{"id":194396,"date":"2025-10-07T03:20:07","date_gmt":"2025-10-07T03:20:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/194396\/"},"modified":"2025-10-07T03:20:07","modified_gmt":"2025-10-07T03:20:07","slug":"do-we-still-like-taylor-swift-when-shes-happy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/194396\/","title":{"rendered":"Do We Still Like Taylor Swift When She\u2019s Happy?"},"content":{"rendered":"

If I were writing a song about Travis Kelce, a man I\u2019ve never met, I would mention that he plays football<\/a>, and that he has a podcast. I\u2019d point out that he\u2019s about to marry Taylor Swift, and that the two of them appear to be very happy together. I might also include a line about how Kelce seems fun; he has good vibes. If I were really reaching\u2014and I almost certainly would be, because, again, I don\u2019t know him\u2014I\u2019d resort to basic physical descriptions. He\u2019s tall, and has noticeably large hands (great for catching balls). Also, he\u2019s pretty hot.<\/p>\n

These aspects, and seemingly these alone, are the ones that Swift dwells on in \u201cThe Life of a Showgirl<\/a>,\u201d her twelfth studio album, which came out on Friday. \u201cPledge allegiance to your hands, your team, your vibes,\u201d she sings in \u201cThe Fate of Ophelia,\u201d which also includes a passing reference to Kelce using his \u201cmegaphone\u201d\u2014a.k.a. his podcast, \u201cNew Heights\u201d\u2014to publicly express his interest in her, after he had attended one of her Eras Tour<\/a> shows in 2023. In \u201cWi$h Li$t,\u201d Swift says she \u201cmade wishes on all of the stars\u201d for someone like Kelce: \u201cPlease, God, bring me a best friend who I think is hot.\u201d The next song, \u201cWood\u201d\u2014Sabrina Carpenter<\/a>-esque in content and Jackson 5-like in sound\u2014is essentially one long dick joke. (Well, not that long: at two minutes and thirty seconds, \u201cWood\u201d is technically the shortest track on the album.) \u201cRedwood tree, it ain\u2019t hard to see\u00a0\/ His love was the key that opened my thighs,\u201d she sings. At one point, she suggests that Kelce has reached \u201cNew Heights of manhood.\u201d (\u201cSinging about travis kelce\u2019s penis over a Jackson 5 sample should get you taken out back like a rabid dog,\u201d one person wrote<\/a> on X.)<\/p>\n

When Swift first announced that she had made a new album\u2014in a guest appearance<\/a> on Kelce\u2019s podcast, which he co-hosts with his brother, back in August\u2014she said that the music came from the \u201cmost infectiously joyful, wild, dramatic\u201d period of her life. Career-wise, she was at a peak: she\u2019d begun writing the record while she was still on the Eras Tour. But she was also alluding to her relationship with Kelce. Swift described his public attempts to court her, adding \u201cThis is sort of what I\u2019ve been writing songs about wanting to happen to me since I was a teen-ager.\u201d After they finished recording the podcast, Kelce proposed to Swift in his back yard.<\/p>\n

I must admit that, when I heard about the engagement, I immediately wondered what it would mean for her music. I fully accept that this is a prime example of how we think of artists less as real people than as entertainment. And that\u2019s the sort of thing that I expected Swift to spend more time grappling with on \u201cShowgirl,\u201d which she billed as a behind-the-scenes look at the pressures of being a performer. Swift is the most commercially successful musician alive, and it might seem, at best, reductive, and, at worst, misogynistic, to suggest that her love life would have any bearing on the quality of her work. She had spent the early years of her career contending with a \u201cboy-crazy\u201d image, largely driven by the media and her detractors, which she would go on to satirize in \u201cBlank Space,\u201d her song about her \u201clong list of ex-lovers.\u201d And yet these men haven\u2019t just been her boyfriends; they\u2019ve been her muses. She is a master of telling personal stories, making them sound compelling and, most impressively, making them feel relatable. This is often achieved through the heavy use of metaphor: a person who is beautiful inside and out is \u201ca mansion with a view\u201d (\u201cDelicate\u201d); a decaying long-distance relationship is captured through \u201cthe rust that grew between telephones\u201d (\u201cMaroon\u201d). Some have speculated that \u201cWood\u201d is a riff on a viral 2021 tweet<\/a> lampooning Swift\u2019s songwriting style, in which a user joked that Swifties must be horrified when Ariana Grande \u201csings about sex and doesn\u2019t write it like \u2018he stuck his long wood into my redwood forest and let his sap ferment my roots.\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n

