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

“She has taken the pop girl and made her the center of music—not a genre, not a style, not a fad. She reinvented pop in the fangirl’s image. In the 2000s, when she began, a young girl writing her own hit songs about her own feelings was rare. Now that’s just what pop is.”

This is one of Sheffield’s central theses about “how Taylor Swift reinvented pop music.” The centering of femininity, especially youthful femininity in Swift’s lyrics and artistry as a whole, though seemingly mundane, represent a fundamental shift in the sensibility of an entire industry with misogyny built into its very foundation.

“It’s like The Divine Comedy, where we have Dante Poet (the author) and Dante Pilgrim (the narrator). Taylor Songwriter may or may not be Taylor Pilgrim, Taylor Lover, Taylor Pathological People Pleaser, Taylor Mirrorball, or Taylor Hi I’m the Problem It’s Me. She likes to keep cryptic about that.”

Sheffield uses an analogy to liken Swift’s presence in her lyrics to Dante’s presence in The Divine Comedy, where distinctions between author and narrator can become very murky. This comparison is a good example of how Sheffield seeks to locate Swift not only within the landscape of music history, but of literary history as well, exalting her lyricism as on par with some of the most revered writers of all time.

“We go to these songs because they tell us our stories. We tell our secrets to these songs, and they scream our secrets back at us. We bring our questions to these songs, the way Taylor asks the streetlights, ‘Will it be okay?’ And the streetlights give her the exact same answer that Stevie Nicks got from the mirror in the sky, all those years ago: ‘I don’t know.’”

Sheffield references the 1975 Fleetwood Mac song “Landslide,” in which Stevie Nicks sings “Oh, mirror in the sky, what is love?/ Can the child within my heart rise above?/ Can I sail through the changin’ ocean tides?/ Can I handle the seasons of my life?,” comparing this lyric to one from Swift’s “Death By a Thousand Cuts,” where she sings “I ask the traffic lights if it’ll be all right/ They say, ‘I don’t know.’” His use of the plural pronoun “we” in describing his response to these songs evokes the collective experience of fans living with the questions in the lyrics, alongside Nicks and Swift themselves.

“In the Swiftian universe, any lost scarf is a ticking time bomb that can take years to explode into a song. No scrap of the past is safe from showing up again—no snow globe, no snowmobile, no snow or beach. She’s a detective who never files the cold cases away.”

This assertion references four songs by Swift: “All Too Well,” “You Are In Love,” “Out of The Woods,” and “Snow on the Beach,” in that order. Pieces of analysis like this one demonstrate that while Sheffield works to demystify Swift’s codes in Heartbreak, he also speaks in them, making choices in imagery and wording that will only be understandable for well-versed Swifties. His metaphor likening Swift to a detective is a nod to her backup career choice, which he will go on to discuss at the opening of Chapter 15.

“An eternal law of pop music: anything halfway cool that’s ever happened is because teenage girls made it happen.”

Sheffield’s championing of the young female perspective as foundational to pop music echoes the sentiments of the 1970s Women’s Music movement. Here, he invests teenage girls with the kind of agency that he argues Swift has fought for her entire career.

“My mom had a saying: You don’t have to attend every argument you’re invited to. Taylor doesn’t roll that way (and honestly, neither did my mom).”

Throughout Heartbreak, Sheffield continuously presents Swift and the women he is closest to—most notably his mother and sisters—as reflecting one another. This mirroring—between Swift’s public life and the personal lives of her fans—is a key aspect of how Sheffield understands Fandom as a Source of Creativity.

“There were rumors of her playing Joni in a biopic, or at least Joni kept claiming, in order to ridicule the younger artist. ‘I squelched that,’ she boasted to the Sunday Times. ‘I told the producer, ‘All you’ve got is a girl with high cheekbones.’”

Sheffield portrays Joni Mitchell’s dismissal of Swift’s merits as an example of how Femininity and Misogyny in the Music Industry are frequently entangled with one another, as one of Swift’s feminist heroes reduces her to her looks. As Sheffield relates it, the misogyny Swift has faced throughout her career has come from all directions, even from other female artists she admires.

“For some reason, the industry honchos did not see the Swift Effect as a positive development. To them, she was proof that the guitar was finally dead.”

Here, Sheffield adopts a sarcastic tone, pretending not to know why music executives were wary of Swift’s revival of the acoustic guitar. The subtext, as with many anecdotes about Swift’s career included by Sheffield in Heartbreak, is a sinister undercurrent of Misogyny in the Music Industry that informs how many men in power respond to her successes.

