Rob Sheffield wants you to know that he is now a true Swiftie. “Heartbreak is the national anthem”, her slim, intense and charming collection of chapters on Taylor Swift begins with her amazement at the “total commitment” of her early fans. It ends with Sheffield attending “three consecutive nights” of the Eras tour, “singing, crying and suffering through an epic and emotional Taypocalypse.” In between, Sheffield reacts to each album and a triple handful of favorite songs, riffing and expanding on the 274 paragraphs. ranked list of taylor songs that Sheffield, a longtime Rolling Stone writer, maintains for that magazine.

This book clearly grew out of those lists and other articles Sheffield has archived about Swift’s career: It’s what science fiction writers used to call a arrangementa book compiled, expanded and revised from works created for magazines. In science fiction, that could be a future story filled with robots. For Sheffield, this is how Swift “reinvented pop in the image of a fangirl,” sharing the deepest cuts and brightest flashes of her “zero to sixty heart.”

Faced with such power and such a well-known topic, another writer could fall into cliché. Another still might plan and execute a longer book with more extensive plots, step by step, placing our girl in musical, cultural, or literary traditions (full disclosure: I’m writing such a book right now). Sheffield doesn’t need to do such things because, like the celebrated rock critics of decades past, he doesn’t write paragraph by paragraph, but phrase by phrase. I could say from his prose what Walt Whitman said about his verse: “I and mine do not convince with arguments. … We convince with our presence.”

And what a presence. “Taylor invented crying in the bathroom; no one has shed more tears in more facilities since indoor plumbing was invented.” “Sometimes Taylor loves to flaunt her self-awareness in ways that make you wonder if she ever knew herself.” A brief biography could be drawn from the deeds of the Sheffield sheriffs, but why? She’s here for the vibes, and she’s at her best when the vibes hit hardest: when she writes about listening to “Lover” (supposedly Swift’s happiest album) while mourning her mother, or when she brings, to talk about the Taylor’s romantic moments, her own. background in the British youth movement called New Romantics, the trend of boys in makeup and synthesizers in everything that gave us Duran Duran.

Sheffield also wants us to know that he is a top-notch rock critic. “The first time I heard ‘Fearless’ was on the phone. The label was so paranoid about the leaks that they didn’t even want to touch it to me in a private room.” Sheffield in 2008 was the kind of writer who would have ‘Fearless’ played over the phone. “Boy George told me that a few years ago,” begins one sentence (it’s the best part of the sentence). “On the Reputation tour in New Jersey in July 2018,” Taylor “asked me before the show, ‘Enchanted’ or ‘The Lucky One’? There’s no good reason to ask a rock critic to keep his personal life separate from his work, but these asides undermine, if only slightly, the identification Sheffield seeks elsewhere between himself and the mass of Swift fans.

That’s Swift’s problem, too, as Sheffield knows all too well: how do you stay close, emotionally, to your fans when they number in the hundreds of millions? He knows better than to give just one answer. Instead, he continues to react, appreciate, notice, with some clichés, more ideas and fierce phrases from a pack of wolves. Swift spends most of her “Reputation” album “trying to act jaded and calm, a really sophisticated New Taylor, but she finally gives up and jumps back into Old Taylor hard enough to break her ankle.” A lesser writer would have stopped at “Old Taylor.” “Delicate,” one of her softest and most beautiful love songs, also shows that “Tay has no idea how bars work. You don’t send your date to make you a drink.”

Half of the best moments in this book work that way: they start as verbal flourishes and end as one-sentence keys to Swift’s kingdom, or at least one of his provinces. The other half is based on Sheffield’s decades of listening to and writing about pop stars not named Taylor Swift. Every Eras concertgoer knows that the pre-show music is Lesley Gore’s “You Don’t Own Me,” but who else knows Gore’s up-and-down discography, or remembers that Gore came out, on PBS, in 2005, and stayed? in a lesbian couple for thirty-three years”? Who else could so clearly explain the Taylorian parallels with Bruce Springsteen, the only other “star whose charisma is so close to kindness”?

“Heartbreak Is the National Anthem” (Sheffield took the title from “New Romantics”) is not the first witty critical book about Swift, and it won’t be the last. It may be the shortest and that’s okay. Few Swifties (few readers) will come to Sheffield for a succession of facts, or even (although we get a few) for claims about how a particular tune or drum machine works. We turn to a reviewer like this for his own feelings, for his reactions, judgments, and personal experience of Swift’s nearly 300 songs. This is what we came for, whether his prose is practical or bejeweled: and he can make the whole place shine.

HEARTBREAK IS THE NATIONAL ANTHEM: How Taylor Swift Reinvented Pop Music

By Rob Sheffield

Dey Street Books, 208 pages, $27.99

Stephanie Burt is a poet (“we are mermaids“), literary critic (“Don’t read poetry“), and Donald and Catherine Loker Professor of English at Harvard University. His The next book, “Super Gay Poems,” will appear in Harvard UP in 2025.