Hi friends!

It’s been a busy few weeks — I’ve just come off a unexpectedly massive shoot (hit by multiple storms in one day whilst shooting exteriors, what a treat), a trip to visit the parents in Orange that crossed over with the delicious annual food festival (imaginatively titled F.O.O.D.), and, yes, a new Taylor Swift album.

I hadn’t intended to write about Taylor this week, but there’s no escaping her — apparently even in your inbox. If you’ve reached your personal Swift saturation point, feel free to skip this one! But it’s not exactly a review of the album itself; consider it more of a personal reflection on Taylor’s persona and the unresolved tensions in her recent work.

Everything Comes Out Teenage Petulance

Even in 2024 I still encounter some confusion about what exactly the appeal of Taylor Swift is for a queer man in his 30s. So here, on the occasion of the release of her 11th studio album, The Tortured Poets Department, is my attempt to articulate my relationship to the world’s most omnipresent pop star and her work.

For all her ubiquity, Taylor Swift isn’t a goddess-on-high like Beyonce or Gaga, whose every new release is received like a work of capital-A ART and given the breathless praise to match. Her persona is more like that of a close friend, or perhaps a daggy elder sister. A new album is rarely an occasion for unvarnished praise; no one critiques Taylor (and yes, I default to her first name) like her fans. She’s cringe. She desperately needs an editor. She frequently intermingles her brilliant lyrics with hackneyed ones. She’s well overdue for a shake up of her sound via some new producers (sorry Jack Antonoff). And she should really let someone else direct her music videos (although she is improving!).

But then, Taylor has always been this way. For all of the “eras” branding, she hasn’t changed much in the going-on-twenty (!) years she’s been a recording artist. Taylor Swift is a singer-songwriter who spins out confessional yarns of love, heartache, and heartbreak which land on a spectrum from strumming-on-her-guitar melodies to scream-and-dance stadium-fillers. Occasionally — particularly on albums folklore and evermore — she’s pushed her writing towards the kind of small-town american narratives that would do Springsteen proud, but she inexorably circles back to memoir. ‘Memoir’ should be interpreted loosely however; as fun as it can be to gossip about exes and feuds, Taylor will always put the needs of the song itself ahead of any pretences of honest autobiography (sorry friends, that famed red scarf is just a metaphor).

It’s also worth noting that the aw-shucks earnestness suggested by Taylor’s persona isn’t always mirrored in the work itself. A perfect illustration is the new album’s title track. ‘The Tortured Poets Department’ is an embarrassingly arch title, the kind of thing you’d expect a precocious teenager to scrawl on their diary, and all the pre-release press would have us believe that it’s meant to be taken with a straight face. But, lo and behold, in context the song is a jab at the pretensions of a romantic partner who wants to style himself as a great artist:

Swifties are used to this gentle bait and switch; her songs are often funnier and more knowing than her own publicity suggests. Indeed, the whole album is rife with instances of the artist pushing against her carefully constructed “Taylor-as-best-friend” persona. In the lacerating ‘But Daddy I Love Him’, she inveighs against “judgemental creeps” believing they have a say in her personal life, “sanctimoniously performing soliloquies I’ll never see”, while the stadium-ready ‘I Can Do It With A Broken Heart’ is all about faking joy in front of oblivious adoring crowds night after night.

In fact, I believe that the widening gulf between Taylor’s reality (as a 34-year-old billionaire of peerless power and influence) and the emotional immaturity of her persona, perpetually fixed in the role of the teenage underdog, has become the central tension of her work. Or, as she sings in ‘Down Bad’:

Taylor herself is conscious of the dilemma: in her 2020 puff-piece documentary Miss Americana, she openly contemplates the aphorism that stars emotionally atrophy at the age they became famous. If that’s true, is she fated to be forever trapped in one of her recurring high school metaphors, rehashing first loves and feuding with mean girls in the corridors? No number of awkwardly deployed “fucks” in her lyrics will make her Patti Smith.

And yet I believe this regressive strain in Taylor’s work is also integral to her power — and that’s why she’s incapable of resolving it. I’m reminded of a passage from George Eliot’s Middlemarch:

A Taylor Swift song treats oversized emotions, partings, and resolves as something both new and monumental, and takes them very seriously. As we grow older, we know better — but there’s nothing quite like recapturing that intensity and attendant clarity for a few minutes at a time. If Taylor Swift is a faintly embarrassing friend to have, she’s also one who’s incredibly good in a crisis. Her songs carry you through flushes of love, torturous breakups, stewing grievances, unexpected ecstasies — and all in a way that’s equally as cathartic if you sing it alone in the kitchen or amongst a crowd of tens of thousands in a packed stadium.

