50 pages • 1 hour read
Rob SheffieldHeartbreak 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 2024A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 6-13Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 6 Summary: “The Fangirl”
Sheffield returns to the subject of fangirls, who he earlier argued Swift has recentered in the world of pop music. He argues that a key part of Swift’s success lies in her understanding of the cultural influence teenage girls wield, an understanding she gained from being a teenage fangirl herself. As a child, she wrote numerous letters to her first idol, country singer LeAnn Rimes. At the age of eight, when attending her first Rimes concert, she sat in the front row and asked Rimes “LeAnn, did you get my letters?” When Rimes replied that she had (“I sure did, Taylor.”), it helped confirm for Swift that Rimes was everything she wanted to become. Sheffield writes, “LeAnn Rimes created a goddamn monster. She warped this child into being the best to ever do what LeAnn did” (44). He uses this origin story to explain why Swift has such a nurturing relationship with her fans, including his own nieces, who met her backstage at the Red Tour. In the 2020s, numerous younger women in pop music, like Phoebe Bridgers and Olivia Rodrigo, have cited Swift as one of their biggest inspirations for becoming singers.
Chapter 7 Summary: “Fearless”
Swift’s sophomore album, Fearless (2008), is widely regarded as her first great one (it earned her her first Album of the Year Award at the Grammys and is the most awarded country album of all-time). Sheffield remembers thinking at the time of its release, “This is a perfect pop record. One of the all-time perfect pop records. A classic. She’ll never top it” (47), the irony being that she has in fact topped it several times over. He asserts that Fearless is the album that crystalized Swift’s public image into the beginnings of what it is today, and that her writing (she either wrote or cowrote all the songs) on it laid the foundations for what would become the well-known Swiftian universe of imagery and tropes. On Fearless, Swift sang about her exes, and more than anything, she sang about girls. The album had a traditional A-side/B-side structure, and yet it felt revolutionary to so many listeners, including Sheffield.
Chapter 8 Summary: “Everybody Loves Petty, Everybody Loves Cool”
This chapter addresses an aspect of Swift’s personality that Sheffield calls “Petty Taylor,” one of her most divisive incarnations. He uses Swift’s 2014 appearance on the Graham Norton Show, alongside British comedic legend John Cleese, to illustrate what he is writing about; after Cleese joked that women are like cats, “unpredictable and cussed,” Swift scolded him for his misogyny, saying “Ooooh, we don’t want to do that” (51). As Sheffield relates, this interaction did not play out well for Swift in the court of public opinion, but it fascinated him because it seemed (to him, at least) like such a pointless fight for Swift to pick on-camera. Petty Taylor has gone on to make numerous appearances throughout Swift’s career: She’s had squabbles with many people, including Nicki Minaj, Damon Albarn, Katy Perry, and journalist Bob Lefsetz, whose negative review inspired her to write the 2010 track “Mean.” Sheffield devotes more time to two of her most recent spats, one with Olivia Rodrigo, and the other involving one of her ex-boyfriends, Joe Jonas and his now-ex-wife, Sophie Turner.
Chapter 9 Summary: “The Songs on Her Arms”
Moving forward to Swift’s Speak Now years, Sheffield considers a tradition she had on the tour for that album where she would arrive on stage with a lyric of significance written in permanent marker on her arms. Sometimes the lyrics came from her own songs, but frequently they were by artists she admired. Sheffield remarks that the practice was “a fan gesture that signified the joy of being a fan—wearing your heart on your sleeve, without the sleeve. It was also a way of locating her and her fans in the wider story of pop music” (57). He notes that Joni Mitchell’s lyrics, in particular, made frequent appearances on Swift’s arms. Swift is a vocal admirer of Mitchell, especially her album Blue, which helped to inspire Swift while writing her fourth album, Red. In one song from Red, “The Lucky One,” Swift portrays a romanticized image of Mitchell escaping the limelight and finding peace (the title of Chapter 8 is a pun on a lyric from this song). Despite this, Mitchell has made derogatory comments about Swift in the press. Sheffield says that off all the versions of Taylor, he feels the most aligned with the one who is a fan of other musicians. In Swift’s artistry, he argues, fandom is foundation of everything.
