Taylor Swift As You’ve Never Seen Her Before

BY NOW YOU KNOW that the past few years have been extraordinary ones in the life of Taylor Swift. Even if you have only casual knowledge of Swift’s music—there may be six or seven souls left on the planet who can’t sing all the words to “Shake It Off”—you’re aware that Swift has become not only one of the most successful recording artists ever, but also an unrivaled power broker who has prevailed in a volatile media economy and brought today’s music overlords to heel. Swift’s 2015 stare-down of Apple—she declined to put her hit album 1989 on Apple’s nascent streaming-music service when the company said it would not pay artists during its initial launch; Apple changed its policy immediately and paid everyone—was a seismic example of a single artist’s toppling corporate might. At 26, Swift is world famous, wealthy, critically celebrated, a style influencer, and a cultural movement unto herself, recognizable everywhere she goes. She also has two awesome cats.

And yet today, in this chapel atop a hill in Reading, Pennsylvania, Swift is none of those things. She is the maid of honor at the wedding of her childhood friend Britany Maack. Swift and Maack have known each other since Swift was ten days old and have stayed close—there are grainy home videos of the two romping around a crib together and, more recently, pH๏τos of them sitting side by side at the 2014 Grammys. Last spring, after Swift accepted Britany’s invitation to be maid of honor via Instagram—kids today!—she took Maack to Reem Acra, where Britany got fitted for her custom hand-embroidered silk-taffeta wedding gown and Taylor for the blush-pink, cap-sleeved chiffon maid-of-honor dress that she has on today (the fitting was also Instagrammed, naturally). Swift has even known the groom, Benjamin LaManna, since kindergarten—she admits to having had a little crush on Ben way back then, when he was “that kid who sat next to me in class with the bowl cut and the Lego lunch box.”

Taylor Swift talks Googling herself, which celebrity’s closet she’d raid, and the bravest thing she’s ever done:

Swift hasn’t been to Reading in more than a decade; she was fourteen when she moved with her family to Nashville, on her way to becoming a celebrated country singer-songwriter and later blossoming into one of the biggest pop acts in music history. Returning to the place where you grew up can be a bit of a mind-bender for anyone, and Swift is no different. During a car ride earlier in the day, she excitedly pointed out landmarks: the creek where she and Britany used to play as kids; a weathered tree house in the front yard of the former Maack family home; the piney woods she and her friends used to think were haunted.

“It’s such a surreal, emotional thing,” Swift says. “When you’re a little kid, you’re riding the same roads to school every single day, hundreds of times. When you come back, you snap into that strange nostalgia.”

And the church! There are nuns here at Sacred Heart Chapel who taught Swift in kindergarten. Many of the wedding guests have known her for just as long. To them, Swift is not the superstar who, a handful of days ago, stood on a stage in Los Angeles and accepted a Grammy Award for Album of the Year, the first woman to win that prize twice. No, that maid of honor, currently fussing over and straightening out the train of the bride’s gown, is Taylor—Scott and Andrea Swift’s older kid, Austin’s big sister, who grew up barely a five-minute drive away and used to go for ice cream at the Friendly’s down the street.

To be clear: I’m not saying the people in this church aren’t aware that Scott and Andrea’s kid turned into, you know, Taylor Freakin’ Swift—it’s hilarious to watch the flower girls try to keep it together, and the nuns seem pretty jazzed, too—but that’s not the story today. Britany and Ben are. And the only evidence that the maid of honor is you-know-who is the paparazzi who have gathered at the bottom of the hill, hoping to snag a pH๏τo with their long lenses.

A treasured footnote to the Taylor Swift backstory is that she spent much of her childhood being raised at, of all places, a Christmas-tree nursery called Pine Ridge Farm. It is the kind of quaint, Norman Rockwell–ian detail that sounds a bit too precious, too good to be true. Weren’t her parents in finance? Didn’t she grow up in the burbs? How was this possibly real? Come on.

The Christmas-tree farm is real. She showed me herself.

