By Stuart Mitchner

I didn’t know what I would find
When I went looking for a reason…

—Taylor Swift, from “The Outside”

I didn’t know what I’d find when I went looking for a reason to go downtown last week. The last thing I expected was a paperback at Labyrinth called Taylor Swift In Her Own Words (Agate $12.95), edited by Helena Hunt. All I knew of her at that moment was the spectacular silver on black image looming on the cover of the October 15 New York Times Magazine (“The Kingdom of Taylor”). The faceless figure framed in black reminded me of nothing so much as a sexy, satiny, silver-booted, silver lamé alien, an ideal mate for Gort, Klaatu’s armor-plated robot in the original Day The Earth Stood Still (1951). So that was Taylor Swift? Really?

Still, the grotesque, off-putting image made me curious. I didn’t know Swift’s music, couldn’t have named a single song, and found the idea of her billion-dollar Gala Tour totally unappealing. Not really expecting to find her in “her own words,” I opened the book and read the first thing she had to say, which was set apart on a single page in front: “I feel no need to burn down the house I built by hand. I can make additions to it. I can redecorate. But I built this.” Right away I was asking myself, “Who is this person whose illustrious namesake, the author of Gulliver’s Travels, might have written those words, such was their cranky, in-your-face command of the moment. What followed was admittedly less Swiftian: “And I’m not going to sit there and say, ‘Oh, I wish I hadn’t had corkscrew-curly hair and worn cowboy boots and sundresses to awards shows when I was 17’…. Because I made those choices, I did that. It was part of me growing up. It wasn’t some committee going ‘You know what Tayor needs to be this year?’” 

Never mind, the opening sentence about burning down the house was worth a thousand glitzy cover images, so I bought the book.

“The Outside”

Since the first song mentioned in Hunt’s introduction is “The Outside,” I listened to it on YouTube and liked it. When I listened to it again, it made me smile, inside and out. Would it have made the great Swift smile? A voice as pure as this one, give or take a couple of centuries? Yes, why not? Although the lyric is based on “the bullying and isolation” Swift suffered in junior high, you don’t need to know the back story to find pleasure in the music, the words, and the singing because she’s bringing you into the song, spacing each line just so, lifting you with her when she goes high on “I” and “try.” And she wrote it when she was 12.

Next day I went to the Record Exchange and bought 1989, the album Swift named after the year of her birth and released in 2014. It turns out that 1989 was in fact the subject of the book’s opening statement, taken from a May 7, 2015 interview in Elle in which Swift goes on to say “we gave the entire metaphorical house I built a complete renovation.” Listening to the album as I drove around town in a light rain, I was pleasantly surprised by the first track, “Welcome to New York,” a celebration of the city with a half-sung, half-spoken rap-style a cappella sweet spot that I related to instantly as a lovelorn New Yorker in exile since 2019: “Like any great love, it keeps you guessing. Like any real love, it’s ever-changing. Like any true love, it drives you crazy.”

1920s to 2020s

So, after the previous weeks driving around town listening to songs from the 1920s like “You Took Advantage of Me” and “That’s My Weakness Now,” I was hearing elaborately layered synth-pop tunes from the 2020s with processed backing vocals that actually seemed to have more in common with Paul Whitman’s grandiosely orchestrated golden oldies than edgy songs of the 1960s like “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Paint It Black.”

Why should this be so? Maybe because something stylized in the production transcended the decades or because the connections music makes over vast spans of time and space are fascinating and unfathomable. That may explain why I got out of the car whistling Bruce Springsteen’s addictive “Dancing in the Dark” from 1984 with its subtle intimations of Swift’s no less addictive “Blank Space,” which opens with lines like “I could show you incredible things, magic, madness, heaven, sin,” spiced with Swiftian zingers (“I can read you like a magazine”) and one that evoked the Brobdingnagian creature on the cover of the Times magazine: “I’m a nightmare dressed as a daydream.”

