Mapping Taylor Swift’s Hero’s Journey (And What Happens Next)
Taylor Swift is undoubtedly on a hero’s journey. Our heroine has left her ordinary world, fought dragons and shapeshifters, learned impossibly hard lessons, faced her deepest fears, and come out on the other side a new woman.
I’m an author and English teacher, so analyzing plot lines and character development is one of my favorite things to explore. I’m also a Swiftie, so naturally, I’ve applied Taylor Swift’s story to the hero’s journey.
The most remarkable thing that I’ve found is that each of Taylor’s albums and eras aligns with the classic 12-step hero’s journey. I’m not saying this is purposeful or calculated – it’s correlation, not causation (unless Taylor is a mastermind of incalculable proportions, and has been since her debut release).
But it’s still an entertaining and fascinating way to look at Taylor’s journey, and it may allow us to see what will come next for our favorite heroine.
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About The Hero’s Journey
The first theory of the hero’s journey was presented by Joseph Campbell in his 1949 book, The Hero With a Thousand Faces. Campbell outlines 17 steps in his theory of “the monomyth”, and his works have been interpreted and expanded on by writers ever since.
The more popular theory of the hero’s journey was presented by screenwriter and professor Christopher Vogler in his 1996 text The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Storytellers and Screenwriters (now a new edition called The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers).
Vogler simplified Campbell’s original structure, outlining 12 steps which are a bit easier to follow and find in most narratives. In popular culture, it’s Vogler’s steps that are most referenced and applied to our modern storytelling.
Here are the steps, and examples from the well-known story of The Wizard of Oz (the original film):
- The Ordinary World: We meet Dorothy in Kansas and see her everyday life.
- The Call to Adventure: A cyclone sweeps up Dorothy’s house and lands her in Oz.
- Refusal of the Call: Dorothy just wants to return home to Kansas, and doesn’t like this strange new world.
- Meeting with the Mentor: Dorothy meets Glinda the Good Witch, who explains how she can get back home (get the ruby slippers) and what to expect along the way (the dangers of Oz).
- Crossing the First Threshold: Dorothy sets out into the unknown on the yellow brick road.
- Tests, Allies, and Enemies: Dorothy meets the lion, tinman and scarecrow, and together they face several enemies on the way to the Emerald City.
- Approach to the Inmost Cave: They meet the Wizard, who tells her she must kill the Wicked Witch to get his help returning home.
- The Ordeal: Dorothy battles the Wicked Witch and kills her, claiming the ruby slippers.
- Reward: Dorothy gets the ruby slippers and shows them to the Wizard, expecting he’ll help her get back home.
- The Road Back: The wizard is just an elaborate ruse, and has no actual power, but he promises to take Dorothy back to Kansas. Setting off in his hot air balloon, Toto jumps from the basket and Dorothy follows, missing her chance to return home.
- The Resurrection: The good witch appears, who tells her she just has to click her heels to get back home.
- Return with the Elixir: Dorothy returns home to Kansas, learning “there’s no place like home.” The ordinary world from which she came now seems entirely different, because Dorothy is different.
Though these steps vary in each narrative, we can see within The Wizard of Oz that each step leads to the next. The lessons learned along the way all add up to the hero’s success in their journey.
Taylor Swift’s Hero’s Journey, Step by Step
So how do these classic steps of the hero’s journey apply to Taylor Swift’s life and career?
Here’s Taylor’s hero’s journey, era by era, album by album, and step by step.
Also make sure to check out my analysis of Taylor’s heroine’s journey right here.
1. The Ordinary World
We meet our hero in her everyday life.
The Ordinary World in The Wizard of Oz: We meet Dorothy in Kansas and get to know her.
Taylor Swift’s self-titled debut album, released in 2006, presented us with our protagonist. Taylor was young, optimistic, extremely talented, and – most importantly – a songwriter. In an era of mass-produced music and manufactured pop groups, Taylor wrote and performed her own creations.
“Debut,” as most Swifties call it, was full of hometown heartbreak, the optimism of youth, country twang and yearning to leave her small town roots.
