How Taylor Swift Created a Cinematic Universe (The TCU)

"It’s just been really fun to kind of expand the musical experience past just listening to a song." One of the things that makes Taylor Swift’s songs so addictive is that they exist in a larger musical universe. We’re pretty used to this in film and TV, But few artists have applied the cinematic-universe approach so extensively to music. "In folklore, there are a lot of songs that reference each other or lyrical parallels." The Taylor Swift Cinematic Universe tells a unified narrative of a woman

navigating her place in the world. It’s a universe full of recurring characters. Episodes pick up one after another, narrative threads resolve albums later, and it always comes back to the prime importance of love and the bravery of making yourself vulnerable. "I wanna still have a sharp pen, and a thin skin, and an open heart." Here’s our deep dive into the motifs and takeaways of the expansive TCU. "There were some fans that thought I had something to do with Avengers Endgame." "‘Cause we had

the single coming out the same day and I have a song that was called ‘End Game’ and so they were like ‘oh my god she’s going to defeat Thanos and-" "Speaking of universes that are really addicting to enter, we have been watching Panic. Our new episode of the takeaway for amazon prime video is about Panic. I...Binged it in less than a weekend, I was really hooked. Were you hooked on it?" "I was really hooked on Panic, I thought that… you know, every episode there was something that was revealed,

it's also really relatable in the sense of there’s a lot of just...coming of age. But then it’s heightened by this intensity of danger and challenge that, you know, y-makes you think, ‘What would I do?’" "Blind man’s bluff challenges you to face three fears at once: fear of darkness, fear of falling, and fear of the unknown." "It had a, just a great atmosphere it was a little bit Twin Peaks, a little bit Friday Night Lights, a little bit Hunger Games. So after you watch Panic go watch our video

on Amazon Prime Video Youtube Channel, we clear up everything…" "Susannah if you tell me to watch a show I’m gonna watch a show." "I am actually telling you to watch this show." All great stories need a compelling hero or heroine, and Taylor Swift has never disguised the fact that the narrator in her songs is a version of herself, singing about her experiences. "I think it's gonna be really crazy to look back when I'm older and look at these albums as, these diary entries from different times i

n my life." But what’s unusual about her semi-autobiographical style is that there are actually multiple versions of her self-proxy -- an array of Taylor-heroines. When we first meet her, she’s the ordinary high schooler -- she’s not high up the social hierarchy, but instead someone who’s (as a bonus track on her first album puts it) Invisible. "You just see right through me." Part of the reason Taylor Swift cut through so quickly was because of this relatable persona: she was a teenage girl, si

nging to teenage girls, about being a teenage girl. "I'm 17, never gotten married or had a kid, I'm not gonna write songs about that. But I will write about what I have been through or what my friends have been through." The flashes of rural America on these early songs -- and their firm rooting in the country genre -- also play into her ordinary girl-next-door-ness. This imagery of Taylor the Country Singer grounds her as a peer of her audience - someone they might run into on the street. But w

hile she paints this rural life as idyllic, Taylor also introduces a quest narrative, "This is a big world that was a small town." which turns her from ordinary high school country girl into a more classic leading lady. When Taylor sings, "I’m just a girl tryna find a place in this world," we get the impression that that place isn’t the small-town life she’s already described, but something bigger, brighter, and further away. This narrative arc mirrors Taylor’s own journey: moving at a young age

from a Christmas tree farm in Reading, Pennsylvania to Nashville to pursue becoming a musician. "I was just sort of kind of looking around at all these big buildings and all these important people and wondering how I was gonna fit in." And in her songs, Taylor the Dreamer and Striver persona is boldly ambitious, yet sensitive and fragile; as she puts it in the liner notes of her second album Fearless, "Fearless is having fears. Fearless is having doubts...fearless is living in spite of those th

ings that scare you to death." Vulnerability is a theme Taylor returns to again and again -- especially on the track fives of her records, "Picking a track five is- is sort of a pressurized decision." which tend to be the space for the TCU to become the most introspective and tragic, or as Lucy Harbron puts it for NME: "all aboard the superhighway to heartbreak and pain." "I started to put the songs that were really honest, emotional and vulnerable and personal as track five." Across these emoti

onally open ballads, we glimpse Reflective Taylor, developing the heroine’s deep, insightful power as an artist. A track five always brings the Taylor-heroine down to earth, reminding us that -- even though in other spots she might elevate herself to the level of a glamorous Elizabeth Taylor or Grace Kelly -- underneath it all she’s still a regular person experiencing our same insecurities and painful life lessons. "Time won’t fly it’s like I’m paralyzed by it." Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang of the

