A pop superstar widely perceived as a romantic has in fact mostly written love songs troubled by strife, ghosts and delusion. Ahead of her wedding, we strip away the gossip to see what Swift-as-songwriter has spent 20 years telling us
When she was 19 and already had her second album under her belt, Taylor Swift made a point of telling a would-be beau he was all wrong for her: “I’m not your princess, this ain’t our fairytale … 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 liked a happy ending: she had no qualms rewriting Romeo and Juliet to end with marriage in Love Story, or imagining stealing a boy from his no-good girlfriend in You Belong With Me, both from the same album as White Horse. She just didn’t want a guy to come and rescue her from the messiness of life, like a prince in an early Disney movie whose appearance signals marriage, a happily-ever-after and, effectively, the end of a young girl’s life.
This story has always been an easy one to reject; even Disney was poking fun at it as early as Sleeping Beauty. And like many women of her generation, Swift has had a complicated relationship with all that marriage implies, at least in how she’s written about it. When she met Travis Kelce, the man she is now set to marry, she was fresh from her 2022 album Midnights, in which she made it repeatedly clear she can and will ditch any man, even a perfectly nice one, who stands between her and her ambition. “He wanted a bride / I was making my own name,” she sang on Midnight Rain. In Bejeweled, the tone toward a neglectful “baby boy” is even sassier: “I miss you … but I miss sparkling.” No man is going to end the Taylor Swift story, because there are only two forces that can end the unfolding of that story. One is God; the other is Taylor Swift.
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