“Lookin’ backwards/ might be the only way to move forward”—Taylor Swift, “The Manuscript”.
“It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards”—Lewis Carroll, “Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There”.
In his 2024 book, “Heartbreak Is The National Anthem: How Taylor Swift Reinvented Pop Music”, journalist Rob Sheffield writes that for Taylor Swift “the constant revising of the self is the self.” Taylor Swift is simultaneously the curly-haired, sparkly-dress-clad Taylor of the Fearless era, the model-esque independent woman we see in 1989, and the gothic songstress who spits venom on reputation. Her record-breaking Eras tour is centred around this multiplicity. Conceptualised as a three hour long production with over fifteen outfit changes a night, this tour took fans through all the “eras” they had seen Swift through. What has always tied together her various personas is the way she looks back at them– how she nods at her past selves, asks questions of them, and gestures at them to stay awhile. No matter how hard anyone (even Swift herself) tries to kill the old Taylor, when she’s put on a stage with a guitar and a microphone, she’s who she’s always been.
And perhaps that’s why the “surprise song” section of the Eras Tour was especially exciting to fans. Every night, before the closing “era” of her show, Swift played two songs (or sometimes two mashups) from her discography– one on piano and the other on guitar. Besides being the only part of the show that deviated from a largely fixed setlist, it was also the most intimate part of the hugely complex production that Swift and her team conceptualised. After the high-powered energy of her 1989 set, Swift would come out in a flowing dress– her band and her dancers nowhere to be seen. It was just her, her instruments, and her fans– a glimmer of the intimacy she could enjoy with her audience before her historic rise to fame. Every night’s songs were different— on the first night of the tour, Swift sang “Tim McGraw”, her debut single from 2006 that peaked at 40 on the Billboard Top 100. As the tour progressed, she wove together vault tracks like “Is It Over Now” with hits like “Out of the Woods” and “Clean”. By amalgamating these songs, Swift amended and rewrote the narrative of 1989, the album from which all three songs originate. “Is It Over Now”— one of my favourite vault tracks off 1989 (Taylor’s Version)– also notably features a reference to a “blue dress/ on a boat” which likely refers to the viral picture of Swift alone on a boat after it was rumoured she broke up with Harry Styles whilst on vacation in 2013. Mashups like these (as well as references like these) allow Swift to alter the narrative about her past experiences while implicitly responding to fan theories, without compromising on her privacy.
Her mashups often also mark narrative arcs of growth for her– and for her audience. For example, on her fourth Eras concert in Singapore, Swift sang a mashup of “Fifteen”— a song about the first day of high school from her second album, Fearless—, and “You’re On Your Own Kid”, from her eleventh album, Midnights. Both songs contain a bittersweet reflection on what it means to grow up. Swift goes from the chorus hook of “You’re on your own kid/ you always have been” to the heart wrenching bridge of “Fifteen” where she sings “If all you wanted was to be wanted/ wish you could go back and tell yourself what you know now”. And in a way, this mashup allows her to speak back to herself about what she’s learned in her years of love, loss, and fame. It manufactures a full-circle moment for fans to trace how they’ve grown up alongside her– and how her work has been the soundtrack to their past and present lives.
In general, Swift has recently been in the business of rewriting and remaking her past– literally. In 2019, when it was revealed that her masters had been sold to Scooter Braun (who, at the time, managed Kanye West–a known antagonist in the Taylor Swift Multiverse), Swift announced that in order to own the music she had painstakingly written and recorded over the years, she would re-record her first six albums. No one really knew what a project like hers looked like, especially at the scale she was planning— but Swift, true to her nature, treated this as a way to pay homage to her younger selves, to re-immerse herself into who she was at a particular sonic moment. Along with each re-recorded album, Swift has also released tracks that didn’t make the original cut– calling them tracks “from the Vault”. These tracks amend and expand the sonic and thematic narrative of each album– in an internet age, they allow audiences to look back at Swift’s life and engage with the narrative of her fame retrospectively.
It is Swift’s ineffable fame that catalyses her impulse towards nostalgic self-referentiality. It’s the enormity of her life, of growing up and growing more prolific during an internet age–where her every move was meticulously documented and archived. And Swift has always been reflective about what it means to be a woman in entertainment. In her fourth album, Red, she has a song called “The Lucky One” that follows a second-person narrative of a famous young woman’s life, with Swift now finding herself in a long line of women who live in the glare of the spotlight. With lyrics like “They tell you that you’re lucky, but you’re so confused/ Cause’ you don’t feel pretty, you just feel used”, this song was Swift’s first admission that being famous wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. When she sang it on the Eras Tour on the piano, she prefaced it saying “This is a song about how horrible being famous is” and her audience roared back in approval. Later on in the tour, when Swift’s longtime mentor Stevie Nicks was in the audience, she sang “The Lucky One”’s spiritual counterpart, “Clara Bow”, titled after a silent film starlet from the 1920s. This song from Swift’s latest album evokes the same sense of being caged by one’s own fame, with lyrics like “I think I might die if I made it” and “All your life/ you’d be picked like a rose”. The song references Nicks in its second verse with the lyric “You look like Stevie Nicks/ in 75’, the hair and lips”, illustrating the way that women in music and entertainment are slotted into certain archetypes. The song ends with Swift singing “You look like Taylor Swift/ In this light, we’re loving it” coming back to an insecurity about the cyclical nature of fame and how young women line up to replace her. I’m struck by the weight of this moment in Swift’s career– to play a song like “Clara Bow” that ruminates on a lineage of legendary female performers in front of a certified icon like Stevie Nicks all but cements Swift’s place in that lineage. In this song, she mirrors the narrative of her own fame with the stories of famous women who’ve come before her.
