#I will not be tricked again like i was with midnights taylor alison swift

[lulabo]

[oneweekoneband]

her Nebraska (1982)

In July I flew to Massachusetts with a plague on, and I felt that it was wrong, but my mother had begged and I’d been out of work for months. Mornings there I ran in long, uneven ovals on the same roads I’d memorized in high school. There’s no sidewalks, but the few feet of dirt between the craggy pavement and the open mouths of the fields serve all right for a single body in motion. When a truck comes up close from behind, the ground shakes, and I step away bouncingly from the street toward thigh-high yellow weeds and grass, and keep going. I was slowly picking my way back in that dirt, sweat-slick from only a plodding couple of miles in peak summer heat, and sucking the wet cotton of my mask in between my teeth on every inhale, when Taylor Swift announced she was releasing a surprise album produced by the guy from The National. Not the guy from The National, like, the voice, but the guy from The National whose photo was circulated on Twitter earlier this year as some kind of antifa super soldier, which isn’t the case, but would’ve been rad. First, I stopped dead to send some outraged, misspelled text messages, and then I ran home faster than I’d moved in years.

Tall, blonde, patrician pop star Taylor Swift is to me something like a cross-between a wife and a boogeyman. Bound we’ve been since we were really children. Time and its changes haven’t rid me of her, and what’s worse is I have never quite been able to wish they would, though I claim as much all the time. Countless hours of my one wild and precious life have been spent on endlessly analyzing the minutiae of Taylor Swift’s music, the mind that made it, the real world events which influenced it. And though all the while I have known she is only a person, and that people, while each strange and lovely in their own ways, are, in the end, mostly dull, needful in just the regular manner, the fantasy is better, the sick dream of a megalomaniac songstress, curious, thrilling, probably evil, and I choose that. I don’t know Taylor Alison Swift, born to this world in, I presume, the usual way. But my Taylor Swift? I’m a renowned expert. I’ve always eaten up stories—movies, music, celebrity news, the one my grandfather tells about falling off his bike once in Ireland as a boy and his face “cracking open like an egg”—like a starved dog. I’m obsessive about my interests, but not inclined to intense fandom, and certainly not fandom in the mode of the stan. For one, I’m too self-absorbed. But caring intensely for a famous person is falling in love with a ghost, and that’s all right—I mean, what the hell? We’re here together just dying... Let’s enjoy—but is an affair best undertaken with the knowledge that everyone alive has their own complex interiority, as unruly as your own, and that you, a stranger, are not in any real way connected to the lawless, blurry middle of that celebrity, and will never be. It’s freeing and fun to know this. I mean, these people are basically in your employ. Glamorous dollhouse dwellers. Acknowledging that uncrossable distance allows for a different, healthier closeness of pure imagination. My feelings, then, can comfortably be at once both fiercely intense and entirely silly. I am a foremost scholar in the art of the Taylor Swift who exists in my head. The real person raised in Pennsylvania I don’t know at all. I have some conjectures on the matter, and, as with all my conjectures, every hackneyed theory, each picky little opinion, I’m sure they’re perfect, brilliant, just absolutely right, but that’s still all they are. Taylor Swift, figure of the cultural imagination, is the Jodie Comer to my Sandra Oh in Killing Eve, annoying and pretty in frills, taunting me endlessly and holding us trapped together in a dance of most enchanting death. But the real Taylor Swift has favorite bed sheets and a social security number and a British boyfriend, none of which I have any desire to know about, and if I saw her at a restaurant I’d politely avert my eyes before, yes, dive-bombing the group text. There’s nobody on Earth I’d stand in line to speak to, but then I’ve been speaking to a certain figment of Taylor Swift for nearly half my life.

