Sedona’s songs have been in my rotation for many years now. Since I’ve moved to Los Angeles I’ve been lucky enough to see her live a handful of times and her work has become the soundtrack to many of my California dreams and doings. I can confirm that in addition to being a phenomenal artist, songwriter, and performer, she is also very cool and very kind. Reading through her roundup of recommendations I was tickled to find some of our interests overlap, and to say I am excited to have her as a gold⭐️goose is an understatement.

For the uninitiated, I put together a playlist of some of my favorite Sedona tracks which you can find here (and of course I highly recommend listening to her flawless debut LP which came out last year). Also, if you’re local to LA, she’ll be performing Saturday night at Echo Park Rising (per the queen, bring lipstick) and Reverie Bookstand on Sunday evening.

Without further ado, here’s some recommendations from Sedona⭐️🪿:

Reading

Sex & Rage by Eve Babitz

Out & About

I performed in my first ever musical! My dear friend Dagger Polyester’s Paradise Motel. It was a one night only extravaganza but we’ll be back soon with more…I also love playing piano late into the night, calms my brain and whole nervous system.

May I Recommend…

Wellbutrin & weekly trips to the ocean

Screentime

Listening

Same stuff as always - Liz Phair, The Replacements, Lou Reed, The Cars

Screenshot Graveyard

I met Alex a little over two years ago in Columbus right before I moved to Cali. Thanks to the internet I’ve been able to get to know him through his beautiful writing for his newsletter Feels Like Home, where he reflects on the things he loves and the people and moments that have shaped him, from music to sports to pop culture.

Looking back through Alex’s works in prep for this newsletter, I ran back his August 2025 essay “Fear the Turtle”, which touts the importance of taking your time with creative endeavors. Reading it with fresh eyes I appreciated it even more than when he initially shared it, as of late I’ve become overwhelmed thinking about falling off the wagon with this newsletter and writing in general. I am grateful for this reminder in particular:

I gently nudge myself toward a place where it’s easier to breathe. An opening where I can remember ease is a virtue. It’s okay to take my time to say what I want to say and make what I want to make. I’ve already given myself a gift by showing up once before. It’s a miracle that I’m here, and it’s a miracle if I do it again.

Alex brings this sort of thoughtful reflection to a monthly music series in Columbus called The Album Club in collaboration with The Scatter Joy Project, a mental health nonprofit making care and resources more accessible. I highly recommend you check it out/attend if you can, and you can subscribe to Alex’s newsletter here. I am so very happy to share his recs below, so let’s get into it <333

I just finished reading Carole King’s memoir, A Natural Woman. I picked up her Tapestry vinyl a few months ago. Elizabeth took me on a record store tour for my birthday, and it’s probably the album I was most excited to find.

I found the memoir fascinating because Carole King’s contemporaries are the legends so many of our legends reach for, including James Taylor, Paul Simon, John Lennon, and Paul McCartney to name a few.

King could’ve sprinted toward superstardom, but instead chose a life with her people in the middle of nowhere in Idaho. Her career took a series of twists and turns, but she remains one of our greatest songwriters.

I got a chance to go to Lollapalooza for work. I’d never been before and didn’t know what to expect, but it made me believe that there’s maybe a reality where I could be into music festivals.

The last festival I went to was Kid Cudi’s Moon Man’s Landing in Cleveland. It was only one day, but the way my knees and back felt you would’ve thought it was a week long, no stops, and I’m 85 years old.

While our days at Lolla were pretty nonstop, I got a chance to see most of the headliners I wanted to see and a few of the acts that played before them. Lorde’s set was amazing for me because she brought out Charli xcx for “”Girl, so confusing,”“ but Charli’s set made me like her new album.

Turnstile gave me a glimmer of hope for men as a species, and I can’t believe I’m saying this, but Tate McRae fucking rips. My jaw dropped a few times. All that to say, you owe me nothing, Lollapalooza. Just a few more hours of sleep.

Consistent with straight male ideology, it’s only right I recommend a YouTube video. A sign of deep respect in our culture. With NBA superstar Russell Westbrook’s recent retirement, I present the highlights from his historic performance in 2017 against my favorite team, the Denver Nuggets.

I was living in Colorado at the time and got to attend this game in person. The Nuggets needed to win to make the playoffs. Instead, Westbrook, who would go on to win MVP at the end of the season, scored 50 points, hit a game-winning shot, AND broke a record with his 42nd triple-double of the season.

If you don’t know what any of this means, just know it was impressive. It’s like Slayyyter already having “”BEAT UP CHANEL$”“ then dropping “”brand new chanel$”“ right on top of it. We thought we were already witnessing history only for Russ to say, “”I’m not done yet.”“

Russ would join the Nuggets later in his career, and I often thought about this game and how he had the ability to make even his enemies become fans. He was undeniable, and I’m sad I won’t get to see him suit up again. But it’s been beautiful seeing the outpouring of love for Russ as he steps into this next stage of life.

My barber told me to watch Terminator 2. He said this while holding a blade to my neck, so yes whatever you say, Mr. Barber. However, I should note that he didn’t just recommend T2; he gave an impassioned plea and reenactment of the film. A performance worthy of my cooperation.

Released in the early 90s, T2 cuts no corners. It’s a perfect action film, but it’s also just a damn good movie. I had to watch it on Pluto TV over the course of several sittings because I knew Elizabeth had no interest in watching, and even then, I knew it was special.

Hoping I can go back and rewatch it again soon. Maybe I’ll also go back and watch the first Terminator movie. Not sure if I have much interest in the rest of the series, though. Man can only take so much robot.

I’ve been listening to some Disney Channel ahh tunes. Not actual Disney Channel songs, but they sound like they could’ve been the lead single of a Disney Channel Original Movie original soundtrack. The two that are top of mind for me right now are “Don’t Break Her Heart” from FLO’s new album and “Find It One Day” from Ravyn Lenae’s new album. Both songs have this early 2000s R&B feel that would’ve made the Cheetah Girls purr.

The year is 2006: a new platform called Twitter had just launched, Disney had just introduced the world to fictional pop star Hannah Montana and the East High Wildcats, and low-rise jeans were not yet a Millennial enemy but the hottest pant wear of the time.

All the while, Taylor Allison Swift is setting in motion the release of her self-titled, debut album on October 24. Preceded by singles “Tim McGraw”, “Teardrops On My Guitar” and “Our Song”, 16 year old Taylor Swift was on the precipice of the life she’d dreamed of since she was a child.

What people don’t understand about Taylor, and I am learning as I go, is that nothing was going to get in her way. Voice lessons three days a week; a role in every local play or production; singing the national anthem for the local baseball team on school nights. From the ripe age of six, Taylor knew she wanted to be a singer, and once she understood this, she did whatever it took to make it happen. She was unabashedly driven, unafraid to not only dream but to be. One guy who performed with Taylor in 2001 says she had a notebook full of her own autographs. She was bold and loud and determined—the world would always be powerless to her drive.

If you’re not as familiar (read: obsessed) with Taylor’s story as I am, it was only a few years prior to Taylor’s 2006 debut that the young, coily haired Pennsylvania pre-teen was modeling for Abercrombie and going door to door on Nashville’s Music Row, handing out karaoke demos: “Hi my name is Taylor, I’m 11 and I want a record deal.” Songs like “Here You Come Again” by Dolly Parton, “One Way Ticket” by LeAnn Rimes and “Hopelessly Devoted to You” by Olivia Newton John were included on the demo1. Surely those bright blue eyes pierced the souls of Nashville big wigs as quickly as ours, right?

Not so much. At 12 Taylor was already figuring out that being pretty and wanting it wasn’t enough. She knew she had to find a way to stand out–that’s when she started playing guitar and writing her own songs. She’d found her calling.

In 2003 Taylor’s parents, Scott and Andrea, along with her little brother Austin, moved to Nashville so Taylor could pursue a publishing and development deal with Sony’s RCA Records. At just 14 years old, Taylor was offered but declined another year of the deal, adamant she was ready to “get out there as soon as possible.”2 By this point she had written or co-written at least 200 songs, and she was tired of hearing others sing them.

When you think Tim McGraw, I hope you think of me

Before Taylor Swift dropped in October of 2006, it was the Chicks, Shania Twain, Carrie Underwood and Faith Hill blasting out of the speakers of my babysitter’s car as we drove to and from the Dollar General. Never before had I heard a country artist like Taylor: a starry-eyed teenager strumming along to songs she wrote about her life.

