Rob Sheffield chronicles Taylor Swift’s career in ‘Heartbreak Is the National Anthem’

Rob Sheffield is an American music journalist and author. He’s been covering music, television and pop culture for Rolling Stone since 1997, and has written five books, including “On Bowie” in the aftermath of David Bowie’s death and “Dreaming the Beatles: The Love Story of One Band and the Whole World,” a collection of essays about the lasting impact of the ubiquitous band. He’s covered Taylor Swift through her career, and his latest book, called “Heartbreak Is the National Anthem: How Taylor Swift Reinvented Pop Music,” is a deep dive into her musical and cultural impact. It’s the first book to go deep on Swift, and Sheffield chronicles her journey from teenage songwriter to the world’s favorite pop star and a pioneer who changed how popular music is made and heard. “Heartbreak Is the National Anthem” comes out Tuesday, and Sheffield speaks at First Parish Church on Friday. We interviewed him Friday; his words have been edited for length and clarity.

You write about your Taylor Swift “origin story”: “Our Song.” Can you describe the moment you heard that song for the first time, and why it struck you and stuck with you?

Oh my gosh, I love that song. It’s really weird to think that there was a time when that was the only Taylor Swift song I knew, and it was enough to make me a raging fan. It was an ordinary afternoon and I was in my kitchen making a grilled cheese sandwich. I had music on in the next room, and this country song came on that completely blew my mind. I loved the way she sang that chorus, “Our song is a slamming screen door,” what a great line! And I especially loved how she sang about being a teenage girl who was a really big fan of music, and yet, as she says, those songs might be good, but they don’t do justice to me, they don’t do justice to how I feel, so I’m just going to have to write my own. The song ends with her saying she took her pen and an old napkin and wrote down this song. I just couldn’t believe what a clever structure that was, not to mention what an audacious move that was. I mean, she’s 16 years old, she’s a country singer and she is taking her place in history as a songwriter. So it’s really her origin story as well as mine as a fan.

This is your first time writing a book about an artist while they’re active. What was it like to write about someone whose career is still unfolding, especially someone like Swift, who seems to be in the news every other day and shows no sign of stopping?

So different, and so much harder. It was absolutely maddening trying to keep up with Taylor who truly is rewriting her story every day. When I started writing this book, “Midnights” had just come out, that was the new album. The Eras Tour hadn’t happened yet, and she was still with Joe Alwyn, so while I was writing, it seemed like everything about her life changed and everything about her music changed – and it was changing day to day. When I was writing about David Bowie, I didn’t have to wake up in the morning and panic and think, oh, no, David Bowie didn’t release an album at 3 in the morning, did he? With Taylor, you never know. It was nerve wracking. I kept telling stories that I thought were over, and then, of course, she’d open them up again. For instance, I have a section in the book about her relationship with Stevie Nicks, starting with when they sang at the Grammys together in 2009. But then “The Tortured Poets Department” came out, and it has an introductory poem by Stevie Nicks and ends with a song where she’s comparing herself to Nicks and dropping her name. So I had to add that to that section, and I sent that part in, thinking it was all finished. But no, I sent it to my editor on Thursday, and on Saturday, Nicks went to the Eras Tour in Dublin, and Taylor gave a whole speech on stage about it. I will say, even though it was hard, keeping up with her was fun, because it’s the kind of pop star she is. She never lets fans relax and she’s always making unpredictable moves, so writing about her was the same sort of maddening experience of being a fan. She always keeps us on our tallest tiptoes.

You started the book after “Midnights.” What made you feel like that was the right moment?

I felt like she had reached a sort of peak of her pop journey with “Lover,” which is still her most popular album, and I felt like she had made this bold new beginning with “folklore” and “evermore.” Honestly “folklore” and “evermore” were the new albums when I started writing, but “Midnights” happened very suddenly and I thought that would work as the last chapter of the book. Little did I know …  But at that time, it seemed like her having the one-two punch of “folklore” and “evermore,” in which she’s really stretching out ambitiously as a songwriter, writing these spooky, acoustic, indie, goth songs and creating this whole new range of characters, meant she had broken into new territory. That made me want to write the book. And then “Midnights” was another total breakaway from where she was with “folklore” and “evermore,” which I felt was kind of brilliant in and of itself. But since then, of course, she’s just kept reinventing herself and rewriting her story, to the point where she never slows down and so the story never slows down either.