“The girl in ‘The Archer’—she is full of secrets everybody already knows. When she sings, ‘I never grew up, it’s getting so old,’ she thinks nobody has ever noticed this. When she admits that she has a history of turning her friends into enemies, she’s absolutely certain she is the first to mention it, as if her friends and enemies don’t laugh about it together.”

Unlike many pop culture journalists who presume that Swift always sings from her own perspective, Sheffield approaches each of her songs as if the narrator is a potentially fictional character. The plethora of characters and voices that he perceives within Swift’s catalogue contributes to the effect of Pop Persona as Paradox. Sometimes, this paradoxical nature is evident within the span of one song, as with the narrator of “The Archer,” who is somehow secretive and laid bare at the same time.

“She left a dozen or so great songs behind, but ‘It’s My Party’ and ‘You Don’t Own Me’ are the two that live on, a back-and-forth argument about female autonomy. She was my mom’s generation, a people-pleasing ingenue who got chewed up and spat out by the Sixties machine, dismissed as a disposable trifle. She would have been shocked at the idea that years after her death, she’d be singing this song every night to stadiums full of Swifties, as they scream along, ‘I’m free, and I love to be free!’”

Leslie Gore is one of the many figures that Sheffield treats as a precursor to Swift. His understanding of “It’s My Party” and “You Don’t Own Me” as two songs on opposite sides of the same dialogue anticipates his subsequent analysis of Swift’s “Right Where You Left Me” and “It’s Time To Go,” indicating that though Swift has perfected the model of a Pop Persona as Paradox, she did not invent it.

“For ‘Holy Ground’ she banged the drum solo on a giant glowing cylinder. ‘She’s rocking out!’ the little kid behind me informed her mom. ‘She’s rocking ooouuut!’ I will remember this kid the rest of my life.”

Sheffield’s anecdotes about his personal experiences attending Swift concerts are a key aspect of the book’s exploration of the relationship between fans and music idols. By ending Chapter 14 with this story about a child who sat behind him at The Red Tour, he ensures that readers will also remember the story, enveloping them in the communal experience of fandom.

“Haylor is a unique case of two brilliant pop brains who keep tossing these paper airplanes back and forth for years—not because there’s any bad blood, but just because it’s a creative gold mine. They’re still at it, as if they just love being part of this tradition too much to let it go.”

Of all of Swift’s romantic relationships, Sheffield spends the most time discussing the one with Harry Styles. Comparing them to other ill-fated pop couples like Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham, he frames their songwriting dialogue as part of music history. Paper airplanes are a symbol used by Swift throughout her music for her romance with Styles (the couple shared a necklace with a paper airplane pendant during their time together), and Sheffield borrows it here.

“She did not want to be Taylor Swift anymore. It was pure self-sabotage. Nobody was asking her for this. After Red, the world was hoping for Red II: Fifty Shades Redder, Red III: Revenge of the Scarf, or Red IV: Maple Latte Massacre.”

Sheffield uses humor to lighten the gravity of this important turning point in Swift’s career. His sarcasm suggests the degree to which Swift’s constant self-reinvention has often required a willingness to avoid giving fans what they want. This mischievous style of writing is indicative of his background in music journalism, a form of writing which tends to lean towards playfulness.

“Does Taylor keep getting pulled back to ‘nice’ because it embodies these fucked-up gender clichés? Is it the demand for female niceness, the way ‘nice’ divides and defines women? Is she reclaiming a word scorned for its girliness? Fighting to liberate the twee? Or just making the best of a trite platitude?”

Sheffield’s use of rhetorical questions leaves room for readers to come up with their own answers, though he heavily implies that the correct answer to each of these questions is “yes.” His close examination of a single word in this chapter exemplifies how the struggle between Femininity and Misogyny in the Music Industry can play out on a microscopic scale.

“She claims the ‘New Romantic’ sound with a female voice—although the genre was androgynous by definition, most stars were boys in makeup singing to an audience of girls in slightly less makeup.”

An avid fan of the New Romantic movement, Sheffield nonetheless offers a subtle critique of it, suggesting that despite its pretensions of gender liberation, the male domination of the movement revealed its failure to escape the music industry’s entrenched sexism. Swift’s embrace of the New Romantic sound and philosophy is therefore more than an homage; it is an attempt to realize goals that the New Romantics only half met in the 80s.

