Taylor Swift's "Vault" tracks chart her preoccupation with her reputation

Taylor Swift is a little bit obsessed with her own reputation. Twisting public perception into pop perfection became a Swiftian M.O. with “Blank Space,” but the reputation album showed just how serious Swift was about her fall from grace. The Taylor Swift of 2017 didn’t know how to handle the fact that her “reputation’s never been worse”; Taylor Swift of 2023 knows she’s an “Anti-Hero.” The precariousness of fame and the preciousness of her own pedestal haunts the oeuvre of an adult Swift, but the “From The Vault” tracks on Taylor’s Version of her re-recorded albums show just how far back this preoccupation goes.

There were hints of it on 2012’s Red, when the pop star released the thoughtful fame fable “The Lucky One” and joked “Who’s Taylor Swift anyway? Ew,” on “22.” However, the “From The Vault” track “Nothing New,” released in 2021, revealed exactly how anxious a 20-something Swift was about being a media darling. It’s a song about being drunk and sad and knowing that the ingénue schtick can only last so long. “She’ll know the way, and then she’ll say she got the map from me,” Swift writes of the hypothetical young pop star destined to take her place. “I’ll say I’m happy for her, then I’ll cry myself to sleep.” It’s not the same kind of heartbreak that the rest of Red is about, and at the time seemed like the first track she’d written that reflected this growing preoccupation with her own fame.

Yet with the release of Speak Now (Taylor’s Version), the vault has granted us yet more insight into how the way these themes have been percolating in Swift’s mind all these years. In 2010, it was the first album to lightly touch on the glaring spotlight in which she suddenly found herself. “Innocent” was her first (but not last) song about Kanye West; “Mean” was a reaction to a specific harsh critic. These are much more primitive versions of the meta-commentary on her image that would develop over the years.

Yet “Castles Crumbling,” released for the first time in 2023, proves the anxieties of the reputation album were a seed planted all the way back in the Speak Now era. It’s about watching the empire she built for herself disintegrate and having the people who lifted her up turn their backs. The self-loathing and honest admittance of her shortcomings would fit in on Midnights; the bridge is an echo of “Anti-Hero.” “People look at me like I’m a monster/Now they’re screamin’ at the palace’s front gates,” she sings. “Used to chant my name/Now they’re screaming that they hate me/Never wanted you to hate me.”

Swift’s desire to be seen as a paragon by her audience still casts a huge shadow over her work, even as she has become more comfortable admitting so in her songs. Take, for instance, the way she edited the lyrics to “Better Than Revenge” to excise the slut-shaming implications of the original. She has a penchant for rewriting her own history; the way she obsessively cultivates her reputation is a symptom of that. Even as she pulls back the curtain to reveal how deeply these concerns are rooted, and for how long, she’s acting on the anxiety that “one day I’ll watch as you’re leaving/’cause you got tired of my scheming.” When all is said and done, Swift will be remembered most for her searing lyrics about love and heartbreak. Yet what the vault tracks reveal is that her body of work has long been built on a foundation of “Castles Crumbling.”