There’s something uncanny about this still and stunning portrait of a twenty-one-year-old Taylor Swift, shot by Katy Grannan for Lizzie Widdicombe’s Profile of the singer, in 2011. Swift was already enormously famous (“Fearless,” from 2008, won a Grammy for Album of the Year; “Speak Now,” released in 2010, sold more than a million copies in its first week), but she hadn’t yet become the object of such fervent and unwavering interest that she had to hold her hand over her mouth when she spoke in public, lest she send a nation of lip-readers into a frenzy. Looking at this image is like seeing a picture of yourself taken just before something seismic happened: maybe you met a great love, or learned you were having a baby, or lost someone. There’s your smiling face, forever moored in the Before.

Did Swift sense what was coming? Maybe. She has always been savvy about cultural desires. Certain aspects of her life have changed dramatically in the past fourteen years, but the grand theme of her work has remained the same. As she told Widdicombe, she is interested in “love, and unrequited love, and love that didn’t last, or love that you wish had lasted, or love that never even got started.” At the time, Swift was beginning to assume a more complicated view of romance—Widdicombe points to the lyric “There’s a drawer of my things at your place” as evidence of more grownup themes. Swift is still in tune with the tenderness of a new love affair, but she is less Pollyannaish, singing about sex and heartache with ease. Young Swift possessed a kind of guilelessness, but the thirty-six-year-old version has seen things, felt things, been hurt. It has made her only more compelling. ♦

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