, by her own admission, “has a long list of ex-lovers.” (Or “Starbucks lovers,” if you too fell victim to a common musical eggcorn.) That lyric from “Blank Space,” penned in Swift’s early twenties when she only had to stand within 10 feet of a vaguely famous man for tabloids to predict wedding bells, is both an eye-rolling rebuke to the press and public and a tongue-in-cheek call-out to her male muses.
That’s the thing about the men has loved (or at least written a song about): They’re more than a salacious sideshow used to distract from the towering talent of a young female artist. They are the art. , always the mastermind shaping her own narrative, has made them so.
From the high school boy who was the reason for “Teardrops On My Guitar” to the head-over-heels relationship that inspired “Lover” to the early-thirties mind games excoriated in the “Smallest Man In The World,” her relationships are the musical equivalent of Michelangelo’s marble. To quote “The Manuscript,” a recent bonus track: “The Professor said to write what you know / Lookin’ backwards / Might be the only way to move forward.” As Swift has processed her romantic highs and lows, so have her millions of listeners.
Her music has soundtracked our own crushes, situationships, entanglements with narcissists, painful deaths of relationships that were wrong because they just weren’t right. Sometimes she does it in real time, as with two songs on her latest album believed .
