Welcome to the LA Times Book Club newsletter.

Hello, fellow readers. I’m cultural critic and avid bookworm Chris Vognar. This week we chat with Rolling Stone pop music critic Rob Sheffield about his new book. “Heartbreak is the National Anthem: How Taylor Swift Reinvented Pop Music.” We also look at recent publications reviewed by Times reviewers. And following yesterday’s 2025 Grammy nominations – a tribute to Beyoncé for becoming the most nominated artist in history – we recommend some great music books from years past.

The first time Rob Sheffield heard Taylor Swift, he was making a grilled cheese sandwich and watching reruns of “Clueless” on the CW, which played pop songs between episodes. One of those songs that day was “Our Song.” It threw him sideways. “I loved every detail,” he wrote in “Grief. » “The banjo, the violin, its tinkling when she sings: “It’s late and your mother doesn’t know!” But especially this ending, when the girl picks up her guitar and writes her favorite song, that is, the one she just sang, the music she has been waiting her whole life to hear.

That was in 2007. Since then, Swift has become a pop colossus, a one-woman, billion-dollar industry whose songs speak to women (and more than a few men) around the world. In his new book, Sheffield, a self-confessed Swiftie whose previous works cover subjects such as the Beatles and David Bowie, offers a passionate look at the artist and the phenomenon.

I spoke with him about Swift’s uniqueness, how she manages to cause so many arguments, and how pop music became one nation under Taylor.

Author Rob Sheffield with the cover of his new book, “Heartbreak Is the National Anthem: How Taylor Swift Reinvented Pop Music.”

(Marisa Bettencourt; Day Street Books)

In the book’s subtitle, you claim that Taylor Swift reinvented pop music. Please explain.

She really transformed it by centering it around the fangirl as the driving force behind pop music. When it came along, the idea of ​​a teenage girl with a guitar writing her own songs was almost like a novelty, almost like a buzz. She was in a rather delicate situation. There weren’t many country artists writing their own songs at that time, even those who were great songwriters.

But now that’s exactly what pop music is. You have Chappell Roan and Sabrina Carpenter and Billie Eilish and Olivia Rodrigo, all these young women who work in a very individual style. They don’t look the same or sound like Taylor Swift, but they’re all working in territory she’s blazed.

You write: “She will throw herself into every feeling with the certainty that it is the last one she will ever experience. »

Yeah, she really makes a mess. She doesn’t stick to one subject. She doesn’t stick to a script. There are so many songs where there will be a love story, and then the couple starts arguing, and then a whole other topic comes up. She is absolutely delighted to change the subject, in the middle of the song. Bob Dylan consciously enjoys being an argument starter, as does Taylor. I thought being a teenage Bob Dylan fan was the most exhausting fan experience I would ever have. But Taylor Swift is very much in this mode. She will change her mind about everything, about the song as she sings it from start to finish.

And yet, she remains resolutely focused on her career, an industry in itself.

It’s amazing that she writes these songs where, emotionally, she’s really reckless. It turns from one side to the other. It will have 12 different moods in a single song. And that goes hand in hand with an extremely focused and extremely driven approach to her career, where she has this obsessive need to keep trying to outdo herself and do something different next time. She never has a year where she does a new and improved version of what she did last year. And honestly, that would be more than enough.

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The week(s) in pounds

A hotly anticipated biography of Johnny Carson proves he is the Everest of famous subjects – tempting but perilous, writes Mary McNamara.

(Photos by Ron Tom/NBC, Alice S. Hall/NBCU, Gene Arias/NBCU via Getty Images)

Abdi Nazemian reviews “Something close to nothing” Tom Pyun’s new novel about a gay couple’s complicated journey through surrogacy. Nazemian writes that it is “a restless novel about restless people whose American dreams are rarely satisfied.”

Comments on Marc Weingarten Oliver Sacks “Mail,” a collection of correspondence from the late neurologist with many intellectual passions. Sacks, writes Weingarten, “was insatiably curious and wrote incessantly and happily about anything that caught his interest, which was almost everything.”

Roxsy Lin speaks with Luis Jaramillo about her new coming-of-age novel “The Witches of El Paso.” As Lin writes, the author “incorporated magical elements into his writing by presenting alternate realities for the main characters.”

And Comments on Mary McNamara “Carson the Magnificent”, the new biography of Johnny Carson completed by Mike Thomas following the death of the original author, Bill Zehme. As McNamara writes: “Television continues to produce stars worthy of blessing and analysis, but it’s hard to imagine that any of them will leave as deep an imprint on their fans as Carson.” »

Additional musical readings

Fans enjoy Taylor Swift’s performance during an Eras Tour stop in California.

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

Here’s a (very subjective and personal) collection of additional music readings to consider once you’re done using Swift.

“I can’t stop, I won’t stop” by Jeff Chang: Chang’s chronicle of the beginnings of hip-hop culture skillfully places the music in historical and political context.

“A Visit from the Goon Squad” by Jennifer Egan: Egan’s wild and entertaining Pulitzer Prize-winning novel brings together 13 stories from the rock ‘n’ roll scenes over a 40-year period.

“Three shades of blue” by James Kaplan: A group portrait of Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Bill Evans that evokes the revolutionary yet ephemeral world of 1950s jazz.

“33 revolutions per minute” by Dorian Lynskey: A history of protest singing, from Billie Holiday to Green Day, which should be very useful right now.

“Quantum criminals” by Alex Pappademas and Joan LeMay: Pappademas provides the words, LeMay the illustrations in this guided tour of the wild walkers and players who inhabit Steely Dan’s catalog.

“The rest is just noise” by Alex Ross: A lively and engaging account of 20th-century classical music from the New York music critic.

That’s all for now. Remember to keep rocking in the free world.