But this album also firmly placed Taylor in “outsider” territory. It was clear she didn’t feel like other girls – she didn’t fit in, and there lay the central conflict. It’s clear in songs like A Place in This World and Invisible that Taylor didn’t fit any particular mold, and was searching for something she hadn’t yet found.
Much like Dorothy, she seemed restricted in her everyday world. She was ripe for adventure, and she’d soon set off on her mythic quest to places unknown.
2. The Call to Adventure
Our hero has seen beyond their ordinary world, and is challenged to leave it.
The Call to Adventure in The Wizard of Oz: A cyclone sweeps up Dorothy’s house and lands her in Oz.
Taylor’s sophomore album Fearless became the most critically acclaimed country album of all time. Suddenly, Taylor was dropped into the world of mega-star, with new rules, new players, and danger at every corner (see the mic-grab seen round the world when she collected her award for Fearless).
It was also the album that solidly created her fanbase, which was an adventure unto itself. “This was the musical era in which so many inside jokes were created between us,” Taylor said, “so many hugs exchanged and hands touched, so many unbreakable bonds formed.”
In the Fearless TV prologue, Taylor said: “[Fearless] was the diary of the adventures and explorations of a teenage girl who was learning tiny lessons with every new crack in the facade of the fairytale ending she’d been shown in the movies.”
It was an adventure she was setting off on, but it wasn’t the happily-ever-after she’d hoped for. Songs like White Horse, Fifteen and Forever & Always wonder if the happily-ever even exists.
But songs like Fearless, Love Story, Change, and Jump Then Fall persist with determination into an unknown future, and jump into adventure.
3. Refusal Of The Call
Our reluctant hero isn’t so sure she wants to walk this path.
The Wizard of Oz: Refusal of the Call: Dorothy just wants to return home to Kansas, and doesn’t like this strange new world.
After Fearless was released to worldwide acclaim, the critics swooped in like the wicked witch’s flying monkeys. They critiqued her voice, her writing, her awards, her body, her hair, and anything else they could.
“I was trying to create a follow up to the most awarded country album in history, while staring directly into the face of intense criticism,” Taylor said in the Speak Now TV Prologue. “I had been widely and publicly slammed for my singing voice and was first encountering the infuriating question that is unfortunately still lobbed at me to this day: does she really write her songs? Spoiler alert: I really, really do.”
“Sometimes I felt like a grown up,” she said, “but a lot of the time I just wanted to time travel back to my childhood bed, where my mom would read stories to me until I fell asleep.”
Speak Now was really a turning point where she could have easily refused the call to adventure. The odds of the music industry were stacked firmly against her. Would she continue on fearlessly into the abyss? Or would she let her doubt and fear overtake her?
It’s here that we see Taylor’s true character shine through. Instead of listening to the doubters, she presented Speak Now to the world with only one name in the writing credits: Taylor Swift.
Songs like Mean, Long Live, Ours, and Better Than Revenge stare her doubters in the face.
“That this was the beginning of my series of creative choices made by reacting to setbacks with defiance,” she said, “That my stubbornness in the face of doubters and dissenters would become my coping mechanism through my entire career from that point forward.”
She firmly chose adventure, and like Dorothy, began walking down the yellow brick road.
4. Meeting The Mentor
A guide assists our hero in navigating this new world.
Meeting with the Mentor in The Wizard of Oz: Dorothy meets Glinda the Good Witch, who explains how she can get back home (get the ruby slippers) and what to expect along the way (the dangers of Oz).
While Speak Now had dabbled with pop and rock, Red planted Taylor firmly in the rock/pop music category, moving permanently away from country.
“Like trying on pieces of a new life,” Taylor said in the Red TV Prologue, “I went into the studio and experimented with different sounds and collaborators.”
Who her most meaningful mentors were at this time is not ours to know, though we can see that Max Martin, Shellback, Jacknife Lee and others were new to the production table this time around.
But it’s also likely that Taylor found inspiration in a different kind of “mentor” for this album: pain. Red is full of the kind of all-consuming heartbreak that makes you a shell of your former self.