Chapter 10 Summary: “‘Enchanted’”
Sheffield discusses Speak Now in more detail, independent of its accompanying tour. The only Swift album where every song is was written by herself, he calls it her “secret prog album,” one of her most experimental. He pays particular attention to a line at the end of “Enchanted,” when she sings about holding words back, something Swift never seems to do in real life or on Speak Now itself. Sheffield also asserts that Swift’s famous knack for writing bridges came into clarity on this album, and that its sound is completely unique within her discography. “Enchanted,” in his opinion, epitomizes this unique sound.
Chapter 11 Summary: “Every Guitar-String Scar on Her Hand”
This chapter addresses Swift’s relationship to her guitar, and the impact that this relationship has had on the music industry as a whole. Swift began playing the guitar at 12 years old with the express purpose of becoming a songwriter; she intuited that having a guitar would allow her to achieve this goal in the most independent way possible. When her first guitar teacher told her it would be impossible for her to learn how to play twelve-string, she taught herself how to play one just to prove him wrong. In the early 2000s, there was a shortage of iconic guitarists in the music industry, and Swift quickly became the female “guitar hero” popular culture had been lacking for several decades. When acoustic guitars began to outsell electric guitars around 2010 (to a predominantly young female clientele), however, executives worried that her image was destroying the instrument’s entire reputation. Sheffield pithily remarks, “Nowadays, nobody’s worrying that the guitar is dead. But nobody’s still pretending the girls aren’t playing them” (65). Swift’s guitar, he argues, was an essential symbol of her autonomy, her energetic spirit, and a shield that literally protected her body from the sexually intrusive gaze of early-2000s pop culture.
Chapter 12 Summary: “The Archer”
Sheffield takes a chronological detour to discuss “The Archer,” the fifth track on Swift’s 2019 album, Lover. That album was released around the time of his mother’s passing, he recalls, and is now unavoidably associated for him with grief. In this difficult time, “The Archer” was the most meaningful song to him on the album. In his assessment, the girl in the archer is a walking paradox, a girl who is convinced her not-so-secrets are secrets. What keeps Sheffield coming back to the song is the fear that he might, in fact, be that girl.
Chapter 13 Summary: “The Bridge: Thirteen Songs from Taylor’s Dreams”
For the 13th chapter, Sheffield lists 13 (Swift’s lucky number) songs that have had a significant impact on Swift’s career, some more obvious than others. The songs are as follows: “You’ve Got a Friend” by Carol King, “Irreplaceable” by Beyoncé, “Boots of Spanish Leather” by Bob Dylan, “Doubt” by Mary J. Blige, “You’re So Vain” by Carly Simon, “Sisters of the Moon” by Fleetwood Mac (Sheffield credits this song to Stevie Nicks, who wrote and sang it), “Bette Davis Eyes” by Kim Carnes, “Nothing Compares 2 U” by Prince, “The Best of Me” by The Starting Line, “Can’t Stop Loving You” by Phil Collins, “Hot in Herre” by Nelly, “Maybe I’m Amazed” by Paul McCartney, and finally, “You Don’t Own Me” by Lesley Gore.
Sheffield pays particular attention to “Sisters of the Moon,” and “You Don’t Own Me,” both of which are key pieces of feminist recording history. He elaborates on the relationship between Nicks and Swift, which is both artistic and personal. Swift herself has commented upon this relationship, most notably in her song “Clara Bow,” in which she imagines industry executives treating her as a new Stevie Nicks, only to find a younger girl to be the new Taylor Swift a few years later. Ultimately, Sheffield argues that Swift embodies both sides of the sisterly dialogue between Stevie Nicks and Christine McVie that was central to Fleetwood Mac’s output, and which is epitomized by the lyrics of “Sisters of the Moon.” Swift used “You Don’t Own Me” as the walk-on song for her Eras Tour. Sheffield calls the song’s message of complete female autonomy, “the premise of the Eras Tour, of Taylor’s Version, of her whole career” (84). He explores how Gore lived out the words of her song in ways that would have been unpredictable while she was recording it; after being dismissed as a has-been by record executives, Gore became little known in adulthood, but had the courage to live life on her own terms, coming out of the closet and remaining in a committed same-sex partnership until her death in 2015.