Early on, Taylor said her dream was to sell out stadiums and hear thousands of people singing her songs back to her. I fear she hardly knew what the repercussions of that kind of dream could have, but for better or worse, Taylor Swift was the jumping off point to a lifetime of massive success and fame.

“I never heard her say the words fame or money. It was always just about the opportunity to go sing her songs and have everybody singing those same words back to her.” – Taylor’s mom Andrea talking about the beginning of Taylor’s career in The End of an Era docuseries on Disney+

Taylor’s debut, if not for its author, could be just another run of the mill country album, albeit a pretty good one. It is not her best album nor is it revolutionary. Taylor chose the album’s producer, Nathan Chapman, a fellow rookie just out of college. He had virtually no credits, but even from the beginning what Taylor wants, Taylor gets. The music was but a conduit to the real star of the show: Taylor’s storytelling and songwriting.

Observing the top songs on the country chart from 2006, one thing that most have in common: the acts performing the songs were not usually the ones writing them. Carrie Underwood did not write “Jesus Take the Wheel”, nor did Kenny Chesney write “Don’t Blink”, or Rascal Flatts “My Wish.” Taylor exploded onto the airwaves, a 15 year old girl singing songs she wrote, supposedly about her own experiences with love, life, and country music. While it would be over a year until Taylor got her first number one, her songwriting prowess had already gotten her pretty far.

After turning down RCA, Taylor set out to find a record deal, sending out promotional packages to labels around Nashville ahead of a performance at the Bluebird Cafe, a historic venue where acts such as Garth Brooks and Faith Hill got their start. The wife of a Universal Music executive, one Scott Borchetta, had a discerning ear and found Taylor’s songs impressive–a sign that spurred his interest.3

Borchetta is credited with a certain “promotional prowess” that was responsible for launching country stars such as Toby Keith to fame.4 Borchetta wanted to see Taylor perform even before her set at the Bluebird, inviting her to his office the day before the showcase where she played “Picture to Burn,” and a light bulb clicked on: here was a young singer-songwriter with not just the vision and talent to succeed, but the unmitigated drive. At this time, the music industry was still finding its footing in the world of digital downloads, piracy, and the rise of streaming. Labels were looking for artists who could sell a lot of records. Borchetta saw Taylor’s potential, and after the showcase offered her a record deal almost immediately. Like most things that sound too good to be true, there was a catch.

Scott was taking a chance on Taylor, sure, but the risk went both ways: Scott was leaving Universal and it would take time to start his own label. The promise of writing and singing her own songs acting as her north star, Taylor agreed she could wait around for Scott to launch what would eventually be Big Machine Records. In a case of ironic foreshadowing, Scott chose the name Big Machine as a “bluff”, a sort of fake it til you make it enterprise.5 Scott was putting all his eggs in Taylor’s basket, essentially banking on her success to ensure his own.

Taylor talked glowingly about how grateful she was to Scott for taking a chance on her, how the record deal with Big Machine was the perfect deal because it was the right deal for her: it would allow her to write and record her own songs, instead of singing the work of others that didn’t speak to or represent the experiences of young women like herself. I am glad that Scott Borchetta was receptive to Taylor’s talent, as I can hardly imagine a world without her, but these memories are tainted by what lies ahead for our young, budding songstress at the hands of this ruthless agitator.

As for Taylor’s infamous performance at the Bluebird, she sang three of her own tunes: “Songs About You”, “Me and Britney” and the to-be released bonus track off her first Walmart Exclusive EP “Beautiful Eyes”. If the latter doesn’t end up on Taylor Swift (Taylor’s Version), there will be hell to pay.

Oh, what a shame

Like any other teenage girl, Taylor was beholden to another patriarchal figure: her dad, Scott, would also become a sort of tyrant in ensuring Taylor’s success. Stay as tapped into the Taylor Swift Cinematic Universe (TSCU) as I am and you’ve likely heard some interesting context that came to light about the beginnings of Taylor’s career, via a leaked email written by Scott Swift to Taylor’s then manager, Daniel Dymytrov. The former manager of Brittney Spears, Dan signed on to be Taylor’s manager in 2005. The seven page email is included as an exhibit in a lawsuit filed by Dymytrov as proof of Scott’s promises to compensate him financially upon Taylor’s success.

The email reveals an unseen version of the “excellent father” Taylor would come to laud in her songs, one almost rabid to ensure the success of his daughter’s (very early, remember) career. Some excerpts include:

“I will sell a shit load of t-shirts.”

“I am not quite the idiot that Andrea (Swift’s mother) portrays me to be.”

“You hopefully will become very wealthy with Taylor.”

The email is erratic, full of misspellings and grammatical errors and run on sentences explaining every little intricacy of Taylor’s journey and why all Taylor’s success was due not to Taylor but…to her father, Scott. Scott had the connections; Scott booked the gigs; Scott pushed Taylor’s singles to the radio stations and record labels; Scott was the one hauling rubber ducks up the Nashville river so Taylor could act as the event entertainment–I’m not making this up, it’s all straight from the horse’s mouth:

This isn’t to say it wasn’t all at Taylor’s request, her desire and drive for success demonstrated in many a video from the early days of her career. In one, she extols how important it is to “relax” and “take a day to yourself.” Which of course as a 16 year-old entails having a camera crew follow you around while you sing your latest single in a full face of makeup. In another, she says how excited she is to tour with George Strait and Ronnie Milsap to see how they have “practiced longevity.” She longed to prove herself a consummate professional from the beginning, and she remained outspoken about her vision and goals without shame or hesitation.

But beyond the determined teenager with a sharp pen, there was also a young woman literally counting down the days until she was 18 so she could be “free.”

Taylor’s dad was quick to become financially entwined, investing enough for a 3% stake in the Big Machine Records, around $500,000. Surely she had no idea that her dreams were rapidly on track to becoming the family business, which I can imagine complicates things even when you’re not the world’s biggest pop star. From the jump, Taylor’s career would become something her parents unequivocally supported both financially and figuratively (as the email lays out pretty explicitly). When Scott Borchetta eventually sold Big Machine Records to Scooter Braun in 2019, Scott’s (Swift) payout was around $15.1 million.

The familial support would oscillate between blessing and curse. That the Swift family’s wealth afforded her tremendous privilege both in the interim and the long term is unquestionable. As privileged as Taylor is, she’s always been outwardly grateful towards her fans and her family for helping her get there. Her ravenous ambition is just second nature–without the fans, she would be nothing, another relationship that would become complicated by her growing fame. The immense pressure these dynamics would create, along with the subsequent struggles, appears as a recurrent theme throughout her discography, and especially on The Tortured Poets Department.

Nonetheless, the dream was laid out in front of her: a record deal, one where she would get to write and record her own songs, maybe even a chance to play them in front of a crowd who might one day sing them back to her. However, the right to own her master recordings was not included in the fine print. But how could Taylor or her team have known how unfortunate an oversight this would prove to be when Scott Borchetta was hanging the moon?

Taylor Swift

It was “Tim McGraw”, a tale of two young lovers parting ways but forever connected by country music, that would open the first Taylor “era”. While Taylor had written hundreds of songs prior to this, it was the meta brilliance of “Tim McGraw” that started it all, both as Taylor’s first single and the opening track for her debut album.

Terribly nostalgic and on the nose, Taylor sings:

When you think Tim McGraw

I hope you think my favorite song

The one we danced to all night long

The moon like a spotlight on the lake

When you think happiness

I hope you think that little black dress

Think of my head on your chest

And my old faded blue jeans

When you think Tim McGraw

I hope you think of me

The very first track on the very first album and already Taylor is weaving a timeless tale, of scorning an ex lover by souring any and all mentions of your mutually adored artist. But, unsurprisingly, it was never just about the boy: it was about immortalizing herself, making an undeniable impact that couldn’t be forgotten.

“Tim McGraw” was Taylor’s first single, merely a sneak peek of her future marketing genius–a way to draw listeners in, then pounce on their eager for gossip ears. All to be met with the personal musings of a 16 year old girl with a whole lot to say. Released in June of 2006, Nashville radio station WSIX debuted the song on its show New Music Slam Off, where listeners can hear new songs and vote on which they like best. Programmers chose a cheeky match up of “Tim Mcgraw” and new Faith Hill single, “Sunshine and Summertime.” Supposedly Taylor beat Faith Hill’s single with 91 percent of the votes - the biggest margin of victory by any artist on the “Square Off” the prior year.

