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.
Prelude-Chapter 5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Prelude Summary: “Prelude: Our Song Is a Slamming Screen Door”
Sheffield recounts his first encounter with Taylor Swift’s music. In 2007, he stumbled upon “Our Song” at home when the CW played it between episodes of the television show he was watching. He writes that he was immediately enraptured by the song’s lyricism, and hoped at the time that Swift’s career would produce “another great song or two” (xiv). Flashing forward to 2011, he attends his first Taylor Swift concert: a Speak Now tour stop at Madison Square Garden in New York City. He is the odd man out in the audience, a six-foot-five male music critic surrounded by a sea of young female fans. He leaves the concert ecstatic, telling friends that Swift is inspiring a new generation of talented female musicians. Over ten years later, writing in the early 2020s, he can confidently say that his prediction came true.
Chapter 1 Summary: “Planet Taylor: Nice to Meet You, Where You Been”
Sheffield begins the chapter by asserting that there is no other figure in the history of Pop music who is directly comparable to Taylor Swift, primarily because of her unprecedented longevity in the industry. “In 2024, she’s at the peak of her fame, her cultural and commercial impact, her artistic powers, her warp-speed work pace,” he writes, “But she’s been at this level for eighteen years” (1). He supports this assertion with numbers, citing the $1,000,000,000 in revenue generated by her Eras Tour in 2023, and the fact that The Tortured Poets Department outsold 2024’s top ten albums combined (five of which were her own albums). This grandiosity, he argues, is an essential part of her artistic image. Her determination to be the most forceful version of herself at all times has led to just as many detractors as fans, and Sheffield expresses sympathy for those detractors, writing that Swift’s presence in pop culture can be overwhelming.
The author then discusses the fan culture that surrounds Swift, using his attendance at three consecutive nights of the Eras Tour as a case study in how that culture operates. He recounts the emotional intensity of the concerts, remembering how several fans sought him out after learning he had brought tissues. There are many factors that contribute to this response from fans. Sheffield argues that Swift has overhauled the image of pop music into one that is unapologetically concerned with the emotions of women, and that an entire generation of fans has grown up seeing themselves in her lyrics (and her many self-reinventions). This sweeping cultural impact has occurred in spite of numerous naysayers, and resistance from the industry at-large. Sheffield recounts the media storm that surrounded her 2010 out-of-tune duet with Stevie Nicks at the Grammys, how critics seems delighted to slam Swift’s performance and musical credibility even at the earliest stages of her career. He writes that although fans and critics alike love to speculate about who Swift is at her core, she is, ultimately, a mystery to all.
Chapter 2 Summary: “I Love You, It’s Ruining My Life”
Sheffield explores the multifaceted nature of Swift’s persona, which varies heavily from album to album and even song to song. There is an ongoing question, he asserts, about whether the Taylor Swift who exists in her songs and on stage is the same person she is in her private life. He specifies that in Heartbreak, he is always talking about the Taylor Swift that exists in the text of her lyrics, rather than the extratextual, real-life Taylor, who he does not know well. In her songs, Swift is detail-oriented, historically-informed, and most of all, convinced of the importance of her own emotional experiences, even when her emotions cause her to contradict herself. He insists that these are artistic virtues, ones that position her firmly in the realm of musical greatness, much to the dismay of critics who are convinced she is an overrated fad.
Chapter 3 Summary: “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young, Loud, and Not-Especially-Great-At-Calming-Down Woman”
Sheffield discusses some of the characteristics that seem to irritate those people who are not fans of Swift. Neither Swift nor her fans exercise very much restraint, especially when compared to contemporary pop megastars like Beyoncé, who has built her career on self-possession. Swift’s songs overflow with details that Swifties become obsessed with. And her stories are never truly finished; there’s always the chance that they will reappear in later music releases. For those who have not become absorbed by Swift’s particular mode of world-building and storytelling, this fanaticism that surrounds her can seem like a bit too much. Sheffield remarks, “those people have never had their lives ruined by a Taylor Swift song. You know what? They have chosen wisely. I envy them” (20).
Chapter 4 Summary: “Early Days: Please Picture Me in the Trees”
Chapter 4 focuses on the biographical details of Swift’s early life. She was born in December of 1989 in Pennsylvania. Her parents are Scott Swift and Andrea Swift, an investment banker and marketing executive, respectively. Taylor has one younger brother, Austin. Due to the wealth associated with her parents’ careers, she grew up in a very privileged setting; her father purchased a Christmas tree farm from a client, where the family resided. Despite being named after James Taylor, Taylor understood that her parents expected her to follow in their footsteps and pursue a career in the world of corporate finance. Upon being gifted a copy of LeAnn Rimes’s third album, Blue, however, she fell in love with country music and became determined to devote her life to it.
Her parents decided to support this dream: They traveled for voice lessons in New York, signed up for Broadway auditions, and managed to book her performances in some prominent venues. At school, she felt ostracized—nobody her age thought it was cool to be a wannabe country star—with the exception of her best friend, Abigail, who features in several of her songs. She recorded her first demo at eleven and convinced her mom to take her to Nashville, where she hand-delivered copies of it to the offices of all the major country music labels. When she didn’t get any call-backs about it, she learned how to play the guitar, thinking it would make her a more authentic, marketable country singer. The family eventually moved to Nashville, and she signed a one-year deal with RCA records, which she did not renew because she sensed that the label would make her wait a long time to release an album. The following year, she was discovered by Scott Borchetta, who signed her to his new label, Big Machine Records, after Scott Swift invested in the company. In 2006, her first album, Taylor Swift was released.