“Musically and lyrically,” Taylor said, “Red resembled a heartbroken person. It was all over the place, a fractured mosaic of feelings that somehow all fit together in the end.”
Musically, she was walking the yellow brick road of a different genre. But emotionally, she was walking the road of the brokenhearted.
It was likely this initial heartbreak that would inspire the rest of her career, with songs like All Too Well, Red, and I Knew You Were Trouble setting the tone for her future lyricism.
5. Crossing The Threshold
We’re not in Kansas anymore. Our hero fully commits to the adventure. There’s no going back.
Crossing the First Threshold The Wizard of Oz: Dorothy sets out into the unknown on the yellow brick road.
By the time our hero crosses the first threshold, she’s entirely inside her adventure. There is no turning back; there is only moving forward.
The 1989 era was the first time we saw Taylor shapeshift into an entirely new artist, crossing the threshold from youth to adulthood. This growth and change is reflected in her songwriting.
“For the last few years,” she said in the original1989 Prologue, “I’ve woken up every day not wanting, but needing to write a new style of music. I needed to change the way I told my stories and the way they sounded.”
She chopped off her long blonde hair, moved from Nashville to New York City, stopped publicly dating, and presented the world with a 100% pop album. But in the1989 TV Prologue, she gave us some context as to why this change was so drastic.
“You see—in the years preceding this, I had become the target of slut-shaming—the intensity and relentlessness of which would be criticized and called out if it happened today, the jokes about my amount of boyfriends. The trivialization of my songwriting as if it were a predatory act of a boy crazy psychopath, the media co-signing of this narrative. I had to make it stop because it was starting to really hurt….Being a consummate optimist, I assumed I could fix this if I simply changed my behavior.”
-Taylor Swift, 1989 TV Prologue
In narrative arcs, crossing the first threshold is usually where the central conflict is explored. So what was Taylor’s central conflict? I’d argue that it was her autobiographical songwriting style. She was criticized both for dating, and for writing about it.
So what did she do on this next step of her adventure? She stopped both. But that didn’t stop the conflict.
Still, Taylor bit back at the media narrative with songs like Blank Space, Shake it Off, and New Romantics.
This sets up a long-running narrative thread: how can our hero live in a world that doesn’t seem to allow her to be a normal, everyday human? Can she make it out of this perilous place, full of impossible standards, alive?
6. Tests, Allies, Enemies
Learning the rules of this strange new world, our hero faces enemies and makes allies.
Tests, Allies, and Enemies: Dorothy meets the lion, tinman and scarecrow, and together they face perils – like the flying monkeys – on the way to the Emerald City.
In 2016, Taylor went into hiding. Snakegate tore down her reputation, and she receded from the public eye. Some very large and public enemies slandered her name and got the world on the cancel wagon.
In the sixth step of our hero’s journey, the protagonist is learning the rules of the strange new world in which they’re living. They learn who they can trust, who they can’t, and how to survive.
In The Wizard of Oz, it’s at this point that Dorothy meets the tinman, scarecrow, and lion, battling a series of enemies along the way as they journey through Oz together.
In Taylor’s journey, navigating her path was just as tricky.
She re-emerged in 2017 with reputation, her darkest and most personal album yet. When she stepped back into the spotlight, “the old Taylor” was dead, and in her place was a steeled hero ready to take on the constant barrage of criticism.
In the reputation prologue, she explained: “I’ve been in the public eye since I was 15 years old. On the beautiful, lovely side of that, I’ve been so lucky to make music for a living and look out into crowds of loving, vibrant people. On the other side of the coin, my mistakes have been used against me, my heartbreaks have been used as entertainment, and my songwriting has been trivialized as ‘oversharing.’”
But it seems that in this time of death and rebirth, she also emerged with an ally: “a love that was really something, not just the idea of something.” It was inside this protective, secluded love bubble that she seemed to find the strength to pick up the sword once again.
She came back swinging with a vengeance, and songs like I Did Something Bad, Look What You Made Me Do, and This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things personified her new attitude toward her enemies.