She has always had an instinct for narrative, so it\u2019s striking that, as Swift\u2019s relationship with Kelce has grown more serious, the story she\u2019s told about him has largely remained the same. On \u201cSo High School,\u201d one of her first songs about him, she sings, \u201cYou know how to ball, I know Aristotle.\u201d A little more than a year later, when she posted about their engagement on Instagram, she captioned the post<\/a> \u201cYour English teacher and your gym teacher are getting married.\u201d These are the roles they adopted, too, when Swift went on Kelce\u2019s podcast. At one point, Swift described some of her music as \u201cesoteric.\u201d \u201cShe\u2019s so hot when she says these big words,\u201d Kelce said. Swift gave him a slightly exasperated look: \u201cYou know what esoteric means!\u201d<\/p>\n

Prior to Kelce, Swift\u2019s muse was Joe Alwyn, a British actor who\u2019s seemingly so kind and unassuming in real life that he keeps getting typecast in films as a sexual predator. (\u201cBoy Erased,\u201d \u201cKinds of Kindness<\/a>,\u201d and, depending on your interpretation of a scene that happens offscreen, \u201cThe Brutalist<\/a>.\u201d) Alwyn is the presumptive inspiration for \u201cDelicate,\u201d \u201cGorgeous,\u201d and the other love songs on \u201creputation\u201d\u2014which, despite being framed as a revenge album, is probably Swift\u2019s most romantic record\u2014as well as many tracks on her subsequent album, \u201cLover.\u201d (\u201cI\u2019ve loved you three summers now, honey, but I want \u2019em all,\u201d she sings, on the title track.) Alwyn and Swift were still dating when she made \u201cfolklore\u201d and \u201cevermore,\u201d the indie, lyrical masterpieces that she released during the pandemic, and he even helped write a few of the songs. (\u201cI just heard Joe singing the entire fully formed chorus of \u2018betty\u2019 from another room,\u201d Swift explained in her documentary-style concert film, \u201cfolklore: the long pond studio sessions.\u201d) Alwyn is also credited as a songwriter on \u201cSweet Nothing,\u201d one of the loveliest songs in Swift\u2019s discography, about a partner who wants nothing but your company\u2014in a world that demands everything else\u2014on the \u201cMidnights\u201d album.<\/p>\n

Swift and Alwyn broke up in 2023, and, roughly a year later, she put out \u201cThe Tortured Poets Department<\/a>,\u201d an album that covered three muses: Alwyn, the 1975\u2019s front man Matty Healy<\/a>, and Kelce. Healy and Swift\u2019s relationship may have been controversial and short-lived, but I will always be grateful for it, because it resulted in \u201cGuilty as Sin?,\u201d which might be the only truly erotic song that Swift has ever written. (The track, which is about the thrill of fantasizing about someone who you\u2019re no longer with, suggests that Swift is better at writing about the fantasy of sex than about the actual act of it.) Kelce, meanwhile, got the aforementioned \u201cSo High School\u201d (\u201cBrand new, full throttle\u00a0\/ Touch me while your bros play Grand Theft Auto\u201d) and \u201cThe Alchemy\u201d (\u201cSo when I touch down\u00a0\/ Call the amateurs and cut \u2019em from the team\u00a0\/ Ditch the clowns, get the crown\u00a0\/ Baby, I\u2019m the one to beat\u201d).<\/p>\n