Taylor says she wrote the song in 15 minutes. Even in her very first music video, Taylor partakes in major easter egging: filming at the studio of June and Johnny Cash, one of Taylor’s earliest influences; deeming the love interest of the video after her first conveniently named crush, Johnny (you can catch his name on the letter left on his doorstep); referencing Tim Mcgraw’s first hit whose protagonist is named Johnny. It’s clear Taylor has always had a propensity for details.

This very first (released) song of Taylor’s also features a songwriting pattern that she would repeat for years to come: rounding out the end with the same or similar lyrics to the very first line. This circular songwriting, referencing her own work or words, opened the door to an entire Taylor Swift Cinematic Universe.

You said the way my blues eyes shined

Put those Georgia stars to shame that night

I said “That’s a lie”

The all important second track is “Picture To Burn”, certainly a tonal shift from the soft country ponderance of “Tim McGraw.” Opening with a quick-fire burst of drums, followed by an almost comical banjo riff, “Picture To Burn” heavily features Taylor’s thick, faux southern accent, one she would ditch for the most part post-Speak Now.

Taylor may have been part poseur as she was hardly driving a truck, baling hay or riding tractors (indeed she drove the same Lexus convertible as Regina George from Mean Girls), but she was sowing her own country seeds through her songwriting. This second track gives a glimpse of her ability to turn more miserable experiences into sonic cautionary tales, a practice that will recur throughout her discography.

“Picture To Burn” was also the fourth single off debut, complete with a music video featuring Taylor’s real life bestie, Abigail. Sitting inside a souped up Mustang, staking out a former flame’s date, Taylor and Abigail watch in disbelief as the new girl slides into the driver seat:

“He let her drive the truck? He NEVER let me drive the truck.”

“That is SO messed up,” Abigail assures from the passenger seat.

By the end of the song, Taylor and her crew have ransacked her ex’s house and committed arson–before we learn it was all just a fantasy in her head. You can catch a few of the guys from this video as part of the band that backed Taylor on the Era’s tour–proving Taylor did learn a few things about the value in longevity over the years.

Some beloved lore: the original first verse of the song actually went

So go and tell you friends I’m obsessive and crazy

That’s fine I’ll tell mine you’re gay

While you can no longer hear this version on streaming services, original copies of the CD do indeed feature “Picture to Burn” (Homophobic Version).” To me, this stands as one of the earliest pieces of gaylor proof, but that’s a post for another day.

Some gaylor lore: Taylor is pictured above with Emily Poe (now Stumler), Taylor’s fiddle player during Debut and pre-Fearless era. In a video of Taylor performing at the Whiskey a Go Go, she quips: “This is Emily over here on fiddle. Now Emily has a boyfriend, but she has agreed that what happens in LA stays there.” One r/gaylor user pointed out they wore matching, heart shaped lockets. Some gaylors speculate that Taylor and Emily were romantically involved, as Emily is heavily referenced in Taylor’s journal entries, blogs, and video diaries from that time. Young Taylor’s MySpace posts from the time are also very…interesting to say the least.

According to Emily’s LinkedIn, she worked with Taylor from July 2006 until January 2008, until she was suddenly excised from Taylor’s band and inner circle. Knowing what we do about the rampant homophobia that still exists in Nashville today, surely Scott Borchetta wasn’t thrilled to have his new potential cash cow spoiling her reputation getting caught smooching her female fiddle player backstage. I think it’s also worth noting Scott Swift was very involved in the operations of Taylor’s band, and as showcased above, very determined to get a return on his investment. Hearsay, perhaps! A hasty attempt at damage control, maybe! In 5o years will this all be declassified? We’ll have to wait and see.

Track three, “Teardrops On My Guitar”, was another lead single off Taylor’s debut and one of the first instances which would inevitably paint a caricature of Taylor as the scorned girl who will write a song about you if you break her heart. The pro of not writing your own songs? Far less speculation about their inspiration.

Taylor was forthright in the fact she was a songwriter above all, having learned the art of storytelling from artists like Patsy Cline, Bruce Springsteen and Carole King. Taylor is hardly the first to write about yearning–however that she was a teenager writing about her personal experiences and sharing for all the world to hear made me think twice about what sharing my own words and experiences could mean.

A pop crossover version of “Teardrops on My Guitar” peaked at number 13 (Taylor’s lucky number) on the Billboard Hot 100–a pretty impressive debut for a 17 year old girl with no prior releases.

While there’s been much (probably too much) to do about the overuse of the “I’m just a girl” trope, when Taylor wrote the fourth song off debut, “A Place In This World”, she really was just a girl, at 13 years old. So was I, so were a lot of her listeners, and the music that industry executives thought was enticing to us as girls really just wasn’t, especially in the country genre.

At the time, country music spoke to working class Americans dealing with the fallout of the present—similar to the hyper patriotic, misogynistic bullshit that still permeates the genre today. By this time, the Chicks were still trying to bounce back after years of being blacklisted from country radio for loudly opposing Bush’s agenda in the Middle East, and the stories of young women within many genres were tapering off. The youngest women to hit the country charts in 2006 were the Chicks themselves, The Wreckers, and Miranda Lambert, all in their early to mid-20s. Country needed Taylor and she delivered.

[...] the lesson of the Dixie Chicks’ forced exile after Natalie Maines’ comment against then-President George W. Bush had branded itself onto her brain at an earlier age, when she’d just planted her young-teen flag in Nashville and overheard a lot of the lamentations of older Music Row songwriters about how the Chicks had thrown it all away.

“I saw how one comment ended such a powerful reign, and it terrified me,” says Swift. “These days, with social media, people can be so mad about something one day and then forget what they were mad about a couple weeks later. That’s fake outrage. But what happened to the Dixie Chicks was real outrage. I registered it — that you’re always one comment away from being done being able to make music.” – Variety, 2020

“A Place In This World” is also just a great country song–the opening thrum of the acoustic guitar followed up by a steady harmony of acoustic and electric throughout; the pedal steel, mandolin and fiddles set the scene as Taylor narrates navigating a world on her own, imploring that although we aren’t sure what tomorrow holds, we better be ready for it when it comes.

In the 2020 documentary Miss Americana Taylor reads an excerpt from an old diary dated May 19, 2003, the same year she wrote “A Place In This World”:

“Oh I tried to practice my songs but I completely psyched myself out and burst out crying. I don’t know if I can do this, I want it so bad but I get so scared of what might happen. Relax, I can handle it. I’m young, I’m talented, they’ll see it in me. I’ve got to hang on.”

Taylor may not have known what was next, but she was wise enough to keep going to get there, an important sentiment for young women to hear. Taylor started off unsure of where she belonged, but her eventual success makes listening to “A Place In This World” almost serendipitous. I am really looking forward to hearing the Taylor’s Version, which will certainly make me blubber like a baby.

The original track 5

Up next, the original track five: ”Cold As You.” What deems track five worthy of specific mention, you may ask? Let me fill you in.

On all Taylor’s subsequent albums, the five slot is exclusively reserved for those songs which sting the most—the ones that describe most candidly Taylor’s vulnerability, anger, hurt, disillusionment, heartbreak or all of the above. “Cold As You” is the inaugural track five, and for good reason.

Starting low and slow, Taylor opens the song by describing the already doomed relationship in four lines, as a pedal steel wanes in the background like sad sonic foreshadowing:

You have a way of coming easily to me

And when you take you take the very best of me

So I start a fight cus I need to feel something

And you do what you want, cus I’m not what you wanted

In the chorus Taylor is distraught over what could be, using literary devices like similes and metaphors to describe how she’s feeling:

Oh what a shame

What a rainy ending given to a perfect day

Just walk away

Ain’t no use defending words that you will never say

Now that I’m sitting here thinking it through

I’ve never been anywhere cold as you

This is one of Taylor’s more poetic songs, and one of the first instances we see her using color as a means of expressing emotion, ala Blue by Joni Mitchell:

You put up walls and paint them all a shade of gray

And I stood there loving you and wished them all away

And you come away with a great little story

Of a mess of a dreamer with the nerve to adore you

OWWIE. If you can believe it, she actually keeps going, through another chorus, a bridge, and finally, just when you think she’s exhausted all that’s been said, she delivers one last gut punch to round out the closing chorus:

Oh what a shame

What a rainy ending given to a perfect day

Every smile you fake is so condescending, counting all the scars you made

As if it weren’t bad enough that this muse never actually cared, that they wouldn’t even care if she DIED for them, they’re fucking fake and patronizing also!! From square one Taylor was unafraid to lay it all out on the table and track five is where she’d do it. On “Cold As You” she put her whole chest into the lyrics and the vocals, by the end straining to get out every last drop of vitriol and sorrow she housed into the music. As a wee pre-teen, I was certain: this is what heartbreak sounds like.

