Taylor Swift, self-preservation and how not to be a potted plant

When I was a freshman in college, I had a monster crush on a boy in my writing seminar. He was but one of the many subjects of my brimming-over desires that year, but he was, miraculously, not not interested, notwithstanding the high school girlfriend he had back home. Writing seminar guy and I would spend late nights sitting across the table from each other in the library, him maybe actually studying, me studying the furrow of his brow. If you’re cringing reading that, please know that I am flushing putting it in writing!

Writing seminar guy thought that I, like him, was listening to the NBA finals on a May night near the end of exam week, when we once again found ourselves sitting across from each other in the library. In fact, I was listening to Taylor Swift’s Tim McGraw on an endless loop.

Taylor Swift reportedly wrote Tim McGraw in math class when she was a freshman in high school while ruminating about her senior boyfriend heading off to college. Was 14-year-old Taylor truly in possession of a little black dress?  Was the moon really like a spotlight on the lake? Was she ALLOWED to put her head on his chest? It all seems sort of dubious now but the lyrics were so tender and open-hearted, in line with my own cartoonish notions of romance, that it hardly mattered. I was open-hearted then too in the way that only the very young and deeply stupid can be. Rationally, I understood that pining in this way was unbecoming—this was not the future that Gloria Steinem had envisioned for me!—but it was nice that this person had no qualms about committing her most mortifying thoughts to music so I could listen to them on repeat in the library. 

Writing seminar guy faded out over the fall, to be replaced by more fleeting crushes and eventually, realer things. My feelings always seemed too big and embarrassing for the situation at hand, but there was frequently a Taylor Swift banger or ballad that was equally big and embarrassing, something up to the task of matching my hysteria at whatever was happening to me. I should’ve been plotting my career with Tracy Flick-like intensity; I should’ve been reading War and Peace; I should’ve been learning how to juggle or bake a seven-layer cake, but when I was starry-eyed, I’d put on Fearless: “Well you stood there with me in the doorway/my hands shake/I'm not usually this way.” Once, in a particularly bad way, I drove around Austin over spring break with some saintly friends, windows down, practically wailing “Standin' by and waitin' at your back door/All this time, how could you not know, babyyyyy/You belong with meeeeee,” thinking about what kind of moron stands around waiting by the backdoor of her alleged beloved, who probably regards her with all the intrigue and sexual interest of a potted plant. Reader, the moron and the potted plant were both me. 

Torch songs—where a person commits the most pathetic stirrings of her heart, no matter how bereft of dignity they leave her, to music—have a long, storied tradition. Fanny Brice, i.e. Funny Girl, the renowned theater actress and comedian, popularized torch songs in the U.S. in 1921, when she, in the thrall of a bad man, ended her Broadway performances crooning My Man: “What's the difference if I say/I'll go away/When I know I'll come back on my knees some day?” Torch songs have been associated with luminaries like Billie Holiday and Etta James, but I submit that Taylor Swift is the millennial queen of torch songs.

In this era, when I was busy bobbing out of messy-yet-very-clear 20-something entanglements, Taylor was well into her meteoric ascent to genre-bending superstardom. At first, she sang a lot about kissing in the rain and one-horse towns, and referenced her high school boyfriends by name. As she began dating fellow A-listers, she became ever-so-slightly more coy, with the titillating details of those relationships woven into lyrics and interviews (remember the Ellen incident?). It was hard not to believe that these breadcrumbs weren’t part of an intentional strategy to gin up interest, part of the pop star machine that was inevitably rising up around her. The public persona of being alternately love-addled and then lovelorn seemed to heighten the intimacy of the songs, because, after all, the feelings were real. And occasionally, she could pen a lyric that felt viciously vulnerable.

All Too Well is a five-and-a-half minute barn burner/perfect torch song that, in excruciating detailed vignettes, documents the disintegration of her four-month relationship with Jake Gyllenhaal. One minute, they were singing in the car getting lost upstate and the next, he was casually cruel in the name of being honest. “It was rare/I was there” nailed the hurt and confusion of anyone left in the wreckage of a relationship that meant a lot to you, and apparently less to the person doing the leaving, so what I’m telling you is I had a good cry or two in the cubicle of my first real job to All Too Well. How do I know it was about Jake Gyllenhaal? Because Taylor Swift embedded the message “Maple Lattes” in the liner notes, referencing the iconic-in-some-circles paparazzi photo of the two strolling in Park Slope, coffees in hand. 