Chapter 5 Summary: “Track Five: The Ballad of ‘All Too Well’”
Sheffield devotes an entire chapter to “All Too Well,” which he has consistently crowned Swift’s best song of all time in his famed Rolling Stone ranking of her entire catalogue (this list is updated and adjusted with every major Swift release). The chapter is structured as a list of observational passages about the song, counting down from thirteen (Taylor’s lucky number). He provides a brief rundown of “All Too Well’s” history: It was first released as the fifth track on Red and was, in Sheffield’s opinion, the greatest song she had ever written, but did not receive wide recognition as such until she released a 10-minute version of the song in 2021 on Red (Taylor’s Version). He goes on to explain the significance of the song being placed as track five on the album: On almost every album, Swift intentionally places her most emotionally loaded songs in this spot.
Along with the ten-minute version, Swift released a short film for “All Too Well,” which opens with a line from Tonight I Can Write the Saddest Lines by Pablo Neruda as its epigraph. When she spoke at the premiere of the film in New York City, an event that Sheffield attended, she revealed that “All Too Well” had long been her favorite song on Red, but that performing it had been difficult because of its highly personal nature, and that fans’ love for it had transformed the song’s meaning. Sheffield understands the meaning of the song as multifaceted depending on which version one is listening to, “But each version feels like it’s all her, because this isn’t really a song about a boy—never was” (33). Later, when the film was screened at the Tribeca Film Festival, Taylor discussed the Neruda epigraph, as well as her love of filmmaker John Cassavetes and actress BarabaraBarbara Stanwyck, an icon of Hollywood’s Golden Age. She revealed that the film’s ending was based on the ending of Stanwyck’s 1937 film, Stella Dallas.
Prelude-Chapter 5 Analysis
This section deals roughly with the years 1989 to 2006, ending with the release of Swift’s debut album Taylor Swift. “Track Five: The Ballad of ‘All Too Well’” diverts from the book’s chronological structure, jumping ahead to “All Too Well’s” 2012 release, such that Sheffield can discuss Swift’s track fives in the book’s fifth chapter, a numerical pun. Other than that final time skip, these early chapters serve as a sort of extended prologue to Swift’s career. The final lines of Chapter 4 directly address the reader, setting the scene for them as if the real action is about to start: “Please picture her at fifteen, making her way in the music biz, when most people figured she had hit her peak just by releasing an album. She was already romanticizing the woman she would become. Too scared to jump in? Least of her problems” (30). As such, the book’s official prologue, “Prelude: Our Song is a Slamming Screen Door,” can be interpreted as foregrounding Sheffield’s concurrent observations of Swift’s career, rather than addressing the artist herself.
By crafting these two parallel prologues, namely the prelude and Chapter 4, Sheffield establishes the book’s central questions about Fandom as a Source of Creativity: Just as Swift’s music inspires her fans and informs their understanding of themselves, Swift’s fans inform and inspire her music. Sheffield explores this symbiotic relationship from his own perspective, casting himself as the archetypical fan and Swift as the archetypical idol. From the start, his admiration for Swift shines through in his tone, with effusive comments like, “There’s nobody you can compare her to, not even the greats,” making it clear how highly he regards her (1). He also expresses solidarity with other fans, tenderly recounting the sense of community he felt while attending the Eras Tour. “The woman behind me who responded to the intro of ‘All Too Well’ by dropping to her knees and spending the entire ten minutes sobbing in a fetal position,” he writes, “you are my goddamn hero” (6). Reading these introductory paragraphs, it becomes clear that Heartbreak is going to be just as much about how fans (beginning with Sheffield) experience Swift as it will be about Swift herself. This structural choice reflects Sheffield’s core thesis for the book: that Swift has “reinvented pop music in the fangirl’s image” (8). Her music anticipates and responds to fan reactions, and Sheffield’s identity as a longtime fan positions him to trace this relationship over the course of Swift’s career.
Despite this tendency to foreground his own fandom, in Chapter 4 Sheffield very consciously removes himself from the narrative, providing a more neutral account of Swift’s early biography. The first portion of the chapter is devoted to expository information, as Sheffield lists biographical details like who Swift’s family members are, where she grew up, and how she first encountered country music. Even in the moments where Sheffield’s voice shines through more clearly, he endeavors not to add too much of his own perspective to the text. In one instance, he opts to use rhetorical questions instead of voicing his own opinion: “It’s an open question. Was she authentically shy in high school, where she spent just one year? Did she really go through the tribulations of adolescent rejection? But does it really matter?” (27). This early attempt to trace a distinction between Swift as a person and Swift as a character—coupled with an admission that such distinctions may be impossible or irrelevant—announces Sheffield’s interest in Pop Persona as Paradox. Swift’s songs transform the raw material of her life into art, and any given Swift album contains songs that represent different aspects of her personality—aspects that often contradict each other. Sheffield is interested in tracing these contradictions without attempting to resolve them.
In Chapter 5, Sheffield merges these parallel narratives (the one about Swift and the one about himself as a Swiftie) into one, using his thoughts about “All Too Well” as an introduction to the structure of the rest of the book. The chapter’s countdown structure offers readers a sense of chronology, while the content of each numbered section functions more like a miniature freeform essay about the song. In this way, the author balances the informational and creative components of the book, and conveys that Swift’s story is intertwined with the stories of her fans. His observation that the smash-hit ten-minute version of the song “only exists because fans called her bluff—after she mentioned the original draft, people kept asking about it, as if she had it hidden in a sock drawer,” drives this point home (33). By establishing the interconnection inherent to the relationship between fans and music idols in this chapter, Sheffield justifies the pairing of his story with Swift’s.