I was fortunate enough to go to the Era’s Tour not once but twice. I feel some ire over Taylor’s decision to keep debut off the official setlist—how can it be the era’s tour without the original era?! I thought surely out of 150+ shows, of the two I went to there was no chance she’d play a debut track during the surprise set. But lo and behold, at Indianapolis night 2, Taylor took to the piano and started playing “Cold As You” (mashed up with “Exile” no less, I think she was trying to kill me). I was truly floored and couldn’t believe my luck. It’s moments like these that define her as a performer and a pop star—the ability to make a nobody like me feel like it’s only us two in a sea of tens of thousands of people, making dreams a reality.

Next on the track list is “The Outside”, a song Taylor wrote when she was 12. Journalist Rob Sheffield credits this song as Taylor’s break into the mainstream as it was chosen as a feature for a Maybelline mixtape gift with purchase titled Chicks with Attitude, an early product of Tay-capitalism. I find this an ironic observation considering “The Outside” is the first track where we can see the cracks in Taylor’s psyche begin to show as she grapples with a choice between success or authenticity:

I tried to take the road less traveled by

But nothing seemed to work the first few times

Am I right?

“Tied Together With A Smile” shows yet another side as Taylor narrates a tale as old as time: what happens when you’ve been smiling on the outside but dying on the inside and too afraid to ask for help. While Taylor deemed her music autobiographical, it included side characters of various people throughout her life. “Tied Together With A Smile” shows Taylor subverting expectations around narrative storytelling often used in country music, seemingly crafting a story to explain the feelings she or her friends are having to make her point rather than exposing the literal story. For example, she talks of a he/him in verse two, but I don’t necessarily believe it’s a romantic muse. While a lot of her lyrics stem from personal experience, those of her peers were of equal importance.

From even her early teens Taylor is clearly ahead of the curve, not just in practice and talent, but emotionally, exhibiting a keen understanding of the dynamics of complicated relationships–what some (including Taylor herself) would call a “precocious” child. The second verse of “Tied Together With A Smile” showcases Taylor’s empathy better than any other song on debut:

I guess it’s true that love was all you wanted

Cus you’re giving it away like it’s extra change

Hoping it will end up in his pocket

But he leaves you out like a penny in the rain

Oh, cus it’s not his price to pay

The repercussions of this kind of emotional turmoil will become another recurring theme in Taylor’s work.

In a sort of emotional whiplash, the latter half of the album turns lighthearted and another pattern begins to emerge:

Corey’s eyes are like a jungle

When he smiles it’s like the radio

One guy’s name, fine. Two and one of them is famous? FINE. But THREE?? Feels like a bit of overcompensating for something if you ask me. However, “Stay Beautiful” is an early indicator of what’s important to Taylor as a person: someone to come home to when things are good or bad, something she will increasingly yearn for in years to come, or appears to as far as her lyrics are concerned.

As a self-proclaimed country girly, I felt pride and power in the opening banjo riff of “Should’ve Said No.” These days with Jack Antonoff often in the passenger seat of Taylor’s studio time, I long for a Taylor track with such aggressive percussion as some of the songs off debut. “Should’ve Said No” really has it all: fiddles, a key change into the minor on the bridge, the righteous indignation that only a scorned 17 year old can muster, doubling down in the bridge just because she can:

I can’t resist

Before you go tell me this

Was it worth it? Was she worth it?

It’s worth noting that Taylor once quipped this is a song about “choices.” Purportedly written in 20 minutes, she was clearly not pondering what she could have done differently, but putting the onus on her muse for doing the wrong thing and demanding they sit with the consequences of those choices.

Sitting mid album, this banger should absolutely have closed out the entire spectacle. In 2008 Taylor took to the Academy Of Country Music Awards stage to perform the song live. She starts out alone, just her and her guitar, slouching on a stool in a black hoodie and jeans, angrily strumming through the first verse. By the end of the chorus before our very eyes she is transformed into pop star Taylor as dancers approach and rip her baggy clothes off from either side to expose a (very modest, knee length) halter dress, ballet flats and her signature blond coils. Boy did she rock that shit, ending the entire performance singing beneath a sheath of onstage rainfall. She ended the Fearless Tour with the same schtick every night. I ate it up.

Early on Taylor expressed a love for female country musicians including Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn, Dolly Parton and Tammy Wynette, citing their storytelling as the main draw.6 If Taylor Swift was a test, the next song would earn her an A+ as a bonafide country fan.

Taylor wrote “Mary’s Song (Oh My My My)” about her childhood neighbors, who came over for dinner one night and told the story of their love that bloomed over a lifetime. I would sing this one over and over as a kid, the simple chord progression (D, A, Em, G) ingrained in my fingers along with calluses from hours of playing.

Almost this whole album can be played with about five or six chords: D, A, E, Em, C, G, maybe an F or a Bm here or there. It was perfect for sixth grade me learning to play guitar, my first of which was a black Esteban with mother of pearl detail. I remember the day I got it at a garage sale. Surely I spotted it as soon as we walked up the drive, my babysitter Jo and I being professional garage sale scopers at the time. I wish I could remember the person we got it from, but I do recall they generously offered to hold it for me while we ran to the ATM to get 50 bucks.

Jo’s cousin Sammy, who lived down the street (everywhere was down the street) was well-versed in the art of guitar upkeep and agreed to change its strings for me, get it in tune so I could play it. I was usually too embarrassed to sing, but sometimes we’d go over there and I’d play them a song I’d recently learned by Googling the chords, or sometimes by ear if it was Taylor. We’d sit in their back room, wall to wall windows facing out into his vast forest of a backyard, sweet tea shaking in a sweaty glass as I aggressively strummed through whatever the flavor of the week was. Usually Taylor, but sometimes Brooks and Dunn or Keith Urban. “Mary’s Song (Oh My My My)” likely made the list a time or two.

If you’ve heard a Taylor Swift song, there’s a good chance it’s the next one off debut: “Our Song” lives on in infamy in the Taylor Swift Cinematic Universe. “Our Song” could be just any other country song really—but it’s set apart by the brilliant way Taylor uses metaphor to describe her and her muse’s “song”: the sounds of their everyday dalliances, sneaking out late, wincing at the sound of the slamming screen door, extra carefully tapping on their window, hoping your mom doesn’t hear you whispering on the phone in the late hours of the night—all this makes up the soundtrack of us. Asking God could he play it again, those sacred sounds of a mischievous rendezvous’ and all its regrets and wishes.

In a rare sit down with Taylor from the New York Times, she talks about her songwriting process and some new lore about “Our Song” comes up. She confirms that the line “When you’re on the phone and you talk real slow” was originally written as “you talk real low” but she changed it because she doesn’t like when a word ends with the same letter that the next word starts with.

On this track, we catch another instance of the Taylor songwriting device where she closes the song with the same or similar lyrics that open the song. In this case she wraps up the story with a nice little bow while also employing a pseudo tradition of country music, revealing that it was her own story she was singing about all along:

I was riding shotgun with my hair undone in the front seat of his car

I grabbed a pen and an old napkin and I wrote down our song

What is more indicative of the fleeting but thrilling phenomena of young love than how capturing it is as arbitrary as experiencing it? A year after its release, “Our Song” earned Taylor her first country number one and made then 17-year-old Taylor the youngest person to single-handedly write and sing a number one single on the Billboard Hot Country Songs.

The “Our Song” video is still one of my favorites, as indicated by my eighth grade halloween costume. It opens with Taylor talking on the phone, painting her nails, and drawing hearts on the mirror in lipstick–you know everyday teenage girl things! Taylor still loves to paint her own nails, and while she’s of course changed in many ways, it’s sweet to see the ways that she really hasn’t over the years.

Next is a track that was near and dear to my younger self, “I’m Only Me When I’m With You.” I can vividly recall listening to this as I walked down the backroads of Petersburg, can practically smell the fresh cut grass and feel the burning asphalt underneath my Old Navy flip flops as it blared into my virgin eardrums.

The title pretty much sums up the concept—of having a person so dear who you can really, truly be yourself around. It was an ideal I really clung to, that I found so special, having a person to feel that way about. At the time I felt it was my sister Kelsey who is five years older than me. When Kelsey graduated high school I concocted my own version of the song, with lyrics specific to Kelsey and I, which I was seriously considering hijacking her graduation party to sing! Actually! Thank God I did not–but it is an early anecdote of my reverence for words and music and the power they held together.

