Lights, cameras, bitch – smile! Even if you want to die. Poor Taylor – forced to repeat this mantra to herself throughout 2023, a difficult year for the most famous woman in the world. She was on the record-smashing Eras tour, straddling the music industry like a colossus in a leotard, all while masking a broken heart and a very bruised ego. One long-term relationship ended, only for a public humiliation at the hands of 1975 frontman Matty Healy to come along. The first year of the Eras tour read like The Great Swiftian Manic Episode.
Never mind now. She has long been defined by cautious optimism, an “all this pain won’t last” kind of disposition. And finally, she’s been proven right. On her sophomore album Fearless (2008) she has a moment of prophetic clarity. Aged 18 she reassures herself over chintzy piano: “I’m going to find someone someday who might actually treat me well”. Typically melodramatic for someone who only just earned the right to vote and still couldn’t legally buy alcohol, but clearsighted nonetheless. Aged 35 she is engaged to NFL player Travis Kelce and has just released a bunch of sugary love songs about exactly that: someone, someday, actually treats her well, etc.
Swift has otherwise been locked in a two-decade long act of self-deception. She wants the great rhetorical theme of her career to be about her relationship with fame; what it means to be the most ambitious woman in the world. And The Life of a Showgirl (2025) gestures to that: the title track is all about the shadowy abysses she haunts as a true starlet; on “Father Figure” she reminds the world that she is not just a pop star but a ruthless industry operator; “CANCELLED!” (guess what that’s about? Take your time) attempts to excavate a darkness that doesn’t come naturally to her.
And you needn’t look far for evidence of this obsession running through the rest of her oeuvre. In 2017 she pleaded with her muse: “My reputation’s never been worse, you must like me for me”. By 2021 she was agonising about being replaced by a new ingénue: “Will you still want me” she asked the world, “when I’m nothing new?” And this anxiety is fully realised, with tremendous force, on her most recent album The Tortured Poets Department (2024) – “You look like Taylor Swift in this light” she winks knowingly at the young girls coming to take her place as the cause celebre of the pop world.
But that is little more than a rhetorical footnote. The thesis statement of Swift Inc. is all contained there in “White Horse”; in the 18-year-old who knew the prophecy. Every beat of her music is punctuated by that honest-to-God yearning: a man will save me, I just know it. There have been some false starts, of course. “I hope I never lose you, I hope it never ends” she sang inauspiciously in 2019 about an old muse who left her high and dry in the house they shared by Hampstead Heath. “How dare you think it’s romantic, leaving me safe and stranded?” she chides another man, who did much the same. But the arc of the universe bends towards an engagement ring on Swift’s index finger.
“If you’d never come for me, I might’ve drowned in the melancholy” she sings of her fiancé on the lead single of Showgirl. And thank God he did! All that suicidal ideation on Tortured Poets, 1989 and Folklore was becoming heavy listening. But then again, he was always going to: she knew it at 18. The resulting effect of that story finally reaching its conclusion is a conceptually banal album (I love my boyfriend) replete with all the sweet giddiness of female adolescence. One of the album’s standout tracks, “Honey”, is shmaltzy, giggle and twirl your hair music. The chorus of “Opalite” could only be written by someone totally in love. I wonder if this is the first time, in my 19 years of listening, that I don’t detect even a hint of her faking it.
We can learn a lot from her strange relationship with Shakespeare. In 2008 she released what might still be her most celebrated song, the Springsteen-esque stadium anthem “Love Story”. In it, she recounts the tale of Romeo and Juliet but asks: what if it all worked out for those star-crossed lovers? “Marry me Juliet, you’ll never have to be alone” Romeo sings at the conclusion. Seventeen years later on Life of a Showgirl she revisits Hamlet. “The Fate of Ophelia” suggests she was destined for the same end as Hamlet’s long suffering lover, if Kelce had not come along to scoop her out of the mire. The album cover – Swift semi-drowning, John Everett Millais style – is a helpful visual aide for those otherwise slow at symbolism.
It takes a unique poetic arrogance to rewrite the great tragedies so it all works out for you in the end. But without that instinct, there would be no Taylor Swift. Her story is one of fate, but bent to her whims; heartbreak, re-rendered to her own advantage; staggering loss, transfigured into supernatural wins. Life doesn’t just happen to Taylor Swift – she told us that at 18. “You’ll do things greater than marrying the boy on the football team,” she sang at the same age, and sure – maybe she has. But marrying the boy on the football team? It was all part of the plan.
[Further reading: Gore Vidal: American prophet]
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