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Wat the age of 19 and with his second album under his belt, Taylor Swift she made a point of telling a would-be beauty that she’s wrong: “I’m not your daughter, this is not our fairy tale… It’s too late for you and your white horse to catch me now,” she sang in her 2008 song “White Horse.” Then as now, Swift loved happy endings: she did not hesitate to rewrite Romeo and Juliet to end with marriage in Love Story, or to decide to steal a boy from her bad friend in You Belong With Me, both from the same album as White Horse. She didn’t want a man to come and save her from life’s troubles, like the prince in the original Disney movie whose character shows marriage, eternal happiness and, the end of a girl’s life.
This story has always been easy to deny; even Disney was laughing at it as quickly as Sleeping Beauty. And like many women of her generation, Swift has had a difficult relationship with all that marriage means, especially in the way she’s written about it. When she met Travis Kelce, the man she is now supposed to marry, she was fresh from her 2022 song Midnights, in which she made it clear that she can and will leave any man, even the best, who stands between her and her desires. “He wanted a bride / I was making my name,” he sings on Midnight Rain. In Bejeweled, the tone of the neglected “baby” is clear: “I miss you… but I miss the light.” No one will solve the Taylor Swift story, because there are only two forces that can solve the spread of the story. One is God; the other is Taylor Swift.
Swift’s narrators and heroes, faced with a series of story-solving issues, inevitably run away, even if they don’t know why. “Sometimes you don’t know the answer” until someone gets down on their knees and asks you,” says the narrator of his song Champagne Problems of 2020. He thinks that the relatives and friends of his lover are telling him that he is “too embarrassed in his head”, and it doesn’t seem to agree. He just knows that he couldn’t say yes. At the same time, a stable marriage union is something that passes through his music as a real goal: from the first songs like Mary’s Song (2006), to the lover himself you can trust him “like a brother” in Call What You Want (2017), to several thoughts and quotes about marriage on the 2019 Album Lover. This can represent the kind of home where no story ends, you just entered a new chapter.
But there is another type of myth that girls adopt in pop culture, and it goes like this: you meet a boy. You love him. He seems to like you. Then inevitably, they hurt you. However, you are not an angel alone, and love is work, so you work. The more you try to do this, the more you prove that this love is important. The more you fight, the more you emphasize your unbreakable bond. And maybe the guy did something bad, but he comes back and wants to fix it. Isn’t it important?
The feminist fantasy that these stories paint isn’t that you’ll go from constant war to wedded bliss but that someone who’s hurt you will care enough to try to change. Some kind of fairy tale love is very attractive, because it feels real. You are not asking for something perfect. You are asking for something to agree on. You find that there are many factors – culture, politics, personality – that can make it difficult for a man to agree with you. Nothing! You want The Prince Who’s Really Trying (Sure, He Is) (I’m Not Making It Easy).
This hidden story is a fantasy that Swift has chased down and perfected in many of her words. They are always interested in life after marriage like dating or first meeting, but they think that life is a conflict. Even on Anga, a song from 2010’s Speak Now that depicts a happy relationship, he shows a late-night fight that ends with his hero running down the street. If her songs were Instagram posts, most of them, especially on Lover, would be similar to the girl who wrote on her anniversary how she and her boyfriend fight all the time and want to kill three times a day, but they wouldn’t change things in the world.
In Love Story, Swift sang: “This love is hard / But it’s real.” That true and tough love remained relevant on most of his 12 albums. To love thee to chase, to love thee to leave; the love that heals and breaks you; love a false god, love the king of your heart; love as freedom, love as prison; but not, at all, simple love. I’ve always loved this side of Swift, this scheming heroine who wears a thousand disguises to chase a man so she can reveal who she is, as the great screwball movies say, “good dame same”. The twist of music, although, unlike the movies, was that the boy always knew. It made Swift’s stories more emotionally satisfying – that hard work was a real labor of love because it was also so unnecessary. This is what Americans, Taylor Swift is a great example of: we don’t believe in anything that isn’t powerful. He wants us to know that he has guitar string scars on his hands.