The pop star machine fed the persona and invited the voyeurism as long as it served them, but lashed out when the narrative threatened to spin out of their control. In the inescapable media blitz that accompanied the release of 1989, her much-heralded first pure pop album, Taylor declared that she had been forced to take a hiatus from dating because the media insisted on harping on her love life, which was very sexist, well, except that 1989 was littered with not-very-oblique references to her relationship with Harry Styles, including, but not limited to, a song called Style. The best clapback was Blank Space, a song she said she wrote in the voice of the boy-crazed, clingy serial-dater she was portrayed as, but honestly, if you’ve ever had the misfortune of dating straight men and you claim to never have looked in the mirror in a moment of weaknesss and earnestly thought, “boys only want love if it’s torture,” then congratulations, I guess you are emotionally evolved.

This is the essential contradiction of any artist who is selling us stories about themselves: is the vulnerability real or is it part of the ploy? Is she an artist who happens to command a corporate machine, or a machine that happens to be good at mimicking the motions of artistry? It should be obvious that the truth can be somewhere in between, but it feels like an impossible tightrope to walk for a young woman who has managed to sustain this level of success and fame for this long.

Backlash was inevitable and when it came, it was fierce. The Phone Call with Kanye West forced a retreat and recalibration, a period in which Taylor said she soul-searched and pinpointed her problem as a pathological need to live her life to win public approval. Yet when she returned two years later, it was with the noisy, over-the-top Look What You Made Me Do. The old Taylor was supposedly dead, but here she was, still obsessed with wresting control of the narrative, insisting that she never wanted the drama in the first place while inviting us to rubberneck anyways.

Because a good portion of Reputation falls into the vein of clanky aggrievedness mixed with some clumsy experimentation with new sounds, it is probably Taylor’s least-loved album. It gets less attention for the handful of songs that artfully capture the dizziness and terror of love in its very early stages, inspired this time by her new and mostly private relationship with actor Joe Alwyn. There’s Delicate: “Is it cool that I said all that/Is it chill that you’re in my head/cause I know that it’s delicate.” There’s the charmingly overwrought Gorgeous: “You're so gorgeous/I can't say anything to your face (to your face)/Cause look at your face (look at your face).” And the stripped-down, lovely New Year’s Day: “Don't read the last page/But I stay/When it's hard or it's wrong or you're making mistakes.”

There’s the classic Taylor Swift giddiness, the lacerating specificity, but also more subtlety, more self-respect, not a single torch song, no exhibitionist bloodletting.

I’ve now been a sometimes-reluctant, sometimes-enthusiastic fan for almost 15 years. It’s odd to have followed an artist for this long, to have grown with them, to have grafted your experiences and your emotions to what they’ve created and the lives they’ve lived, no matter how preposterous that kinship is. I don’t let myself swoon just over anyone who pays attention to me anymore. It takes more to set my brain and my heart ablaze. I’m no one’s potted plant. I believe in falling in love but I also believe in self-preservation. And it doesn’t feel all that different from making art that’s emotionally honest and resonant, that’s vulnerable, but doesn’t cheapen your feelings, your pain, your traumas by giving them away thoughtlessly.

Last month, Taylor released folklore, a surprise album created in isolation, and it feels like she’s finally figured out a way to walk the tightrope. She did it by mostly closing the curtain on her personal life, no breadcrumbs, no secret messages encoded in the liner notes. She did it by inhabiting points of view outside of herself, by making the world a little bit bigger than one where she sits at the center of the universe. 

A trio are written in the voice of teenagers, young people who still get to be hysterical and open-hearted, locked forever in the summer of their first loves. betty is gorgeous and cinematic, a slowly-building narrative that centers around the extremely relatable sentiment of, “I’m only seventeen/I don’t know anything/But I know I miss you.” august circles torch song territory—“to live for the hope of it all/cancel plans just in case you’d call”—but drenches the whole thing in nostalgia and faded memory. 

my tears ricochet, is purportedly about Taylor’s break with her record company, but the metaphor is understated enough that no matter the context, “tossing out blame/drunk on this pain/crossing out the good years” is gutting. In invisible string, one of the only on the record to obviously reference her relationship with Alwyn, she makes peace with the old Taylor, instead of trying to bury her: “Cold was the steel of my axe to grind/For the boys who broke my heart/Now I send their babies presents.” 

What happened? Is this just what happens when you get happy? Or did she finally reach such a pinnacle of success that she felt she could guard pieces of herself. I don’t know, but I’m glad that, after all this time, she’s still ruminating on what humans tend to obsess over, even in the midst of a world on fire: love, heartbreak, loss.