Las Culturistas podcast make the distinction between Taylor and Tayla; For them, Taylor is the quieter, honest artist, "She’s being Taylor on this." while Tayla is the fierce, performative pop star who comes out in her more melodramatic or combative publicity-seeking moments. "I love when she’s a pop star, bratty, big sound - that’s Tayla to me." It’s Tayla who loves the drama and sings to the haters on very public beef tracks addressing her substantial list of feuds, delivering the campy fun o

f videos like Bad Blood and its cold-blooded nemesis pretty clearly meant to be Katy Perry -- while Taylor supports herself with a star-studded supporting cast (or squad) to show off who’s in her corner, so to speak. Building on Beefing Taylor, we get Taylor the Mad Woman, who’s almost cartoonishly, gleefully angry and vengeful, making it feel fun to lean into the behaviors that tend to get women labeled "insane." "Got a long list of ex-lovers, they’ll tell you I’m insane." In The Man and Mad Wo

man, this persona takes on a righteous, feminist anger. "The most rage provoking element of being a female is- is the gaslighting." In the video for Look What You Made Me Do - which maybe shows Taylor at her angriest and maddest, a dark spin on her as the leading lady, "I’ll be the actress starring in your bad dreams." -- she lines up a range of recognizable Taylors and pits them against each other. "We are never ever getting back together music video, Shake It Off music video ballerina, Red tou

r." Here she’s self-mocking through some of the least flattering versions of herself as seen and defined by others. "Stop making that surprised face, it’s so annoying" "There she goes, playing the victim, again." -- like the calculating, cut-throat villain from Katy Perry’s "Swish swish" or the "snake" she was branded as during her beef with Kim Kardashian and Kanye West [Taylor hisses], the Tayla part of her enjoys clapping back at the haters, even relishing having her reputation tarnished, bec

ause (far from taking the high road) it’s a lot more fun (and sells more records) to fight back. "What are you doing?" "Getting receipts, gonna edit this later." Yet despite the song’s dramatic assertion that the old Taylor (or Taylors) are dead, these versions of herself still remain key facets of her character that make up the full picture of Taylor Swift. The feuder, the emotionally vulnerable person, the down-to-earth country girl, the mad woman with an empowered, slightly cheeky rage, the n

aive high-schooler-at-heart… these all take a more mature form in her recent work, but they’re all still highly visible pieces of her identity as an artist. There is also Taylor the Business Mogul guiding her own destiny, as she’s illustrating with her project to re-record her first six albums after her enemy, music executive and investor Scooter Braun, bought up the masters. "Which brings us to Scooter Braun." "Ugh" "Now could you re-record?" "Oh yeah!" This project reclaims the Taylor Swift he

roine character and her journey as hers and no one else’s. "I’ve spent quite a bit of time writing break-up songs." Then, of course, there’s the series of romantic heroes who play opposite the Taylor-heroine in stories of love and heartbreak. "I got a blank space baby, and I’ll write your name." In the early days, when Taylor-the-heroine is still young and naive, a lot of agency is given over to these heroes. A repeated image on her first album is the car or pickup truck. "You’re just a boy in a

Chevy Truck." She’s riding shotgun with her hair undone on Our Song, and complaining bitterly about the, "Stupid pickup truck you never let me drive." on Picture To Burn. In high school, a vehicle is status, elevating these boys in the social hierarchy. "He’s got a car." These early love stories are very archetypal; love in these small-town romances is dramatic and epic like it feels in the movies. "Music starts playing like the end of a sad movie." As she gets older, and her love life becomes

more public, Taylor reverses this process: taking men who already have a lot of social status and reducing them to the level of a high school boyfriend. In songs about relationship with Jake Gyllenhaal, the space of the car again feels important, likening him to those high school boyfriends she once knew. In All Too Well, they’re, "getting lost upstate," and in Red the perspective flips, and it’s Taylor in the driving seat. "Loving him is like driving a new Maserati down a dead end street" She’s