I went to a Taylor Swift concert the night before I moved into college in 2009. My father’s work friend, firefighter by day, near professional gambler by night, got comped tickets to the Fearless Tour stop taking place at the nearby casino, and he let me have them as a reward, mainly, for happening to be seventeen. Live in-person and performed acoustically, “Fifteen” made me cry. A few years after that, in the thick, sticky part of my first post-college summer, I wrote approximately twenty-three million words about her in these very pages.  (”Pages”) At that point, Taylor’s most recent release was 2012’s Red, and the work I produced that long ago July about Taylor and her career, writing I was fairly pleased with at the time, feels now, besides just being extremely clearly written by a twenty-one year old, strange to me for the way it favors the sweet over the sour almost uniformly. There is a wholesome kind of ardor in that writing which maybe I’ve outgrown the ability to hold. Or maybe Taylor just proceeded to spend the next half a decade plus releasing one bad single after another, and it was taste—and trespasses against taste—and not some shift in my nature which altered the tenor of our bond. I have real love for my particular image, gleaned from public statements and published art, of smart, bizarre famous woman Taylor Swift, and I admire the bulk of her output very much. I’m just no longer so inclined to fawn. This is not to say I am here to offer a Taylor Swift hate screed. I couldn’t swing it, and, anyway, I’m not a pop feminist-for-hire circa 2010. But we’re older now. Things are different. At twenty-eight, twenty-nine this month—Taylor will, also this December, turn thirty-one—I regard Taylor Swift warily, like an ex with whom you have a tentative friendship, perpetually on the brink of falling one way or the other into hatred or delight, only to wobble back the opposite direction again at the slightest provocation, but still, despite best efforts, even, I regard her all the time. 

folklore was released at midnight on July 24th 2020, but I was at a cabin in rural Vermont without Internet or cell service. I drank Bud Light seltzers with my mother while watching the eerie pandemic return of Major League Baseball, and when I got into a strange bed there I stewed, knowing there were people out in the world all over who were hearing Taylor Swift songs I never had, and that this was a fundamental wrong, a disruption in the balance of the universe. I listened to it the next morning in a Dunkin’ Donuts parking lot. 

And folklore is great. That’s the terrible thing. Slightly less great, maybe, than some people have insisted, tricked, I think, by just the pronounced shift in sound. But it’s great. A little gift I asked for a thousand times and was still surprised to get, like a wife who didn’t expect her henpecked husband to ever follow through and buy the paraffin wax hand bath as-see-on-TV. For years, I’ve been halfheartedly insisting that Taylor had a great album in her. I’d say it even, perhaps especially, while she stubbornly fed me gruel. Or worse, gruel with the occasional whiff of something better. With a ripe, little raspberry dropped into the slop. The bright, villainous thrill of “Getaway Car” made me believe Taylor, my Taylor, was in there somewhere under the lacquer of sequins and synth, which, while not objectionable by default, seemed a costume, and an ill-fitting one. The lived-in world of “Cornelia Street” made those old scars sting. That gay “Delicate” video. When she did “Call It What You Want” on SNL and played guitar while wearing an ugly sweater. If the abominable “ME!”, lead single off Lover, was the stick, 1989’s “Clean” was the carrot. I was Charlie Brown, and Taylor my Lucy, yanking the football back again and again. Over drinks I still yelled that Taylor Swift’s next album would be, “her Nebraska”, referring to my favorite Bruce Springsteen record, and learned to live with that egg on my face for good. I suppose I even came to like it. There was something inherently funny in taking up, like, “blind faith in the as of yet untapped greater artistic potential of massively wealthy and popular singer Taylor Swift” as my totally inane personal cause du jour, and eventually it was a bit, a gag I performed to be obstinate and didactic, but way down somewhere awful near my kidneys I meant it the whole while. And then she did it. A pandemic befell the world and amid a sea of human suffering Taylor Swift remembered she can write. She wrote, and with a massive, crucial assist from Aaron Dessner, whose music on this record is sometimes so beautiful it actually angers me, as the last thing I needed in already perilous times was to be made to try and marry my uniquely perverse emotional responses to beloved divorced dad band The National and fucking Taylor Swift,  she made an album which, if not her Nebraska, per se (I’ve come to realize that a major part of believing Taylor Swift will one day make an album I find as quietly devastating and gorgeous as Nebraska is knowing that no album will ever actually be Her Nebraska... That each will, rather, to me, be more and more evidence that it’s coming still, more proof that the limit is untouched, on and on ad infinitum, or at least until the seas take us into a place of salty peace.) is a shocking credit to all my hard-fought and deluded confidence. folklore is great. This fact has made me feel almost equally as disoriented from my understanding of the world as the time-melting COVID-19 lockdowns have, and it turned my Spotify year in review annual collective AI humiliation kink thing into a glaring indictment of my mental state, but still, I mean... It’s great.

In talking about folklore a bit this week, there are a number of specific topics I intend to cover—what a thrill it is to hear Taylor say “fuck”; Taylor’s terrifying birth chart; the astoundingly perfect bridge of “the last great american dynasty”; “because my ass is located at the back of my body”; the bit in last year’s “Lover” where deranged WASP Taylor Swift implies that to “leave the Christmas lights up til January” is some signifier of being a love-struck bohemian, when actually everyone who doesn’t employ domestic staff to take their lights down does this; how reputation is the best of the Taylor Swift records released in the latter half of the 2010s, actually, and the people who can’t see that are cowards—but intend mostly to let the muse move me where she will. Against the advice of my better angels, she—that tie-in marketing eldritch terror—always does.

