In Heartbreak Is the National Anthem (Dey Street, Nov.), music journalist Rob Sheffield investigates Taylor Swift’s ascent to pop stardom and the secrets of her musical longevity.
What was it like to profile an artist whose career is in progress?
It’s so different from writing about the Beatles or Bowie. Taylor Swift’s completely restless and unpredictable, and not only is it impossible to sum up where she is right now, but I guarantee she’ll do something in the next week that will absolutely drive me crazy.
I wanted to write about her as an artist as opposed to her boyfriends or her image, which was mostly what people wrote about when she started out. And sometimes it was weird to get into arguments in bars and I’d be like, no, it’s not the image, it’s not the boyfriend. She just writes these genius songs, and has since she was a teenager, because she’s studied the greats—Bruce Springsteen, Prince—and learned their tricks. She definitely wants to be part of the long run of music history.
What do you mean by tricks from other artists?
After Prince put out Purple Rain, it was the world’s favorite record. All he had to do to follow up was make Purple Rain again, but instead he made the total opposite, Around the World in a Day. I was a teenager when it came out. I was like, why is he doing this? But—and he said it at the time—he didn’t want to make the same record twice. That set the tone for his career, and that’s the ultimate trick Taylor picked up from him: she’ll never make the same record twice. After Red, I thought, this is a perfect record—she could keep making this for the rest of her career. And the shock when I first heard 1989 and I was like, honestly, why is she doing this, just to do it? The easy way would’ve been more than enough.
How has she navigated being a woman in the music industry?
She’s always been in control of her artistic presentation, her music, her business. Everything that she can do herself, she does, and she’s been willing to be called the names that a woman is called when a woman does it that way.
She’s also managed to avoid the phenomenon of being aged out of the scene. It’s very tricky for teen stars to graduate to being adults stars, and much harder for female artists. I write in the book about Taylor’s walk-on song for the Eras tour, Lesley Gore’s “You Don’t Know Me.” Gore was a teenage pop star who was flushed out of the business by 21, and Taylor has really set out to challenge that paradigm. To me, using that song was saying, yeah, Lesley Gore didn’t live to see this kind of future, but I will.
