Why Taylor Swift Sounds Better Through a Closed Door
Kierkegaard, Streaming Culture, and the Retrieval of a Pop Song’s Buried Form
If you’d told me 10 years ago that I’d be sitting on my couch on a Saturday morning, scrolling YouTube with my 8-year-old son for Mozart’s Don Giovanni, I would’ve laughed. But there I was, hunting through descriptions of a 240-year-old opera, looking for decent English subtitles.
For the next 3 hours my son and I watched Mozart’s masterpiece. To my surprise, he stayed for almost the entire performance, rapt, as I was.
I found myself here through an unintended series of readings that began with a modern book on aesthetics, then moved to a 19th-century theological work where Mozart made an unexpected appearance. What I discovered there — about a distant ear pressed to a theater door — would eventually help me understand why Taylor Swift sounds better that way.
The German philosopher, Peter Sloterdijk argues in his book The Aesthetic Imperative that the ear is the first organ to develop in utero — that we are born into rhythm and resonance, not sight and separation.
Before we see, we hear. The rhythm of our mother’s heartbeat The melody of her voice. We emerge, first, into an enveloping sonic world. Sloterdijk calls this a state of being-with. In this state reality is not composed of objects and separation, but of melodies and rhythms — a maternal sonic embrace.
However, when we are born, we are cast out of rhythm and into perspective, and the Cosmic Homesickness begins. From that ‘catastrophic’ moment, every human gesture — every community formed, every cathedral built, every hand reached toward another, every piece of art composed — is an attempt to reconstruct that original sonic embrace: to build, with others, vessels that hold us in relation.
Nearly 180 years before Sloterdijks embryonic excursions a Danish philosopher and theologian Søren Kierkegaard, wrote an essay titled The Immediate Erotic Stages or The Musical-Erotic. A pretty wild title in any epoch, it unfolded a story I was completely unprepared for and the experience has taken me months (or is it a lifetime) to put into words.
The essay is one among several others in Kierkegaard’s Either/Or. The essay led me to expect an exposition on sexuality or a critique of wanton desire, but I found instead a radical claim: that the character of Don Juan, as an archetype of pure sensual immediacy, can only truly exist — and be experienced — in music. Not in poetry, not in visual art — only in music. In Mozart’s Don Giovanni, this archetype reaches such perfect expression that, as Kierkegaard puts it, to attempt another would be like trying to write a second Iliad.
For Kierkegaard, the character Don Juan (Don Giovanni in the opera) is not an individual — not a person in the psychological or narrative sense. He is not defined by history, motive, or reflection. Rather, Don Juan is an existence-form, or what Kierkegaard calls a sensuous universal. He represents a mode of being: pure immediacy, a pre-reflective, purely affective life in which others are not encountered as persons, but as occasions for desire itself.
Don Juan experiences the world as pure erotic possibility, stripped of personhood or consequence. He doesn’t seduce individuals — he is seduction itself, pure appetite moving through the world. This is why the character Donna Elvira poses an existential threat to Don Giovanni: returning to demand recognition and justice, she embodies the very reflection and consequence his mode of being cannot acknowledge. For Don Juan, there can be no relationship, only reaction — the difference between meeting someone and being struck by them.
On Kierkegaard’s first encounter with the opera, he sat near the front, absorbed by the set, the visuals, the action. The second time, he chose a seat farther back. Then again, he found the most remote, darkest corner of the theater. Finally, in his most intense encounter, he stood outside the opera house itself, ear pressed to the door, listening to the music resonating through the wood.
‘The better I understood it, the further I moved away from it — not out of coldness but out of love, for it wants to be understood at a distance.’
Standing there in the corridor, shut out from the spectacle — freed from the tyranny of sight — the music revealed its full nature. No longer subordinated to plot, character, or staging, it became what it always was: pure immediacy given symbolic sonic form — that which cannot be seen, only heard, only felt as it moves through, being-with.