The music video is more like a home VHS tape, consisting of behind the scenes footage of Taylor on the road with various legacy country acts, including Tim McGraw and Faith Hill, George Strait, and Rodney Atkins. Likely shot on her personal camcorder, it’s a relic of the past, capturing the excitement of that period in her life: touring for the first time, winning ACM awards, and getting to travel the country with her band and family.

The second to last track, an interesting choice, is “Invisible”, one of the more ballad-esque songs and the only one with a piano carrying the melody. It also features a really great pedal steel from Dan Dugmore who played on many a country record of the early aughts including Garth Brooks, Keith Urban and Reba. Superficially Taylor sings about the devastating loss of what could be, but the subtext of the song reads much sadder to me than just a girl who can’t grab her crush’s attention:

You just see right through me

But if you only knew me

We could be a beautiful miracle

Unbelievable, instead of just invisible

Taylor’s been quoted as saying something along the lines of “I’m intimidated by the fear of being average” and it shows. Even early on the part of her that needs to be chosen, above everything else, seems to be the driving factor in a lot of what she does. Superficially, “Invisible” may be the “dirty macking” song that predates the historic “You Belong With Me” (my friend Alex wrote an incredible essay on this very topic), but at the core of this subgroup of Taylor songs is a young girl longing to be seen and heard.

Finally rounding out the 14 song LP is “A Perfectly Good Heart”, a somewhat disheartening close to an album full of songs drafted in glitter gel pen and littered with doodles of hearts and stars. Posing the subject of the song with a bevy of rhetorical questions, Taylor sings:

Why would you wanna break a perfectly good heart?

Why would you wanna take our love and tear it all apart?

Why would you wanna make the very first scar?

Why would you wanna break a perfectly good heart?

In the second verse, already overwhelmed by a rhetorically laden first verse, Taylor ponders what would have happened if she’d read the signs, as if it’s her fault. I, too, often looked for the things I’d done wrong or wished I had done differently. Til the last song, Taylor’s debut transmutes the common experiences of young women into accessible, mainstream country music.

All in all, Taylor Swift is a strong debut from the would-be pop princess. Debut’s standing in the current Taylor Swift discourse is quite neutral–some people love it, most people don’t really care about anything that came before RED or reputation. I find it a bit curious and sad that amongst the 45 songs that made up the massive setlist for the Era’s Tour, not one from debut was given a standing slot. I am but a peon in the TSCU, but I have to imagine there is a subset of fans just as upset as me at this snub. If you’re asking my official opinion, less songs from RED to make room for “Our Song” or “Teardrops On My Guitar” would have served the show just fine.

Beautiful Eyes and Unreleased Tracks

While Taylor was working on her second record, Fearless, she received lots of messages from fans asking for new music in the interim–this manifested in the Beautiful Eyes EP, released on July 15, 2008, through Big Machine Records exclusively to Walmart. The two disc EP (one CD and one DVD) featured a bevy of bonus content, including varying versions of songs from her debut, music videos, awards show performances, and most notably, two new songs: the eponymous “Beautiful Eyes” and “I Heart ?” the latter of which she wrote in 2003.

I wouldn’t be surprised if she whipped up “Beautiful Eyes” in a matter of minutes. It’s not what you would call profound, but it does house that specific 2008 country nostalgia that makes me wish I was sitting on the couch in my childhood home watching CMT videos.

“I Heart ?” elicits similar feelings, if only because Taylor’s faux country accent is out in full force. It has the audacity and scorn of “Should’ve Said No” but the playfulness of “Our Song.”

Wake up and smell the break up,

Fix my heart, put on my make-up,

Another mess I didn’t plan.

And I’ll bet you thought you beat me,

Wish you could only see,

I got an “I Heart ?”

Written on the back of my hand

Notably, Taylor Swift is one of two re-records she has yet to release, the other being 2017’s reputation—a very poetic end to the end to the whole “Taylor’s Version” saga, as all she has left to claim is her name and her reputation. As far as we know, Taylor’s Version of debut is finished—now we just wait for the inevitable drop, perhaps this upcoming October on the record’s 20th anniversary.

What can we expect from the debut vault tracks? I am really hoping for recordings of “Beautiful Eyes” and “I Heart ?”, and maybe unreleased songs like “I’d Lie”, “Permanent Marker”, and “Dark Blue Tennessee.”

“I’d Lie” is another track that’s near and dear to me. A companion to both “Our Song” and “Teardrops On My Guitar,” it’s a wonder this banger didn’t make it onto the final cut of the album. I remember belting it in the car, Ohio sun beating in through the open windows as the miles passed, feeling so seen by every lyric down to the details and dates:

And I could tell you

His favorite color’s green

He loves to argue

Born on the seventeenth

His sister’s beautiful

He has his father’s eyes

And if you ask me if I love him

I’d lie

A Good Girl

Another notable unreleased track is “Thinking ‘Bout You”, which Taylor recorded with Chely Wright in 2006. Some context around Chely: she’s a country artist from Kansas City, Missouri who remained a closeted lesbian for the majority of her career, an experience so emotionally harrowing it almost caused her to take her own life, according to her memoir Like Me (as in...a cowboy like me? That’s a ways away I won’t get ahead of myself).

“Thinking ‘Bout You”, which Chely and Taylor wrote together, features the following lyrics:

Now I can’t walk straight

can’t talk straight

I can’t think about anything but the way

it should be and it could be

Since coming out, Chely has been outspoken regarding the dangers of closeting and condemning the rampant homophobia that plagues not just country music but Hollywood. When she and Taylor collaborated, there were literally no country artists out of the closet: Chely is credited as the first out country music singer, and to this day she’s a staunch opponent of the inhumane pressures of closeting within the entertainment industry.

At a book signing in 2010, Chely mentioned in order to change the status quo, someone at the very top needed to be the one to do it:

[...] Imagine a blender. People get into it and the hiding just spits them out and you don’t survive. You can’t stay in it but the machine stays fully intact. It’s unforgiving and it kills people, spiritually and oftentimes physically…

[...] People get kicked out of that blender and that machine just.. it’s gonna keep going. And it’s gonna keep going until somebody who has something to lose stands up and just says ‘I’m gay.’ Somebody big.

I’m not going to argue for why I think Taylor is gay or why or why she should come out of the closet (I have already done that). However, I will say if Chely revealed any of her experiences to Taylor at the time, it is unsurprising that Taylor’s ambition (which is vast), people pleasing tendencies (which are deep-seeded), and general sense of self-preservation would lead her to lean into the boy centric narrative that served her from the beginning. Taylor herself has acknowledged the toxicity that comes with trying to make it in the country music machine, stigmas that inevitably bleed into the rest of the music industry. In Miss Americana, she reflected on the attitudes of the time:

“Part of the fabric of being a country artist is don’t force your politics on people. Let people live their lives. That is grilled into us.”

Is it a coincidence that a lot of Chely’s words seem to align with themes of Taylor’s future music? I will address these as they arise in each subsequent era.

Personally, despite being a perpetual girl kisser (I was smooching all my girl friends as a kid–my therapist says this is normal who would have thought!!) I had never considered myself gay. Had someone like Taylor, or anyone around my age who wasn’t on Glee, been openly gay I may have reconsidered a lot earlier. However I know we are all on our own journeys…or if you were me, attempting to mimic Taylor’s journey as closely as possible. Real or not, it was a good time for the most part and the tunes were great.

A place in this world

Whatever Taylor’s relationship with it, Taylor Swift spawned the foundation for a lifetime of achievement. After its release, Taylor would head out on tour with big name country artists of the time such as Rascal Flatts, George Strait, Brad Paisley, Tim McGraw and Faith Hill. She often took to MySpace to document her tour travels and general disbelief at the life unfolding around her:

Pretty sure George Strait SAID MY NAME. Me and Emily (my fiddle player) and Megan (she travels with us and is 23 and handles basically everything) were watching George’s show.. and all of a sudden he says “I’m very happy to have the talented Miss Taylor Swift out here with us”. YESSSSS. It was pretty awesome, sort of a life changing moment. ha. So life on the road is awesome.

Whether or not Taylor knew what kind of fame waited for her, no one can say for sure. But what is certain is the throngs of screaming girls (and guys!) waiting to get a photo or autograph from the young singer-songwriter after every show held promise for the days ahead.