Out of Style

Some listeners who bonded with Swift’s country music no doubt responded to the brave new world of 1989 the way folk purists did to Bob Dylan’s venture into electric rock, a possibility she discusses in “Empire Builder,” part two of In Her Own Words. When she began gravitating toward “late 80s-infused synth-pop,” Scott Borchetta, the CEO of her label Big Machine, “went into a state of semi-panic,” pleading “Can you just give me three country songs?” She refused “because it felt disingenuous to try to exploit two genres when your album falls into only one.” She also linked the change to her decision to move from Nashville to New York City, which she finds hard “to compare to any other force of inspiration I’ve ever experienced in my life. It’s like an electric city.” In that sense New York is there not just as the subject of the first track but flashing city-city-city somewhere in the soundscape of every song.

Words That Dance

As the arc of her career suggests (think of a comet), even as Swift’s songs were winning country music awards, they were crossing over to a larger audience, as happened in 2008, the year she graduated from high school, when “Love Story” appeared on both pop and country charts. Meanwhile Fearless, the record it came from, was on its way to becoming the best-selling album of 2009.

The song “Style” on 1989 jests at the tyranny of genres, as Swift shows in the wildly inventive video she conceived, directed, and performed in, and in lyrics like “You got that James Dean daydream look in your eye. And I got that red lip classic thing that you like. And when we go crashing down, we come back every time. ‘Cause we never go out of style’….” Even without the music, those jazzy spondees beg to be danced to when you’re driving a 20-something Honda CRV road tested to Moby’s “Feeling So Real.”

In fact it was my background in Mobynomics that made it easier for me to relate to the 1989 experience, which also reflects, as Swift admits, the influence of Peter Gabriel and Annie Lennox and the music of the 80s. The entertainment establishment made the adjustment bigtime, with 1989 winning Album of the Year and Best Pop Vocal Album at the 2016 Grammy Awards. The record of the moment for me the year Taylor Swift was born was Kate Bush’s The Sensual World, which features one of her most moving songs, “This Woman’s Work.” I can feel something like the same inspirational pulse beating in Swift’s beautiful “This Love,” particularly in the chorus, “This love is good, this love is bad, this love is alive back from the dead.”

Reborn

As Swift announced in August during the Gala Tour, 1989 has a double life. Because of a dispute about the ownership of her back catalogue, she re-recorded the work and will release it as 1989 (Taylor’s Version) on October 27 of this year, the same date the original was released in 2014. Included will be five tracks “from the vault” that never appeared on the 2014 incarnation, including “You Are In Love,” which has the same subtle incantatory flow as “This Love.” Set with the first words, “One look, dark room,” the phrasing builds toward a modest but deeply felt revelation: “One step, not much / But it said enough / You kiss on sidewalks / You fight and you talk / One night he wakes / Strange look on his face, / Pauses, then says, / You’re my best friend / And you knew what it was / He is in love.”

Swift and McCartney

In Her Own Words was published in 2019 as the world was about to disappear into the Never Never Land of the pandemic. In October 2020, Swift visited Paul McCartney in his London office, where they discussed the albums they recorded during lockdown, Swift’s Folklore and McCartney’s McCartney III. In the get-together, which was featured in Rolling Stone, they’d been talking about their work for some time when Swift said, “There’s so much stress everywhere you turn that I kind of wanted to make an album that felt sort of like a hug, or like your favorite sweater that makes you feel like you want to put it on.” On cue, McCartney says, “What, a cardigan?” And Swift says, “Like a good cardigan, a good, worn-in cardigan,” a reference to one of Folklore’s most haunting tracks.

The Ultimate Connection

Two years ago this month, I made a similar discovery, except that the person I found was not a world-famous star fresh from a record-setting world tour, but an actress I’d never heard of, Jessie Buckley, who plays the title role in Wild Rose, a 2018 film about a country singer from Glasgow whose dream is to go to Nashville and make a name for herself — like Taylor Swift, whose determination to make it in Nashville inspired her family to relocate there. So here are two short-skirted, cowboy-boots-wearing country singers, one a dark blonde from Reading, Pennsylvania, and the other a redhead from Killarney, Ireland, and they were born 15 days apart, Swift on December 13, 1989, Buckley on December 28. How’s that for a connection? In the words of the other Swift, by way of Lemuel Gulliver,” nothing is great or little otherwise than by comparison.”