Taylor Swift! Interviewed! About her music, not her life! When this interview dropped I was like a dog with the zoomies. Then I got sick which ended up delaying this take by quite a bit. Now we are here.
There’s a lot in this interview. For one thing, there is a major victory for resident swemo isabel when Taylor talks about how emo writing influenced her.1 I also recommend Dave Moore’s comments on it possibly more than my own post below:
Anyway. Taylor mostly focuses on lyrics, which makes sense. One thing she talked about that I personally liked is that in lyrics, how things sound is as important, and sometimes more important, than what they mean. Her example is “talk real slow” from “Our Song,” which should be talk real low. But “talk real low” doesn’t sound as good (and, though she doesn’t say this, it’s more annoying to sing).
Or you know, you can look at a song like “The Prophecy” on TTPD in which she puts a series of whining, shrill “eeee” sounds on the higher notes: plee-EEZE, knee-EEZ. She does “sound like an infant.” Eeeeee.
For me, I think Taylor’s love of and playfulness with language is part of why her songs don’t get old. Even tics of hers that often do not work for me, like her pleasure in juxtaposing old language and classic imagery with new language (“a red rose grew up out of ice frozen ground / with no one around to tweet it”), come from this sense of hers of language as something that can be rearranged over and over, tossed up in the air, without losing something or being degraded. And some of that is made possible because lyrics are not poetry and do not contain the entire meaning of a song.
But… it’s also why I tend to think Max Martin is not a great collaborator for her artistically. Max also is only interested in how words sound but it often feels as if to him they are almost unnecessary. I listen to Showgirl, as an album rather than individual songs, frankly much more than I expected because it turns out it’s a great “put it on and grind through annoying tasks” album. But whenever I get to “Honey” I get… mad would be an overstatement but it just really feels like a wasted opportunity and an unfinished song.2 So much about it is so good but why is it going on and on about people being mean in the bathroom? The Taylor-and-Max collaborations I like best are mostly the ones on reputation, like “Dancing With Our Hands Tied.”
This is a Taylor Swift interview so people are gonna get mad about something; the main thing people have chosen to get mad about3 in this interview is Taylor’s comment that her fanbase is very big now, some of it is extreme in ways she can’t do much about, and some of it engages in “paternity testing” that she doesn’t like. I have seen this last comment referred to as “gaslighting” because Taylor, after all, was the girl who hid secret messages in her album liner notes, so who is she to say that she doesn’t like this now? And so on.
Now whether or not Taylor can change this aspect of her fandom is one thing. (I don’t think she really can.) However…. The last time the liner notes contained references to Taylor’s actual life was in Red (2012, fourteen years ago). The first time she said she did not like paternity tests—her term!—was reputation (2017, nine years ago). She’s been trying to shift this aspect of the fandom for a long time. As has come up in other contexts, like politics, the adoration of Swifties is not a blank check Taylor can cash however and whenever she likes. She can get her fandom to do certain things and she can’t get it to do other things.4 One thing she can’t do is get it to detach from its need to decode songs for secret meanings.5 It’s too much a part of the fandom’s basic character. What was fun when you were a teenager is maybe not so fun when you are in your thirties, but it’s the deal that was struck, whether or not anybody knew the implications at the time. Taylor would probably make it again.
The real change between what Taylor wrote in reputation and what she says in her New York Times interview is that she is now willing to say that the fans are part of her problem. Up until Tortured Poets, it was always “the media” or “the industry,” even if there were moments when she was clearly, unambiguously irritated at the intrusiveness of her fans. Taylor is and remains and probably will continue to be accommodating to people who understand boundaries and want to snap a picture. She likes being famous. Still, if you watch that clip of her briefly losing her temper at TIFF over the yelling about her scarf, you can see that she is realizing that this guy represents a problem. The TIFF interview, coupled with some other acts of Swiftie overreach like “hacking the livestream of a funeral during COVID to get a glimpse of Taylor and Joe,” gets you most of the way to “But Daddy I Love Him” before Matty Healy prompted an open letter from her own fans to stop dating him.
To be clear: Taylor mostly likes her fans, but she is now willing to say she doesn’t like all of them. She used to hang out with her fans online. Now she doesn’t. If she has kids, she will probably pull back even more.
