Will Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s marriage have an effect on her music?

Every fairytale wants a cheerful ending, and after 11 albums of affection, heartbreak and shattered desires, Taylor Swift has discovered her Prince Charming. But after she introduced her engagement to Travis Kelce, what is going to Swift’s newfound happiness imply for her music?

Swift’s biggest present as a lyricist is the best way she weaves her personal story into her songs, balancing intricate, particular element with common themes of affection, hope, heartbreak and betrayal.

And from the very starting, the musician’s love life has been the connective tissue of her writing.

Her debut single, Tim McGraw, written throughout a faculty maths class, was all about her then-boyfriend, Drew Dunlap.

Believing they’d break up earlier than he left for school (a premonition that got here true), she wrote a music to commemorate the instances they’d slow-danced within the moonlight to the automotive radio: “When you assume Tim McGraw/I hope you consider me.“

It’s a timeless story – one which’s destined to be repeated at brisker’s weeks throughout the nation this autumn – and set in movement a career-long narrative about Swift’s romantic tribulations.

She’s written about emotionally unavailable males (Jake Gyllenhaal, All Too Well), falling for a nasty boy (Harry Styles, I Knew You Were Trouble) and rebound romances (Tom Hiddleston, Getaway Car).

Throughout all of it, she’s been conscious of the obsessive degree of debate round her relationships. In Shake It Off, she poked enjoyable on the media’s discourse: “I am going on too many dates / But I am unable to make them keep / At least, that is what folks say.“

Blank Space went one step additional, taking each horrible hearsay about her love life and amplifying it with satirical relish.

“In the last couple of years the media have had a wonderful fixation on painting me as the psycho serial dater girl,” she told the Grammy Museum. “Every article was like, ‘Here’s Taylor Swift standing near some guy. WATCH OUT GUY!’

“My first response was to be like, ‘That’s a bummer. This is not enjoyable for me’.

“But my second reaction was, ‘Hey, that’s actually a really interesting character they’re writing about: She jet-sets around the world collecting men – and she can get any of them, but she’s so clingy that they leave and she cries in her marble bathtub surrounded by pearls’.

“I used to be like, ‘I can use this’.”

It’s a theme she returned to on final 12 months’s But Daddy I Love Him – the place she likened the net critics of her relationship with The 1975’s Matty Healy to a village stuffed with pitchfork-wielding puritans.

Confronting her audience, she scolded: “I’ll inform you one thing about my good identify / It’s mine alone to shame / I do not cater to all these vipers wearing empath’s clothes.“

Now, it’s reductive to cast Swift’s back catalogue (274 songs and counting) to a soap opera about her love life.

She’s written insightful and witty lyrics about the media (“You would not final an hour within the asylum the place they raised me“, Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?); concerning the joyous bonds of friendship (“We’re completely happy, free, confused and lonely in the easiest way“, 22) and even getting away with homicide (“I’ve cleaned sufficient homes to know how you can cowl up a scene“, No Body No Crime).

But not for nothing has she been called “pop’s biggest diarist” and “the maestro of reminiscence”.

So what happens when she settles down? As her friend and collaborator Florence Welch of Florence and the Machine once pointed out: “Contentment is a creativity killer.”

“Marital bliss and home boredom are inclined to make much less fascinating rock songs than searching for love,” agrees journalist and author Hadley Freeman, speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

For proof, look no further than Bruce Springsteen. In 1991, he married his bandmate Patti Scialfa, disbanded the E Street Band and relocated to California.

Springsteen celebrated his new-found serenity with two albums, Human Touch and Lucky Town – but they are regularly ranked as his worst.

Female artists have frequently used settling down as a source of inspiration.

Madonna’s Ray Of Light, written after the birth of her daughter Lourdes, eschewed her brash 1980s persona for a more spiritual, psychedelic sound. Amid stiff competition, it remains her best album, and I’ll fight anyone who says otherwise.

When Beyoncé revealed her baby bump on stage at the 2011 MTV Awards, columnists tripped over themselves to speculate what it might mean for her music. But her next album, 2013’s Beyoncé, was a turning point – a disruptive, experimental, futuristic R&B album that set the template for the third act of her career.

Swift has already proved she can write affecting, moving songs from a place of happiness. Her six-year relationship with Joe Alwyn generated songs like Delicate and Lover, which rank among her best work.

She’s already written two songs about Kelce, both of which appeared on last year’s The Tortured Poets Department album.

On So High School, she described how his chivalry restored her religion in males (“Get my automotive door, is not that candy?“), whereas The Alchemy rhapsodised concerning the second he received the Super Bowl and ignored the trophy to “come operating over to me”.

The star recently confirmed that her forthcoming 12th album, The Life of a Showgirl, is “extra upbeat” than the rest of the material on Tortured Poets Department – which was largely concerned with her split from Alwyn and a tumultuous relationship with Healy.

Speaking on the New Heights podcast, she said Showgirl was recorded during the European leg of her record-breaking Eras Tour – placing it in the early stages of her relationship with Kelce.

“It simply comes from, like, essentially the most infectiously joyful, wild, dramatic place I used to be in in my life… and in order that effervescence has come by way of on this document,” she said.

Summing it up more succinctly, Kelce described the album as “12 bangers”.

So, to return to the original question: Will Taylor’s music reflect her newfound happiness? It would be weird if it didn’t.

But let’s not forget that her last period of domestic bliss, during the relationship with Alwyn, also prompted a shift away from diary-entry lyrics.

The pandemic-era albums Folklore and Evermore embraced fictional, fantastical storytelling, set against a backdrop of organic, acoustic soundscapes.

They marked a turning point in Swift’s cultural acclaim, rejuvenating her career after the uneven and poorly-received Lover album.

If marriage prompts another shift, it could open up a whole new chapter in her career.

“There’s a complete realm of different materials while you’re married or settled down,” author Olivia Petter told Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour. “So it is a completely different form of fairytale, a special form of fantasy, that she’s getting into now.”

Some fans have already pointed out that the star’s lucky number is 13 – and her 13th album will be the first to address her marriage.

For conspiracy-minded Swifties, it virtually appears to be like as if she’s deliberate all of it alongside.