Okay, but the dress is innocent.
Photo: Scott Kowalchyk/CBS
On Late Night on December 10, host Stephen Colbert asked Taylor Swift a question he’s asked singers like “Dolly Parton, Elton John, Paul Simon,” and more. What are Taylor Swift’s top-five Taylor Swift songs? While Swift has a massive discography, this ought to be a relatively easy question. She just had to answer it herself when she submitted five of her songs for consideration in her first nomination to the Songwriters Hall of Fame. Those five songs — “All Too Well (10 Minute Version),” “Blank Space,” “Anti-Hero,” “Love Story,” and “The Last Great American Dynasty” — may not be her favorite so much as her self-perceived best. I hear you on that one. But when Colbert asks her, Swift has the opportunity to mention these five, or say that she was rethinking her submitted list, or anything specific at all. Instead, she does something she rarely does in public: She fumbles the answer.
“Don’t — like — this is so much pressure,” she stammers. “I think I’m gonna say that I’m gonna need a little time to get back to you on all five, because I don’t have enough — I think that I require a little bit of time to appreciate my work in a way.” Eventually she tells Colbert that “All Too Well (10 Minute Version)” and perennial folklore fav “Mirrorball” are on the list, but that she’s “really obsessed” with The Life of a Showgirl (the whole album) at the present time. It’s not so much that Swift’s answer isn’t valid. With a catalogue that deep, it makes sense that her personal favorites would be ever-shifting and situationally dependent, but that’s true for just about everyone with any type of favorite anything. When people go on late-night talk shows, they prepare the material they’re going to discuss in a pre-interview with the host or research assistants. If Swift knew she was going to be asked this, why are two songs, a whole album, and an otherwise “I don’t know” the most coherent answer she could summon? There is a politician-esque amiability to Swift’s time with Colbert, a desperation to please all possible parties while offering up nothing new.
It’d be one thing if Swift stumbled over just this answer and otherwise provided Colbert with charming anecdotes about the past few months of her life, but the rest of her interview is oddly punctuated by passages of non-specificity. When discussing her post-show routine, Swift also winds up breaking down a scene from her forthcoming documentary that is in the trailer, functionally describing something many people have already seen. When Colbert later asks her about audiobooks, Swift responds with an enthusiastic “yes!” but refuses once again to get more specific about what she’s been listening to. “I’ll tell ya the elements,” Swift concedes, before describing premises akin to Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier (great book, to be clear — I just read it for the first time myself). It feels almost as though Swift learned a strange lesson from the specificity of The Tortured Poets Department, like shouting out Charlie Puth, and now feels the need to make everything as open-ended as possible rather than call attention to any one thing she’s been into lately. This wasn’t the case on her Showgirl promo tour a few months ago when she talked about how much she loved One Battle After Another.
It’s been a big, long year for her with even more to come, but not unlike the sentiment around The Life of a Showgirl, it’s starting to feel as though she’s spinning her wheels on what to say. Would it not have been more interesting to discuss her recent Hall of Fame submissions and any buyers’ remorse she experienced in nominating just five of her songs as representative of her best work? The highlight of the interview is Swift’s brief and bizarre Gandalf impression — talk about something truly new! Beyond that, however, Swift returns to bread and Showgirl and her masters. On the eve of her docuseries’ release, maybe Swift finally feels like she’s given enough to those who watch her every move. As she tells Colbert, her goal was to go onstage every night of the Eras Tour no matter what and give it her all. A talk show, however, can be a six out of ten.