The title of the book comes from “New Romantics,” a song from “1989.” Why did you pick that?

Something I love about Taylor is that she writes these personal songs that are intensely emotional, often very sad, lonely, isolated, miserable, and yet these songs create a sense of community because they feel so universal. It’s really wild to stand in a stadium on the Eras Tour, and she’s doing “my tears ricochet,” which is a song about, on some level, being dead and haunting the people who did you wrong in life, and everyone’s singing along. To be singing that with 80,000 other people makes it a very different song, because I associate those “folklore” and “evermore” songs that came out during the pandemic with solitude and listening on headphones. Singing it with 80,000 people under the stars made it a totally different experience, and to me, “heartbreak is the national anthem” is representative of that, of the way that we as fans find some kind of community around these heartbroken songs. And unfortunately, given the events of this week, I would say heartbreak really is the national anthem right now.

You say in the book that “nothing like Taylor Swift has ever happened before.”

Everything about her is so unprecedented. She’s had this 18-year run at the top without ever taking time off, without ever repeating herself, without ever going the obvious way or the obvious commercial way. There’s no precedent for that. And on top of that, it’s wild to think that when she began doing this in the early 2000s, she was the only one doing what she was doing then too. She’s just always been this way. At that time, she was a teenage girl with a guitar writing her own songs, and that was a novelty; a lot of people saw it almost as a fluke. There’s a long tradition of teenage pop girl stars singing songs that some male producer has written for them, and for Taylor to be doing this was really breaking the mold. There weren’t any country stars at all who were putting out entire albums written by themselves, that’s not something country stars were expected to do. But she was doing that at 16, and people thought, wow, isn’t that a concept? Now, that’s what pop music is: Young women writing songs about their own lives. That’s everything that’s at the top of the pops right now. Look at Chappell Roan, Sabrina Carpenter, Charli XCX, Tinashe, Billie Eilish, Olivia Rodrigo. They’re such different artists, they don’t sound like each other, they’re not copying each other or Taylor, but they’re all picking up on the territory that she opened up. For her to have to fight so hard as a teenager to prove that this could be done, and then to look at pop music now, it’s just completely different. The main reason nothing like Taylor Swift has happened before is that she has totally transformed what people think of as possible in pop, and specifically in terms of female voices in pop. That, to me, is at the very heart of what she’s done.

As for where she’s going from here, that’s a damn good question. I’ve been trying to answer that question, frankly, the whole time I’ve been writing about her. I’ve been covering her since her debut album and I’ve always tried to figure out where she would go next, and honestly, I’ve been wrong every single time, so I should know better by now than to try to guess. Some people have been saying that after the Eras Tour, she’s going to relax, have some down time, and I’m like, are you new here? She doesn’t like down time, it’s not her thing. Down time is not the cat purring in her lap or the breeze in her hair on the weekend. She likes to be frantically busy, she does not want people talking about what she did last year. So I see her jumping right back into music, and I could be wrong, and no doubt am because I always am, but I would love to see a punk rock record. There’s this great clip, you must have seen it, where she’s on stage with a punk band doing “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together.” It’s a totally different approach to the song, where she’s just bashing it out and wailing at her guitar, and I feel like if she can do that for this one song, she’s not going to stop there. That’s No. 1 on my wishlist, and so if I had to guess next year’s Taylor Swift, it’d be that. But whatever it is, what I do know for sure is that there will be a next year’s Taylor Swift who’s different from this year’s Taylor Swift, because that’s something she’s made the very center of her artistic mission. She’s never going to do a slightly better version of what she did last year, she’s always going to do something different.

Rob Sheffield reads from “Heartbreak Is the National Anthem: How Taylor Swift Reinvented Pop Music” at 7 p.m. at First Parish Cambridge Unitarian Universalist, 3 Church St./1446 Massachusetts Ave., Harvard Square, Cambridge. $10, or $38 with book. This Harvard Book Store-sponsored event includes a friendship bracelet-making kit with every ticket.

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