What difference will marriage make to Taylor Swift’s music?
Every fairytale needs a happy ending, and after 11 albums of love, heartbreak and shattered dreams, Taylor Swift has found her Prince Charming. But after she announced her engagement to Travis Kelce, what will Swift’s newfound happiness mean for her music?
Swift’s greatest gift as a lyricist is the way she weaves her own story into her songs, balancing intricate, specific detail with universal themes of love, hope, heartbreak and betrayal.
And from the very beginning, the musician’s love life has been the connective tissue of her writing.
Her debut single, Tim McGraw, written during a school maths class, was all about her then-boyfriend, Drew Dunlap.
Believing they’d break up before he left for college (a premonition that came true), she wrote a song to commemorate the times they’d slow-danced in the moonlight to the car radio: “When you think Tim McGraw/I hope you think of me.“
It’s a timeless story – one that’s destined to be repeated at fresher’s weeks across the country this autumn – and set in motion a career-long narrative about Swift’s romantic tribulations.
She’s written about emotionally unavailable men (Jake Gyllenhaal, All Too Well), falling for a bad boy (Harry Styles, I Knew You Were Trouble) and rebound romances (Tom Hiddleston, Getaway Car).
Throughout it all, she’s been aware of the obsessive level of debate around her relationships. In Shake It Off, she poked fun at the media’s discourse: “I go on too many dates / But I can’t make them stay / At least, that’s what people say.“
Blank Space went one step further, taking every horrible rumour about her love life and amplifying it with satirical relish.
“In the last couple of years the media have had a wonderful fixation on painting me as the psycho serial dater girl,” she told the Grammy Museum. “Every article was like, ‘Here’s Taylor Swift standing near some guy. WATCH OUT GUY!’
“My first reaction was to be like, ‘That’s a bummer. This isn’t fun for me’.
“But my second reaction was, ‘Hey, that’s actually a really interesting character they’re writing about: She jet-sets around the world collecting men – and she can get any of them, but she’s so clingy that they leave and she cries in her marble bathtub surrounded by pearls’.
“I was like, ‘I can use this’.”
It’s a theme she returned to on last year’s But Daddy I Love Him – where she likened the online critics of her relationship with The 1975’s Matty Healy to a village full of pitchfork-wielding puritans.
Confronting her audience, she scolded: “I’ll tell you something about my good name / It’s mine alone to disgrace / I don’t cater to all these vipers dressed in empath’s clothing.“
‘Contentment is a creativity killer’
Now, it’s reductive to cast Swift’s back catalogue (274 songs and counting) to a soap opera about her love life.
She’s written insightful and witty lyrics about the media (“You wouldn’t last an hour in the asylum where they raised me“, Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?); about the joyous bonds of friendship (“We’re happy, free, confused and lonely in the best way“, 22) and even getting away with murder (“I’ve cleaned enough houses to know how to cover up a scene“, No Body No Crime).
But not for nothing has she been called “pop’s greatest diarist” and “the maestro of memory”.
So what happens when she settles down? As her friend and collaborator Florence Welch of Florence and the Machine once pointed out: “Contentment is a creativity killer.”
“Marital bliss and domestic boredom tend to make less interesting rock songs than looking for love,” agrees journalist and author Hadley Freeman, speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.
For proof, look no further than Bruce Springsteen. In 1991, he married his bandmate Patti Scialfa, disbanded the E Street Band and relocated to California.
Springsteen celebrated his new-found serenity with two albums, Human Touch and Lucky Town – but they are regularly ranked as his worst.
Female artists have frequently used settling down as a source of inspiration.
Madonna’s Ray Of Light, written after the birth of her daughter Lourdes, eschewed her brash 1980s persona for a more spiritual, psychedelic sound. Amid stiff competition, it remains her best album, and I’ll fight anyone who says otherwise.
When Beyoncé revealed her baby bump on stage at the 2011 MTV Awards, columnists tripped over themselves to speculate what it might mean for her music. But her next album, 2013’s Beyoncé, was a turning point – a disruptive, experimental, futuristic R&B album that set the template for the third act of her career.
Swift has already proved she can write affecting, moving songs from a place of happiness. Her six-year relationship with Joe Alwyn generated songs like Delicate and Lover, which rank among her best work.
She’s already written two songs about Kelce, both of which appeared on last year’s The Tortured Poets Department album.
On So High School, she described how his chivalry restored her faith in men (“Get my car door, isn’t that sweet?“), while The Alchemy rhapsodised about the moment he won the Super Bowl and ignored the trophy to “come running over to me”.
The star recently confirmed that her forthcoming 12th album, The Life of a Showgirl, is “more upbeat” than the rest of the material on Tortured Poets Department – which was largely concerned with her split from Alwyn and a tumultuous relationship with Healy.
Speaking on the New Heights podcast, she said Showgirl was recorded during the European leg of her record-breaking Eras Tour – placing it in the early stages of her relationship with Kelce.
“It just comes from, like, the most infectiously joyful, wild, dramatic place I was in in my life… and so that effervescence has come through on this record,” she said.
Summing it up more succinctly, Kelce described the album as “12 bangers”.
So, to return to the original question: Will Taylor’s music reflect her newfound happiness? It would be weird if it didn’t.
But let’s not forget that her last period of domestic bliss, during the relationship with Alwyn, also prompted a shift away from diary-entry lyrics.
The pandemic-era albums Folklore and Evermore embraced fictional, fantastical storytelling, set against a backdrop of organic, acoustic soundscapes.
They marked a turning point in Swift’s cultural acclaim, rejuvenating her career after the uneven and poorly-received Lover album.
If marriage prompts another shift, it could open up a whole new chapter in her career.
“There’s a whole realm of other material when you’re married or settled down,” author Olivia Petter told Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour. “So it’s a different kind of fairytale, a different kind of fantasy, that she’s stepping into now.”
Some fans have already pointed out that the star’s lucky number is 13 – and her 13th album will be the first to address her marriage.
For conspiracy-minded Swifties, it almost looks as though she’s planned it all along.
