Taylor Swift vs. Sleep Token
What Authors Can Learn
Yes, I am pitting Taylor Swift against Sleep Token.
No, I haven’t lost my mind.
They are, in fact, two sides of the same genre-fluid, myth-making, audience-bewitching coin. If you’re not a fan of either, I promise, this is not about the music. Well, only a little bit about the music. This is about the kind of cultish cultural phenomenon that both Taylor Swift and Sleep Token conjure with dancey tunes and soul-rending lyrics. This is a look at how they approach their work, their marketing and the audience and what you, as the friendly neighborhood author, can take away from it.
First up, to recap who we are talking about just in case you spend the majority of your music enjoyment time in 90s grunge like I do.
Taylor Swift is a millennial pop princess, a billionaire, and either the most hated or loved woman in football.
Sleep Token, and its creator Vessel, is what happens when pop culture hits its why choose phase and MaskTok, Tumblr, a gothic cathedral, and an eldritch god have a baby.
Both are brilliant.
Both are deliberate.
Both have fan bases that will travel the world, spend ungodly amounts of money, alter their bodies, and will go to the mattresses with throat punches should you besmirch a hair on their precious little god’s heads.
Which is kind of a dream actually, for any creative, to be loved and defended like that. But I digress.
I could dissect this and look at it through a lot of different lenses, but I’m going to give you just three points that I hope will give you some ideas to interrogate about your own creative process and business practices. There’s more I can say about this, so we may come back for a TS vs ST Round Two.
Trust Your Audience
As you’re tiptoeing through the plethora of writing tips, and do’s and don’t’s, we’re told to write at a sixth-grade reading level. “Make it accessible!” “Dumb it down so people get the point!”
But what if you didn’t?
What if, instead, you challenged your audience to meet you where you are? What if you trusted your audience to be big kids and that they know how to Google and use a dictionary?
Now we’re going to play “Is it a Taylor Swift lyric or a Sleep Token lyric”.
Lyric A
I want auroras and sad prose. I want to watch wisteria grow right over my bare feet
Lyric B
No alabaster carvings or faces on a farthing, would prevent my head from fading to black
Auroras, prose, alabaster, farthing… These are not sixth grade words. They are using precise language to conjure an emotional texture. Change a word and you kill the spell. Go ahead and play Mad Libs with those lyrics and you will utterly destroy the emotional experience.
And this is limited to vocabulary, they are both trusting that you can cultivate reading and listening comprehension, and let yourself fall into the metaphor.
Lyric C
I was your robot companion, you were my favorite color.
Lyric D
You kept me like a secret, but I kept you like an oath
When I heard Lyric A, I had to shut the music off and sit down for a minute. Reading comprehension is about the words, then the imagery, and then the implications. I slid immediately to the implications and had to cry. I could vividly call forth the experience in which a mere glimpse of your beloved brings you joy but in turn, you are no more than an empty prop to them, and the pain and suffering that that experience would engender.
That is what trusting your audience looks like.
Art is nothing more than the creator of the art bringing the consumer of the art into a shared emotional space. Vessel trusted us to feel the pain along side him.
They both freely dip into folklore, mythology, literature, and it’s on you as a fan to do your own personal curriculum about it. If you don’t know who Ophelia or Damocles are, can you still enjoy the music? Sure, but would you skip the crust of your pizza? Not only is it the best part, but it’s the thing holding your slice together.
In the parasocial world we live in, you don’t have to do your own research. TikTok is flooded right now with full on Ph.D. level dissertations on Ophelia and Damocles, so you don’t even have to read Hamlet, just go watch those dudes.
(Side bar - I’m writing this several days out from the release of “Life of a Showgirl”. Yes, I am aware of the criticism of “The Fate of Ophelia”. No, we are not discussing that here as it is outside the scope of what we’re doing.)
So, write weird, write smart, let your rabbit holes and hyperfixations bleed all over the page. You’re readers will keep up. Trust me.