Even early on, Taylor was not one to leave the fate of her potential in the hands of others: social media was her way of taking the reins in building a following that could ensure her success. Not only was she keeping fans abreast of her everyday schedule, she was promoting the album, linking to her website for pre-orders and encouraging the fans to call into radio stations and ask them to play her songs. There were all these young people, and especially young women, like me, hungry for someone like Taylor to take over the airwaves. She appealed directly to the masses, and it slowly started to work.

It wasn’t an overnight success: Taylor Swift sold about 43,000 copies its first week. A little over a year later, it jumped to 187,000 copies, number 8 on the Billboard 200 and to date has sold over 7 million copies worldwide.

And the awards! Taylor would be nominated for dozens of awards after the release of her first album, including Best Female Performer, New Female Vocalist, and Album of the Year at the Academy of Country Music Awards; Best New Artist at the Grammys; and several BMI country and CMT Music awards.

She also won the Country Music Association’s Horizon Award, which designates an artist who has “truly arrived in country music.” Already Taylor sat among the ranks of heroes, like The Chicks and LeAnn Rimes. Already everyone understood the potential of this remarkable young woman with a lot to say, and who was ready to do whatever it took to make sure everyone heard her.

That’s it! Another chapter of the Taylor saga is complete. If you’d like to read more about the TSCU going mainstream with Taylor’s 2008 iconic release, and my favorite Taylor album, Fearless, I’ve linked the posts for the available chapters of my Taylor series The Monster On The Hill below <3

If you’re also in your cowgirl bag this summer, here’s a playlist I enjoyed bumping while working on this chapter and in the car when I’m feeling a little homesick <3

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By 2014, Taylor was well on her way to household name status: four-time multiplatinum-album-maker, seven-time Grammy winner and “billion-time gossip-blog subject,” Taylor knew it was time to leave her country roots behind and forge a new legacy in pop music. The success of RED’s breakout dance pop hit “I Knew You Were Trouble”, which spent seven weeks at number one on the pop charts, proved she was capable of reaching heights Nashville couldn’t offer.

Live from the top of the world at the Empire State Building, clad in a two piece skirt set and red lip that would come to define her style during the era, Taylor cheekily greeted viewers with a “Welcome to New York.” Taylor expressed not just a desire to experiment with a new style of music, but a need, one that would result in a musical rebirth via a new album titled 1989.

1989 was more than just a genre switch—it was a refresh of her entire brand, from country bumpkin to city slicker, from girl with the guitar to woman with a sharp pen. As Rob Sheffield pointed out: “She could milk the country pop rock mix that so many artists had spent worthy careers trying to reach”.1 But to grow as an artist and reach the level of success she yearned for, Taylor felt there was no choice but to try something new.

With my last album ‘RED,’ I kind of had one foot in pop and one foot in country, and that’s really no way to walk and get anywhere. If you want to continue to evolve, I think eventually you have to pick a lane, and I just picked the one that felt more natural to me at this point in my life.2

1989 appeared to Taylor in the night like a sleep paralysis demon. It was the 2014 Grammy’s, and Taylor was up for the biggest award of the night, album of the year, for her seminal 2012 album RED. Sitting in the front row, Taylor waited with bated breath as they announced the winner: “Rrrrr…andom Access Memories.” Not, “Rrrrr…ed.” It was an immediate wake up call:

You have a few options when you don’t win an award: you can decide they’re all wrong, they all voted wrong. Second you can go up and take the mike from whoever did win it3, or third you can say, “Maybe they’re right, maybe I did not make the record of my career. Maybe I need to fix the problem, which is that I have not been making sonically cohesive albums.’ So I went to bed and I woke up at 4 in the morning and was like “It’s called 1989, I’ve been making 80s synth pop. I’m just going to do that. I’m calling it a pop record. I am not listening to anyone at my record label. I’m starting tomorrow.

Citing the 80’s as a golden decade she’d missed, being born at its very end (December 13, 1989), Taylor aimed to emulate the artists of the time who had abandoned convention in favor of making something new:

People realized songs didn’t have to be this standard drums-guitar-bass-whatever. People were just wearing whatever crazy colors they wanted to because why not? There just seemed to be this energy about endless opportunities, endless possibilities, endless ways you could live your life.4

Kevin Evers posits that the late 80’s was a perfect era for her to emulate, a decade “strongly characterized by an overwhelming earnestness and utter lack of ironic detachment, topped off with a glossy dollop of high drama”.5 It was not solely about the synth—it was the attitude, one that matched Taylor’s disposition at the time. Fight fire with fire, as they say. Taylor was not just stoking the flames, she was dumping gasoline on the whole facade. Taylor understood what would sell albums, sonically and narratively, and if that’s what the public wanted, that’s what they’d get.

The album’s inspiration stems from some of her favorite acts from the decade of her birth, such as Phil Collins, Annie Lennox and “Like a Prayer”-era Madonna—signaling to the world she was no longer a country darling but an eager student of the pop universe.

And in true capital TS fashion, Taylor was studying. She brought back pop powerhouses Max Martin and Shellback to produce. She started working with Ryan Tedder (OneRepublic, Adele), and her now longtime collaborator, pop savant Jack Antonoff of Bleachers and Fun!, who brought the stylings of synth-pop progenitor Vince Clarke, a frequent partner of popular new wave bands like Depeche Mode, Erasure and Yaz.6 Taylor was doing her homework and vying for an A.

Her label was grading on a different curve, however: upon hearing the finished album, Big Machine CEO Scott Borchetta lauded the album, saying it was her best yet…but could she give him just 3 country songs? But Taylor was done toeing the line: the time for her pop metamorphosis was now or never.

Because she was also anxious, already aware of the inevitably of irrelevance women in pop music have always faced. In 2019’s Miss Americana, Taylor laid out her feelings explicitly:

The female artists that I know of have reinvented themselves twenty times more than the male artist…Be new to us, be young to us, but only in a new way and only in a way we want and reinvent yourself but only in a way that we find to be equally comforting but also a challenge for you. Live out a narrative that we find to be interesting enough to entertain us, but not so crazy that it makes us uncomfortable.

It wasn’t that Taylor wanted to morph herself—she was conditioned to chase acclaim, molded by the high of applause yet unable to believe that she deserved any of what she’d rightfully earned. The more success she achieved, the blurrier the lines of reality became–not only what others believed about her, but how these misconceptions shaped what she believed about herself. She was just 24 years old while writing 1989, at the peak of her career up to that point, and even then she felt as though it could all slip through her fingers at the drop of a hat.

“My fears circle around me making the wrong choices and messing this up for myself.”7

Honey Life Is Just A Classroom

I was a high school senior at the time and like every other Taylor release, I was stoked. After a brief swiftie lull during the RED album cycle, I was ready to sink my teeth into another Taylor album with abandon. Finally old enough to experience the kind of emotional turmoil that Taylor sang about in her songs, but of course still young enough to believe that the world revolved around boys, I was eager for her wisdom as I navigated the confusion and devastation that often accompanies high school relationships.

There was a guy who I’d had a crush on for years that I’d befriended and eventually made a move on. This would go on to be a tumultuous, on and off thing for years to come. Then there was the kid I’d known since kindergarten, who I’d “dated” back in sixth grade and tried to relate Taylor songs to even then. As Taylor put it, I was very convinced we’d never go out of style, and our never ending will-they-won’t-they was a narrative I was more than happy to stoke the flames of. Throughout my coming of age, Taylor’s songs would be there not only to comfort me, but chide on my bad behavior in some instances. I was constantly finding wonderland, or so I liked to think.

Taylor was stoking the flames of some of her own stories. After years of speculation regarding her dating life and relationships, 1989 saw Taylor begin to push back on the idea that she was only writing songs about boys. At surface level she used her songwriting prowess to placate those who still enjoyed that part of her work, but one need not look far below the he’s and him’s to know that Taylor was driven not by boys but by success.

Taylor found from the beginning of her career that writing songs supposedly airing out her dirty laundry was, for lack of a better term, a good bit. What started as a way to draw people in became the single thing that a majority of listeners clung to. Ever the pathological people pleaser8, in order to keep the applause coming and the records selling, she continued to use this formula to garner the kind of success that represented not only praise but “love.”

So the boy crazy narrative continued to stick, even as in interview after interview, Taylor remained politely dismissive of questions regarding her personal, especially dating, life. And still the press and the fans and the peanut gallery pressed: who are the songs about? Give us more—more of you, more of your life, more of everything. But what if she didn’t want to? How could she fight back when no one would listen to her? If people wouldn’t listen to her words, she at least could make them listen to her songs, and she surely would.