But the other half of reputation explores her new ally – her lover – and the comfort and strength this new relationship provided. Songs like Delicate, Don’t Blame Me, End Game, Call it What You Want, and New Years Day give us a peek inside her personal life during this tough time.
7. Approach to the Inmost Cave
We discover our hero’s innermost thoughts, fears, and ambitions.
Approach to the Inmost Cave in The Wizard of Oz: Dorothy and her friends meet the Wizard, who tells her she must kill the Wicked Witch to get his help returning home.
As our hero approaches the “inmost cave” of their personal journey, they’re usually in a “getting to know you” phase. They learn more about themselves, their allies, their enemies, and the world in which they’re living.
Sometimes in this step, our protagonist will enter a relationship or discover a romance, but they’re also learning that all is not what it seems.
All was really not what it seemed between reputation and Lover, because there was a big shift happening behind the scenes: Taylor left her label, Big Machine Records, after over 13 years and six albums. Her contract was up, but her reasons for leaving and signing with Republic have never been fully revealed.
Leaving Big Machine, however, left the company with ownership of those six albums. This step in her journey would serve to set up the largest personal and professional battle of her career: the ownership of her masters (what Swifties call “the masters heist“).
She had now not only left her previous life, but she’d left the one ally that had assisted her in every battle: Scott Borchetta and Big Machine.
But internally, it seems Taylor was reflecting on the emotional side of her journey. In her “inmost cave”, she wrote Lover, which was “a love letter to love itself.”
“I’ve decided that in this life, I want to be defined by the things I love – not the things I hate, the things I’m afraid of, or the things that haunt me in the middle of the night,” she said in the Lover Prologue, “Those things may be struggles, but they’re not my identity.”
It seems Taylor was also reflecting on the larger world and her place in it as a female artist. She dipped her toes into politics with songs like The Man, Miss Americana and the Heartbreak Prince, and You Need to Calm Down.
It’s also at this point where we got to peek behind the curtain in the Miss Americana documentary, which gives us insight into her self-reflective seclusion, the lover who accompanied her there, and her position in a patriarchal society.
8: The Ordeal
The mid-term exam. Our hero confronts their greatest fear and emerges forever changed.
The Ordeal in The Wizard of Oz: Dorothy battles the Wicked Witch and her flying monkeys. She ends up killing her, claiming the ruby slippers which are the key to getting her back home.
The 8th step in the hero’s journey is the most transformative. Our protagonist battles both their inner demons and their arch nemesis, emerging from the fire that forged them as a new person.
After Taylor released Lover in 2019, she planned another stadium tour, coined “Loverfest”. But two big things threw a wrench in her plans.
Firstly, Scooter Braun purchased her masters from Big Machine. After many attempts to reclaim ownership of her first six albums, they were yanked away and handed to her arch-nemesis (and Kanye’s manager). She was, understandably, devastated.
Secondly, the COVID pandemic shut everything down, and canceled her planned tour.
But while the world shut down, Taylor didn’t. She kept writing, kept planning, and kept pushing forward. She tried on a new genre of music, and dropped folklore just six months into the pandemic.
Remember in the fifth step, when our hero crossed the first threshold and the central conflict was established? One of Taylor’s central conflicts was how to write about her personal life without the constant criticism of her personal life. So with folklore, she chose to write about fictional characters instead.
“In isolation my imagination has run wild,” she said in the folklore prologue, “and this album is the result, a collection of songs and stories that flowed like a stream of consciousness. Picking up a pen was my way of escaping into fantasy, history, and memory.”
folklore came with the disclaimer that these songs were not all autobiographical, and as a result, Taylor presented us with her most poignant and emotional album to date. Were the central emotions inside the album Taylor’s, or completely made up?
We’ll never know, and that’s the beauty of this ordeal. She emerged from the master’s heist and the pandemic with a new formula: one that allowed her to write about her life without writing about her life.
Part of her died when her masters were taken away. Part of her died when the pandemic canceled her public life and performances. But she emerged from this fire with a new weapon: fictional storytelling.