The most prevalent and markedly misogynistic criticism of Swift revolves around her constant references to her own relationships in songs. She has often pushed back against this, pointing out that the public never raises the same criticisms in relation to male artists like Bruno Mars and Ed Sheeran who also write about their relationships. To me, those who fixate on Swift’s muses are usually missing the point. Sheffield writes on this misreading of Swift’s work: “The boy in a Swift song is usually just a mirror for a girl’s experience of self-discovery and self-figuration. He’s the blank space where she writes her name.” The muse, for Swift, is the reflective surface where she sees the version of herself she has become– and the versions of herself that circulate in the press. In “I Bet You Think About Me (Taylor’s Version)”, a vault track from Red (Taylor’s Version), Swift writes “I bet you think about me/ when you say, “oh my god, she’s insane”/ she wrote a song about me”– and in doing so, responds not only to her seemingly pretentious muse, but also to a culture that insists on reducing her work to the men she’s dated. In lines like this, and in songs like “Blank Space”, she pokes fun at the perception that she’s a boy-obsessed “scribbling woman” (in the words of Nathaniel Hawthorne) instead of an artist to be taken seriously.
Swift’s artistry is also deeply entrenched in how she allows listeners to see themselves in her work. In “mirrorball”, she writes of herself as a blank screen onto which her listeners can project their images of themselves. She writes to audiences and lovers alike, “I’ll show you every version of yourself tonight”, but simultaneously warns them, “When I break/ it’s in a million pieces”. Written in a rare period of quiet in her career, during the coronavirus pandemic, “mirrorball” reflects Swift’s contradictory relationship to fame– one where her notoriety plagues her but also seems to anchor her. She writes that although they’ve “called off the circus”, she’s still teetering on the tightrope of attention and fame, and that she’s “trying everything” to keep her audience engaged. She also refers to “masquerade revelers” who drunkenly watch as her “shattered edges glisten”–calling attention to a digitally-driven culture that loves to witness the downfall of a woman.
After her years of being hounded in the media, Swift’s songs about the reality of her fame often take a darker turn. Be it the hunter-prey metaphor in “I Know Places” or the figurative murder of the “old” Taylor in “Look What You Made Me Do”, Swift’s work about falling from grace among camera flashes cuts deep. It finds its culmination in “Who’s Afraid Of Little Old Me?”, a gothic-esque track on Swift’s newest album, where she deploys the narrative of a witch-hunt to write about the whirlwind of rumours and headlines that is her life. The thesis of this song, to me, is her confession in the second chorus– “I was tame, I was gentle/ till the circus life made me mean”. Here, she harks back to the nice-girl image she and her label cultivated during her country music days. This is an image she was eventually forced to shed during her fall from grace preceding the release of reputation— her sixth album which contained lines like “They’re burning all the witches even if you aren’t one”. In “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me”, Swift sings “You caged me and you called me crazy/ I am what I am ’cause you trained me”. She places culpability on the media for its relentless scrutiny of women’s behaviour, while acknowledging the role it’s played in making her who she is today.
Far before the media attention took over her life, in 2008, a curly-haired, nineteen-year-old Swift narrates the story of writing her most recognisable songs. She says that it emerged after a fight with her parents over a boy she liked that they didn’t approve of. She recalls screaming “But, Daddy, I love him!” before storming to her room and slamming the door. When she reemerged, she had written what would become a career-defining hit for her– “Love Story”. About sixteen years after its release, on her eleventh album, The Tortured Poet’s Department, Swift writes a song called “But Daddy I Love Him” in the wake of criticism of her latest muse, the 1975’s scruffy-haired, cigarette-smoking Matty Healy. In the song, she sings “I just learned these people only raise you to cage you.” In part, these two songs respond to the same stimulus– Swift’s self-righteous rage at people trying to dictate or control her sexuality, and her desire to flaunt her love in the face of criticism. “But Daddy I Love Him” perhaps responds to the #SpeakUpNow campaign that a sect of Swift fans began online, imploring Swift to make a statement about Healy’s past problematic comments. While Healy’s comments are certainly not to be condoned, it seems a little excessive for Swift to be held accountable for the actions of her partner. The controversy reads like the infantilisation of a grown woman and a license felt by the public to debate her private life. And certainly, Swift did not take kindly to this. In the bridge, (which always promises to be potent in a Taylor Swift song) she sings “God save the most judgemental creeps/ who think they know what’s best for me”, very much responding to the kind of paternalistic and parasocial entitlement her army of online fans and critics show towards her romantic relationships. This reads to me like a subversion of Swift’s lyrics in “Love Story” where she sings “You were Romeo, I was a scarlet letter” – older now, in “But Daddy I Love Him” she shifts the blame away from herself, onto the people who scrutinise her romantic choices.
