Taylor Swift Is Reportedly Working On New Music Because, Of Course, She Is
Reports suggest Taylor Swift is writing new songs while settling into married life, and fans are already speculating about the next album.
Celebrities
Page Six reported on Aug. 27 that Taylor Swift is writing new music, which is approximately like reporting that the tide is coming in.
The process is not news
Swift has described her method at the Grammy Museum before: fragments of lyrics and melodies collected continuously in her phone's notes app, whether or not an album is in progress. By that account she is always writing, and any report that she is writing is a report about the calendar rather than about her.
What makes this one interesting is timing. Swift and Travis Kelce are settling into married life, both of them returning to work after a stretch in which the personal news comprehensively outran the professional. A release now would be her thirteenth studio album — and thirteen is not a number this particular artist is going to allow to pass without comment.
Two competing theories
The speculation has organized itself into two camps. The first expects a country-leaning record, fed by Swift talking about a renewed attachment to Nashville and by the song she wrote for "Toy Story 5." The second expects a re-recording of her debut for its twentieth anniversary, which would close the loop on the entire re-recording project she began years ago.
Both are plausible. Both are also exactly the kind of theory an artist with this level of control over her own narrative would be content to let run, since neither costs anything and both keep the audience occupied during a quiet period.
The close reading
Then there is the textual analysis. A fan account noticed that Taylor Nation's social posts had been using the word home repeatedly, and drew the obvious conclusion.
It is genuinely impossible to say whether that is a clue or a coincidence, because both have been true before. Swift has planted things in captions that turned out to matter, and the accounts have also used ordinary words in ordinary ways while thousands of people diagrammed them.
The actual achievement
Which is the thing worth stepping back for. Swift has built an audience that treats her marketing department's word choices as textual evidence, and a media environment in which a report that a songwriter is writing songs runs as news on a Thursday.
The album will arrive when it arrives, and it will be enormous. The apparatus around it never stops running in the meantime, and it does not particularly need her to feed it.