[reallylonglies]

Taylor Swift - Demon Hunter: Part 1

It was when she had me in the headlock that I began to wonder if I might have struck a nerve.

Was it something I said?

I thought back through everything I had said to her that day.

“You look nice today.”

Wasn’t that.

“Have you done something different with your hair?” 

Pretty standard conversational fare, shouldn’t provoke this kind of reaction.

“Your boyfriend is a fire demon, and you need to exorcise him.”

I thought it might be that but then who can tell with teen girls, honestly? 

“Why are you mad?” I asked her, or at least tried to ask her. My voice was a little strained because her elbow was tightening on my throat and her hair was hanging over my face so that every time I inhaled I got a mouthful of it. 

“Why are you in my dressing room?” 

Oh, yeah. Maybe it wasn’t even the fire demon thing, maybe I was just intruding. Suddenly it all made sense. Mystery solved. Case closed. 

I made some strangled noises and tried to spit out a clump of blondeness but it wasn’t going to work. Country singers have big hair and now a good solid third of hers was clogging my airways. She was going to have to let me go if I was going to explain.

“You’re going to have to let me go for me to explain,” I whispered gently into her thoughts. It’s just mild telepathy, nothing fancy. I don’t have a nosebleed whenever I do it or anything.

She dropped me and shouted an expletive. It was uncouth, I was shocked and taken aback. You don’t hear that kind of language in the other realms.

“You can’t be shocked and taken aback, you’re the one who broke into my dressing room,” she shouted, her eyes had narrowed to thin slits of rage.

Perfect, I thought, we can use this.

“Use what? Who the hell are you?”

“See, this is why I don’t use the telepathy thing - once I get into the swing of it I start sharing thoughts I don’t want to and before long everyone knows where I’m going for lunch and there’s a queue for the burrito bar. It’s like inception. Suddenly everyone wants a burrito and I’m left at the back of the queue where the burritos are just wet tortillas filled with cold rice and the memory of beef.”

She kicked me in the face. She has really long limbs. 

“I will admit I should have explained myself better.”

“Yes.” 

She folded her arms and looked at me. There was an awkward silence before I realised it was now time to explain myself better.

“Have you ever heard of muses?” 

“Like the Greek myth?” 

“No, not the band. The Greek myth, you know, this is why my job has been hell since 1994… Oh, wait, you said myth didn’t you? That is the correct answer… That doesn’t happen often. Imagine if those muses were like the Greek myth except also they’re fire demons that possess men of influence and try to trick them into forming a global government of badness that will bring about the fall of mankind.”

“So not really like the muses at all then?” I liked her sarcasm, it was spunky, she’d need that in the hellscape. Demons love spunkiness.

“There are nine of them, plus assorted demons and servants. Can I move on to the good part?” 

“Is that the part where you leave my dressing room before I call the cops?” 

“No. It’s the part where I tell you that you, Taylor Alison Swift, are a Lightning Rod.” 

They never react the way that I want them to. It’s not like telling someone they’re a wizard and they get to go to wizard school. Tell someone that and suddenly you’re like their best friend in the world: it’s all fun and laughter and shopping for owls. Tell someone they’re a kind of magical exorcist and the fate of the world depends on them and suddenly you’re the bad guy. 

“Yeah, I’m calling security.” 

“Wait, wait, wait!”

She paused, her hand hovering over the phone. 

“Listen.” 

She did, I saw her eyes, once angry slashes of rage, grow wide. 

“What is that?” 

“That’s me. You can hear me.”

“No, it’s like music. Like a melody.”

“It’s the sound of me disturbing the dimensions by being here, you can hear it because you’re a Lightning Rod, Taylor,” I always feel weird about this bit, sometimes they can smell us, sometimes they can taste us on the air, but every once in a million years there’s one that can hear it. Every one of us, demons, sprites whatever, we have our own little tune. We know each other’s, but Lightning Rods don’t have them because they’re technically mortal. It’s like having someone who hates the internet scroll through your Instagram and tut. I think that’s what it’s like. I don’t show up in photos so Instagram’s not really my bag. Stupid demon laws. 

“What’s a lightning...thing?” she asked, her eyes a little misted as she concentrated on my tune. 

