“She ripped up her own formula”: How Taylor Swift single-handedly changed pop music

There are no accidents in Taylor Swift’s world. On the bright June night my family and I saw the Eras tour, her surprise songs were “I Forgot That You Existed” and “This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things.” Did I mention it was Scooter Braun’s birthday? It was classic Taylor, sliding in an Easter egg for the fans to interpret. It was also, as critic and author Rob Sheffield puts it in his new book, “Heartbreak Is the National Anthem: How Taylor Swift Reinvented Pop Music,” classic “Petty Taylor.” That’s the thing, she contains multitudes. She’s Taylor, the wistful girl. Taylor, the tortured poet. Taylor, the epic grudge holder. 

Sheffield, a contributing editor at Rolling Stone and author of prior books about The Beatles, Duran Duran and David Bowie, has been writing about Swift since the earliest days of her career, so he’s uniquely qualified to declare, as he does in “Heartbreak,” that “nothing like Taylor Swift has ever happened before.” In our recent “Salon Talks” conversation, Sheffield made the compelling case for why, at age 34, Taylor Swift has already built a body of work and a community of fans staggeringly unparalleled in the annals of popular music.

“She never wants people talking about what she did last year,” he noted. “She’s never satisfied.” And now, with the Eras era at an end and an avowed anti-Swiftie about to enter the White House, Sheffield talked about how Taylor has impacted a generation of young musical artists, how she manages to remain so fascinating and divisive, and the Taylor song he thinks sums up the moment we’re living in right now.

The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

We all have a version of Taylor Swift that exists in our heads, what do you think we’re getting wrong or missing about the Taylor we don’t see?

We feel like we see everything, and she is so meticulous in constructing these Taylor characters that she brings to life. All the different characters in her songs. We all have our personal Taylor and it’s funny that so much of that is what songs we think of as speaking directly to us. 

I’m very much a “‘mirrorball” person, I’m very much a “New Romantics” person. I’m kind of a “mirrorball” person who wishes he were the “New Romantics” person. I would love to be the “Blank Space” person, but realistically for me, “New Romantics” is me at my best. That’s how I picture it, whereas “mirrorball” is probably more the day-to-day. 

But there’s always this idea that everybody feels like they get things about the real Taylor that nobody else does, and to me that’s something that’s really fascinating, but also beautiful about the phenomenon. Everybody feels like they have their own lens on Taylor that’s different from everybody else’s, and everybody’s right about that.

And everybody’s right, because you used the word “character.” It’s very easy to interpret everything she says as, “I’m speaking exactly the truth,” instead of seeing that she’s also creating characters and telling stories. That’s part of her songwriting.

An analogy I make in the book is Dante writing the “Divine Comedy.” Dante is the main character, and we speak of Dante the poet and Dante the pilgrim. When you’re talking about Dante’s poetry, it’s just understood that one is the person in the poem and one is the author who’s writing the poem, and it’s very much like that with Taylor. She is the one writing the songs. She’s the one constructing the albums, putting everything together, putting the show together with so much meticulous care so it’s different every night. Also, she is this realm of characters that she creates in these songs that we identify with, or relate to, or are terrified of becoming, or are terrified that we already are, or are threatened by. She creates these vivid characters that we all have intense emotional reactions to.

I want to talk about that intense emotional reaction, because she’s so polarizing. That’s part of her brand, and she knows it and she loves it.  

She loves it. She is so fanatically driven to keep topping herself. She never wants people talking about what she did last year. She’s never satisfied with people saying, “Yes, that album she did a couple years ago or the one before that, that was so great.” That’s never going to be enough for her. She’s never going to repeat herself even when it’s the obvious, sensible, sane move. 

“Red” is a huge favorite for me and that’s a perfect pop album, it’s a perfect country album, it’s a perfect rock album with that ’70s Laurel Canyon singer-songwriter vibe in so many of the songs. It’s got disco, it’s got dubstep, it’s kind of a perfect pop album.

After “Red,” I thought, “Wow, I hope and assume she spends the rest of her life making that album over and over again.” I’d be absolutely delighted if that’s what she’d chosen to do. I would not at all mind if in 2024 we were saying, “OK, this year’s version of ‘Red,’ this is pretty good. A little better than last year’s version. Maybe not as the one, three or four years ago.”

And that’s something she absolutely decided not to do in ways that seem completely insane. Immediately after that, she ripped up her own formula that she spent so long building and perfecting and made a new wave synth pop ‘80s record. Decisions like that I think are part of what make her so polarizing because she is never settling down in one spot long enough for people to categorize her.

I wonder if that’s also part of what is vexing to critics. You are a man, you write for Rolling Stone. Do you think that that’s part of why she may be not taken as seriously critically, especially by men?

Absolutely. Especially when she first appeared and a lot of people just took a look at her and assumed that she was just bubblegum pop. It was amazing how long that went on and you still see it. You still see a lot of that. It was pretty much universal in her early years, a lot of people were convinced that she was just this year’s model of a disposable teen pop idol.

Do you think there was an inflection point where the world outside of her regular fans started seeing her as a real artist?

I think the last walls pretty much tumbled with “Folklore” and “Evermore.” She had just made “Lover,” which was designed to be a very pop album, one that had a little bit of everything – a little bit of country, a little bit of pop, very much designed for radio, very much designed to be a crowd pleaser, lots of pink on the cover. Then less than a year later, she’s making these indie folk albums where the cover is in black and white and she’s standing in the woods and doing all these acoustic songs.