Similarly, in 2013, critics of Swift’s work began circulating a meme featuring pictures of her overlaid with text that read “I wish Taylor Swift would write a song called “Maybe I’m the Problem”. In 2022, as the lead single for her tenth album Midnights, Swift released a song called “Anti Hero”. The hook for the song goes “It’s me, hi! I’m the problem, it’s me.”, responding to the critical culture around her work. She also responds to claims of inauthenticity and self-absorption with the pithy line “Did you hear my covert narcissism I disguised as altruism/ like some kind of congressman”. While it’s unclear whether this is an acknowledgment of her flaws or a dig at her haters, by recognising and addressing this criticism, Swift one-ups her critics. All the while, she dives into insecurities that the scale of her fame makes her “a monster on the hill”, that the amount of media interest in her life will drive away anyone who wants to be close to her. This sentiment also forms the axis of “peace”, a sparse ballad from Swift’s first pandemic album, folklore. Plaintively, we hear her asking a lover “Would it be enough if I could never give you peace?”. She assures him “I’d give you my sunshine/ give you my best” but admits soon after that “the rain is always gonna come if you’re standing with me”. Here, we see Swift at her most vulnerable: bargaining with someone who’s uncomfortable in the spotlight that perpetually shines on her, whether she wants it or not.
And in “The Prophecy”, a track on the Anthology section of her latest release, Swift ruminates on the cards she’s been handed as a result of her career as a performer and how they impact her chance at what she’s always wanted– a happily-ever-after. “And it was written/ I got cursed like Eve got bitten/ Was it punishment?”, Swift asks in the beginning of the song. Her allusion to Eve’s original sin and the idea of predestination as a consequence of her level of fame creates a kind of hopelessness in this track. In the chorus, she pleads, “Who do I have to speak to/ About if they can redo the prophecy?”. And while the line “Don’t want money/ Just someone who wants my company” chafes a little, especially in the light of her newly acquired billionaire status, this track speaks to Swift’s highly publicised string of heartbreaks over the years and what it means to fall in and out of love under a magnifying glass.
In “The Manuscript”, it is Swift’s shift into a third person perspective that allows her to find clarity in her past. She paints a portrait of herself as a young woman in a romantic entanglement with an older man. Casting a retrospective gaze on the unequal partnership she found herself in, she sings “She thought about how he had said since she was wise beyond her years/ everything had been above board/ but she wasn’t sure.” Swift’s cult favourite power ballad “All Too Well (Ten Minute Version) (Taylor’s Version) (From the Vault)”, also mirrors this discomfort, with lyrics like “You said if we had been closer in age, maybe it would have been fine/ and that made me want to die”. The Manuscript revisits the relationship dissected in All Too Well’s ten minute version– Swift seemingly even references the “All Too Well” short film that she wrote and directed in 2021, writing that “The actors were hitting their marks” and “The tears fell in synchronicity with the score”. By the end of the verse, Swift finds some closure: “And at last, she knew what the agony had been for”. Swift seems to express that in making art about her past– and in remaking her work and reflecting on it– she finds answers to questions that have haunted her for years. And when she brings her listeners to the end of the song, she steps out of the character she’s built and sings “Now and then, I reread the manuscript/ But the story isn’t mine anymore.” This marks for her a moment of being at peace– of coming to terms with her past, and leaving it there to rest.
In her book “In Memory of Memory”, Maria Stepanova writes that the past becomes “‘pasts’: a co-existing layering of versions”, that we mould the hard facts of our lives into narrative shapes and strands. This process of continually remoulding and shaping one’s past in accordance with one’s present is the hallmark of Taylor Swift’s career. Sheffield echoes this sentiment, noting that it’s very “Swiftian to keep tinkering with her past. Anything less would be betraying the girl she used to be.” And in Swift’s body of work, memory and remembering hold an immense weight– it is in revisiting pivotal moments in her life that she’s achieved an unfathomable level of critical and commercial success. Her legacy lies in re-evaluating her experiences of girlhood as a woman– in editing and scratching out and forgiving and recognising. In her Speak Now era song, “Long Live” which she’s consistently dedicated to her audience, Swift ends by (somewhat prophetically) singing “we will be remembered.” While she’s been right about that all along, what’s most special about Swift has nothing to do with the records she breaks or the money she makes. It’s how she, by example, shows her audience how to turn their gaze inwards onto themselves, with tenderness and a critical eye– to honour the versions of ourselves we’ve left behind.
Yamini Krishnan is a graduating student of English and Creative Writing at Ashoka University. She enjoys writing poetry and culture pieces. Her writing has been published in Vayavya Magazine and Scroll.in amongst others.