“It’s a kind of exorcist. The muses are drawn to you. You’re like catnip...Demon-nip if you will.”

Her gaze snapped back to me, fire in her eyes again.

“What does that mean, am I in danger?” she asked. She didn’t sound afraid, more angry, like this whole thing was just some big inconvenience to her.

“No danger,” I said, “If you let me train you.” 

“Ugh,” she sank into a chair, “Fine.”

********************************

New York, midnight. Rain falls. 

He cracks open his hotel room door and stumbles in. He doesn’t feel good. Who would, in his condition? 

“Hello John,” she whispers gently as the storm outside throws light across her face. She’s draped in a chair with it’s back to the corner of the room. The dress he left her in is gone, and she’s dressed all in black. A hood obscures most of her face. 

“I thought I just…” his drunken vision swirls to the hotel door. His memory takes him back on a stumbling journey through the lobby, out into the street, crying girl in a dress. 

“You left me to make my own way home, John,” she said. Her lips were blood red. 

“How did you…” he was on the 20th floor. The elevator had taken ten minutes. 

“I’m in good shape, John,” she looked at him, she was holding something silver and small. He wanted to look at her, and at the same time he wanted to close his eyes tight until she was gone.  

“What do you want?” with a sudden wave of discomfort he realised how much she was scaring him, this wide-eyed nineteen year old girl whose heart he’d been toying with. He looked around the room, she’d taken the mirror off of the wall above the mantlepiece, it was leaning against the fireplace. She’d scratched something into its surface. “What did you do with the mirror?”

“Do you remember when he came to you? He said he’d help you and you shook his hand, and you never saw him again.”

“What are you talking about?” he didn’t like her voice, it sounded different: powerful.

“And even though you never knew his name, you always remember that after that encounter everything started going right,” she stood up, her clothes were wet from the rain. She held out her hand, her nails sparkled. 

He didn’t want to touch her but something in him was compelled to reach out. 

Before he knew what was happening he was on his knees, her arm was tight around his throat and she was pressing something cold against his head. 

“Look up,” she said, wrenching his neck so his face was opposite the mirror. He did not expect what he saw. Two faces fought against each other on the surface of his skull. One moment he recognised his own deep set eyes, his square jaw. The next second, a different face, rounder, with odd, taught features seemed to pull against his skin and try to gain prominence. 

“Get out,” she said, but as he tried to get away from her she wrenched his body back into position, “Not you John.” 

She pressed the silver object harder into his skin, it hurt like hell. Something inside him was tearing. To his horror, the face in the mirror began to speak. 

“You can’t beat me Swift, they’ve all tried - even Aniston gave it her best shot, he likes having me here.”

“Sure,” she said, her grip tightening, “But how many of them knew your tune.”

She whistled. Two brief, one long, and then two more quick notes. Rising and descending in pitch like a small hill of sound. 

Something felt like it was splitting within him. Like his skin was pulling away from his whole body and falling backwards. In the mirror he watched as something horrifying emerged from his limp frame. She let him fall to the ground like a sack of rotten potatoes.  

“You’ve had your fun with him, asshole,” she said, and kicked the mirror hard. It shattered and burst into flames. 

He woke in a cold sweat. The mirror hung above the fireplace. 

A nightmare.

**************

“I just don’t think it’s fair to name-check him,” I said, reclining in an armchair. I liked her home studio. It was warm, my office in the Inbetween is cold and damp and the demon who sits next to me smells of actual brimstone. 

“Why?” she said, strumming her guitar pensively, “His demon, his song. Doesn’t the world get to know what he did?” 

“The demon or the man?”

“Both,” she stopped strumming and bowed her head, “Is it the muses that make them all assholes or do I have just awful taste.” 

“Look,” I said, putting on my most authoritative voice, “You’re the best in the business. You’re a talented exorcist. I hear back at the office they’re even making a pamphlet about you for us to give to the next generation of Rods. You’ll be an inspiration.”

“That is not an answer to my question,” she said, putting her guitar back into its stand and spinning around in her chair, “I’ve heard of guys battling their inner demons but I never knew I would be the one that had to do all the vanquishing. It’s exhausting.”

I always came to watch her record the songs. There was something exciting about watching the lights flicker and the room shake as she trapped a demon in a melody. She was the first aural Rod since the invention of recorded sound, this innovation was helping us keep some real pieces of work at bay in her pieces of work. 

As she hit that first line of the chorus I felt the ground quiver below me. Fabulous, a real spectacle. Something worth manifesting for.