The Taylor who was crucified for writing about her personal life could no longer be persecuted for doing so. This new weapon allowed her to release some of her most personal songs yet, with the caveat that these songs may not be about her at all.
Still, we can see Taylor’s personal struggles shine through in songs like my tears ricochet (allegedly about the masters heist), mirrorball (allegedly about the pandemic and her precarious place in the spotlight), and mad woman (about her position in a patriarchal society and industry).
9. The Reward
Transformed, our hero reflects and arms themselves for the final battle to come.
The Reward in The Wizard of Oz: After killing the wicked witch, Dorothy claims the ruby slippers and broomstick. Returning to the wizard, they expect they’ll soon find out how to get back home.
After our hero’s central battle, they usually get a bit of time to rest, reflect, and rest. This is the point in the narrative with long shots of our protagonist looking in the mirror, steeling themselves for the rest of the road ahead. Are they ready to finish the journey?
For Taylor, evermore was this contemplative pause. The world was still shut down due to the pandemic, and the solace she had found in her fictional storytelling kept beckoning.
“It feels like we were standing on the edge of the folklorian woods,” she said in the evermore prologue, “and had a choice: to turn and go back or to travel further into the forest of this music.”
She could have reverted to her previous formula, where she “treated albums as onе-off eras and moved onto planning the nеxt one as soon as an album was released.” But after all her adventures, trials and tribulations, she chose to break her own rules.
“There was something different with folklore,” she said, “In making it, I felt less like I was departing and more like I was returning. I loved the escapism I found in these imaginary/not imaginary tales.”
Staying in the world of fictional songwriting seems to have allowed her reflection and perspective she needed to keep persevering. For it’s during this era that she was also mapping out her road “home”: re-recording her first six albums.
evermore was a reward in and of itself, but it also allowed her the time and space to re-arm herself, plotting a road map to reach her ultimate destination.
Many songs on evermore revolve around closure: champagne problems, happiness, coney island, evermore, right where you left me, and it’s time to go. She’s wrapping up her time in the folklorian woods, and arming herself for the next step in her journey.
10. The Road Back
Forever changed, our hero tries to get back home.
The Road Back in The Wizard of Oz: The Wizard reveals himself as just an elaborate ruse: a man from Kansas who landed in Oz by accident. He offers to take Dorothy back in his hot air balloon, but just as they’re about to leave, Toto jumps out of the basket and Dorothy runs after him. The Wizard floats away without them.
In the tenth step of the hero’s journey, our protagonist is on their way to the final victory. But it won’t be smooth sailing. Danger is still tailing them, and they’ll need to pass these final tests to complete their journey.
This is the stage at which all previous enemies and exploits can come back to bite them, and may prevent them from moving forward.
Between evermore and Midnights, Taylor had begun paving the road home, setting the stage for the final battle. She released Fearless Taylor’s Version in 2021, then Red Taylor’s Version. She had begun reclaiming her name and life’s work.
With Midnights, was returning to the Taylor Swift we all knew and loved, but with a more evolved, potent pop sound. She was also armed with the knowledge, experience, and hard lessons from her near-cancellation, the pandemic, and the masters heist.
But she was also returning in other ways. Midnights marked a return to pop music, but it retained the lyricism and storytelling she had developed during the folkmore era.
But it did something else important: it gave her another way to write about her life without writing about her life.
Midnights was about “13 sleepless nights” throughout her life, meaning that the songs about heartbreak were not necessarily about a current heartbreak. While folklore and evermore used fictional songwriting to escape persecution, Midnights used history and past tense.
Midnights looks back over the sleepless nights of her life, reflecting on where she’s been and where she’s going. Songs like Anti-Hero, You’re On Your Own, Kid, Mastermind, and Dear Reader reflect on her impossible position in a world that won’t let her just be human.
But songs like Vigilante Shit, Bejeweled, and Karma keep pushing forward through the doubters and the critics, biting back as she did in much of reputation.
What we didn’t know during the Midnights era – at least during the first year – was that she was plotting a different metaphorical road home: The Eras Tour.
11. Resurrection
The final exam: death and rebirth. A single choice defines who our hero is, and where she’s going.
