Taylor Swift told me she could imagine a time when she’d stop performing and just be a writer. "When I’m 40 and nobody wants to see me in a sparkly dress anymore, I’ll be, like: ‘Cool, I’ll just go in the studio and write songs for kids.’ It’s looking like a good pension plan." Perhaps. But Swift’s songwriting may be too quirky, too personal, to fit all comers. Swift’s parents named her after James Taylor, and she has a seventies-folkie’s soul; she is a confessor, a memoirist. You could call Swift a generational bard: She merges the pleasures of old-fashioned songcraft with millennial social-media oversharing.