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

Diving back into Swiftie fan culture, Sheffield explains the significance of Swift’s cryptology, a practice she is well-known for. She leaves hidden meanings in her lyrics, music videos, and almost all other promotional materials for fans to decode and interpret. Sheffield notes that this tendency can be traced back to a radio interview Swift gave in 2006, where she admitted that her dream job outside of being a pop star would be a crime detective, revealing her penchant for clues and puzzle-solving. The first example of her use of codes was in the CD booklet for her debut album, where seemingly random letters were capitalized in order to spell out words that revealed the songs’ true meanings, an artistic choice she said was inspired by The Beatles’ backwards records. As her career has progressed, she has escalated this principle, hiding messages in so many places, it borders on excess.

The codes encourage a parasocial relationship with her fans, who serve as the detectives constantly trying to find the hidden meanings. While Swifties are under the illusion that the codes might reveal something about Swift’s personal life, however, Sheffield asserts, “she tempts people to read the songs autobiographically while always keeping her deepest mysteries to herself” (93). This was never truer than during Swift’s 1989 era, which marked the beginning of her mythologizing her relationship with ex-boyfriend, Harry Styles. Swift and Styles have been engaged in a musical dialogue ever since, one that follows the example of famed music exes like Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham, Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen. Songs like “Style” by Swift and “Perfect” by One Direction started a songwriting volley that continues to this day; in 2019, Swift released a song called “Daylight,” only for Styles to release his own “Daylight” in 2022. Neither Swift nor Styles ever discuss the relationship outside of their music, leaving fans to speculate on the few morsels they are given.

Sheffield recalls listening to 1989, Swift’s fifth album, for the first time, and thinking in a panic that Swift had possibly destroyed her own career. 1989 completely disregarded the successful formula of Red, which Swift could have very easily stuck to for several albums, opting instead to fully embrace the energetic sounds of 80s pop music. Swift plunged forward with this project, despite doubts coming from nearly all directions, most of all her label executives. But all naysayers were proven wrong when 1989 became her most beloved album by fans and critics alike.

The 1989 era was characterized by some key developments in Swift’s public image. She moved to New York and made the city the setting of the album. She also began her formative collaboration with producer Jack Antonoff, which continues to this day. She formed a “Girl Squad” of glamorous celebrity friends, which earned her a mean girl reputation with the press. The press also began to lambast her for dating too much, and using her exes as fodder for her songs. Yet Swift seemed impervious to the vitriol, promoting songs like “Style” that placed her dating history front-and-center. The rerecorded version of the album, released in 2023, included new vault tracks like “Slut!” and “Is it Over Now?” which are even more brazen in their confrontation of misogynistic press narratives. Sheffield concludes the chapter, “1989 is the first album where Taylor encounters ghosts. She’d be meeting more of those” (104).

On the subject of press criticisms, Sheffield devotes the entire chapter to the word “nice,” and why it is constantly reappearing in Swift’s songwriting. He tracks its various occurrences throughout the Swift discography, from her first hit, “Tim McGraw,” to “Wildest Dreams,” on 1989, “This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things” on Reputation, “Bejeweled” and “Midnight Rain” on Midnights. Despite being such a non-substantive word, Swift has wholeheartedly embraced it.

“Niceness,” he goes on to posit, is a quality people are constantly searching for in celebrities, especially women. “It’s a gender-coded trap for any woman in the public eye,” he argues, one that Swift unwittingly fell into at a young age, when she was determined to prove that she was nice as she could possibly be (107). He compares her to Bruce Springsteen, who also had such an overwhelming reputation for niceness that he tried to escape it in 1989 by firing his band and leaving New Jersey for California. This tactic was unsuccessful: Springsteen eventually returned to New Jersey and reunited his band with little to no media scandal. Swift’s attempts to escape her own nice girl persona have not been met with such grace.

Sheffield provides historical context for one of 1989’s bonus tracks, “New Romantics,” which borrows its name from the alternative, androgynous pop scene of the 1980s. Sheffield is, independent of his love for Swift’s music, an expert on the New Romantics, and the release of the song was a particularly delightful convergence of his interests. For Sheffield, the song’s lyrics, sound, and cultural references all epitomize the transformation she was undergoing during the creation and release of 1989. In a 2015 interview with members of Duran Duran, the posterchildren of the New Romantics scene, Sheffield introduced them to Swift’s song. Initially wary, the band members became intrigued when they learned that Sheffield thought it was a fitting tribute to their heyday. John Taylor, the band’s bassist, aptly remarked, “Once you’ve gone to Max Martin, you don’t go back to Nashville. But she had a vision for herself that she could exist outside of categories. And I guess we were probably like that with our own sound. We left Nashville. Even before we left Birmingham” (114). Sheffield takes the comparison one step further, arguing that Swift developed the New Romantic sound into something new by making a distinctly feminine version of it (though androgyny was one of the movement’s key tenets, most of its prominent acts were comprised of men).

