Taylor Swift’s new album launch shows her storytelling skill lies in keeping things hidden

Taylor Swift has never been the best dancer. Nor does she have the vocal range of Mariah Carey. But she is a great storyteller.

Storytelling is as much about what you obscure as what you share. Wave a flag over here and no one is looking over there.

Think about what you think you know about Swift. She was uncool in high school. She left her scarf (or, ahem, something else) at Maggie Gyllenhaal’s house. She broke records with her Eras tour. She bought the rights to her music back.

Swift likes to be in control, and everything she does, everything she shares, when and how, is carefully considered and manoeuvred into place.

And yet. Her legion of fans love her because she is able to sell herself as an everygirl, a regular person just like them. To them, she’s a dorky and earnest friend, not a savvy billionaire whose public image has been curated to the nth degree.

Swift this week announced the details of her next album. The morsels were, of course, doled out in stages, first with the countdown on her website revealing the name, then the appearance on boyfriend Travis Kelce’s podcast, New Heights, during which she debuted the album cover, track listing and release date.

Like any Swift update, it was a big deal. According to reports, 1.3 million listeners tuned in to the live broadcast of a podcast that is usually about sport. Once again, a carefully chosen platform that allows Swift and her team to control every aspect of the “interview”.

It’s her boyfriend, so he’s not going to ask any curly questions, and allows Swift to set the terms on which they’re engaging. She’s going to tell the audience exactly what she wants them to know.

Because it’s a conversation between two lovers, it gives the impression that it’s going to be intimate, and that fans will be brought into their story, but what did Swift actually reveal?

That they met because he had gushed about her on the podcast and it tapped into one of her teenage fantasies of being wooed with a boombox? That’s cute but it’s surface level, and also fits into the existing narrative that she was just like you in high school, kind of lonely and pining for a movie character boyfriend.

Or how about that in the eight months since the end of the Eras tour, she has been chilling out and baking sourdough bread and watching otter videos on social media. Again, that might seem like a personal detail, a window into her days, but it’s not.

It is, however, not completely innocuous. Maybe she really does bake bread, but the choice to share that aspect of her life is designed to make her relatable. Bread baking is inoffensive and wholesome, and it doesn’t define anyone’s personality.

What she’s not going to share is that she probably has private chefs or staff who can run out to some buzzy bakery and they won’t even have to line up.

She’s also not going to tell you about spending her time in meetings and conversations related to exactly how they’re going to release this new album, or how they would’ve plotted every media appearance, including the Kelce podcast.

Or acknowledge that she could afford to take eight months off to chill after the Eras tour because she made so much money off it.

Swift is in complete control of what she wants you to know. She’s telling a story, it’s just not the whole one.

In a 2023 GQ profile, Jacob Elordi said, “the central thing that makes a movie star is mystery.”

The Australian actor has chaffed against the demands of celebrity in the 21st century, where actors are supposed to prostrate themselves on the altar of the attention economy. If everyone knows everything about you, how could they ever buy you, an actor, as a character you’ve been hired to play, was his argument, essentially.

It wasn’t a flawless analogy because the central thing that makes a movie star is how many tickets they can sell, and that’s always hinged on how much a moviegoer wants to see you, not the character.

Swift’s ability to generate crazed fandom, album sales (and every version of the same vinyl), song streams, fill stadiums, convince everyone that dowdy, sequined shift dresses and skin-pinching friendship bracelets were cool, is based on the fact she seems accessible, not mysterious.

Sure, many of the songs are genuine bangers, but it’s the stories within them that connect to her fans more than the melodies. Every song is a jigsaw piece, and over soon-to-be 12 albums, fans feel like they make up the puzzle that is Swift. But it’s an incomplete one.

Her first record, the eponymously titled 2006 debut album, is an earnest portrait of a girl next door, overlooked, unthreatening and innocent. For years, her look was romantic curls and school formal gowns that could’ve graced any page of Dolly magazine in the 1990s.

Even now, with all the resources and access at her disposal, Swift is still mostly a terrible dresser, and it’s genuinely a question of whether she deliberately eschews a more fashion-forward look due to personal preference or because looking like a dork is more relatable, and therefore sellable.

Kanye West had no idea that in 2009 he did Swift a huge favour when he stole her acceptance speech moment at the MTV Video Music Awards by declaring it should’ve gone to Beyonce. It immediately cemented the perception that Swift was the underdog being disrespected by a mean, older man.

Same goes for her dispute with Scooter Braun over the control of her masters, which both benefited from and also fed into a female economic empowerment movement. No one is going to begrudge her – or any artist – control over their own work.

In the Kelce podcast episode, she detailed how she “dramatically fell to the floor” when she found out that she had finally reclaimed all her music rights. But note that she said she had “since I was a teenager, I’ve been actively saving up money to buy my music back”.

Swift manages to make a transaction worth hundreds of millions of dollars sound like when you saved up to buy your first used car.

She’s been able to exploit that us (her fandom, her artistry, her relatability) versus them (the man, the machine) dynamic ever since. Every woman who has even been spoken over can latch onto Swift as a kindred spirit. She gets it, you know?

At an earlier point, Swift copped some flak for writing about her ex-boyfriends in her music but the narrative has moved on.

Some of that is the culture shifted (again, the chicken or the egg) and there’s a wider acceptance as more and more people shared more and more aspects of their lives on social media that everyone has right to own and broadcast their experiences.

The other part is that sometimes might does equal right. Her fandom is now so large and powerful, and she collected high-profile friends whose fame she later eclipsed, so ubiquity wins the day.

She also told everyone through the Red and Reputation albums that you don’t mess with Swift, because she can be ferocious as well as sweet.

Swift has been able to cultivate a fiercely protective fandom because she has teased all these different parts of herself without giving them all of her, so that anyone can project onto her whatever and whoever they want her to be.

The leader of a girl squad? Sure. The pop princess? Absolutely. An empowered billionaire businesswoman? That too. The relatable girl next door? Always.

As she told us herself, she’s got a blank space. You just have to write your name at the top of the Taylor Swift story you want to read.