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

The “Eras Tour” was Taylor Swift’s sixth concert tour, which she performed globally between March of 2023 and December of 2024. “Eras” broke several records and became the highest grossing concert tour of all time with $1,000,000,000 in revenue, generating global socioeconomic impact. It followed her would-have-been sixth tour, the “Lover Fest,” which was cancelled in its entirety due to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Swift envisioned “Eras” as a celebratory retrospective of all her albums, with a track list of over forty songs, divided into ten acts corresponding to each album, or “era.” At the time of Heartbreak’s publication, the “Eras Tour” was ongoing, but nearing its end.

Master recordings, commonly referred to as masters, are the original recordings of pieces of music or specific performances. These recordings can be copyrighted, and owners of the copyrights are entitled to any royalties generated by digital or analog distribution of the recordings. In 2019, Scooter Braun acquired the masters of Taylor Swift’s first six albums from Big Machine Records, Swift’s former record label. Swift expressed dismay at the transaction because she had been trying to purchase the masters herself for years, had the funds to do so, and had been denied by the label. This conflict inspired Swift the rerecord all six albums, a project which has received widespread acclaim and is ongoing as of 2024.

In music, “prog” is a colloquial abbreviation for “progressive music” (especially progressive rock), an amorphous genre that refers to any music aimed at pushing the boundaries of preexisting genres. Progressive rock emerged from the experimental environment of the British rock scene in the 1960s, where elements of other genres were increasingly incorporated into traditional rock music. Notable artists from this movement include King Crimson, Peter Gabriel, Pink Floyd, and Supertramp. When Sheffield refers to Speak Now as Swift’s prog album, he is not calling it a rock album, but rather including it in the wider tradition of progressive music that blossomed from this original movement in the 1960s.

Romanticism is a social and artistic philosophy that promotes individualism, subjectivity, and an appreciation of the natural world. The original romantic movement occurred in Europe in the late 18th and 19th centuries as a response to the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution, both of which deemphasized the importance of emotional experiences and individual self-expression. Taylor Swift is heavily influenced by these “Old Romantics,” especially the poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge (well-known for works such as “Kubla Khan” and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner) and William Wordsworth (“I Wandered Lonely As a Cloud”). She made this connection explicit with the release of her 2020 song, “The Lakes,” which refers to the Lake District in England where Coleridge and Wordsworth resided.

Equally influential to Swift are the “New Romantics,” a musical movement of the late 1970s and early 1980s that originated as a subculture in the nightclubs of London and Birmingham. Well-known artists from this movement include Duran Duran, Boy George, and Depeche Mode. New Romantics were heavily concerned with liberation from gender-based restrictions, and frequently presented themselves as androgynously as possible, though Sheffield notes that the movement consisted predominantly of male artists. Swift paid homage to the New Romantics throughout 1989, one of her most critically acclaimed albums, and even included a song named after the movement, which Sheffield discusses in detail in Chapter 18.