I think it’s partly the way that the pop world changed in her wake. It’s really strange to think when she first arrived in the late 2000s, the idea was that she was a teenage girl with a guitar writing her own songs. People thought, “What a concept! Isn’t that cute? That’s like a novelty, that’s her gimmick. That’s why the little girls are attracted to her, because of her supposedly writing songs.” So many people were convinced that she didn’t write the songs and you still see that, you still hear that. It’s something that Oasis and Blur can agree about; they will both accuse Taylor Swift of not writing her own songs.

For her early years, she was this young girl with a guitar singing her own songs about her own life. She was the only one doing that. That was a real stepping out on a limb thing for a pop artist to do, and people were really slow to see that she actually was a real songwriter and that these young girl fans that she had were a very sophisticated and discerning audience.

A lot of people are always threatened by the teenage girl fans of pop music, and you look at what Taylor was doing in 2007, 2008 when she was just fighting so hard to prove this could be done. Young girl, guitar, her own songs – there’s no male producer or a male Svengali who’s pulling the strings. She is the one telling the story as she goes along. 

You look at just a few years later, right now in 2024, and that’s what pop music is. What is huge in pop music right now is all the Taylor Swifts that have arrived in her wake because after she proved it could be done, lots of these fans that she had picked up guitars and started writing their own songs. That’s why we see what’s huge now, whether it’s Chappell or Sabrina or Charli or Billie or Olivia, so many of these artists who are women writing their own songs about their own lives on this very real and candid level and not having any male producer writing the songs for them, which used to be the standard practice for decades and decades. There were all these teenage pop girls who had some male producer writing their songs and that just doesn’t exist anymore. Now it’s like these women writing their own songs.

The music industry is cutthroat and a very dangerous place for young talent. How do you think she was able to sidestep all of its pitfalls?

I think she’d studied the past. I think part of how she stayed out of those pitfalls was she’s always been a super music geek, and that’s something that’s always been very apparent in what she does. I think she had studied the past and studied the [former teen music] stars. She was always a pop fan. I love the moment when NSYNC appeared at the Video Music Awards and were a surprise on stage with her and she said, “I had your dolls.” I just love that. I love picturing so much of Taylor comes out of that primal experience for her being a really young music fan and being into NSYNC, being mostly into the female country stars of the ’90s, and for her to understand the pop world and understand pop history. I think she made a lot of decisions really young about what she did and didn’t want to do and she stuck to those.

When you talk about the male Svengali, I want to talk about Scooter Braun, and what happened when he purchased the masters to Taylor’s first six albums. She’s been rerecording those albums and releasing them under her “Taylor’s Version” banner to be able to own a version of her music again. I think the aggressiveness of her making a move like that is part of why people don’t like her. Can you explain the significance of “Taylor’s Version”?

Aggressiveness is a very, very good word for it. So the news breaks that her record company, the people that she knew and trusted and had spent her whole career with, the people that she had described in her liner notes as family, they had sold her catalog to her worst enemy and how she responded was saying that she was going to rerecord all her old albums her own way. That sounded at the beginning like the most ridiculous idea anybody had ever heard. It’s one of those things now nobody wants to admit that they were skeptic[al] about it. It’s like Bob Dylan going electric; nobody wants to admit that they were the one who booed.

It’s such a Taylor idea, and again, people thought it was an empty threat, and I am more than willing to admit that I was one of those people. I felt, based on everything I know about the music industry and everything I know about her and her career, this would be a crazy use of her time at this moment, her energy, her effort. She’s Taylor Swift right now, she needs to keep on being Taylor Swift. I couldn’t see any scenario where she would follow through on that threat and rerecord her life’s work in her spare time while she is also making these new records. 

Needless to say, she made good on that threat and not only got away with it, not only didn’t embarrass herself, but made it a triumph that made people relate to those albums more.

People related to the idea of an adult revisiting these stories that they told about themselves at a younger age. The clearest cut example of that is “All Too Well,” the 10-minute version. That was my favorite song in the world before she did the 10-minute version. I didn’t think I could love that song more. For her to go back in her 30s and revisit the person she was in her early 20s, writing a song about herself when she was a late teen – that sense of going through life and revisiting your own story as you move on and as you grow older, I think that made people relate to her more than ever.

Your least favorite Taylor song is “Bad Blood.” Rob, one question: how dare you? Why?

That’s a fair question. It doesn’t have a tune. Usually Taylor doesn’t cut a corner [on] a melody. The chorus is just two notes sung over and over again, and not the two most melodious notes in the world. I get the idea behind it. It’s not like I leave the room when she does it live, as she always does. I always sing along. I always have a good time. 

The worst Taylor Swift song is still better than most people’s best songs. I’m not saying it’s not a banger, I’m saying that there’s 273 better songs in her catalog. It was so strange for me when that was a single. “1989” has so many genius songs on it and that’s a single? But again, she does everything her own way. She is clearly not taking any wise industry advice from any wise industry men and she just calls these shots herself.

She is ending her Eras tour; we are also ending an era as a nation. What will it mean to have the future president of the United States tweeting out, “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT”?

We have a real misogynist resurgence with this male candidate who, it’s no exaggeration to say, has based his campaign around declaring war on women. That he won the popular vote is certainly a devastating manifestation of the misogyny that is so deeply embedded in American culture, and that’s definitely part of this story that she’s telling unfortunately, that this is a moment where there is both intense feminist activity and intense misogynistic backlash.

If you were to sum up this moment in history with a Taylor Swift song, what would it be?

Honestly, I’m going to say it’s “New Romantics,” which is a song that I’ve loved forever. It’s always been one of my very favorites, I think it’s always No. 2 on my Taylor Swift songs rank list. It has more resonance now, hearing it at a moment when heartbreak really is the national anthem.