Check this interaction.
My lovely Ashley Violet here, is moved to expand her experience of life, in the comment section, not in in directly relationship to the work., because the work means that much to her and she wants to savor every last bit of it. If a reader told me they were excited to look up words because of something I wrote? Shit, I’m ugly crying right now and it’s not even about me.
Write Like Someone’s Going to Read it Twice
It will not shock you to learn that I am a ride-or-die for Xaden Riorson. When I read the last word of Onyx Storm, I threw the book across the room, had an adult beverage and then picked the book and hit Chapter 1 again immediately. IYKYK.
It was on my second read, that I discovered the end of the book, and the horrific cliffhanger, are revealed to you in Chapter 6. Did anybody pick it up during the first read? Nope. AND not catching it, NOR having it be revealed, neither affects your enjoyment of the story.
Sleep Token and Taylor Swift know, and are counting on, the fact that you are not going to listen to a song just once. You will listen a second time. And then again, and then couple days on repeat. They both are highly effective at dropping bread crumbs, hiding easter eggs, embedding foreshadowing and utilizing call backs that lead fans to the desire to deconstruct the lyrics line by line. It’s well thought out and intentional. I do no believe either of these artists has happy accidents.
Further, they leverage it because they have trained their audiences to look for it. All Taylor has to do is pop a “13” in the background of an Instagram post and 1000s of people will have a sleepless night trying to figure out what it means.
Sleep Token is fucking worse. They don’t do interviews. They don’t even really do music videos. But they do puzzles. They hid coordinates in the marketing graphics for one of their albums that lead fans to connect “This Place Will Become Your Tomb” to Point Nemo, the space graveyard and most isolated point on earth. They don’t explain, they don’t reveal, they let fans duke it out in the comment section.
Now, as an author, you have to have comprehendible work. But we have an arsenal of tools, foreshadowing, callbacks, red herrings, unreliable narrators, motif, mirroring and the entire language of symbolism to give that second read experience teeth.
So, drop your Chekhov’s guns, let them go off, because if you can get someone to read your work twice, you have created a super fan.
Commit to the Bit
As I said, Sleep Token doesn’t do interviews, they don’t talk from the stage. They all wear masks and do their best to keep their identities hidden. Vessel, the singer and song writer, is creating a story, a whole narrative experience, and every single part of the operation of that band is on point and on message.
The marketing for their latest release, “Even in Arcadia”, embodies a destroyed paradise and two factions about to go to war. That is in every single piece of marketing. Every image. They are on tour right now and their stage set is a destroyed ruin littered with falling petals. Vessel preforms in a gold encrusted pauldron like a warrior monk.
They have fully committed to the bit.
Here’s where I’m going to get throat punched my Swifties. I don’t dislike her music. “Shake it Off” is fucking catchy. But I’m not a fan and have only a passing interest in her work. She just released, days ago, “Life of a Showgirl”, and I am disappointed. But let me pinpoint exactly where my disappointment stems.
In her marketing leading up to the release, the images she released were dirty, like gritty, underbelly dirty. Like we were going to get scathing window into ugly things in the music industry. But what we got were peppy odes to dick pics.
Don’t get me wrong, I love filth and sexual innuendo, especially when its clever or in your face, but she failed to deliver on the promise of the premise. In her marketing she was promising showgirl, and what we got was pop princess in love with an axe to grind.
Branding, telling the commercial story of who and what you are requires you to commit to the bit. To go all in and to have an eye for how everything you put out connects.
If you’re doing dark romance, don’t do a cartoon cover. If you’re doing space opera, your marketing should be epic in feel.
These three items require one more thing. Trusting yourself as an artist. With each book write, each word on the page is opportunity for you to trust your own vision. I think that’s half the battle. Making good decisions and making them stick.
In closing, Swifties, please be kind. Just because I’m disappointed that we’re not seeing Dark Taylor, does not diminish the impact this album can have for you.