You change, and your story changes. But it’s even madder, more shameless, louder, when it’s the other way around.

You’re writing a new story now. Creating a new story is like bleeding…you have to open yourself up, and let material in that doesn’t belong in you yet, and it hurts, and it makes you raw, and the ache lasts even when you think you’re done bleeding-creating. I hear it in you every time we talk.

I hear it in so much of the work of my newest favorite artist, the bleeding-creating. It’s a miracle and a testament to her gift that I can hear it because I have been, like most of us, cauterized many times over by the pouring out of fake (bad) blood, by the too-sharp-by-half wisecracking about a (clean) break, by the crocodile tears thrashing and (ricochet) splashing themselves all over pop music. But especially in what has probably become my favorite of her songs (for now), “the last great american dynasty,” I hear her changing her story—a hollow cliché that’s supposed to gloss a lie as nakedly false as pop music narratives, but as I hear her changing her story, I hear her change, and I feel me change, moving toward new, fresh, lively truths.

Your new truths, like hers, reveal layers of you that were always in you even before you opened yourself up like you have in these recent months: loyalty above all, and a willingness to bravely try new ways of living, and a stubborn refusal to accept any limits. These layers in you are writing a new story for me. I feel the great grace of being your family now, in whatever form that becomes as we move forward.

But time’s not only a vector pressing toward the future, Joni’s songs (one part of Taylor’s past) insist. Artists teach us how we create our own perceptions of time and, through analepsis and prolepsis and all kinds of other fancy tricks, make that vector into a Moëbius strip in our minds and hearts. I love “american dynasty” so fondly because of how it wrestles with time and space so ferociously yet rests with a song so light and spry, so gently teasing. Every single line teases, astonishingly deftly, without exception, from “Rebecca rode up” (wink-linking social mobility with a train line) to “how did a middle-class divorcee do it?” (delivered deliciously with a catch of her breath that catches the lascivious gossip implied in inquiry into her marriage bed) to “the doctor had told him to settle down/it must have been her fault his heart gave out” (her command of lyrics as strong as Joni’s or Bob’s on display here, challenging the cliché about cardiac failure that makes fault lines impossible to ascribe to another medically, daring to confront that organ’s vital link in literature to how we give our hearts out, how we open ourselves up when in another’s thrall and thereby give imaginative credence to this preposterous, sardonic frame of blame) to “flew in all her Bitch Pack friends from the city” (reminding us who truly knows how to be a rat and a brat, and reminding us that even when we “take our minds off” our home early in our stories and flee toward an idyll, we never really take our homes out of our minds but instead keep finding their echoes inside us as we bleed-create) to “then it was bought by me” (the passive syntax chiming beautifully with the images of places and times spread throughout the song that maintain their hold on us even as we move forward, Holiday House still the subject of this phrase that narrates the abrupt arrival of our narrator through the force of her success, her power to “buy” the life she wants with all the psychological acquiescence this idiom implies).

This is how great art works its way into us. This song is about Rebecca Harkness, and also about Taylor Swift, and about an oil empire heir, and Dali, and ballet dancers in mid-20th century Los Angeles, and Frank Sinatra, and about my connection to the beach, and about you. You are as resistant to others’ efforts to name you and define you as Rebecca. You are creating your own life anew, even when it hurts and makes you raw. At least I can trust that you won’t dye any dogs; of all the things you might find in you, I very much doubt you’ll find that.

I find in myself as a listener, again and again, my love for musical prolepsis, for the writing of an artist’s dreams of musical hyperarticulation (loud and proud in the culture, listened to by so many) through being, in their own past, musically hyperarticulate about this very vision. I’ve written about this more than once already in this space, for example about “Tim McGraw,” her first hit. I have, in this space, prefigured my love for “american dynasty” years before the song was even written. For in this song, as has been her style these past several years, she squeezes time’s accordion, pairing her always-present prolepsis with analepsis, writing herself into Rebecca’s story and thereby earning the right to actually ask, as the brightest of all stars in the pop firmament, “Who knows if I never showed up what could have been?” and have us hear it not only as humble-brag hubris but as heartfelt humor.

You showed up for me and are changing my story. You are showing up for your family and are changing your story. I love watching you play your way into this new song.