Taylor Swift and The Breakup Narrative
Writing for you today: Natasha (Red is my favourite Taylor album so even though it’s not my week to write I felt compelled to quickly jump on and share some pre-Poets excitement. pls forgive typos!)
Last year we – the four of us who run Swiftian Theory – met for lunch at a pasta restaurant in North London to do a song draft. This involves going round the table, picking your favourite Taylor Songs, writing them down, and trying to get the greatest ones before your friends do so you end up with the best list. As you can imagine, it also involves a lot of fun debate (is her second best song Would’ve Could’ve Should’ve or Out of the Woods? Would you pick Cruel Summer over Dear John? etc.) As we started writing, a male waiter handed us four menus. ‘What are you doing?’ he said. So we explained. ‘You guys like Taylor Swift?’ he asked, perplexed. ‘All she does is write breakup songs about her exes,’ he added, before going on to tell us he was only into a certain genre of music from the past that I’ve already forgotten. It might’ve been ‘music from the 50s’ but the implication was clear: I like music that’s actually good.
It's easy to forget today that this is still a prevalent narrative. Taylor is now a grammy-award winning billionaire, beloved by kids and teens and men and women and everyone from Baz Lurhman to Adam Sandler and the US Senate Judiciary Committee. (As we found out this week, even Vick Hope listens to Taylor as soon as her husband Calvin Harris – Taylor’s worst ex - is out of the house.)
And yet, despite all the praise and acclaim, there’s still a mainstream belief that she’s a singer who just writes about her exes. Even my brother fell for this myth. When I told him that Poets was likely to be an album about Taylor’s recent breakup, he replied, ‘Again?!….do we need another breakup album tho?’ I’ll tell you here what I told him: Taylor hasn’t done ‘a breakup album’ for nearly 12 years, since Red was released. (She has since described Red as her “one true break-up album”).
On her next album, 1989, she intentionally avoided the overt breakup narrative. As she said in her Billboard Woman of the Decade Speech:
‘They’re saying I’m dating too much in my 20s? Okay, I’ll stop, I’ll just be single. For years. Now they’re saying my album Red is filled with too many breakup songs? Okay, okay, I’ll make one about moving to New York and deciding that really my life is more fun with just my friends.’
Of course there were breakup songs on the album – hello the masterpiece that is Clean! - but she made considerate effort not to pitch it that way, and interspersed them with many other themes. Next we have Reputation: absolutely not a breakup album. Even though Getaway Car and I Did Something Bad allude to a relationship’s messy end, they are footnotes to the main drama.
Then came Lover: an album about falling in love, not losing it, even if she contemplates what that might feel like on Cornelia Street. The only clear breakup song was Death By A Thousand Cuts, which she continuously stressed was fictional and inspired by the film Someone Great.
On to Folklore and Evermore and the continuation of Taylor’s insistence that, as well as her own stories, she was writing from the perspective of people she’d never met. It doesn’t matter whether you believe her or not – I don’t fully, for the record, as some of these songs feel so clearly her – the important point is that she was still trying to get away from the ‘I’m writing about my breakup’ narrative, whether that was because of Joe’s desire to remain private or because of the way her work had been previously trivialised by that criticism.
Finally, there’s Midnights. Since her breakup with Joe, people are retrospectively trying to apply a breakup narrative onto some of these songs. It’s true you can find traces of things unravelling . But we know she wrote at least part of the album while they were still together. You don’t write ‘Karma is the guy on the screen / coming straight home to me’ on a breakup album.
Despite all this, throughout her career, she’s been running from this narrative that she only writes breakup songs. Really, it’s understandable that my brother and anyone who hasn’t been listening closely to her music would think that too, because even she has leaned into it. In her SNL monologue she parodies herself as a girl who loves glittery things and baking and writing songs about ‘douchebag’ exes and naming them in her lyrics. It makes me sad to watch this now:
I get why she tried to lean into the narrative – she wanted everyone to know she was in on the joke rather than just the person being laughed at. I wonder if she thought there was more power in at least acknowledging that she knew what her critics were saying. Only a decade later is she ready to admit that, ‘I took the money / the jokes weren’t funny.’ Sometimes it’s only age that allows us to see experiences that seemed funny at the time were actually more painful than we realised in the moment. The extra years and wisdom give us courage, not only call them out, but to be fully ourselves, in all our glittery, sometimes heartbroken glory, without fearing being laughed at or undermined.
Which brings me to Poets, and why I am so excited about this album. Of course there’s the obvious things to look forward to: intimate songs about one of the most significant experiences of her life. A return to specificity after some of the more cryptic themes on Midnights. Her description of writing the album: “I needed to make it. It was really a lifeline for me.It sort of reminded me of why songwriting is something that actually gets me through life and I’ve never had an album where I’ve needed songwriting more than I needed it on Tortured Poets.”
Let’s hear that again: I’ve never had an album where I’ve needed songwriting more than I needed it on Tortured Poets.” God knows what we’re in for, but I’m scared and excited by the emotional depths she’s going to take us to.
But on top of all this, I’m excited because she is finally reclaiming the breakup narrative 12 years later. She’s no longer running from it, no longer bending her work into a different shape or theme to avoid being pigeon-holed as ‘the girl who only writes about breakups.’ Maybe she can see the misogyny in some of this earlier criticism more clearly. Maybe she’s owning the fact that writing songs about love falling apart is just as credible as writing about politics or any other topic that people might deem more ‘serious’. Call me crazy, but I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Poets is exactly the same length – 65 minutes – as Red, which she has described as ‘her one true breakup album’. Could Poets be the moment that she stands in front of the world and says, This is what I’m good at. I’m not ashamed to say it matters. And if you don’t get that, maybe the joke is on you.
**
Other stuff I’m thinking about this week
*The track list length announcements
So many long songs. Are we getting a new All too well or WCS? I just don’t think I’m ready for ‘But Daddy I love him’ at 5 minutes 40 seconds
*The Joe / Alison Oliver theories
Despite all my passion for Poets in this post, I hope Taylor’s team get out ahead of this storm and do something like she did for Dear John - eg get Taylor to ask her fans to not to go after Joe. It will be a shame if that side of things ruins the mood of this release. (Tree: if you’re reading, please get on this for us.)
A brilliant new lyric analysis from two Swifties
Happy one week until Poets day!
We’ll be back next week with some first takes on Poets.
All’s fair in love and poetry.
Nxx
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