Four different booklets in special editions of her new album contain reproductions of handwritten journals that reveal what Swift wants us to see — and what she doesn’t.
Jon Caramanica and
On Friday, when Taylor Swift released her seventh album, “Lover,” she didn’t just deliver 18 songs into the digital ether. As one of the few remaining pop stars to prioritize physical sales, Swift offered her devoted fan base four special-edition CD versions of the album, available exclusively at Target, each accompanied by a booklet containing a reprinted selection of handwritten journal entries spanning her career, from ages 13 to 27.
Instead of collectible fluff, the result, for any close reader of Swift’s work, is a meticulously curated glimpse into the artist’s real-time feelings on an array of issues, people, ideas and squabbles that have defined her life as a musician and celebrity. “I frequently and drastically changed my opinions on love, friends, confidence and trust,” she notes in the introduction to the selections, and then proceeds to show just how.
Across the four unique assortments, Swift tells a piecemeal story of her rise in the industry, where label meetings as a young teenager turn into radio play, record sales, the Grammy Awards and the Met Gala, mixing landmark moments with mundane personal updates, drafts of lyrics and other marginalia.
Jon Caramanica, a New York Times pop music critic, and Joe Coscarelli, the pop music reporter, dug through the entries searching for insights about Swift, her music and her methods of self-presentation.
JOE COSCARELLI Jon, I have to come right out and say that after reading the “Lover” booklets multiple times as if they were Tina Brown’s “Vanity Fair Diaries,” I can’t help but be borderline hyperbolic: Nearly a decade and a half into Swift’s career, which includes seven varyingly diaristic albums and countless hours in the public eye, these carefully selected and expertly pruned diary pages might somehow be the single most revealing cumulative artifact when it comes to establishing what kind of person, artist and operator Taylor Swift has become — and has always been. I’m not sure she’ll ever need a memoir if she has hundreds more of these pages lying around.
Like the best pop culture ephemera, the entries feel like a skeleton key to an Established Persona in ways both intentional and not, leaving the reader to wonder exactly how much self-awareness is involved at any given moment. Most often, the answer is obviously a lot — every page feels designed to address a running theme or controversy in Swift’s career, from her endless ambition to her obsession with fairy-tale love to her anxiety around performance to newer narratives, like her struggles with her body image. But then there are selections that feel so telling, vulnerable and formative that you wonder how such a careful, politician-like celebrity could be so casually, unceasingly herself.
JON CARAMANICA I gobbled these up as well, but as my excitement was growing with each oh-wow detail, I couldn’t help but think, time and again, that I was being triggered by someone who specifically understands just how much to reveal, and on what terms.