Anyway, though. I’m bringing this up mostly because it gives me an excuse to air my own niche Taylor song reading, which is that “High Infidelity,” a song which is paternity tested by most to be about “cheating on Calvin Harris,” is… probably not about Calvin Harris. I mean, maybe it is, but if you follow the usual fandom assignments of songs to exes, that means Calvin Harris has exactly two songs “about” him. The other one is “I Forgot That You Existed.” To me, that’s crazy. It would be crazy for those to be the only two songs you wrote about somebody.
Per his statement in an interview in 2023, Aaron Dessner and Taylor collaborated on “High Infidelity” (along with “Would’ve Could’ve Should’ve”) in 2021; it sounds like it might have been the second song she wrote for Midnights. “High Infidelity” is about being surveilled by a partner who doesn’t really love you, who resents you and regards you as a freeloader on his largesse, who is intrusive and possessive (thus, the first words are “lock broken”), and who keeps trying to force you into a life you don’t want but which fulfills his own wishes. Again, this is “supposed” to be about Calvin Harris.
But if you ask what is the force in Taylor’s life about which she’d say things like:
Storm coming, good husband
Bad omen
Dragged my feet right down the aisle
Or:
Put on your records and regret me
I bent the truth too far tonight….
Put on your headphones and burn my city
Your picket fence is sharp as knives
Or even:
Do you really wanna know where I was April 29th?
Do I really have to chart the constellations in his eyes?
Then I don’t think you can really pin this on an ex-boyfriend. I’ve never gotten the impression from Taylor’s comments in interviews that the big problem with her past romantic relationships is boyfriends who were obsessed with marrying her. She’s said she had boyfriends who did not treat her as a human being and that she’s had boyfriends who expected her to stop writing music. But dragging her down the aisle, no.
So… who does drag Taylor down the aisle? One answer is the media (as identified in “Lavender Haze”). One answer is the fans. That answer has been my preferred answer for a while, but a third and better answer is her old label, in allegedly trying to get her to commit to writing six more albums with Big Machine before selling it. All of these strike me as more likely—also more interesting—sources of the embittered and almost betrayed feelings that fuel the unfaithful narrator of “High Infidelity.”
It’s not that I think there is no chance this could also be alluding to real cheating on a real ex. One of the shifts folklore marked in Taylor’s songwriting was that she began consciously writing songs that are drawing on more than one thing. (To me, this is actually a way bigger shift than the character work she mentions, since she has lots of songs pre-folklore narrated by “characters,” such as “Speak Now.”) Many situations can form the “High Infidelity” stew. But even if you insist that it’s in some direct way autobiographical, the fact is that becoming obsessed with April 29th is just a dead end, and at best the answer to a trivia question. Similarly, in an interview Taylor did on the Showgirl promo circuit, she ended up clarifying that “The Black Dog” is not about a real bar called The Black Dog. She added that nobody knows what the song is about, which struck me as a somewhat extreme way of underlining that point.
But it’s also obvious what the song is about emotionally speaking: it’s about watching somebody move on and hoping that their life sucks without you. Throughout the song Taylor keeps shifting the referent of the “old habit”—the old habit is checking in on her ex’s location, the old habit is her loyalty, but also maybe she is the old habit that dies screaming. She reinforces that and even gives you a “ha / ha / ha”:
do you hate me?
Was it hazing? For a cruel fraternity
I pledged and I still mean it
Old habits die screaming
And so on and so on. I dunno. I’m obviously not a neutral commentator. Watching her talk about writing music with her big hand gestures I just thought man. I love her so much. But, to the extent that that is a statement you can make about someone you’ll never meet or know, I really do. I hope she writes one hundred more albums.
I don’t feel that way about “Eldest Daughter” because to me that always sounds like a song from some millennial-core musical lost to time. Like imagine this person heaving a big sigh and then going “everyone’s so punk on the internet” (sits down on bench, throws up hands) “everyone’s UNBOTHERED til they’re not.”
I mean I assume some people are mad she’s in it but who cares that ain’t my business.
An interesting test of her reach will come if she ever does direct and release a movie, since historically Swifties have not shown up for Taylor’s movies.
I also think people don’t quite get how genuinely deranged parts of the fandom are, i.e., there are people out there who think Taylor has reinvented bearding for straightness and is really with Matty Healy while both of them pretend to be with other people.
Swifties need to expand their historical scope and make wilder connections to history
April 29: https://www.npr.org/2017/04/26/524744989/when-la-erupted-in-anger-a-look-back-at-the-rodney-king-riots
I just learned the sw*ftologist lives in Singapore, is where I'm at these days.