There are no accidents in Taylor Swift's world. On the bright June night my family and I saw the Eras tour, her surprise songs were "I Forgot That You Existed" and "This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things." Did I mention it was Scooter Braun's birthday? It was classic Taylor, sliding in an Easter egg for the fans to interpret. It was also, as critic and author Rob Sheffield puts it in his new book, "Heartbreak Is the National Anthem: How Taylor Swift Reinvented Pop Music," classic "Petty Taylor." That's the thing, she contains multitudes. She's Taylor, the wistful girl. Taylor, the tortured poet. Taylor, the epic grudge holder.

Sheffield, a contributing editor at Rolling Stone and author of prior books about The Beatles, Duran Duran and David Bowie, has been writing about Swift since the earliest days of her career, so he's uniquely qualified to declare, as he does in "Heartbreak," that "nothing like Taylor Swift has ever happened before." In our recent "Salon Talks" conversation, Sheffield made the compelling case for why, at age 34, Taylor Swift has already built a body of work and a community of fans staggeringly unparalleled in the annals of popular music.

"She never wants people talking about what she did last year," he noted. "She's never satisfied." And now, with the Eras era at an end and an avowed anti-Swiftie about to enter the White House, Sheffield talked about how Taylor has impacted a generation of young musical artists, how she manages to remain so fascinating and divisive, and the Taylor song he thinks sums up the moment we're living in right now.

The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

We all have a version of Taylor Swift that exists in our heads, what do you think we're getting wrong or missing about the Taylor we don't see?

We feel like we see everything, and she is so meticulous in constructing these Taylor characters that she brings to life. All the different characters in her songs. We all have our personal Taylor and it's funny that so much of that is what songs we think of as speaking directly to us.

I'm very much a “‘mirrorball” person, I'm very much a “New Romantics” person. I'm kind of a “mirrorball” person who wishes he were the “New Romantics” person. I would love to be the “Blank Space” person, but realistically for me, “New Romantics” is me at my best. That's how I picture it, whereas “mirrorball” is probably more the day-to-day.

But there's always this idea that everybody feels like they get things about the real Taylor that nobody else does, and to me that's something that's really fascinating, but also beautiful about the phenomenon. Everybody feels like they have their own lens on Taylor that's different from everybody else’s, and everybody's right about that.

And everybody's right, because you used the word "character." It's very easy to interpret everything she says as, "I'm speaking exactly the truth," instead of seeing that she's also creating characters and telling stories. That's part of her songwriting.

An analogy I make in the book is Dante writing the "Divine Comedy." Dante is the main character, and we speak of Dante the poet and Dante the pilgrim. When you're talking about Dante's poetry, it's just understood that one is the person in the poem and one is the author who's writing the poem, and it's very much like that with Taylor. She is the one writing the songs. She's the one constructing the albums, putting everything together, putting the show together with so much meticulous care so it's different every night.........

© Salon