Since reports came out last weekend that Taylor Swift and the actor Joe Alwyn had split after more than six years together, Swifties have been scrying for signs that they should have known, or intimations of the pop superstar’s state of mind.
The news came via Entertainment Tonight, a reputable source that seemed to have been briefed by an insider stating that “the relationship had just run its course”.
CNN confirmed the news, and a few days later People magazine – a similarly old-school organ – quoted claims that the actor had “struggled with Taylor’s level of fame and the attention from the public” and that “the differences in their personalities have also become harder to ignore after years together”.
Fans, however – well trained by Swift to sift through her work for clues as to her motivations and future activity – knew this was not the full story. They scoured setlists for her current Eras tour, which began on 17 March in Arizona, and noticed that on 31 March she swapped the song Invisible String – a love song to Alywn – for The 1, a regretful song about how “it would’ve been fun / If you would’ve been the one”.
The setlist, nevertheless, remains packed with songs about their romance, which Swift started writing about on her 2017 album, Reputation. Her most recent album, 2022’s Midnights, opens with Lavender Haze, a song about the couple’s efforts to preserve the sanctity of their relationship away from the media: both parties skirted the subject in interviews, using noticeably similar lines that while they might discuss their relationship if they were having drinks with the journalist, they would not do so on the record.
Fans avidly watched as Swift played her first show since the announcement, on 13 April in Tampa, Florida. They understood an ovation after the breakup song Champagne Problems to indicate support for Swift, and inferred poignancy from her long pause and repeated thanks to them thereafter.
But Swift made no explicit comment on the breakup and used the changing “secret songs” section of her setlist to make another announcement that fans had been expecting, hinting that the third album to be released in her re-recording project would be her 2010 album, Speak Now. “Recently a lot has been going on in my mind about this album so I thought I might play the title track,” she told the crowd.
Swift is remaking her first six records – appending the parenthesis (Taylor’s Version) – in order to reclaim ownership over her masters after they were sold by her former label head to an industry foe, apparently without Swift being given the option to buy them herself. The rocky Speak Now is the only Swift album on which she is the sole songwriter and features one of her most highly regarded songs, Dear John, thought to be about her relationship with the songwriter John Mayer, 12 years her senior – an experience she returned to in the raging Midnights bonus track Would’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve.
Swift has previously hinted that Speak Now is coming via clues in the video to her Midnights single Bejeweled. On an evident paparazzi walk this week as she left a New York restaurant, she was pictured wearing jeans embroidered with a sparkly butterfly, a visual motif of that album era.
Despite currently touring a show that features 44 songs performed over more than three hours, this week Swift was also spotted recording at New York’s famed Electric Lady studios as well as filming a music video in Liverpool.
As with all her music videos since 2019’s Me!, it is likely to be directed by Swift, who has cinematic ambitions. In December it was announced that she is writing and directing her debut feature film for Searchlight Pictures. In February, she won the Grammy award for best video for All Too Well: The Short Film, which she made to accompany the extended 10-minute version of a beloved Red song on that album’s re-recording.
Meanwhile it was announced that Alywn will star alongside Felicity Jones, Adrien Brody and Guy Pearce in The Brutalist, about an artist who flees postwar Europe for America.
The media and fan frenzy over the breakup is symptomatic of a moment in pop when musicians are heavily telegraphing their feelings regarding past relationships in their lyrics and visuals, encouraging fans to put the pieces together – as with Miley Cyrus’s global No 1 single Flowers.
Despite expressing distaste for media interest in her love life earlier in her career, Swift arguably seeded this trend by littering the liner notes to her albums with clear clues as to her songs’ subjects. This week, fans in New York City flocked to leave flowers at the house hymned in her song Cornelia Street, from 2019’s Lover, as the place where her and Alwyn’s love blossomed.
Swift has yet to unveil the highly anticipated UK leg of the Eras tour. Fans have no idea what album, tour or project she might announce next, leaving them in the state of tortured anticipation she describes on Would’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve: “The God’s honest truth is that the pain was heaven.” Speak Now might be coming soon, but these days Swift isn’t saying anything in a straightforward way.
