“Happiness”
By: Stephen Fife-Adams
Tags: 2020, Healing, Happiness, Taylor Swift, Grief

Photo by Neroli Wesley on Unsplash

I want to talk about my favorite song of 2020, a small beacon of light in this terrible year, but before I do that, let me start by acknowledging that it took me far too long to recognize the obvious: Taylor Swift is one of the great songwriters of our time. That’s not a sentence I would have written even six months ago, but I get it now, I have the zealotry of a converted skeptic, I burn to evangelize my newfound faith. Her stature is comparable to that of Bruce Springsteen in the mid-’80s, a mainstream pop music giant who writes lyrics of unusual wisdom and depth, a crowd-pleaser who broadens her audience by cutting her own individual path. She transcends genre by crafting songs that can work as pop anthems, country heart-wringers, singer-songwriter confessionals, or emo folk songs, depending on her choice of producer. Outside the music world, she is as consequential a figure in our culture today as Bob Dylan was in 1966, or Kurt Cobain was in 1993. Her example has changed lives.

None of these assertions should be remotely controversial. Yet for all that, Taylor Swift is underrated. She rarely has been mentioned in the same breath as icons like Dylan or Joni Mitchell; more often, she’ll be compared with generational peers like her erstwhile rival Katy Perry. Reviews will spend as much time talking about her public spats with other celebrities as her music. Even positive assessments can’t resist a bit of snark about how her careerism undercuts her legitimacy, as if rock stars haven’t always cozied up to music journalists or engaged in promotional cheesiness to sell more records.

Some of the double standard here comes from everyday misogyny of the type that punished Hilary Clinton for coming across as too cold and ambitious. But Swift gets doubly docked for having built her success largely by appealing to the passions and sensibilities of teen girls. Our culture doesn’t take girls seriously. We pat them on the head and indulge their enthusiasms and feed them slogans like “Girl Power!” and “The Force Is Female!” while taking their money. Swift herself was a teen girl when she launched her career; she first learned her craft by writing songs that mirrored and magnified the complexities of her own teen-girlness. She took seriously what so many girls like her cared about and turned it into serious art. In return, millions of girls became devoted to and inspired by her, which was enough for too many people to dismiss her music as superficial pop trifles. In the early days of her success, she couldn’t even win an award without someone barging in to challenge her legitimacy. As Swift, her fans, and her semi-autobiographical subject matter moved into adulthood, as she became a bona fide superstar, she never quite shook off the condescension that greeted her every move.

Here is where I need to eat crow. I wasn’t a hater, but I didn’t take Taylor Swift seriously, and I didn’t give her music the attention it merited. Our elder child recently confessed that when they were younger, they kept their love of Swift’s music under wraps because they thought I’d make fun of them. This is difficult for me to accept about myself because I like to think I’m a perceptive and broad-minded music lover. I should have learned a thing or two since the days when I sneered at Madonna, expressed disappointment at Bjork’s Debut, and tuned out One Direction, only to be proven snobbish, thick-headed, and wrong every time. Yet here I am, having to take the blinders off again.

What brought me to my senses was the release of folklore in July. I think I must have been the target audience for folklore: an indie rock devotee with a melancholy streak who loves narratives told in brilliant language with sterling, precise detail. It didn’t hurt that the album was largely produced by Aaron Dessner of The National, one of my favorite bands of the past two decades, which prompted me to listen more closely than I had to anything Swift had released before. Dessner’s production is in many ways the opposite of the glossy, glittery, maximalist sound that characterized many of Swift’s earlier recordings (and which at times I’d found a barrier). It allows the songs to breathe and pushes the lyrics up to the front of the listener’s consciousness; and the lyrics are extraordinary, the work of a master operating at the peak of her powers. After folklore came out, Swift kept on writing and recording new songs, and in December she surprise-released another 15-song album, evermore, which is at least the equal of its predecessor.

Which brings me, finally, to my favorite song of 2020: “Happiness”, the centerpiece of evermore and the song that convinced me Swift belongs in the company of Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Elvis Costello, Joni Mitchell, and other poets laureate of the rock era.

Like most Taylor Swift songs, “Happiness” is about love. Like many, it is about the end of a relationship: “All the years I’ve given / Is just shit we’re dividing up.” But it is not quite like any other breakup song I can think of, although it has antecedents in parts of Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks and Springsteen’s Tunnel of Love. There are plenty of songs about feeling heartbreak, and there are plenty of songs about picking yourself up and moving on from heartbreak. Swift herself has written more than a few of them. “Happiness” captures the moment of transition between the two, the point when everything feels ruined but maybe no longer hopeless. Swift’s narrator is “right down in it,” the wound still fresh and raw, and yet she can also sit “above the trees/ [And] see this for what it is.” Singing over a funereal organ, she is both grieving and observing her own grief, both deranged and clear-headed, and she knows exactly how hard it will be to get to a better place: “And in the disbelief / I can’t face reinvention / I haven’t met the new me yet.”

The word “yet” does a lot of work in that line. This is, after all, a song called “Happiness”, and despite its dark emotions and mournful tone it is in the end an expression of optimism. The singer’s hurt is changing her, and through her changing she will heal. In the next few lines, Swift tells us what healing looks like. “There’ll be happiness after you,” she sings, then adds, “But there was happiness because of you / Both of these things can be true.” Even if now she nurses her rage (“Sorry, I can’t see facts through all of my fury”) and cries “acid rain / On the pillow where you used to lay your head,” she knows that the way forward is not by “making you a villain.” Her future happiness is bound up with the happiness she used to feel with the “good man” who hurt her. She can’t give him “the green light of forgiveness,” but she knows that the “new me” will. “Across our great divide / There is a glorious sunrise.”

“Happiness” gave me literal goose bumps the first time I heard it, and every time I’ve heard it since I feel somewhat breathless. Most of my favorite songs are ones I want to sing along with when I’m in the car driving by myself; this one makes me want to pull over and close my eyes and live for a few minutes in its embrace. It’s hard to say why it struck such a deep chord in me, but I think it has something to do with this traumatic pandemic year, our hate-poisoned culture, and the anger and grief so many of us have been carrying for so long. Swift’s lyrics have a meaning specific to the story they tell, and they also carry a larger meaning. Like a psalm, the song is a balm for our broken selves and our broken world. “There is happiness / Beyond the blood and bruise … There is happiness / In our history.”

In the last week of 2020, we’re huddled in our homes, crouched in fear and fury, not just unwilling but unable to forgive those we blame for getting us to this place. We aren’t ready yet, can’t even bear to think about moving on. Yet we know, eventually, we will leave this dark era of suffering behind. We have to, or it will break us. Our hurt is changing us, and through our changing we must heal.

We haven’t met the new us yet.