I sometimes wonder how Taylor Swift will cope the moment she ceases to be the most famous woman in the world. I have been observing Swift’s career since I was 11 years old, when she released her debut album in 2006. Fearless (2008) punctuated the early years of senior school; Red (2012) the denouement of my teens; and the pop manifesto 1989 (2014) soundtracked university. I could go on all the way until her latest release, the rather un-gnomically titled The Tortured Poets Department (2023) – or, a manic episode set to synths.
Well, it’s good news for the long-indentured hopeless romantic – romance is not so hopeless after all, so it seems; and she continues to be the most famous woman in the world, for now. I am talking, of course, about Swift’s announcement on Tuesday – the Instagram post heard around the world. After all the false starts, inappropriate men, decades of pining, and stacks of records about how all love ever does is “break, and burn, and end”, Swift is engaged to be wed.
Her boyfriend of two years, NFL tight end Travis Kelce, proposed to the singer in a rose-garden of sorts, and the crowd went wild (28 million likes and counting on Instagram; a breaking news push notification from the New York Times; sections of the Amazon will need to be felled to accommodate the newspaper column inches about to be filled on America’s royal wedding). And now, the two great themes of Swift’s lyrical universe – love and limelight – have come together in Holy Matrimony.
Here is the secret to understanding the star: her contradictions are the most stable and predictable things about her. Just look to the whiplash effect of watching her feted Eras Tour (which came to Dublin last summer). As Swift rattles through her career highlights, 2006-present day, the viewer is thrown like a rag doll between discordant genres. We have twangy guitars one minute, breezy synths the next, cavernous choruses fill the stadium, then we whip back to quiet folkish ballads. Reputation (2017) makes an attempt on hip hop and trap sounds; Lover (2019) is the stuff of Disney poptimism. She has never presented a stable artistic identity to the world.
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And it extends beyond the words she commits to the page. In 2019 Swift was all about social justice (gay rights became her cause du jour); we don’t hear so much about that from her any more. In 2012 she spent all summer being paparazzi’d around New England, cosplaying as a Kennedy. By 2014 that act was gone, in favour of a sleek bob in New York City, in concert with the oh-so cosmopolitan 1989 record. You have to wonder whether Swift has any taste at all: whose persona – sonic, visual, political – changes so much and so frequently?
[ Taylor Swift’s engagement ring marks a return to vintage eleganceOpens in new window ]
No matter all these giddy and precipitous genre leaps, there is one emergent theme across these records. She has made 11 studio albums; the 12th (The Life of a Showgirl) lands on October 3rd, though it leaves me struggling to find a polite euphemism for what I can only describe as a Fame Death Drive. Swift might have written reams of complex, nuanced, specific, universal (blah blah blah) songs – soundtracking the lives of millions of adolescent girls. But all of it is done in service of the id she can never escape: the need to be bigger, and better, and more famous than everyone else, and herself.
We detect early signs of this in her debut album (aged 16), she’s “a girl on a mission” who is “ready to fly”; by 18 she’s reassuring herself that she will “do greater things in life than marrying the boy on the football team”; at 20 she’s “shining like fireworks” over some other singer’s “sad empty town”; two years later and her “name goes up in lights”; by 2020, aged 30 in the middle of the pandemic, she reckons with the audience, reassuring them that she’s still “in her highest heels” trying everything “to keep [us] looking at [her]”. But the worst of all for Swift? The fear that she might be replaced by a new ingenue.
Everything Swift does – the world’s biggest tour, the prolific songwriting, the album release schedules and, yes, the engagement announcement – must be understood through this lens. And yes, the bores of the world aren’t technically wrong when they call the proposal announcement a “business move” (duh, when you are your business everything you do is a “business move”, Sherlock).
But none of this means the rest of it isn’t real. And this is what the tepid cynics and aromantics misunderstand about Swift and the rest of the universe. The songs are still written by a real person with real feelings; famous women fall in love and have their heart broken too. Swift’s quest for ever more plaudits and accolades is not an anathema to the pursuit of love. Self-interested robots who only want to sell more concert tickets don’t write songs such as All Too Well; they wouldn’t be capable. And so, back to the great Swiftian duality – love and limelight – in concert, at last.
