The Many Muses of Taylor Swift

Deciphering the love language of inspiration

I became what professionally might be called a “Swiftie” on a hot summer night in Brooklyn. Rattling in the back of a cab, the radio suddenly started playing “Karma.” In the crystalline enunciation that is a trademark of any Swift song, I heard the catchiest definition of karma ever as Swift sang:

'Cause karma is the thunder
Rattling your ground
Karma's on your scent like a bounty hunter
Karma's gonna track you down
Step by step from town to town
Sweet like justice, karma is a queen
Karma takes all my friends to the summit
Karma is the guy on the screen
Coming straight home to me

If you aren’t a Taylor Swift fan, you are in a national minority: a 2023 survey found that 53% of US adults claim to be fans. Generationally, the appeal is widespread: 45% are millennials, 23% are baby boomers, and 21% are Gen Xs. Gen Z makes up just 11%. The genders are split evenly: 48% are male, 52% are female. Three-quarters are white.

Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour has driven an estimated $5 billion in related consumer spending. Tickets often cost $2,000. Sweatshirts are $75. Opening night for the tour brought in more revenue than Super Bowl LVII. The GDP of this economic engine puts Swift Nation ahead of about fifty countries.

“It's kind of like the Marvel Cinematic Universe,” Charlie Harding, a music journalist, told Time. “We're in the Taylor Swift cinematic universe at any given moment. There's endless amounts of discussion to be had at every level of this world that she's created, and each one I think serves a different audience.”

The Taylor Swift cinematic universe is full of Muses turned villains. Most of these Muses are ex-boyfriends. This is why Taylor Swift’s relationship with Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce was announced as if a new prince had been named. The news drove:

• A 400% increase in Kelce’s jersey sales

• 383,000 new followers on Kelce’s Instagram account

• A 3X increase in Kansas City Chiefs ticket searches

Taylor Swift’s art seems to start not so much with how or what but who: she knows how to find inspiration, because she knows how to find her next Muse.

Idols of Inspiration

Taylor Swift and Joe Jonas, circa 2008. Source: People

In 2008, Swift and boy band idol Joe Jonas briefly dated. The byproduct of the relationship was six songs inspired by the relationship. Seven, if you count Swift’s “Invisible String” (2020), in which Swift sings:

Cold was the steel of my axe to grind

For the boys who broke my heart.

Now I send their babies presents.

For the record, Swift reportedly sent a gift to Joe Jonas and Sophie Turner when they had their first child. The song is beautiful with the compassion of frustrated longing. Joe Jonas, like almost all of Taylor Swift’s ex-partners, lasted as a muse much longer than as a lover.

When Sophie Turner, better known as Sansa from Game of Thrones, announced her divorce from Joe Jonas this year, Swift fans pointed out that Turner was now in the unique position of listening to break-up songs from one of the most famous musicians in the world that are specifically about her ex-husband.

Musecraft

Source: Vox

In 600 BC, the Greeks believed artists got inspired by the Muses. There were nine Muses, to be exact, and they were all the daughters of Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory.

As this helpful height chart shows us, Swift has more Muses than Mnemosyne: from John Mayer to Jake Gyllenhaal and Joe Jonas, Tom Hiddleston (Loki) to Taylor Lautner (werewolf) and Conor Kennedy (political werewolf), each Swiftie Muse has inspired her songs over the years.

Fans have done the math:

29 songs/ 20 boys = 1.45 songs per boy.

29 songs of heartache/ 83 songs total = 34.93% of her songs of about guys.

15 boyfriends/ 9 years = 1.666.. boyfriends per year. OR One break-up every 7.2 months.

EDIT: Since somebody asked, she has released 36 singles, and 16 are about heartbreak, so 16/36 = 44.444..% ~44.4% of her singles are about heart-break.

Another observer estimates that 38% of Swift’s discography is about break-ups. Fans are already wondering what the Kelce era will sound like. But where some might see troubled relationships, I think it’s helpful to think about this in a different way: Swift is an artist who is churning and burning through Muses. In the process, her partners become masterpieces more than men.

As psychologist Otto Von Rank puts it in Art and Artist (1932), this should be expected: it isn’t easy to be a Muse.

The conflict between life and creation reaches extreme intensity… [the Muse] is expected to be Muse and mistress at once, which means that she must justify equally the artistic ego, with its creativeness, and the real self, with its life…

This is the burden of anyone in a relationship with an artist: the partner becomes material. The artist must then maintain the idol that begets inspiration and the human behind it. But this becomes impossible, as Rank explains:

“[The artist has a] fundamental craving for totality, in life as in work, and the inner conflict [with the Muse], through it may be temporarily eased by being objectified in such an outward division of roles, is as a whole only intensified thereby.

Taylor Swift’s past - and the people she left behind there - are less real than the songs. Memory, the mother of all Muses, becomes the totality and the harmony of the music that she - and each Muse - leaves behind. The man who used to be a Muse becomes a song. The song becomes a theme. The personal becomes public, the public becomes popular. The popular becomes poetry. The poetry becomes profit.

The Profitable Plane

Nothing is more universal than the theme of love. Maybe this is why more than half the country is a fan of Taylor Swift: anyone who has fallen in and out of love can relate to her confessional lyrics.

Or, as Rank puts it, popular art offers a “plane of illusion” where the audience joins the artist in a setting that nourishes the soul. In making art from a common, human theme, Swift helps the audience live symbolically within a different reality - where they meet many others along the journey. This plane of illusion is a “seeming life” with less fear and more pleasure and helps the audience transcend individual humanity in favor of a greater whole. In surrendering to the work, the artist creates a world for others to enjoy. This is the plane of illusion.

Rank explains:

The self-renunciation which the artist feels when creating is relieved when he finds himself again in his accomplished work, and the self-renunciation which raises the enjoyer above the limitations of his individuality becomes, through not identification, but the feeling of oneness with the soul living in the work of art, a greater and higher entity.

The magic of a Taylor Swift song about love is that we find ourselves in it, alongside others. This is what Rank believes is the pleasure of enjoying art: a “simultaneous dissolution” of individuality between audience and artist where we release the fear that is our mortal ego and come back to reality, “richer for this universal feeling.”

Unfortunately, the act of artistic creation is ultimately, according to Rank, an act of destruction:

[An artist] wastes as he creates and this brings him new conflicts, from which again he seeks to escape by living.

Many Muses have been sacrificed at this altar. Maybe this is what makes each new Taylor Swift relationship so interesting: whether it works out or not, we are not just watching the progress between two people, but the process of artist and audience as the reality of a new relationship becomes a shared reality where we can share parts of ourselves. Even if it costs $2,000 to do it.

What makes “art” art? Are influencers our new artists? Read Litverse’s “Do Influencers Pass the Art Test?” for more on Rank’s analysis of what makes humans create.