Rob Sheffield, a longtime journalist at Rolling Stone, has been a fan of Taylor Swift’s for a long time — back to the eras when the music industry and other journalists weren’t taking her all that seriously.

But Sheffield has always been astounded by Swift’s songwriting and artistry, and he just published a book about her, “Heartbreak Is the National Anthem: How Taylor Swift Reinvented Pop Music.”

It’s the latest tome from Sheffield, who grew up in Milton, Mass. He has written several previous books, including the bestselling memoir “Love Is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time” and “Dreaming the Beatles: The Love Story of One Band and the Whole World.”

He’ll talk about his Taylor Swift book on Thursday at the United in Westerly.

Asked if he plans to make a pilgrimage to Holiday House, the seafront mansion that Swift owns in the Watch Hill section of Westerly, Sheffield laughed and said, “I don’t know if I’ll make the pilgrimage.”

Here’s what else he had to say in a phone interview at the end of October.

Sheffield compares Swift to other artists he has written books about — the Beatles and David Bowie:

“I’ve been writing about her since about 10 minutes after hearing one of her songs, ‘Our Song,’ in 2007. It just completely blew me away, and really in so many ways, the book began there because I’ve been writing about Taylor Swift and her music as she’s evolved, going into so many weird places that none of us could have predicted back then.

“My last couple books were about David Bowie and the Beatles, all-time legends, and to me she’s absolutely on that level. I wanted to write a book about her that was not about celebrity or image or gossip but just about her place in history that way, her place in music.”

Swift was often dismissed as a novelty when she first started writing and recording her own songs, with her first album released in 2006 when she was 16:

“When she started, she was a teenage girl, and to a lot of people in the music business world, that meant that she was in a tiny little corner, the teenage girl corner, so she was dismissed as bubblegum pop. That was very pervasive. It was very strange how she was so ambitious and on such an obviously historic level as a songwriter at such a younger age, and still she’d be getting backhand compliments like ‘Oh, she’s very promising,’ ‘She’s good for her age’ or ‘She’s very good at marketing’ — you still hear that one sometimes. As opposed to an artist who is clearly ambitious and clearly aiming for a historic level at a really early era.

“It’s funny when you go back and listen to her now, when she started out, it was almost like she was seen as a novelty, this teenage girl with a guitar, writing her songs, her OWN songs, about her own feelings and her own life. ‘Isn’t that a novelty? Isn’t that a clever angle for her to have?’ It’s funny that now all these years later, in 2024, that’s what pop music is. ... Look at what’s popular in 2024 — young women writing their own songs about their own lives. That’s what’s huge, whether it’s Sabrina or Chappell or Billie or Olivia or Tinashe or any number of brilliant artists who are at the top of the charts in 2024. They’re all walking through doors that Taylor kicked open.”

Sheffield was thunderstruck when he heard his first Taylor Swift song. He was making a grilled cheese sandwich in the kitchen at the time and wasn’t even paying close attention to the music playing in the next room:

“This song completely knocked me sideways. It was the song ‘Our Song’ with the phenomenal chorus hook — ‘Our song is the slamming screen door.’ I was just so blown away by the voice in the song, that she’s singing as a teenage girl who is a big pop music fan. I love how she brags in that song: I’ve heard every song ever made. I’ve listened to every album. I listen to the radio. I’m a walking teenage music encyclopedia over here. But all these songs, they don’t do justice to what I’m feeling. They don’t speak for me. They don’t do justice to my hopes, my dreams, my feelings, so I’m just going to have to write a song myself.

“It ends with her going up to her room with her guitar and pen and paper, and she sits down and she writes ‘Our Song.’ To me, that was just so brilliant and such a manifesto, a mission statement about the teenage pop girl fan who is not going to let other people write her songs anymore. She’s just going to speak for herself.”

Sheffield hasn’t interviewed Swift, but he has met her at a few shows:

“She’s always wonderful, kind, funny, absolutely 100% real as a person, as honestly anybody will tell you. People have so many stories about random encounters with her or encounters at a show, (and there’s) not a lot a variety to the stories. She remembers things about people, she pays attention to people.”

Sheffield recalled that a friend of his interviewed Swift and followed her for a couple of days back when her debut came out. She was on MTV doing “Total Request Live”:

“He was watching her talk to fans, and he said she was just standing there for hours. She had a different compliment for everybody. She noticed something about what they were wearing or something they said. She noticed something specific about them to compliment. He said, ‘Pop stars take years to learn how to do that.’ ... He was like, ‘She was 16 and she already had so much energy for that.’ It’s absolutely something that you cannot fake. It’s really amazing that she always had an appetite for connecting with people on a human level, whether it’s a fan situation or in her music.”

When Swift said she was going to re-record her old albums after the rights were bought by nemesis Scooter Braun, a lot of people assumed she wouldn’t follow through, considering all the time and energy it would have required at a very busy time of her career. They were wrong:

“Part of what people love about her and also part of what people hate about her, what people find bewildering and mysterious about her — she’s willing to set these gigantic challenges for herself and live up to them, even when nobody is asking her to do things like this.”

Sheffield went to several concerts on Swift’s Eras Tour:

“I’ve seen her many times over the years in many different types of shows, but the Eras Tour was really eye-opening for me in terms of what a celebration it was, what a tribal celebration it was, what a community she brought together. ...

“Something I always love about seeing her live is that she’s doing these incredibly sad songs, these really lonely, heartbreaking songs, yet you get 60,000 people singing these songs. It’s always weird for me to hear a song like ‘My Tears Ricochet,’ which is a highlight of the Eras Tour from ‘Folklore.’ This is just the loneliest, most desolate song, a song that, when it came out, it was the quarantine, and I was listening to the song by myself on headphones. It was such an isolated experience. To be singing it out under the stars with 60,000 other rabid Swifties totally changes the experience and also that she’s tapping into these really deep, sad feelings and yet we’re sharing them in this mass catharsis — really amazing that it’s something she can do as a live performer.”

Sheffield brings tissues to Swift’s concerts — and he’s not the only one who needs them:

“I go through a lot of tissues at a Taylor Swift show. I do a lot of crying. It’s like that for me at a Stevie Nicks show or a Bruce Springsteen show: They do these sad songs and ... ‘I don’t know about you people, but I’m going to do some crying right now.’ I brought a lot of tissues for myself at the Eras Tour, and even the first night, I was like, ‘I didn’t bring enough, because everybody near me needs them.’ On the third night, when she began ‘Evermore,’ a security guard came over to me and said, ‘Hey, are you the guy with the tissues?” I said, ‘Uh, yeah.’ He said, ‘We really need some back here.’”

If you go

Who: Rob Sheffield

What: He will read from and sign his new book, “Heartbreak Is the National Anthem: How Taylor Swift Reinvented Pop Music”

When: 6 p.m. Thursday

Admission: $6 and $34 with a book

Visit: unitedtheatre.org