A Me-Sized Reinvention
If I have listened to anything that is not Taylor Swift’s Midnights in the last two weeks it has been by mistake. The album goes on in the car, in the kitchen, and in my head – word for word, beat for beat – any time I am not actually listening to it. I scream the lyrics so hard I give myself a headache. At first I was unsure about it, but by my third listen I was certain – this music was curing me.
This album is important to me firstly because it has given me a vocabulary with which to not only understand, but also start to move through, my heartbreak. Before Midnights I was the “monster on the hill”, very much “it’s me, hi, I’m the problem it’s me”. Then I was more “god rest my soul, I miss who I used to be” and “you’re on your own kid, you always have been”. And now, well, “I miss you, but I miss sparkling”. After months of not liking myself, in the light there is now the faintest memory of shimmer.
But there’s something else, above and beyond the music. In one of my multiple-times-weekly “what the hell am I doing with my work?” text conversations with poor Jen, she said that maybe it would be useful to pick some lighthouses of people whose work I loved, and I said “yes but the trouble is I just want to be Taylor Swift” and oh we laughed.
But…what if I was Taylor Swift?
Let me break it down. The art itself is good. The music is good, it speaks, it connects, it’s honest, it moves you. That’s the kind of art I want to create. But the art is good because it’s taken seriously without being serious. It is thought out and worked hard on but then there are the slightly silly, cameo-rich videos to go with it because they were fun to do. The metaphors and the writing and the meanings and the Easter eggs were all honed and re-written and taken seriously, but not so seriously that the joy was lost.
There is something in there for me. I’m either far too serious, or not serious enough. I’m either so precious about an idea, a title, for something, that it has to be published in The New York Times or it’s not happening – so weirdly enough it doesn’t happen. Or, I’m so throw away with things, doing them for the sake of it, that they melt away into nothing and I don’t even care. If I’m going to do this, whatever “this” is, there needs to be a Taylor Swift-level of commitment.
Talking of commitment, let’s also discuss re-invention. Taylor Swift doesn’t do “give the people what they want” – she does eras. The easiest thing in the world would be to churn out similar album after similar album, staying true to genre and following the “successful enough musician” checklist. Instead, she reinvents. She switches up aesthetic and genre and feel whilst maintaining the red thread of what it means to be a Taylor Swift album – her voice. Change and constancy, holding hands and producing magic.
Of course, Taylor Swift has wealth and privilege on her side. I’m not debating how easy it is to “reinvent” when there are multiple millions in your bank account. But what would be a me-sized version of this?
Re-invention only works when you commit. You can’t sort of re-invent yourself: “hey guys, it’s completely different but also with a lot of the same things!” It doesn’t work, it’s a mixed message and it doesn’t do the old or the new well. Re-invention works when you know your voice, you stay true to it, whilst saying something completely different. It works when you say “I hear what you like but wait til you see this”. It is trusting your voice and your artistry to continually level up.
A me-sized re-invention would be to subvert the path that is expected. To pitch the things I really want to write, to go there in my Instagram posts, to translate all those jottings in my Notes app into pieces that see the light of day. To lose all the rules I’ve given myself over the last five years, to pick something that will make money and really make it make money. To bring more of who I am with my friends to who I am in my work.
I’ve not been doing that. As much as I say I’ve been transitioning my work, I haven’t really. Because I haven’t taken the big risks, haven’t left the old eras behind. I haven’t been paying enough attention to detail that an entire aesthetic unravels from a lyrics like a pulled thread on a cardigan. I’ve been trying to make myself believe I’m reinventing while staying put – and that’s not how it’s going to work. Risks need to be taken, changes need to be made… and I need to be a little more Taylor Swift.