I feel like watching my dating life has become a bit of a national pastime…and I’m just not comfortable providing that kind of entertainment anymore. I don’t like seeing slide shows of guys I’ve apparently dated. I don’t like giving comedians the opportunity to make jokes about me at awards shows. I don’t like it when headlines read ‘Careful, Bro, She’ll Write a Song About You,’ because it trivializes my work.– Taylor talking with Rolling Stone in 2014

Taylor was ready to join the big dogs, and she knew pop-country crossovers wouldn’t get the job done. Gleeful, brass heavy, unabashed pop had to do the trick, right? Looking back on the Billboard 2014 year-end chart, it seemed like a safe bet.

The 1989 Secret Sessions

To promote the album, Taylor planned something truly unique: at her various massive dwellings in New York, Los Angeles, and London, Taylor and her team hand picked 89 fans to listen to the album with Taylor before its release—she called it the 1989 Secret Sessions. Prior to the event, fans were given no context to what could possibly ensue, just that it was an exclusive event put on by Taylor Nation, the newly formed official Taylor fan club. It wasn’t until Taylor walked in, carrying a tray of freshly homemade cookies, that it became clear what exactly they were in for.

“I decided that I wanted to play this entire album for the fans long before it came out. I wanted it to be this whole secret society gathering in living rooms. And so I decided to have them in my houses.”

Each fan got to talk with Taylor, commemorating the once in a lifetime moment with polaroid photos, perfectly in sync with the album’s release aesthetic. To this day I seethe with envy of everyone who got to sit on Taylor’s living room floor, eat her food and tell her how much they love her. Forget hearing the new album—I want to see what her guest bath looks like! She’d continue the tradition for two more album cycles, stopping after the release of Lover likely for public health reasons but also because she had set yet another unrealistic standard amongst her fans: access to her literal home, her inner sanctuary, her personal space and life. While it was a great way to build an even more solid bond with her fans, I can imagine it built a whole new set of expectations for those who weren’t part of the chosen few—ones she would never be able to live up to, as hard as she tried.

1989

The album starts off with “Welcome To New York”, a corny, ambiguous yet earnest tribute to the Big Apple. High pitched, analog keyboard synths (created with the Juno 106) so unlike any other Taylor song create an immediate and clear delineation from the country pop she’d become synonymous with, instantly transporting listeners to the decade of the album’s namesake. Just before the chorus there’s a delicious beat drop, followed by an uninhibited and giddy chorus:

It’s a new soundtrack

I could dance to this beat forevermore

The lights are so bright

But they never blind me

Welcome to New York

It’s been waiting for you

The original era was very largely associated with New York City, and on this song she’s hard launching not just new sonic forays but a new Taylor. Walking out the front door every day in New York, there’s so much potential, a sense of wonder at the possibility that anything could happen. “Welcome To New York” is the sonic equivalent of this sensation. In the second verse she sings:

When we first dropped our bags on apartment floors

Took our broken hearts, put them in a drawer

Everybody here was someone else before

And you can want who you want

Boys and boys and girls and girls

Considering I was in the throes of my boy obsession, I didn’t read this as anything more than loud allyship after years in the homophobic sphere of country music, and it made me all the happier to support Taylor. And maybe it was! Some gaylor’s like to joke this was Taylor’s soft coming out that the majority of listeners decided to ignore.

The all important second track is “Blank Space”, one of Taylor’s most iconic songs, a chart topping mammoth that’s held pop music in its clutches for years. Using hyperbole and satire to poke fun at the public’s perception of her “dating life,” Taylor wrote the song from the perspective of the woman the media had pigeonholed her as; one who “jet sets around the world collecting men and she can get any of them but she’s clingy that they leave and she cries and she gets another one in her web and she traps them and locks them in her mansion and then she’s crying in her marble bathtub surrounded by pearls.”

So it’s gonna be forever

Or it’s gonna go down in flames

You can tell me when it’s over

If the high was worth the pain

Got a long list of ex lovers

They’ll tell you I’m insane

But I’ve got a blank space baby

And I’ll write your name

Subverting societal expectations, she wrote a song so explicitly over the top about the way she is perceived that surely everyone couldn’t miss the point, right? RIGHT??

The corresponding music video is one of her best: beautifully shot, funny, campy as hell. We want drama? She gave us drama, and more. The start of a years long working relationship with Joseph Kahn, there’s screaming, crying, perfect storms, beautiful gowns, dapper men, all in a never ending rotation continually ruined at the behest of a psychotic woman.

She’s basically hitting us over the head with a golf club shaped point and yet some people took it as her finding another way to “victimize” herself rather than witty commentary on our collective inability to see a successful woman as anything other than obsessed with securing a man. She would continue to drop similarly explicit references throughout her music, videos, poetry and more, especially in her last few albums, disdaining the notion that all she cared about was finding a man rather than building a legacy that would last. Many, including many of her fans, would continue to ignore those messages, instead favoring their own preferred version of her.

Taylor came up with the concept and melody and showed it to Max and Shellback during a writing session, where the trio created its instantly recognizable opening with a Mellotron. Widely considered the world’s first analog sampler, the Mellotron is featured on innumerable iconic records including the Beatles’ “Strawberry Fields Forever,” David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” and “Wonderwall” by Oasis. It feels apt that “Blank Space” would join these ranks, as it’s one of Taylor’s most massive commercial and cultural hits. It boasts over 2.4 billion streams on Spotify and 3.4+ billion views on YouTube; it spent 7 weeks at number one on the Billboard Hot 100, making her the first woman in U.S. history to knock herself out of the number one spot (replacing “Shake It Off”).

I feel like it’s hard to overstate the grip that 1989 had on culture at the time of its release. One example is a 2015 Father John Misty cover of “Blank Space” in the style of the Velvet Underground. Tom Breiham at Stereogum notes it basically entails Misty reciting the lyrics while his band plays the “I’m Waiting For The Man” instrumental for six minutes, the result being “almost unlistenable.” He is not wrong, but it is good for a laugh, and any digs at Ryan Adams’ expense (who recorded an entire cover album of 1989) are a-ok with me.

Up next is one of my all-time favorite Taylor songs, and another of the wildly popular singles off 1989, “Style.” “Style” has an undeniably catchy guitar riff that is tailor made for strutting down a long catwalk with 10 of your closest friends, including models, members of the U.S. women’s soccer team, and Lena Dunham. It’s also perfect for late night drives home, when all you can think about is that one person you just can’t seem to ditch.

I think no matter how old I am I will always find a way to listen to this song personally, one of many reasons why it’s a spectacular pop song. One that doesn’t get brought up as much: the gratifying way her singing aligns with the rhythm, otherwise known as prosody. Especially that line that leads into the chorus–how she sings “You got that” to align with the boom-kat of the drums and synths is the perfect set up for a chorus of her singing right along to the beat. You can almost hear her smirk as she sings “I should just tell you to leave, cus I know exactly where it leads but I watch us go round and round each time,” the melody looping back around to that irresistible chorus, trapping listeners into the very tumult she’s so adamant she should avoid.

The music video has all this beautiful imagery revolving around shattered glass, portraying Taylor’s features in shards alongside those of a handsome model-esque man. It was all too perfect that Taylor was rumored to be seeing Harry Styles of One Direction shortly before the album’s release. It was certainly a compelling and convenient narrative.

Next up is the fruit of what would become a decade plus long working relationship. “Out Of The Woods” begins with the echoing “oh oh oh” of Jack Antonoff’s vocals, creating the effect of an exclamation bouncing off the walls, surrounding you in what feels like an inescapable chamber.

Never before had a male’s vocals been featured on a Taylor track like this—who was this guy?! Jack would collaborate with Taylor on some of her most popular tracks in the future, almost always recognizable by his now ubiquitous style of production featuring ostentatious synths, often in lieu of traditional percussion. In an interview with the Grammy museum, Taylor mentioned Jack created the main percussive sounds on “Out Of The Woods” with a “combo of white noise through blowing out the EMI board, clapping his hands, and no joke, dropping his gear bag on the floor.”

An unending feeling of panic is present throughout the song, especially on the chorus as Taylor sings:

Are we out of the woods yet?

Are we in the clear yet?

On the bridge, she divulges the peak of the tumult, the words tumbling out of her as she relays the tale of a love gone wrong:

Remember when you hit the breaks too soon?