Perhaps we ask the impossible of Taylor. Is it any wonder she’s forever mired in past relationships when we demand she re-enact her old battles and show her scars night after night for our own catharsis? Can we expect an artist to live so consistently in the past, and yet still grow up alongside us?

A pair of recent B-sides suggest one possible answer. The snarling ‘Would’ve Could’ve Should’ve’ on Midnights and elegiac ‘The Manuscript’ on Tortured Poets are told in the past tense, reflecting on a teenage girl’s relationship with an older man. If the season of youth is still the central topic of Taylor’s artistic middle age, these songs reveal that she’s found new insights with the passing years; she resists easy conclusions, instead ruminating on uneven power dynamics, naiveté, questions of culpability, and a festering sense of regret.

When Taylor Swift mourns her lost innocence — the innocence she is paradoxically so adept at conjuring verse by verse — I suspect it’s not only at the hands of a bevy of shitty boyfriends, but her own: the selfhood she sacrificed to become the most famous woman in the world. And even if the rest of us haven’t profited so richly from our wounds, I still recognise that feeling of giving up part of yourself before you fully understood what it was worth, and knowing that the regret will linger long after the world believes you should have moved on.

After eleven albums, critics and fans alike know Taylor’s concerns, foibles and failures all too well. She surprises us with stealth album drops or new tracks about old battles, not artistic innovation. We leave it to other artists blaze fresh trails. Behind the synth pop, pyrotechnics and choreo, Taylor Swift remains a girl with a guitar — and perhaps she always will be. After all, many a great artist spends their career circling one theme, idea or practice (in my last newsletter I called them “hedgehogs”). The only question that really matters is: are the new songs any good?

May at the Movies

An exciting few weeks ahead in cinemas! I absolutely adored Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers (highly recommend if you love tennis and/or messy love triangles), and am thrilled to see Hirokazu Kore-eda’s extraordinary Monster (my no.1 film from last year) finally getting its wide release! Plus we’ve got Goran Stolevski’s Housekeeping for Beginners, Tran Anh Hung’s The Taste of Things and, yes, David Leitch’s The Fall Guy to look forward to - comedy Ryan Gosling is the best Ryan Gosling.

But the event I’m most excited about this month is Cinema Reborn, screening in Sydney 1-7 May at the Ritz and in Melbourne 9 - 15 May at the Lido. It’s a brilliant local festival that presents new restorations of classic films from around the world, staffed entirely by volunteers (including Friends and Strangers director James Vaughan, who’s one of the programmers). This year the offerings include Terence Malick’s Days of Heaven (one of my all-time favourites), Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samouraï and Powell & Pressburger’s I Know Where I’m Going, along with films by Chantal Akerman, Im Kwon-taek and Jean Renoir. I’m planning to camp out at the Ritz for a few days to catch as many as I can. Check out their program!

Odds & Ends

• There’s been a thrilling new excavation in Pompeii! A huge banquet hall has been uncovered revealing a series of mythological frescoes. Most feature events from the Trojan War, including Paris’ first meeting with Helen, and Apollo attempting to seduce the prophet Cassandra. The paintings are absolutely gorgeous works of art, although there’s a good argument that we shouldn’t be digging up anything else in Pompeii (over a third of the city remains buried), to ensure such treasures are preserved for future generations.

• The sublime Nymphia Wind from Taiwan won Season 16 of Ru Paul’s Drag Race! She even recieved personal congratulations from Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen. The Washington Post has a wonderful piece about Nymphia’s surprising role as a cultural ambassador. Give it a week and I bet this will have ballooned into an international incident.

• A great photo essay about how vinyl records are made, following the entire process from cutting to packaging.

• And the actual Patti Smith took her shout-out in The Tortured Poets Department very well, responding with a cute image on Instagram holding a copy of Dylan Thomas’ poetry. Smith also has a very pure newletter where she regularly posts her thoughts, poetry, and pictures from her travels. An absolute legend.

And that’s it for this week, thanks for reading! I’ll be back soon with a few words on Francis Ford Coppola and his mentor Dorothy Arzner…