That’s why it was surprising, when Swift was inducted into the Hallwriters Hall of Fame in January, that he quoted Kate Capshaw, wife of Steven Spielberg, saying that “good things are true and easy”. This is, for Swift, a new chapter.
Eeven in Swift’s sweetest songs, there is a familiar doom. He was always looking over his shoulder. Maybe there was an external threat, like in Love Story. Maybe there was a lot of old stuff, like in 2012’s Start Again, where the narrator of the song remembers: “I think it’s weird you think I’m funny because / He didn’t.” Even on Lover, who is expected to have a first dance, we are told: “I seriously doubt that everyone who sees you wants you.” On the album’s 12 songs, they have several love songs that I would say are safe and unrequited.
One is So High School, from 2024’s The Tortured Poets Department, a Sixpence None the Richer-esque creation about the joys of letting a grown-up be good to you. Swift uses internal rhymes (in the pre-chorus only: “blink,” “crinklin”‘, “sinkin'”, “pinky”, “twinklin'”, “drink”, “think”, “brink”, “wrinkle”) to create a soundscape where everything sounds magical and harmonious. He says he’s drunk and gets promoted to this point of view and it sounds like it. And if you think that this song seems a little silly, he knows, and looks at each other impassively while singing the songs of “Grand Theft Auto”, “you know football”, and “total shake” and “Aristotle”. What are you going to do with it? Make a small post online?
Tormented Poets, despite its divisiveness upon release, was my favorite album of all time for Swift to make: brave, angry, heartbroken, Daring to fight the public through songs that live in different ways, like a woman who may have killed her husband and is running away to Florida. He revisited Love Story with the updated and heartbreaking But I Love You Daddy, in which love leads to marriage and the definitive middle finger. In the song, he included what could be the words “growing up” sometimes means/never growing up”.
In All the Suffering Poets, Swift returns to her fleeting dreams and ends them. A lover who left but promised to come back to you? He is Peter Pan. Men who told you that you are big and mature for your age? That was just a line, which they feed all the girls. The guy who swears things will change this time? “A cheater sells a fool a way to find love quickly.” The song Robin shows Swift watching a child play: she comes to understand that her own insecurities are costing her this genre. The final and most imprisoning delusion that you can overcome, in this album, is the belief that you are an intelligent person without delusions. True adult life, and true adult love, and true adult happiness, could only be achieved by destroying the false maturity that made the wise-beyond-his-years youth so easy to appreciate.
If good and true things are supposed to be easy, Swift didn’t do a convincing job on last year’s The Life of a Showgirl. On an album that was supposed to have found love with her now-boyfriend, Swift struggled to express happiness, and often fell back on manufactured arguments – pitting herself against missing girls in the bathroom, materialism, online hate campaigns – songs designed to reflect her newfound freedom. Some of the songs were good: happy opalites and finding happiness after bad relationships – but like Start Again, it relies on bad relationships to explain the good. Swift doesn’t ignore this: The Grand Daughter faces the dilemma of how to write about happiness after spending so much of her life on the defensive. It’s about how Swift isn’t so cool and she acts so bold, but now she’s found true love that she can let go of. This is a beautiful bridge depicting the image of love which is “ferris wheels, kisses, and lilacs”. To get to the bridge, you have to sit under Swift and sing passionately: “I’m not bad.” It sounds like an air horn every time, even a pleasant wrinkle in the feeling that is disturbed, if not noticed. If true love sounds light, maintaining that sense of simple joy in music is not.
There is a certain type of fans who believe that marriage is the end of Swift’s story; that his next album, being his lucky number 13, would be his last. I doubt it. What is possible is that for some of these fans, marriage is the end of their interest: that when Taylor Swift is married to a certain man, she will stop showing her life to them. But, for Swift, marriage has always been the beginning of another story. He won’t stop telling her a new love story after he fails to try. He can and hopefully will write an album that offers joy in all its complexity. Sometimes the prince actually appears on a white horse. But that horse does not know where to go. Grab and go.