also showing that this new love is more out of control, and maybe defined by a power imbalance - although on We Are Never Getting Back Together she claims that power back, transforming him into an uber-recognizable mansplaining hipster. Love for Taylor is also dangerous - a theme that’s prominent in the songs about a more "bad boy" romantic hero who enters the TCU scene with that "James Dean daydream" look in his eye: Harry Styles. "What are your thoughts on Haylor? What are your thoughts on Ha

ylor?" In Style and I Knew You Were Trouble (both about him), the love story is defined by images of crashing down, and lying on the cold hard ground, and once again, a driver in a car who can’t keep his eyes on the road, whose journey could end in burning flames or paradise. If in the Jake songs the heartbreak stops her in her tracks, then on these songs it’s like she’s fully aware of, perhaps drawn to, the danger. "I guess you didn’t care and I guess I liked that." She also shows more sexual a

gency in Style. "There’s a lot of like, sensual imagery going on here." "She’s trying to show you, like, ‘I am sexual.’" But the repeated refrain of Out Of The Woods, "are we out of the woods yet," calls to mind the feeling of a relationship that you know isn’t sustainable - with the video repeating the motif from I Know Places of being hunted. "This was a relationship where it was kind of living day to day wondering where it was going if it was going to go anywhere if it was going to end the ne

xt day." What’s so striking about Styles as a character in the TCU is that Taylor’s and Harry’s real-life relationship was incredibly short-lived and (according to countless articles) over back in early 2013. So it’s truly as a fictional character that Styles looms large in the TCU -- as a ghost largely embellished by Taylor’s mind, who’s also instantly recognizable to us based on our collective imagination of the figure. "I talk about in another song on the record a crooked love which is kind o

f like never quite synced up right." He’s essentially the personification of that figure all of us have a version of: The One Who Got Away, or the Great Love Who Could Have Been, with eyes, "so inviting, I almost jump in" as she sings on Evermore’s "Gold Rush." That song isn’t confirmed to be about him, but it’s hard not to see this TCU recurring character in the lyrics about a boy who grew up beautiful, whose hair falls into place like dominoes while "Everybody wonders what it would be like to

love him." But when Taylor says she doesn’t like a gold rush, she refuses to want the boy that everyone is after, vowing instead to carve a more unusual path. The TCU also features a series of less central love interests, "The singer was so heartbroken when he ended things, she penned her song ‘Forever and Always’ about the boybander." Sometimes her breakup songs border on beef tracks too, as with Dear John, a track five meditation on how John Mayer wronged her. "Don’t you think I was too young

to be messed with?" But what’s maybe most interesting about Taylor’s use of love songs is that she’s never strayed from singing about romance, even though this has been used as a stick to beat her with. "What do you care? You go through men faster than Taylor Swift." "You know what Taylor Swift, you stay away from Michael J. Fox’s son." On Lover she fully embraces this image of herself, and she’s more explicit than ever about who she’s singing about - London Boy doesn’t quite reference Joe Alwyn

by name, but it’s a clear outline of their relationship. "Took me back to Highgate, met all of his best mates." Alwyn even breaks through to a deeper level of the TCU, becoming a co-creator on folklore and evermore, though he fittingly adopts a character name, authoring his own fictional persona within the story universe. "I only wish our other two co-writers were here: Justin Vernon and William Bowery" "William Bowery is Joe, as we know." Yet even as the drama of her romantic life has lessened

with this stable relationship, "I also was falling in love with someone who had a really wonderfully normal, balanced, grounded life." the importance of love remains central in the TCU. "I wanted the chorus to be these like really simple existential questions that we ask ourselves when we’re in love. Can I go where you go?" In the TCU, love is the emotion that underpins everything. "Love is the great unknown, its like, and that’s why I write songs about it." And that draws out so much of who we

are - for better or worse. While you might expect that the Taylor-heroines’ well-documented lessons in heartbreak might have turned her into a more closed-off person, instead over time, her great strength (musically and personally) is that she continues to make herself vulnerable -- if with a more clear understanding of the risks. In her early track fives, there’s a sense that she’s viewing her Vulnerability as a weakness; in Cold as You the narrator calls herself "a mess of a dreamer with the

