Taylor Swift’s Holiday House

7 A.M.

by Gauraa Shekhar

Elliot knows about the new Taylor Swift album before I do. Friday afternoon, Polamalu jersey, phone in hand, sleep in his eyes: “How are we celebrating?” A dream of a man. 

Lover dropped the week we moved into our current apartment. Naturally, the stereo system was the first thing we unpacked. After hauling all my shit down the six flights of my old walk-up, after packing up Elliot’s basement apartment, in which waking up always felt like waking up underground: boxy, grey, sunken—we stood in the hallway. Almost a year ago to the date, admiring the high ceilings, the big windows, the unshared bathroom. This would be our home, our year; took a long time to come. “Lover” rang true in the moment—the song felt private, turned our empty one-bedroom into an echo chamber—we could let our friends crash in the living room/ this is our place, we make the call. It felt like real ownership of a moment.

And as with most TS albums, Lover had its weak moments, too—sure spelling is fun, but have you tried sampling a James Corden interview in a track about London? Have you tried plugging a line from Humpty Dumpty into a song about the fight, the good, good fight? So, we made a game out of it—silver tequila, a hearty gulp for each time Taylor tried to appeal to the everyman. “We could let our friends crash in the living room”? The woman owns two penthouses on Franklin Street, a three-story townhouse on Cornelia, and not a guest bedroom to spare? We memed “London Boy,” made a Pittsburgh version of it, replacing mentions of Shoreditch with Squirrel Hill, lacing the chorus with “boy, I fancy yinz.” 

Still, even when the work itself isn’t groundbreaking, Taylor Swift has the knack (and power (and resources)) to turn an album release into an event. It’s impossible not to remember where I was, what I was doing, who I was with, how many times I ordered Papa John’s, when most of her albums came out. Folklore certainly isn’t different.

At ten to midnight, Elliot and I close the flaps of our laptops, roll a j to smoke in the bathroom, and tune into the YouTube premiere of “Cardigan.” This is good, we agree—the piano as life raft, good for her—and from time to time, I turn to look at Elliot, try to inspect his face for signs of sincere enjoyment. The song’s competent, interesting—the best lead single she’s had in a while, in fact—and when the video ends, we line up the track list of her sixteen lyric videos; willing to give the songs an honest try.

The album sounds delightful, it’s true—gorgeously layered (the production on “August” has a nice Heaven or Las Vegas sheen to it); the hooks linger. But the lyrics, fading in and out over loops of artistically-realized nature, become impossible to ignore: half-formed punchlines, sloppy metaphors; plenty of fodder for bad tattoos. It’s shocking to hear people commend the maturity of lines like, “we never painted by the numbers, baby/ but we were making it count.” And later, on a track with Bon Iver: “I think I’ve seen this film before, and I didn’t like the ending”—I mean, it’s not the worst thing in the world, but is it not unbearably corny? Unimaginative?

Taylor Swift’s New York appears small on the album. Small, and only in smudges: cobblestone paths, the High Line; unnamed dive bars on the east side. I try to picture Taylor at Sophie’s—would she search for a lock in the bathroom stall? Finding none, would she still pee? What would she do if she couldn’t find a vacant barstool? I don’t say this out of spite; I’m just curious. Most of the kids I went to grad school with came from money, and sometimes they’d say they were taking the train, but you could see them in the distance, walking a couple blocks up, waiting for an Uber. 

I listen to Folklore again, draft a tweet, let it decay. The album loops itself blurry, and we’re back to “The Last Great American Dynasty”, a song about Rebekah Harkness, a “middle class divorcée” who married the heir to Standard Oil money, bought a Rhode Island mansion and dubbed it “Holiday House.” By the end of the song, Holiday House lands neatly in Taylor’s custody. Which is lucky, since she owns it in real life, too: seven bedrooms, seven-hundred feet of private beachfront, a million summer parties in a pool once cleaned with champagne. 

The next week, I’ll find a number of TS stans harassing a Pitchfork critic on Twitter for not giving the album the rating it deserved (which was, already, a very generous 8/10). They’ll call her a bitch, and it’ll drive me mad. Elliot will ask me what’s wrong, and I’ll try to tell him, explain, and I’ll get only about halfway there.

It’s the idea of treating someone so powerful with so much fragility; it’s the idea of writing songs about working people—the kind who frequent dive bars and live in one-bedroom apartments; who put up their own Christmas lights, and when the time comes, take them back down—while you’re building a massive property portfolio both on and off your Tribeca block. Which is nothing new, but still. 

Perhaps my inability to empathize with one-percent narratives is my fault alone. Maybe the job market’s crashing and this isn’t the best time to hear tales of rich people confetti-ing money into oblivion. Maybe exile will always feel too real and too heavy a word to treat as metaphor for love removed. But, perhaps what makes actual folklore exciting is also what makes it dangerous: there is a difference between the words we read and the words we hear, though ultimately both converge into stories we tell ourselves.

Later, I’ll look up Rebekah Harkness on the internet, read about the St. Louis Family she was born into—wealthy, not middle class, not by any means. I’ll learn that she dyed a neighbor’s cat green, filled her fish tank with goldfish and scotch—a detail I’ll find more cruel than quirky. I’ll study Rebekah’s portrait: blonde, light-eyed, perfect heat-roller curls; a string of expensive pearls around her neck. A wizened, mid-century vestige of Taylor Swift.