“The Kanye/Taylor screenshot became an iconic visual image. It spoke to male cultural anxiety about the explosion of female-driven pop, which made (and still makes) many men irate, like something is being stolen from them. Kanye was the image of male authenticity speaking truth to girl power.”

Sheffield treats Kanye West’s attacks on Swift as a microcosm of misogyny in the music industry. By likening the screenshot to a piece of iconography, he conveys how Swift’s face has become irrevocably woven into the fabric of pop culture, even in moments she would rather it not be.

“The word ‘reputation’ comes up a lot—in reference not to her public image, but to the far more relatable dilemma of how you surrender your identity in counting the likes and faves you rack up every day, or how many times you look in a mirror, or how much of your neural bandwidth you reserve for the scoreboard on what’s wrong with you. That has always been a theme of her songwriting, going back to the high school milieu of her earliest records—she’s always sung about girls struggling not to internalize the misogyny around them.”

Sheffield considers the significance of the title of Swift’s sixth album, an album that he argues is widely misinterpreted on almost all fronts. Here, he illuminates the double entendre of “reputation,” linking the word to Femininity and Misogyny in the Music Industry and in the wider world inhabited by Swift’s fans.

“That’s a key part of being Taylor: the constant revising of the self IS the self.”

Although humor defines Sheffield’s tone throughout the text, his analysis of Swift’s identity has earnest philosophical underpinnings. Here, his definition of Swift’s self as a process of revision echoes philosopher René Descartes’s famous line, “I think, therefore I am” from Discourse on a Method.

“The Scooterific backstory already seems like a footnote to a major creative project. The TV phenomenon symbolizes Swift’s unwavering commitment to creative autonomy—a refusal to let external forces define her artistic narrative.”

The made-up adjective “Scooterific”—a neologism combining Scooter Braun’s name and the suffix “ific,” which informally means “extremely”— pokes fun at Braun and his authority in the pop music industry. Sheffield furthers his diminishment of Braun’s importance by using a simile likening him to a footnote, thereby conveying that Swift’s “Taylor’s Version” project has been ultimately successful in reclaiming public authority over her own narrative and pushing Braun and his supporters to the periphery.

“Maybe this cranberry sauce symbolizes what true romance is all about. Maybe love doesn’t have to be burning red. Maybe it doesn’t even have to be golden. 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.”

Sheffield’s analysis of Swift’s messaging extends beyond the music itself and into the rich world of her visual output. Here, he fixates on a minute detail from the “Lover” music video, a plate of cranberry jelly bizarrely paired with pasta, arguing that the sauce symbolizes love itself. This methodology resembles the meticulous analysis of Swift’s musical universe carried out by Swifties on numerous internet forums, helping to confirm for readers that Sheffield is, indeed, a member of the fandom.

“The way Swift sees the story, Betty ends up getting back together with James. But even if Betty might get the guy, Augusta gets the song, and that’s a win for Augusta.”

Sheffield tries to characterize Swift as a figure in her own songs, but he also aims to parse the fictional characters she creates in her music. In this case, he discusses the high school love triangle that is Folklore’s throughline, with Betty, James, and Augusta all voiced by Swift at various points in the album. As Swift characterizes these fictional teenagers and provides a feminist moral for their story (in a manner reminiscent of a fableist), they are in turn characterizing her and her values.

“On Folklore and Evermore, turning the lives of our loved ones into folklore is how we keep them alive—it’s how we ensure that like a folk song, their love will be passed on. ‘Marjorie’ is about communing with someone you’ve lost and trying to hear the story they always wanted to tell you.”

Once again, Sheffield uses the first person plural pronoun to convey the collective experience of music-listening. He borrows the phrase about folk songs from Swift’s song “seven” off of Folklore. This device imbues “Marjorie,” a song particularly personal to Swift, with universal significance.

“She could be talking to the girl in ‘Right Where You Left Me,’ telling her, ‘Sometimes giving up is the strong thing / Sometimes to run is the brave thing.’ Of the two voices at the end of Evermore, she’s the one to listen to and take seriously. But the other is more fun.”

Taylor Swift’s Pop Persona as Paradox is epitomized in Sheffield’s analysis of her two songs “Right Where You Left Me,” and “It’s Time to Go” (placed directly next to each other on Evermore), which he imagines as two polar opposite versions of the singer in discussion with one another. Juxtaposing the mature, sage voice of “It’s Time to Go Taylor” with the melodramatic, juvenile voice of “Right Where You Left Me Taylor,” Sheffield demonstrates how Swift can mutate her own image into its own opposite within the span of minutes.