nerve to adore you." In "White Horse," when Taylor sings I’m not a princess, this ain’t a fairytale...this ain’t Hollywood, this is a small town, the heartbreak feels deflating. She’s let down that real relationships don’t match up to her youthful, idealized notions of love. "Stupid girl, I shoulda known." Then, in her discussions of 1989, she describes a turning point where she no longer goes into relationships expecting them to be the one, but with, "that realization that it's the anomaly if s

omething works out." Skipping ahead to the two track fives that we know are about Joe Alwyn, in Reputation’s Delicate she is stripping herself down to her rawest, understanding that vulnerability is a risk you have to be willing to take. "And then there are these moments where it's very like 'Oh my god what if my reputation actually makes the person that I like not wanna get to know me?'" and in Lover’s The Archer she is confronting the reality of her past, taking a break from the joys of her ne

w happy relationship to face her tendency toward self-sabotage. The past is still present in the TCU, just as much as we might not like to admit it, this is often true in our lives. Taylor’s previous loves are framed as ghosts. "Stand there like a ghost, shaking from the rain." "Wonder how many girls he had loved and left haunted." -- ephemeral and distant, yet specters which nonetheless can’t fully be gotten rid of. Still, when she sings, "my mind turns your life into folklore; I can’t dare to

dream about you anymore," whether or not this is inspired by Styles or another, it’s really about the person we imagine a love with in our dreams -- an ideal to which no reality can compare. Even more so than any particular real person, it often feels that Taylor is talking about a more mythical dream man or ghost she’s forever found in her music. In the video for Willow, she’s united with a soulmate figure across different time periods and worlds that, crucially, she accesses through her piano.

"I loved the feeling that I got immediately up- upon hearing the instrumental." "It felt like somebody standing over a potion, making a love potion dreaming up the person that they want and the person they desire." "There was a point where I- that I got to as a writer who only wrote very diaristic songs, that I felt it was unsustainable." In the permanent-feeling love story that began on Reputation, and solidified on Lover, a chapter also closed. A more mature-feeling Taylor seemed to be lookin

g forward in her personal life. "I’ve loved you three summers now, honey, I want ‘em all." So what would be the next phase of the TCU? "Would I not be able to write break up songs anymore? I love break up songs!" 2020’s Folklore and Evermore begin a new chapter, in which Taylor builds out the universe through a larger cast of point-of-view characters. "I get to create characters in this mythological American town." Taylor had written in other characters’ voices before - Mary’s Song on her debut

album was a love story from the perspective of her neighbors - but here she is reaching for stories that aren’t hers and using them to add new shades and textures to the TCU. "I had been wanting to write a song about Rebekah Harkness since 2013." On The Last Great American Dynasty, she channels her "Mad Woman" side into the story of another rebellious woman who flouted convention, New York socialite Rebekah Harkness, who once dyed a neighbor’s dog key lime green in a fit of anger (and whose Rhod

e Island house Taylor happens to own) "I had a marvelous time ruining everything." The reboot is also reflected in Taylor revisiting known spaces from her older material, like high school, and love triangles. So on folklore, through the intersecting narratives of betty, august and cardigan, we get a familiar story of a boy, James, cheating on his love, Betty, with an unnamed girl. "And I’ve been kind of in my head like calling the girl from august either augusta or augustine." But whereas before

the TCU only focused on the Taylor stand-in’s point of view, now we get all sides. In betty, we hear James’ mea culpa, as well as his insecurity and his excuses: "I’m only seventeen, I don’t know anything." "I’ve written so many songs from a female’s perspective of wanting a male apology, we decided to make it from a teenage boy’s perspective apologizing after he loses the love of his life." This is thrown back at him on cardigan, when Betty is the narrator and declares. "I knew everything when

