Second mentions of Taylor Swift in reports of her engagement to Travis Kelce gravitated to one song in particular: the “Love Story singer” is getting married, news outlets declared, with zero takers for the “Smallest Man Who Ever Lived singer” at this happy time.
Such an alternative description of Swift would have hinted at some grit in the oyster, some thorns in the rose garden, and given a proper sense of back story, but if something can be presented in a neat little box, like a ring, the media rule is that it will be.
Love Story, released in 2008, rewrites Shakespeare so that Juliet’s dad comes around to the whole idea of her marrying Romeo and no one dies. There’s a youthful charm to this refusal to accept tragedy, even if it’s not as much fun as & Juliet, a musical in which our heroine wakes up to find Romeo dead but resolves to go on living her own life.
Swift later cited Love Story, which she wrote when she was 17, as an example of her hopeless romanticism, so invocations of the song do seem thematically appropriate, to the point of being pat, in a week in which she and Kelce hard-launched the concept of an “engagement garden”.
Taylor Swift has been writing love stories her whole life
Is the UK absurd enough to arrest Sally Rooney at Heathrow?
I was done with Oasis until the Irish-made video for one of their songs revived them for me
RTÉ’s Traitors aftershow: Uncloaked will be part of the new not-TV-but-on-TV genre that’s still jarring
The Sun went its own way. Opting for “Look what you made me … I do” on its front page, it bravely died on the hill of its readers’ being familiar with Look What You Made Me Do, Swift’s single from 2017.
It doesn’t work as a headline, and the song is about vengeance, karma and distrust, all of which (I’m told) are completely unrelated to marriage, but it’s still better than tritely repeating “It’s a Love Story”.
Even more fabulously, Today, BBC Radio 4’s flagship news programme, wrapped up its Wednesday broadcast by playing a Swift song widely assumed to be about an ex-boyfriend: Paper Rings, a jangly, poppy track written in the honeymoon phase of her relationship with the British actor Joe Alwyn.
“I like shiny things, but I’d marry you with paper rings,” she sang in 2019, in what must seem like a long time ago to all concerned.
[ Taylor Swift’s engagement ring marks a return to vintage eleganceOpens in new window ]
The internet is now awash with listicles of every reference to marriage in her songs, as if there’s something definitive to be learned from this beyond the inescapable fact that, like most women, she exists in a culture in which white weddings are still frequently seen as the pinnacle of female achievement.
“Getting married isn’t the biggest day of your life. All the days that you get to have are big,” is the countermessage offered by the British singer Self Esteem on I Do This All the Time to anyone who – borrowing Swift’s words on another matter – would very much like to be excluded from this narrative.
The American superstar has provided her own correctives. The mass frenzy she attracts can convey the impression that her songs are entirely autobiographical – diary extracts designed for the literal interpretations they often receive. In reality, most operate in the deliciously fuzzy realm of autofiction, while some are story songs crafted around characters who are patently not Swift.
What can I say? The first “marriage” song of hers that sprang to my mind was No Body, No Crime, a murder ballad from 2020 in which the narrator’s friend suspects her husband is having an affair and then goes missing, prompting the narrator to avenge her death by killing the husband and pinning it on his lover.
That one didn’t make the listicles, funnily enough, though another ballad from Swift’s Evermore album did. On the sadness-steeped Champagne Problems, a woman who “never was ready” only realises she must decline her boyfriend’s proposal once he is on his knees, Dom Pérignon on standby.
Does she reject him because, as his friends claim, she is “f**ked in the head”? Or is this view, seemingly internalised by the woman, inextricably tied up with societal expectations of what she is supposed to want?
Cocredited to Alwyn under a pseudonym, Champagne Problems was composed before their relationship fractured in real life. With comparatively little drama erupting in Swift’s world around that time, she turned to character studies, creating greater distance between artist and art, and releasing some of her finest work.
This style of songwriting won’t garner as much feverish commentary as the more obviously personal and generously gossipy songs on last year’s The Tortured Poets Department, her magnum opus, on which The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived was the coruscating standout. But it does suggest that fears about the quality of her marital-era output are misplaced.
Swift’s contentment with Kelce might yield fewer Tortured Poets-type excavations of her emotional state, but she has already proved that her songwriting powers can run on something other than heartbreak, and that’s the sort of happy-ever-after in which all her fans can share.
