is in the spirit of the Folklore/Evermore duology, which was Swift’s most explicit effort at fictional storytelling. Paradoxically, though, Sheffield also recognizes that to some degree, these different characters are all the same person, having been invented by Swift. His assessment of “it’s time to go” Taylor and “right where you left me” Taylor as oppositional voices warring inside the same mind captures this truth. In the end, he uses the singular “her” to refer to them both: “In terms of topics where you trust her expert advice, ‘knowing when it’s time to go’ comes between ‘galactic astrobiology’ and ‘blindfolded machete combat’” (168).

Nevertheless, the even-keeled maturity of “it’s time to go” Taylor is a seemingly new version of Swift; Sheffield, at the very least, does not discuss any prior song with such a sage voice. His descriptions of “Marjorie,” too, hint at this new maturity in Swift’s writing. Referring to Swift’s admiration for her grandmother, Sheffield writes, “She wishes her adult self could have learned even more from this wise woman,” perceiving that Swift was writing firmly from her 30-year-old perspective, rather than any of the younger characters who appear throughout Folklore and Evermore (165). The arrival of a new incarnation of Swift who is concerned with emulating the wisdom of her late grandmother marks a key development in her public persona. That this mature persona coexists in the same era where she voices children playing pirates and all three members of a teenage love triangle is yet another example of her Pop Persona as Paradox.

In Midnights and the Eras Tour, Swift demonstrates her mastery of this ever-expanding persona. The disorientation with which Sheffield describes his experience at the Eras Tour illustrates just how many versions of herself Swift is juggling at once in 2024: “The sheer bombardment of songs was physically overwhelming—during ‘All Too Well’ everyone was ready to be carried out on a stretcher, only to realize, We’re barely halfway through” (175). Even so, Sheffield indicates Swift’s eagerness to keep acquiring new selves, observing that part of the reason she seemed to enjoy her blossoming relationship with Travis Kelce was that it allowed to her to explore who she was in an entirely new public setting. He observes, “She also seemed to love that Kelce was her gold ticket to the NFL, which was a new world for her to conquer—it was probably the last bastion of American culture she hadn’t snuck into yet” (177). Even as fans like Sheffield admit to being utterly dizzied by the number of Taylor Swifts who exist in 2024, Swift herself shows no signs of slowing her self-reinventions down.

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