It’s the morning of the wedding, and I am riding in an SUV with Swift and her mother, Andrea. Andrea is powering down the road, and Swift, dressed in a caramel-colored Reformation jacket and a pair of black jeans, is sitting pᴀssenger side. This area around Reading and its adjacent town, Wyomissing, is rich with pastoral roads marked by open fields and stone homes, and the kind of rolling countryside that makes you want to saddle up and ride a horse—which Swift did as a child.

“That was kind of my mom’s thing,” Taylor says. “She really wanted me to be a horseback rider, and I did it compeтιтively until I worked up the nerve at age twelve to tell her I didn’t really love it like she loved it.

“I just wanted to make music and do theater,” she says. “So I’ve been a big disappointment.”

“I’ve gotten over the bitterness, finally,” Andrea says sarcastically.

Her style has never been deliberately provocative or fad-chasing—on the contrary, there’s always been a kind of effortless appropriateness to Swift, a quality she shares with her friend the Midwest-raised model Karlie Kloss—and yet it’s easy to see a curiosity about new things. Recently Swift cut her hair into a sharp bob, and she’s been seen strutting in a pair of Gothy, over-the-ankle Vetements boots that look stolen from the closet of Siouxsie Sioux. As usual, the changes are small, recognizable—a genius of Swift’s, from music to everything else, is experimentation without alienation. Swift’s style never tries too hard or appears publicity-craving; everyone’s already paying attention, anyway.

Because I’m a hopeless cheeseball, I can’t help asking: Being part of this wedding, does it make Swift think about being married some day? For the past year, she has been seeing the Scottish DJ-producer Calvin Harris. Harris is not here with her, but in early March, he and Swift will post cutesy notices on social media—his on Snapchat; hers on Instagram—commemorating the one-year status of their relationship. Soon after, both will post pH๏τographs of an idyllic, whereabouts-unknown vacation in the tropics, with ts + aw written in the sand. (Harris’s given name is Adam Wiles.)

“I’m just taking things as they come,” Swift says. “I’m in a magical relationship right now. And of course I want it to be ours, and low-key . . . this is the one thing that’s been mine about my personal life.”

Swift’s friend Lorde thinks that Swift can only withdraw from music for so long. “We talk about this—in order to do good work, write these deeply personal records, we’re constantly in a place of metacognition. Sometimes it can feel like you’re a scholar writing a thesis about your own brain,” Lorde says. “So I think she’s going to try to pick up some new skills, maybe take courses in something. Tay is a big fan of taking time off until about month two—and then she gets this look in her eyes, and I know all the Dateline and frozen yogurt and mooching around is about to go out the window.”

Here on a basement floor of the country club, where the bride is adjusting her gown, Swift and I hear the cocktail party gaining steam. A pair of bridesmaids stroll by. Swift gives them high fives.

“Honestly, I never relax, and I’m excited about being able to relax for the first time in ten years,” she says.

Swift takes a sip of her Old Fashioned. “I feel relaxed right now.”

JUST A FEW DAYS before, Swift had been in the thick of it. In her Grammy acceptance speech for Album of the Year, she’d offered stirring words to women in the audience, but also made what was presumed to be a less-than-veiled reply to Kanye West, who’d released a new song in which he’d bragged he’d made Swift famous and tackily theorized the pair would one day have Sєx. The story pinged around on social media for the next 72 hours and generally made me want to put a metal pail on my head and bang it loudly against a wall.

Hadn’t this whole Kanye vs. Taylor nonsense—which began, of course, seven years ago, when West barged into Swift’s MTV Video Music Awards acceptance speech to argue that Beyoncé should have won—been declared over? Taylor Nation was aghast. Austin Swift posted an Instagram video in which he casually tossed a pair of West’s Adidas Yeezy sneakers into the garbage.

I tell Swift the whole thing reminded me of Al Pacino’s famous line as the aging Mafia don Michael Corleone in The Godfather Part III.

“ ‘I thought I was out . . .’ ”

Swift knows exactly where I am going and finishes it: “ ‘They pull me back in!’ ”

“I think the world is so bored with the saga,” she goes on. “I don’t want to add anything to it, because then there’s just more.”