The Resurrection in The Wizard of Oz: The good witch comes to Dorothy again, revealing that Dorothy had the key to going back to Kansas all along: she just had to find it out on her own, that “there’s no place like home.”
If step 8, the ordeal, was a midterm exam, step 11 – the resurrection – is the final. Our hero must call on all the things they’ve learned, and summon every ally, to defeat the enemy once and for all. In doing so, they are transformed, and can finally return home to their “everyday world.”
For Taylor, The Eras Tour, combined with the mid-tour release of The Tortured Poets Department, form her final battle. This is her ultimate display of how she’s changed, what she’s learned, and how she has transformed from a teenager from small town Pennsylvania to the world’s most powerful superstar.
The enemies that were chasing her all along, both big and small, are defeated with this twofold action.
The Eras Tour proved that, no matter what the doubters and critics have to say, the world wants and needs Taylor’s music and talent. It quickly became the highest grossing tour of all time.
TTPD proved that her autobiographical songwriting was not something to run away from, but something to run toward. While her past three albums veered away from romantic truth-telling, TTPD ran toward it with gusto.
Songs like The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived, So Long, London, My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys, Down Bad, How Did it End, and many more, showcase her signature autobiographical style with more potency than ever before. We were given a look behind the curtain at what was going on in her heart, without the veil of pseudo-fiction or past tense.
Songs like I Hate it Here, The Prophecy, I Can Do it With a Broken Heart, The Manuscript, and Clara Bow reflect on her unique position in the celebrity world.
12. Return With the Elixir
Our hero’s victory parade.
Return with the Elixir in The Wizard of Oz: Dorothy returns home to Kansas. The ordinary world from which she came now seems entirely different, because Dorothy is different.
In The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy returns home to Kansas with crucial knowledge to share: “there’s no place like home.” What she’s been looking for has been inside of her all along.
So what is Taylor’s final step in the hero’s journey? What’s her victory lap?
For my purposes, there are two ways of interpreting it: her victory lap is The Eras Tour, or it’s her completion of the re-records.
As I don’t want to say, literally or metaphorically, that her career is close to over (I don’t think it ever will be, as long as she breathes), I tend to view her return with the elixir as the latter: the release of Taylor Swift Taylor’s Version, and reputation Taylor’s Version.
The two final missing pieces of the puzzle are her name and her reputation, and only then will she have the magical elixir that can heal her, and heal the world.
She will have learned, like Dorothy, that what she was looking for was inside of her all along. No matter how many enemies she battles, and how many haters try to tear down her name and reputation, she holds the magical elixir inside of her: her talent and perseverance.
If you’re a Swiftie, you know that Taylor has always held the power to heal the world. But in completing the re-records, she’s also healing a void within herself. Moreover, she’s setting an example that if you keep trying, you can finally win.
Unlike Dorothy, Taylor will likely never return to being a small-town girl. She’s so big, so popular, and so famous, that her everyday world no longer exists. But ours does, and her hero’s journey has indeed helped to heal our everyday worlds.
The cracks in our hearts, the disappointments we face, the impossible standards we’re held to, and the constant criticism we deal with as women daily, are all soothed by Taylor’s music and example.
That is her gift to the world, and the ultimate boon in the face of a society that constantly tries to tear powerful women down.
Taylor Swift’s Hero’s Journey: What’s Next?
I have some personal theories on what Taylor will do next, but practically, we can look to the past to see what the future holds.
TTPD was released in spring 2024, which means we can (likely) expect new music in spring 2026. In between now and then, we’ll hopefully see Taylor Swift (Taylor’s Version) and reputation (Taylor’s Version), with vault tracks to fill in the new music gap.
But the larger question for me is: how will she ever tour again after The Eras Tour? It’s a similar dilemma that she faced early on in her career: following up Fearless, the most acclaimed country album of all time, with a bigger, better album.
Will she try to go deliberately smaller and more niche, will she try to go much, much bigger, or will she stop touring altogether?
We’ll have to wait and see, but I don’t see this hero’s journey ending anytime soon.
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