It was here that Kierkegaard inhabited the existence-form of Don Juan — not through ethical transgression or the reduction of others to objects, but through aesthetic reception itself. Music enabled him to know the archetype without enacting its material harm, to know through resonance rather than domination.
Where Don Juan’s immediacy forecloses relation (for it can only be this way), Kierkegaard’s ear pressed against the theaters door restores it:
I can see nothing but am close enough to hear and yet so infinitely far away.
This infinite receding is the return to that primordial maternal sonic embrace — where knowledge arrives not through analysis, but through resonance.
This brings us to Taylor Swift — or rather, to what one of her songs becomes when approached from this infinity point, from the gesture of pressing your ear against the theater door.
I first encountered Taylor Swift’s I Knew You Were Trouble when I had to learn it on drums for the Portland Cello Project, a band I was touring with at the time. When I wrote out my drum chart, I wasn’t particularly moved. The production is safe, programmed, and fully locked to the Pro Tools grid — a textbook case of what I’ve elsewhere called the griddification of music: the flattening of temporal nuance into machinic regularity.
The one moment that stands out is the triplet kick pattern in the chorus, a clear nod to the dubstep craze dominating EDM at the time. But even that, never quite resonated with me. It sounded engineered to resemble a mirror, rather than to enter into productive-relation-with the listener.
That said, the song clearly resonated with hundreds of millions of people, and that matters. If I step back from the drum production, the bones of the song are fantastic. The melody in the chorus is undeniably catchy, and the contrast between the syncopated verse and the soaring chorus is magic. I had fun each night playing the song with them.
Still, jumping from 2012 to 2025, the song has that dated rather than timeless sound associated with classics that traverse generations. I couldn’t help but think the logics of platform streaming were already reaching into the studio in 2012, sanding down its edges to fit a more passive, lean-back listening experience.
I recently received a Bandcamp notification that someone I follow had released new music. The name pulled me out of my current workflow: Matthew Charles Heulitt, a guitarist I’d studied with at the University of Miami’s studio music and jazz program back in the ’90s. We’d shared stages in the Bay Area years later, but life had pulled us to opposite coasts — him to Pittsburgh, me to the desert Southwest. The track title made me do a double-take: ‘(I knew you were) Trouble.’ Matthew, reimagining Taylor Swift?
His liner notes explained: ‘This whole thing started thanks to a teenage student of mine who decided to learn over 30 Taylor Swift songs in a year. I didn’t know her catalog at all, so it was all new to me.’ What began as a teaching obligation transformed into something else entirely.
I clicked play and was immediately floored.
What Matthew created is not, to my ear, a reimagining. It’s a retrieval. The melody was always strong. The structure always held. But the version released in 2012 — though it connected with millions — was constrained by its production context. The song still held space for something more, but that ‘more’ remained submerged.
Reading deeper into Matthew’s liner notes, he reveals:
What followed was… a saga. I messed around with ideas for over a year — different grooves, reharmonizations, weird time feels — until this version began to take shape. Once I committed to producing it, that turned into another year of intense tinkering, slow mixing, and general creative chaos.
Two years of patient circling. Like Kierkegaard progressively withdrawing from Don Giovanni until he found his infinity point — ear pressed against the theater door — Matthew’s process enacted its own necessary distance. Not withdrawal from the song, but withdrawal into it, creating the conditions for what had always been embodied to finally surface.
This is excavation in the deepest sense: finding the precise distance where genuine relation emerges through sonic embrace — where knowledge, ethics, and being become available.
Matthew’s arrangement reminds us that a song isn’t just something to be passively consumed. It’s something to be answered. His labor wasn’t about style or novelty for the sake of novelty, but about care. In doing what the platform economy actively discourages — sitting with time, engaging with risk, excavating space — he honored the song’s form. And in so doing, he reminded us that responsibility doesn’t just belong to the listener but to the artist too.
The better I understood it, the further I moved away from it — not out of coldness but out of love, for it wants to be understood at a distance — Kierkegaard, Either/Or.