It comes as no surprise that Rob Sheffield’s newest book, Heartbreak Is the National Anthem: How Taylor Swift Reinvented Pop Music shares many similarities with the career it chronicles. Sheffield’s account of one of the most massively successful acts in music history has all the self-referentiality, complex, tangled lore, and space for big emotions as the richest Taylor Swift songs.
Sheffield is no newcomer to the Swiftian universe. A longtime Rolling Stone staff writer, Sheffield has been a leading voice in Swift’s career for over a decade. As early as her original Speak Now days (we’re talking 2010; this was no Taylor’s Version), Sheffield asked a relevant question. After noting how people tend to dismiss Swift as “good for her age”, he wondered, “Where are all the older people who are supposedly making better pop records than Taylor Swift?” The answer remains, as he knew then: “There aren’t any.”
Among Swifties (and make no mistake, I have spent much of my life among Swifties), one of Sheffield’s many claims to fame is maintaining a running ranking for Rolling Stone for every song Swift has ever released, updated whenever she drops a new project. The very spirit of this ever-evolving ranking shows that Sheffield doesn’t just understand the fans; he’s one of them. Sheffield is never afraid to reveal his emotional connections to the music he writes about, whether it’s the Taylor Swift albums he describes listening to on cassette throughout Brooklyn or the iconic 1980s tracks discussed in his 2010 book Talking to Girls About Duran Duran. Sheffield is also the author of other music books such as On Bowie or Dreaming the Beatles; if Swift seems like an outlier among these acts, Sheffield is endlessly armed with enough comparisons between her and her legendary predecessors to convince readers otherwise.
But finding a way to tell a story as multifaceted as Swift’s can be complex even for people like Sheffield and myself, who have been following her career since the beginning. (Not that it’s a contest, but Sheffield writes the first Taylor Swift track he ever heard was “Our Song”, her third single, and that he first saw her live in 2011. My Taylor origin story begins with “Tim McGraw”, her debut single; I saw her Fearless tour live in 2009.)
Sheffield’s approach to Heartbreak Is the National Anthem, a book consisting of thirty loosely chronological chapters (with a prelude and handy timeline to boot), allows him to examine multiple arcs in the Taylor-verse from a variety of angles. Of course, Swift’s self-mythologizing necessitates this: as Sheffield points out, “Taylor creates a narrator that many people feel like they know. When we talk about Taylor, sometimes it’s the Taylor in the songs, sometimes it’s the real-life Taylor who wrote the song, sometimes there’s confusion between them, and sometimes she’s the one confused.”
But Sheffield never seems confused about his role in the constellation of music fandom. Though not by the strictest definition, a “fangirl”, he is still a student of music history. He knows a thing or two about, as he writes, an “eternal law of pop music: anything halfway cool that’s ever happened is because teenage girls made it happen.” In one of his book’s best chapters, he continues: “History is littered with the charred remains of pop stars who’ve played fickle with [teenage girls], trying to upgrade to more respectable adult audiences. History shows the girls are not slow to punish this. When you ditch the girls to impress other audiences, you impress nobody.” Sheffield’s entire book attests to his innate understanding of this. Never dismissive of the fangirl, Sheffield instead proves he’s in on the game by allowing readers to see how Taylor Swift’s music has impacted his own life.
The tenderness with which Sheffield does this is one of the book’s greatest successes. One chapter offers a profoundly heart-wrenching essay about the ways he felt seen by Swift’s song “The Archer” during the final days of his mother’s life. In another, Sheffield recounts an adorable story wherein Swift stopped backstage to meet his young nieces against all odds right before taking the stage for her opening number on the Red tour. “She was already dressed to go out and sing ‘State of Grace’ in her white shirt and black hat,” Sheffield writes, “But she saw five random girls. Quite honestly, she should not have been allowed anywhere near sobbing children… with sticky, wet, red goop all over their faces. She was wearing her stage shirt, no time to change. She hugged them all.”
Over and over again, Sheffield gets the right things that other critics overlook when approaching Swift’s work in a vacuum. That’s primarily because he takes the crying children with sticky red goop on their faces seriously. He takes seriously the “woman behind [him] who responded to the intro of “All Too Well” [at an Eras Tour show] by dropping to her knees and spending the entire ten minutes sobbing in a fetal position.” (He calls this woman his “goddamn hero”, and I’d like to second that.) In short, he takes fangirls seriously and recognizes even the most minute ways Swift takes women and girls seriously, which has shaped her career.
In explaining how Taylor Swift learned to play a 12-string guitar, Sheffield pulls from a 2007 radio interview where she described a “real jerk of a teacher” who shut her down when she showed interest in the instrument. That, of course, only inspired her more. “She gravitated to the 12-string because it was more work—but also because a man said no,” Sheffield summarizes. Speaking authentically about girlhood back to girls may seem like the expectation for pop stars now, but Sheffield sagely reminds us of when Swift started building her career on this model in 2006. It was her selling point precisely because it was an anomaly.
However, analysis like this extending to pop stars of today is somewhat rare, particularly considering the book’s subtitle. There are plenty of comparisons to artists who came before Swift, Prince and Stevie Nicks chief among them, and occasional mentions of younger artists like Phoebe Bridgers who have cited Swift as an inspiration. But rather than trying to wrestle with the historical significance of Swift’s legacy, Sheffield’s book spends more time threading narratives throughout the arcs in Taylor Swift’s songwriting, musical evolution, and career.
To be clear, Sheffield does this very well. Even with all my years of devoted Swiftie service, I was still tickled by the aptness of some sonic similarities he notes between songs I never would have considered together. (“Enchanted” and “Snow on the Beach” as two parts of the same “crush-as-hallucination dream-pop” synth story? Inspired.) One could argue that when it comes to finding the throughlines in Swift’s sprawling discography, no one does it better than Taylor herself.
For this reason, some chapters invite further discussion, much like even the most beloved Swift albums have fans flocking to the internet to air their most minute thoughts. How these devoted Swiftian scholars might ask, can you consider any exploration of the iconic “All Too Well” complete without even a cursory mention of “The Manuscript”, a song that seems to point at Swift’s excavation of the non-single directly, and consequent resurrection of it into her self-directed short film to accompany the song’s mythic ten-minute version? Why use Swift’s lyrics so much for referential fodder when fans are undoubtedly already familiar with them? These conversations are part of the intended fun: as Sheffield knows, the only thing better than loving music this fiercely is finding another music lover to banter with.
One obvious question for Sheffield about his book might be: why now? Taylor Swift is still at the top of her game. No matter how well-informed, prescient, or insightful Sheffield’s book is, it’s sure to be outdated within a year. But the answer is just as glaring. Why write this book now? Why write it at all? Because it’s the Swiftian thing to do. As Sheffield notes, a crucial element of Swift’s work is that “the constant revising of the self IS the self”. If Heartbreak Is the National Anthem seems raw or incomplete, that’s because it is: much like the subject and her career. The real magic is that Sheffield, like Swift, knows this is far from a weakness. Constantly updating her legacy IS Swift’s legacy.
However, being a complete factual biography of Taylor Swift’s life isn’t what Heartbreak Is the National Anthem is about. It’s about something Sheffield, Swift, and Swifties understand intimately: that we owe it to ourselves to pay homage to the music that lights our hearts on fire. There is something inherently sacred in revering these moments, these songs that understand you so specifically and sincerely — it’s as if they’re shining just for you.