Interview by Martha French
Portrait by Harry Dodge

MF It’s impossible not to absorb news and opinions about Taylor Swift. How did you go from that to a formalised process of thinking and writing about her, in tandem with Plath? 

MN I think a lot of people on the outside of the Swift phenomenon – a perfectly fine place to be – don’t understand the link between autobiography and the many years of people feeling like they’re being brought into an epic story of a person, and her Eras Tour as taking that journey through achievement and ambition and expression. The Plath thing came to be because I was listening to kids being like, “Do you know who Sylvia Plath is? I hear that there are Plath references on this record.” I wrote my undergraduate thesis on Sylvia Plath, so I’ve carried a lot about Plath with me my whole life, and like a lot of people was reading her when I was a young teen, so I think there was a slightly pedagogical impulse to fill in some information. I’ve felt some kinship with her “all life” project, having also, in some of my books, made art of my life. Plath and Swift, who are both known as personalists or confessionalists, know – because they’re canny creators – that they’re making characters that speak their work. Plath described the speaker of “Lady Lazarus” as “a very resourceful woman”. This idea that it’s only uncooked confessionalism doesn’t bear any resemblance to the actual art. Given the recurrence of the critique against the personal and its gendered nature, it felt like that always needs a little bit of attention. 

MF Is it possible to write a broadly “positive” criticism of Swift or Plath that doesn’t first have to mount itself as a defence?

MN Tone is interesting, in that I feel loving, and then at the same time, I have things to say that are really using them as portals and instances, so it’s not evaluative criticism of them as people. In the world of evaluative criticism you can always hear the sound of the critic trying to shore themselves up, and then when you write more about things that you love, it’s still a formal problem. You’re not really aiming to say, “I just like it, and that’s all there is to say!” Then there’s the “here are some bad things, but here’s why the good things overpower them” and that’s not really what I’m interested in saying either. So it’s actually a whole different art form, which is writing about things which you care about, and which you love, but not in service of their promotion, but more in service of what they help us see.

MF Both Plath and Swift play in different ways with what it means to be emotional. Is it perverse to not meet the work on that level? 

MN Well, Freud would say it’s not free association that cures the patient, but that being able to free associate is the mark of something unloosed. Much of Swift’s work is about being able to capture certain emotional moods of being a human, in different songs and places. People want to chalk it up to “Taylor Swift is a jealous person” or whatever, but to me, she’s actually a philosopher of moods. I think she’s talked about it that way, in terms of reaching for a song as obtaining a little glittery cloud outside yourself. Many people who make things feel like that, like there’s something you want to capture, that your emotions make you able to see.

MF I wonder if people will be quite surprised that Taylor Swift is the central concern of your latest project.

MN There’s a whole subtext in a way to making that choice, which I think has to do with greater questions about America, and who we are. There’s such a rabid – I mean there always has been, but it’s on steroids at the moment – idea of which American lives matter, or what you have to do or be to participate in normcore mass culture. Swift has nothing to do with, say, [Nelson’s previous essay collection] Like Love: Essays and Conversations (2024) and its heroes, who are mostly avant-garde artists. But I think there’s something – especially with her relationship with Travis Kelce and the inroads into the NFL, which is hallowed all-American ground – about the diversity of her fans. My writing about it says, “I can be a part of this too!”, and refuses the gatekeeping about what is American. This piece was written during the peak of the Eras Tour in 2024, which was also when Kamala Harris was running for president. What was everyone focusing on with Kamala Harris? She has a big mouth, and laughs too much. It wasn’t lost on me that Harris didn’t have to say “I want to be president”. It fell to her as Biden stepped aside. So all of this difficulty of ambition, in the Swiftian sense of, “I want to be the best, the most famous and the most played”, made this spectacle of a woman going for the highest office in the most powerful country in the world troubling for many people. So, I think the excitement when I was writing was that it could go a lot of ways. Now, of course, the fear-edge has taken over. 

MF Perhaps what makes engaging critically in Swift so difficult, and so exciting, is that she’s such a moving target.

MN Being a pop musician is different to being an avant-garde writer, but I do think everybody who creates has to figure out how to keep going. Instead of indulging in the critic’s sadism, which always wants to slay or abdicate, I look to people whose output and work ethic I admire to see how they keep going on. At least in the States, a lot of people are having difficulty concentrating on their art. They know it’s valuable and worthwhile, but their attentional capacities and their nervous systems are just rattled. At the end of the day, as I wrote about Swift’s song “Clara Bow” and why I found it so haunting, she knows that we’ll be gone, and there will just be whatever we did, and that’s it. So we’re all kind of going blind by moving forward. 

MF Exactly, and art is art, and that’s really all it is. There’s a dispiriting element to that in times of crisis, because you want it to be a kind of literal balm, but that doesn’t mean it can’t have its own utility. 

MN Some of the most fun I’ve had with my family over the last few years has been with Taylor Swift. I feel very grateful to her, as I’m sure millions of people do, because I don’t want life to be one long political slog. I think she’s been very canny by self-consciously creating ways of participating in fandom that are fun. She’s given people things to do together that bring bedroom listening into enjoyment with other people. Those kinds of bonds, apolitical as they may be, are the same bonds that we depend on to protect each other. .