Loving him was red, burning red, Taylor Swift sings about maybe John Mayer, perhaps Jake Gyllenhaal, on the semi-eponymous album Red (2012). But by 2017 she had a new muse, he found her “deep blue” and he “painted her golden”. In 2019 now, same muse and perhaps the biggest revelation of her romantic life: “I once believed love would be (burning red)/But it’s golden, like daylight”. Phew – it’s all going to work out. Until 2022 comes around. Muse gone, revelation in tatters: their love wasn’t golden, it wasn’t even red, it was “maroon” (like “the rust that grew between telephones”, the carnations he mistook for roses, the burgundy stain on her T-shirt, the lips she used to call home).
Over a decade, Swift spun a forensically precise yarn about the affairs of her heart – not just in primary colours, but in Pantone hues. Red, blue, golden, back to red – no, maroon. (Now, with another muse, things are “opalite”, making up for all those “onyx nights”). I think about this, about watching and listening to it unfold in real time as I grew up with her lyrical universe, and wonder why someone who cares so much can, equally, care so little.
You won’t have missed her two-year stretch on the Eras Tour: a 3.5-hour sprint through her musical catalogue, by almost every metric the biggest concert run of all time, a target of a thwarted terror plot, and one last hurrah for the monoculture. Swift, now 35, is at the height of her powers – behind the scenes of this exhausting show, that feat of endurance, she also managed to write and release two new studio albums: the genuinely tortured Tortured Poets Department (2024) and (in a major genre pivot) the bubblegum wedding-dance-pop Life of a Showgirl (2025). I like one album better than the other (psychotic episode set to synths, please!), but no one can look upon Planet Swift and find her lacking in work ethic.
It all looks great, until you watch the documentary of this period of her life: The End of an Era, released on Disney+. It proves that she cares: the years of preparation, the extra work and choreography that eats into what is technically her time off, her emotional resilience. In one affecting scene, we watch her run to the stage in a glittery orange blazer and leotard after meeting the families of the victims of the Southport stabbing. It’s all admirable; it’s all tremendously likeable. But the documentary itself? It’s boring, badly made, self-indulgent – an extended scene about Swift granting her crew a huge monetary bonus becomes one long self-back-patting exercise. It is a bad advert for Swift and her music.
And I really do wonder why. Swift could make any movie she wanted, with any director and any cinematographer. She made the concert she wanted. She wrote the albums she wanted. She set up that intricate lyrical and melodic universe with greater skill than any peer. And so, it is endlessly confusing to me that the scaffolding around Empire Swift is so badly constructed. Who bothers to write a song like “All Too Well (10-Minute Version)” while also being content with a “docu-series” as artistically lazy as this – with its staged phone calls, excessive concern with an assistant choreographer’s backstory, no thematic throughline, and no discernible narrative? We jump from “I love the Eras Tour!” to a foiled terror attack in Vienna, to Ed Sheeran, and then to the emotional breakdown about Southport, all with alarming pace and no linking argument.
I know that Taylor Swift can marshal plot and characters because I have listened to Evermore. I know she can achieve thematic consistency because 1989 exists. And I know she can charm – she wasn’t even 16 when she wrote “Our Song”. She did not apply these skills here. By way of analogy, consider that Restaurant Gordon Ramsay has three Michelin stars, while the chef himself is also slinging cheap processed meat for Burger King. I wonder if Salman Rushdie started writing graphic novels about horses, would we be confronted with a similar artistic bipolarity? A profound gulf in aptitude, located within a single brain.
And it’s not just boring documentaries. It’s the expensive-but-cheaply-made merch: ugly cardigans, tacky wine tumblers, the Life of a Showgirl earbud case (?). It’s the poorly conceived talk-show appearances, where she speaks like an evasive politician and tells bland, unspecific anecdotes. It’s the weird stints in acting – whether she’s leaden in an ensemble rom-com or actively frightening as an anthropomorphic cat in Cats. And it’s the documentaries that came before: Miss Americana (2020) tried to argue that Swift was a committed social justice warrior; instead, she read as a cynical opportunist. She didn’t need to release it.
Every time Swift is involved in a project outside of songwriting, it is like she is holding a megaphone to the world: Look! I am bad at this! I would like her to stop. For an artist so concerned with legacy, reach, fame and accolade, she seems happy to divest herself of those traits at random. I like the Taylor Swift who backdrops her love affairs with refrigerator light; the anxious hand-wringer who wonders, again and again, if it’s “cool” that she said all that; who asks the muse if he can see right through her, ‘cos she sees right through herself; the self-confessed anti-hero of her own story. Not the Swift who flogs cheap wine glasses and worse televisual “experiences”.
But there is no need for excessive anxiety about the Swift legacy, no matter how many sledgehammers she wields. The filtering effect of time will step in, and all the ugly scaffolding of Empire Swift will fall away. What will be left is the colour: red, blue, golden, maroon – in permanent marker.
[Further reading: Taylor Swift is totally in control]
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