Scene Stealers

Taylor Swift Does Her Best Joan Holloway in New Mad Men–esque Video

It’s a return of sorts for the Nashville star.
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Taylor Swift has played the teen who likes a boy who likes another, fancier teen. She’s played a futuristic Amazonian woman off to war. She’s played some kind of zombie snake-obsessed actress in your bad dream. All brilliant roles for the songbird perched on the ledge, but now, in what is possibly the role of a lifetime, she’s playing a Mad Men–esque character that borrows the hair and clothes from Joan Holloway and the cheating from Don Draper.

The video is a collaboration with Sugarland, a duo comprising Jennifer Nettles and Kristian Bush, for their song “Babe.” Swift co-wrote it with Train’s Patrick Monahan, and lends backup vocals, too. It was originally intended for her 2012 album, Red, and will appear on Sugarland’s forthcoming album, Bigger, out Friday.

In the teaser, Swift plays a woman at the office and looks modeled after the Christina Hendricks Mad Men character, with red hair, and wearing classic Joan colors (rose boatneck top, crimson pencil skirt). But in this telling, she is not the office heroine climbing the ladder despite the social expectations of the time. She’s the other woman. See the teaser here:

Nettles plays the blonde and scorned Betty Draper back home, and actor Brandon Routh is the Don-type. Hear “Babe” below.

The song is a return to her roots in more ways than one—or, more accurately perhaps, it’s an overnight motel stop on the way back to her roots. Sugarland, are stars with classic Music City bona fides and several country music awards, plus a Grammy, between them. They reunited last year and this is their first album together on the other half of that divide. The song, too, is from a pre-1989 Swift, that is, right before she made the final leap to pop. It’s not a classic country song, and Swift’s pop instincts are front and center, but her country sensibility and famously teenage sentiments are all over it. The trailer above premiered during the CMT Music Awards in Nashville, and the full video lands June 9.