I get why Swift would not want to fuel the dispute, but it’s not hard to see a connection between West’s credit-taking and the long tradition of men being dismissive—actively as well as subconsciously mansplainy—of the hard work and success of women. This is something Swift has become hardened to, having spent much of her early years being mainly recognized not for her songwriting gifts (which just about everyone now agrees are rare and special) but for who she was dating, her fame distilled into what Swift calls “my incredibly Sєxist Men–of–Taylor Swift slideshows.”

“You know, I went out on a normal amount of dates in my early 20s, and I got absolutely slaughtered for it,” she says. “And it took a lot of hard work and altering my decision-making. I didn’t date for two and a half years. Should I have had to do that? No.

“I guess what I wanted to call attention to in my speech at the Grammys was how it’s going to be difficult if you’re a woman who wants to achieve something in her life—no matter what,” she adds.

The day after the awards, Swift went shopping at Barneys in Beverly Hills—“I was like, ‘I’m going to buy some nice shoes today’ ”—and says she was approached by a number of women, mothers in particular, who thanked her. “Their response was really beautiful. You never know what anyone’s response is going to be. So when it’s good, it’s really nice.”

Swift has reached a level of fame at which unsolicited drama just finds her. The Men–of–Taylor Swift slideshows have calmed down, but she now takes grief for her “squad” of celebrity female friends, who, depending on the jab, are either too glam or too phony or some combination of the two.

“Ugh,” Swift says when I bring it up. “I’ve had people say really hurtful things about me, and so I’ve kind of learned how to gauge it: ‘This is, like, low-to-medium-level hurtful.’

“There are a lot of really easy ways to dispel rumors,” she explains. “If they say you are pregnant, all you have to do is continue to not be pregnant and not have a baby. If the rumor is that you have fake friendships, all you have to do is continue to be there for each other. And when we’re all friends in fifteen years and raising our kids together, maybe somebody will look back and go, ‘That was kind of ridiculous what we said about Taylor and her friends.’ ”

It’s as if Swift has become so big, so enticing a target, that she is no longer a mere person but a cultural symbol from which anything can be demanded. Jack Antonoff describes Swift’s status as “almost like being president.” He adds, “She’s the biggest, but a lot of people have been the biggest. Not a lot of people have been the biggest and the best, and she is.”

All of that feels a million light-years away, here, back home, among friends, at Britany’s wedding. Before we part, Swift makes a request: She needs to practice her maid-of-honor speech. Now.

And so, in a basement corridor at the country club, Swift recites her maid-of-honor speech, which she has memorized.

I don’t have to tell you that Taylor Swift’s maid-of-honor speech is great. Of course it’s great.

HERE’S ONE OTHER THING about this wedding: Brit­any and Ben made the brilliant decision, which apparently is becoming a bit of a thing with twenty-first-century nuptials, to politely ask their guests to not bring their phones. So from the ceremony to the receptions and the toasts, people actually paid attention to the bride and groom—they focused, laughed, existed in the now. “All of our guests were present,” Britany tells me later. “I truly attribute this to everyone unplugging from distractions and enjoying the moment.”

When the time comes, Swift grabs the mic and delivers her maid-of-honor address with the unperturbed calm of someone who does this kind of thing before 50,000 people. She tells the story of having a crush on kindergarten-era Ben with his bowl cut and Lego lunch box. She talks about how, as toddlers, Britany was the physical one, and she was the verbal one. “Essentially what you had were these two babies who each made up for what the other lacked,” Swift says. “One couldn’t really walk. One couldn’t really talk. And interestingly enough, we ᴀssume those exact personas to this day when we are drunk . . . give us an hour.”

The room goes crazy.

A few beats later, Swift has everyone teary when she talks about the “real love” she sees between Britany and Ben. “Real love doesn’t mess with your head,” she says. “Real love just is. Real love just endures. Real love maintains. Real love takes it page by page.”