This chapter addresses Swift’s infamous, post-1989 “villain era,” with Sheffield explaining the events that led to Swift’s loss of public favor. In 2016, Swift became involved in a very public dispute with the then-married power couple Kim Kardashian and Kanye West (popularly referred to as Kimye). By this point, Swift and West already had a long and fraught history; when she won the award for “Best Female Video” at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards, West interrupted her speech on stage to announce that Beyoncé should have won the award for her “Single Ladies” video. Swift was only nineteen at the time of this incident, and older celebrities, including President Obama, Oprah, and Katy Perry rallied around her. Unwittingly, this effusive sympathy made it seem like Swift was playing the victim, an image of that would prove to have staying power.

In the years following the VMAs debacle, West seemed eager to rehash the drama, complaining that Swift had never come to his defense. Swift tried her best to keep quiet about it, with the exception of her song “Innocent” on Speak Now, that addressed West through thinly-veiled lyrics. By 2015, the two had seemingly made nice, referring to each other as “friends.” But in 2016, West released “Famous,” a song with the controversial line, “I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex / Why? I made that bitch famous,” along with a music video that depicted a staged sexual encounter between the two. Swift was vocally outraged, but West claimed that she had given him advance permission for the song and lyric. Kardashian then released a video of the phone call where Swift supposedly gave permission, and popular opinion turned drastically against Swift. Years later, it was revealed that Kardashian had edited the video, and that Swift never gave permission at all.

The same year, Swift published a poorly-received post to Instagram, encouraged her followers to vote in the presidential election, but not endorsing either candidate. Alt-right trolls began claiming that she was revered by neo-Nazis and white nationalists, and mainstream media outlets promoted the story, calling her “Nazi idol” and “Aryan Goddess”—claims that had zero factual basis. This narrative only furthered villainization of Swift in the popular opinion. In the years since, Swift has become more vocally supportive of the Democratic Party, and it has also become clear that the “Famous” phone call was a frame-up by Kardashian and West. Even so, Swift is seemingly unable to drop the conflict, releasing a song as recently as 2024 that addressed her conflict with Kardashian.

Reputation, Swift’s sixth album, arrived three years after 1989 and was another sonic reinvention. Swift marketed the album as a response to her feud with Kimye, including abundant snake imagery as a reclamation of the snake emojis that Kardashian had used to refer to her. But surprisingly, Reputation is an album comprised mostly of love songs. During her hiatus from the spotlight, Swift had started dating Joe Alwyn, a British actor who was determined to keep his personal life private. The love songs on Reputation offer intimate, domestic glimpses into Swift’s personal life, and coexist with the album’s other main thread, aggressive, feminist rage. The summer before the album was released, Swift was occupied by a federal lawsuit filed against her by David Mueller, a country radio DJ who alleged that she had wrongfully had his job terminated in 2013 after he groped her during a photo op. Swift countersued Mueller for battery and sexual assault, and won the case, along with the single dollar she had filed the suit for. Sheffield concludes, “It wasn’t the story she wanted to spend the summer telling, but she didn’t back down. She did something bad” (134).

In 2019, Scott Borchetta sold Taylor Swift’s masters to Scooter Braun, leaving Swift feeling betrayed and without agency over her own music. When she announced her response, a plan to rerecord all six of her albums made with Big Machine, people were unsure that she could pull it off. Sheffield writes, “Who wants to be one of the clods who thought this plan was a self-defeating mistake, a faceplant of epic proportions? Well, I’m that clod, and I wouldn’t dream of lying to you about it” (138). As soon as Swift released her first rerecord, Fearless (Taylor’s Version), all doubts about the viability of the project vanished for Sheffield, and nearly everyone else. In particular, Swift’s addition of “vault tracks” to each album won people over, the rerecords struck the perfect balance between old and new.

Sheffield goes on to write about the significance of reinvention as a theme over the course of Swift’s career. He argues that her preoccupation with reinventing herself is in the tradition of her favorite romantic poet, William Wordsworth, who notoriously spent the final years of her career rewriting his old poetry only to be slammed by critics. Unlike Wordsworth, however, Swift has managed to pull off every self-reinvention she has attempted, including changes to some old lyrics for the rerecords. Ultimately, Sheffield determines that the Taylor’s Version project not only reclaims autonomy for Swift, but also allows her to comment on her past-selves.