I was young." Betty tells us what it feels like to be treated like an "old cardigan under someone’s bed" while James misses her "standing in her cardigan"(an object that feels like a more fleshed-out, sophisticated version of All Too Well’s scarf) "I left my scarf there at your sister’s house." Meanwhile, in august, from the point of view of the other woman, the narrator is more self reflective, and the song lets us empathize by grounding us in her experience of the relationship with James. "Sh

e’s like really a sensitive person who like really fell for him and she was trying to seem cool and seem like she didn’t care because that’s what girls have to do." Whereas on Picture to Burn music video, her character exclaimed, "He let her drive the truck he NEVER let me drive the truck." on folklore, we see growth in how the two girls don’t blame each other. "The idea that there's some, like, some bad, villain girl in any type of situation who, like, takes your man is actually a total myth be

cause that's not usually the case at all." Likewise, invisible string and mad woman are gateways into opposing character perspectives from Jane Eyre. In "Invisible String," Taylor aligns with the novel’s leading lady, referring to a line spoken by her love Mr. Rochester, "I've a strange feeling with regard to you, as if I had a string somewhere under my left ribs, tightly knotted to a similar string in you." But on the latter she’s identifying with the novel’s "madwoman in the attic," Rochester’

s first wife, Bertha. "No one likes a mad woman / You made her like that." The other classic Taylor Swift narrative of the small-town girl who leaves for the big city is also revisited from a different perspective on evermore. Dorothea and Tis The Damn Season flesh out the good part of that life she left behind, and the negative parts of her big city success (i.e., going to to LA and her "so-called friends" that make her yearn for a simpler, more authentic time. There’s a sadness for how this si

mpler life is pretty much inaccessible to someone as famous as Taylor with her "champagne problems," which adds another layer to why she’s adopting these new characters’ voices. "I try not to ever really say where I am the most." "You mentioned that you keep wound dressing with you?" "Yeah I’ve had a lot of stalkers." If the other Taylors we saw in the Look What You Made Me Do video are all actualized versions of who she’s been, these new characters are parallel-universe versions - people she ma

y have become had things turned out differently. In happiness, Taylor’s mature acceptance of what her exes contributed to her life demonstrates emotional growth and seems to signal a true moving on from the past. "It goes to... I haven't met the new me yet, the person I’m gonna have to become in order to get over this- this person who's gonna have to have new hobbies and fill their time with new things other than you." Yet a key theme in the TCU is also staying true to the person you’ve always b

een. Growth is also never fully achieved but a process you have to keep working on. In evermore’s "long story short," Taylor sings, "past me I want to tell you not to get lost in these petty things," but the album still Contains the track "Closure," which seems to be dissing Kim Kardashian and declaring, "I’m fine with my spite." The TCU’s genius lies in the fact that there really aren’t that many precedents for it in musical terms. But modern culture is shaped by the fan experience, and Taylor

Swift not only gets this, but also feeds it. "I did a Spotify vertical video for Delicate, and I painted my nails the exact color tones that I wanted the next album to be. "She understands which characters we’re hoping to meet again, planting clues and easter eggs, "I love to communicate via easter eggs." wrapping up storylines and offering cliffhangers, like an epic author who grasps what her audiences is really coming for. With music, so much of the meaning is about interpretation and filling

in the blank spaces "I think the best messages are cryptic ones." With Taylor Swift, listeners aren’t just given license to do that, we’re encouraged to -- thus becoming characters in the TCU ourselves. "Try your hand at writing." "It’s like, one of the most cathartic, healing, therapeutic things I’ve ever done." Our new episode of the takeaway is about Panic. Yeah Susannah so what did you think about that- that ending. "Yeah, I thought it was fittingly chaotic. It’s a show that, does make you d

isoriented, there are a lot of threads to follow, I thought the twists were really enjoyable, it was adrenaline-fueled, it’s definitely a show that you really want to talk about after. Most of us, hopefully, are not playing a game like Panic but I think we can all relate metaphorically to so many of the lessons that come out of this." "And we really confront so many of our own fears. Our real fears, and our imagined fears, and fears that we put in our own way versus the fears the world sort of t

hrows at us too." "You gotta know what to be afraid of, when to be afraid of it, and you gotta know the difference." "I kept thinking about sort of what my challenges would be and the fears and I don’t even-" "Oooh what- what would be… do you want to tell us that? I don’t know if you want to share this what would be your… individual challenge?" "Ray had a few, being buried alive definitely" "That’s scary. I think, um, everyone’s gonna enjoy it and after you finish the show, go watch our video, A

mazon Prime Video Youtube channel," "The Takeaway" "We clear everything up, I know there are a lot of questions that you’re gonna have when your head is spinning a little bit at the end. And more importantly, tell you what it all meant. Watching the takeaway is a huge part of supporting the channel, and what we’re doing, so please check it out!