Author Rob Sheffield.Marisa Bettencourt/Supplied
Taylor Swift plays six sold-out stadium shows this month at Toronto’s Rogers Centre and three more at Vancouver’s BC Place in early December. If you’re wondering how the Shake It Off superstar got to this place in the music world and why it matters, Heartbreak is the National Anthem, the cracking new book from veteran Rolling Stone writer Rob Sheffield, is an analysis of the unprecedented Swift situation. Sheffield spoke to The Globe and Mail from New York.
Taylor Swift is issuing her own book, Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour Book. What were you thinking, releasing a Swift book in the same month that she is?
I didn’t know she would be doing that, but I knew there would be something. One of the things about writing a book about Taylor Swift is that so much was going to be changing by the time the book came out.
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That she’s self-publishing her book and releasing it exclusively through Target stores is definitely on brand for her.
Very much so. She’s controlling what she can control, whether it’s connecting with her fans or re-recording all her albums.
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Your book is an analysis of Swift’s career, but it’s also a personal account to a degree. Was it a given that you would put yourself in the book?
That’s the way I wrote my last couple of books, On Bowie and Dreaming the Beatles. All three of these artists are huge figures in pop music. Listening to, say, the Beatles, there’s the public aspect. You go to the supermarket, you hear Hey Jude. You’re doing your laundry and you hear Blackbird. But then you have a song that you love, that you hear something in it that nobody has ever heard.
Mine would be Baby You’re a Rich Man.
For me it’s Martha My Dear. When I listen to it, I think, why isn’t this song more popular? With Taylor Swift, it’s the same thing – there are songs that your hear everywhere. You go to a wedding, you’re going to hear Love Story. You just are. If you go to a party or a club, you will hear Blank Space. But there are also all these songs that have personal appeal.
Swift fans are renowned for brushing aside the hits for deep cuts.
Right. Something like Long Live was never a hit, but for me it is one of the absolutely most amazing Taylor Swift songs. So, being a fan of Bowie or the Beatles or Taylor Swift, you have your own personal relationship with the music. That’s something I wanted to capture with all three of those artists.
It occurs to me that my favourite Beatles books are Growing Up With the Beatles and The Man Who Gave the Beatles Away. Both are by authors who are in the story.
The Nicholas Schaffner book, The Beatles Forever, is one of my favourites. Everybody knows the story of the Beatles, but finding your own place in that story is something that we all do as Beatles fans. It’s the same with Taylor Swift. Being a fan means you have your own relationship with a very public artist.
The difference is that you actually know Swift a little. You casually mention that you’ve listened to some of her new albums in her apartment, albeit when she wasn’t there. How does that happen?
For security reasons, she is always looking for ways to make sure the albums don’t get leaked. And for the most part, they don’t get leaked. It’s the only place she knows for a fact there won’t be any microphones. So, I first heard 1989 on her couch.
I first heard Pearl Jam’s Backspacer in a Universal Music rep’s car during a torrential rainstorm. I can’t imagine that’s how Eddie Vedder imagined his work being debuted.
That’s so perfect. I love that.
You describe Swift as fascinating, deeply weird and mysterious. Is she that, compared with an Elvis or a Michael Jackson?
I don’t mean fascinating or weird in a personal way. To me, the music is where the weirdness is. When she released Fearless, she was a country-pop ingenue. She could have kept doing that forever. And then she came up with Red, a rock-pop hybrid. She could have kept making that for the rest of her career. So, it was very strange to hear the follow-up, 1989, on her couch. This synth-pop, new age album, directly inspired by the music of the eighties. It’s been a bizarre run. She’s never made the same album twice in a row.
She’s also changed the world when it comes to making room for young female pop stars who write their own songs. It’s a big part of your book, and a big part of what she’s accomplished.
Absolutely. If you remember when she started, the fact that she was a girl with a guitar writing her own songs about her own life was a novelty. It’s almost like, here’s a dog that can juggle. And now, all these years later, that’s what pop music is.
It’s the story of 2024, really.
Yes. Olivia Rodrigo, Sabrina Carpenter, Chappell Roan, Billie Eilish, Gracie Abrams, these are artists different than Taylor Swift, and different from each other in many ways, but all young women writing their own songs about their own lives. Britney never did that. She had her albums written by male producers – Svengalis. That just isn’t going to fly any more, not after Taylor Swift.
This interview has been edited and condensed.