Chapters 6-13 Analysis
Sheffield returns to Heartbreak’s overarching chronology, with these chapters roughly spanning the years 2006-2010 (though he again jumps ahead for the purposes of a numerical pun in chapters 12 and 13). Over the course of this era in Swift’s career, Sheffield gradually begins to address the issues of Misogyny and Femininity in the Music Industry that will prove central in later chapters. Misogyny is an insidious character in these chapters, with Sheffield strongly hinting at its presence without naming it outright until his climactic analysis of Gore’s feminist anthem, “You Don’t Own Me.”
In chapters eight through eleven, Sheffield puts forward key examples of the systemic misogyny Swift has faced from the earliest stages of her career, but instead of spelling this out, he lets the events speak for themselves. In Chapter 8, her contentious interaction with John Cleese over his blatantly sexist joke is received poorly by the public— “For a moment, she really does try to talk herself into being slightly less than Taylor Swift. It doesn’t go well—” even when her discomfort with the joke seems entirely justifiable to Sheffield in retrospect (52). Then, in Chapter 9, she faces rejection from one of her musical heroes, Joni Mitchell, who sees fit to make demeaning remarks about her appearance. Finally, in Chapter 11, guitar executives refuse to be grateful for the boost she has given their industry, simply because the new clientele is predominantly female. Though Sheffield never calls the misogyny by its name in these anecdotes, his tongue-in-cheek sarcasm in Chapter 11— “For some reason, the industry honchos did not see the Swift Effect as a positive development—” lets readers know that he is omitting the word as a way of emphasizing what is happening to Swift (65).
These quiet hints at the theme of misogyny build toward Chapter 11, where Sheffield’s feminist analysis comes into full view. By selecting songs by Carol King, Carly Simon, Kim Carnes, Lesley Gore, and Stevie Nicks for his list, he is able to convey the profound influence that second-wave feminism (which had its heyday in the 1960s and 70s) has had on Swift’s music. It is his poignant narration of Gore’s struggles, however, that brings the tension between Misogyny and Femininity in the Music Industry to Heartbreak’s forefront. “Lesley Gore was forced to live up to ‘You Don’t Own Me,’ in ways she never wanted and wouldn’t have chosen,” he writes, “It’s the song of a girl who wants to be free. But it also turned out to be the song of a woman who lived and died unowned” (85-86). The resonance between executives withholding financial control over her own music from Gore in the mid-twentieth century and the dispute over Swift’s masters nearly seventy years later emphasizes for readers that systemic misogyny is a key force in Swift’s story, one whose existence precedes her birth.
As these chapters illustrate, misogyny functions as an undercurrent throughout the story of Swift’s career, occasionally rising to the surface and operating in a more blatant manner. As such, Sheffield treats it as subtext for much of the book, simulating its insidious presence in the lives of female popstars like Swift. From the guitar industry to female role models like Joni Mitchell, there is a seeming eagerness to demean Swift on the basis of her femininity. This dynamic will only escalate in the next section. And yet, Sheffield portrays Swift as unapologetically feminine throughout. Describing the archetype she crafted for herself during the Fearless Era as, “the teen country songwriter, always falling in love, bedeviled by the boyfolk, making the thrills and spills of a week-long high school romance sound as torchy as one of Patsy Cline’s marriages,” he makes it clear that Swift’s brand of femininity cleverly plays with stereotypes, egged on by the persistent sexists who constantly underestimate her (47-48). In this way, femininity and misogyny seem to feed off of each other over the course of the book, each force digging its heels in when receiving resistance from the other.