20 stitches in the hospital room

When you started crying baby I did too

When the sun came up I was looking at you

Remember when I couldn’t take the heat

I walked out, I said I’m setting you free

But the monsters turned out to be just trees

When the sun came up, you were looking at me

The music video (another directed by Kahn) depicts Taylor overlooking the sea. These vines accompany her throughout as she trudges through snow, fire, rain, and mud—what I interpret as representative of the relationship she has with her career. A through line I’ve noticed in studying her interviews for this series is a constant worry about whether or not everything she would lose everything she’d worked for. I can imagine at some point or another she may start to wonder if the stress and hindrance is worth it, and the way the vines mold to her body, tearing her down in the process and sometimes lifting her up, is representative of the push and pull relationship she has with her relationship with her job, and ultimately, fame.

By the end, she finds herself back on the shore and as the video cuts off, the adage “She lost him but she found herself and somehow that was everything” appears on screen.

Jack would grow into a harbinger of chaotic good within the Taylor Swift Cinematic Universe, often trolling Taylor about the various inconsistencies between the stories she tells in her songs versus the ones she presents to the public. These seemingly innocuous comments would pop up more frequently over the years as Taylor and Jack’s relationship grew from collaborators to good friends. While there are none from the 1989 era that I can recall, I’m sure someone with a better memory than me could, as from the jump Jack was more than happy to stir the pot, playfully calling into question the narratives that Taylor was peddling.

“People think they know the whole narrative of my life,” she says. “I think maybe that line is there to remind people that there are really big things they don’t know about.” – Taylor talking about the bridge of “Out Of The Woods”

Up next is “All You Had To Do Was Stay”, a song with a beat drop so powerful and lyrics so devastating it earned the track five slot. Considering 1989 was an almost entirely new style for Taylor, “All You Had To Do Was Stay” marked a departure from the usual slower paced, melancholic musings that typically made up a track five. But that hardly means Miss Swift skimped on any of the biting lyrics.

I still find this one of the most cathartic songs to listen to, but as a teenager and into my early 20’s especially, I felt a kinship to this song as someone who felt perpetually left by boys. The introductory “hey hey hey” fading into the first verse still causes a visceral internal reaction, which outwardly manifests in an embarrassing stank face and vigorous head bobbing.

People like you always want back the love they gave away

And people like me wanna believe you when you say you’ve changed

The more I think about it now, the less I know

All I know is that you drove us off the road

There’s a magnificent plunge in the music accompanied by a high pitched “STAY” right before each chorus, eliciting the familiar eerie feeling of your stomach dropping seeing that one particular person’s name pop up on your phone for the millionth time. She describes an often unbearable sensation of losing someone, but the arguably worse feeling that comes from their inevitable return. Taylor writes a situationship final boss better than anyone.

As Taylor is often wont to do, we’re served a case of emotional whiplash as the next track bounces us into pure bop territory. “Shake It Off” is Taylor’s most ubiquitous song, an earworm that even the biggest of haters can’t seem to shake off (see what I did there). Working with Max Martin and Shellback, “Shake It Off” was 1989’s lead single, a boppy, undeniable pop song that both captivated and repelled listeners, securing Taylor’s status as a household name.

Speaking of her inspiration for the song, she says she was finally getting over caring what everyone thought of her and she wanted to make something that mimicked her newly unencumbered mindset.

I’m very well aware of what everyone says about me, like every single thing. And the difference between now and three years ago is I honestly don’t care anymore. And life is much better that way and I wanted to write something that sounded like the way I feel about all that. – Taylor talking about “Shake It Off”

There’s a lot of sonic elements about this song that I really love: initially Taylor was very adamantly against the horns, to the point where she told Max Martin she did not want to go that route until the idea for the chorus hit her. The “ba ba ba ba” are actually a chorus of Taylor, Max, and Shellback’s vocals, recorded together at Conway Recording Studios in Los Angeles.

A debate around Taylor’s work that often comes up is why, if she is one of the greatest songwriters of all time, launch her foray into the mainstream with “the players gonna play play play play play and the haters gonna hate hate hate hate hate”? It certainly was quite the choice, and left many scratching their heads. It continued a pattern that she’d started with RED (“We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together”), and would come to adopt over the next several album cycles, picking a seemingly superfluous or even silly song as the lead single for albums full of far superior tunes. I don’t necessarily think that there was truly any rhyme or reason behind this inclination—moreso that Taylor just wanted to release something fun and draw listeners into a new era with something different than what she’d usually released. There she is, Miss Mirrorball, trying to give everyone what they want.

Like “Shake It Off”, “I Wish You Would” is a quintessentially 1989 song, with over the top beat drops, electric guitar riffs and lyrics lamenting the would’ve, could’ve, should’ve of it all. Jack sent Taylor the track and she wrote the lyrics to his music, the story of a “crooked love in a straight line down”. There’s some god-tier lyrical ranting

I wish we could go back

And remember what we were fighting for

And i wish you knew that

I miss you too much to be back anymore

And I wish you were right here, right now, it’s all good

I wish you would

then the outro repeats ”I I I I I I wish I wish I, I I I I I I wish I wish I” her stunted vocals illustrating the almost maddening dissatisfaction of yearning she’s singing about.

Up next is another of Taylor’s monster hits, “Bad Blood.” If you’ve never seen its accompanying music video (which was a cultural event on its own) which features a remix with Kendrick Lamar, it stars a laundry list of hot people, including Lamar as “Welvin Da Great”, Hayley Williams as “The Crimson Curse”, Zendaya as “Cut-Throat”, and, of course, Karlie Kloss as “Knockout.”

Taylor’s particular style of talk-singing features heavily here so as not to figuratively or literally mince any words. While I almost always skip this one, and could have gone without it during the Era’s Tour, it WAS incredibly fun to sing the bridge with 60,000 other Swifties, including an audience led ad-lib of Kendrick’s line:

Bandaids don’t fix bullet holes

You say sorry just for show

If you live like that, you live with ghosts

(Kendrick) You forgive, you forget, but you never it go

The narrative around this song at the time revolved around Taylor’s supposed feud with Katy Perry, which began when Perry allegedly hired away Taylor’s backup dancers. There was also some supposed animosity over John Mayer, as both had purportedly dated him in the years prior. Katy and Taylor would later reconcile, and John Mayer is basically out of the closet at this point, so it all worked out.

A Taylor Swift-Kendrick Lamar collaboration always comes as a shock to people, but Taylor has always been an outspoken fan of rap, hip hop, and R&B music. She just loves and respects artists of all genres, and the conclusion of an interview with Rolling Stone from 2014 confirms that like any of us, Taylor is just a fan girl at heart:

“You want to know a trick to immediately go from feeling victimized to feeling awesome?” she says. She pulls out her phone and hands me the earbuds: “This is my go-to.” She presses play, and Kendrick Lamar’s “Backseat Freestyle” fills the speakers.

A fan favorite, “Wildest Dreams” is the album’s most ballad-esque track. Opening with the actual beat of Taylor’s heart, it tells the story of a Bonnie and Clyde romance that’s over before it even starts. The video, also directed by Kahn, starts on the set of a 1950s movie shot in the African sahara amidst giraffes, lions, and elephants. Starring opposite Scott Eastwood, Taylor dons a smoldering black wig and red lip, a classic old time Hollywood beauty. It seems the two are in love, but it’s revealed at the premier for the film that Scott is betrothed to another woman.

The song itself is an ode to romance that had no shot from the jump, but it’s interesting that the video sort of pulls the curtain back on the idea of Hollywood “romance.” The line from the bridge “You’ll see me in hindsight, tangled up with you all night, burning it down” stands out, especially when you pair it with the visuals from the Era’s tour, almost ten years later, of Taylor lying in a bed that’s caught on fire. Not only is there something about the romance that is forbidden, that must be hidden away from the crowds, but it’s also a source of destruction that threatens to burn down whatever facade the lovers built up. What is there to hide, and why must she burn the whole thing down?

“How You Get The Girl” is similarly cryptic. Very catchy and brilliantly written, there’s no mention of a male muse, but because of the public’s obsession with Taylor’s relationships, the assumption is that she’s speaking from her own experience of getting played when she could very well be talking about how she uses these tricks herself. There’s a double entendre too—how you get the girl, obviously, as in how you secure the girl; but also how you got the girl, ‘got” being a slang term for deceiving someone.

“This Love” fades in next, with Taylor’s soft vocals and a subtle synth mimicking the gentle lapping of the water she’s singing about:

Clear blue water

High tide came and brought you in

And I could go on and on and on and I will

Skies grew darker

Current swept you out again

As the stakes heighten so do the sounds, and a more aggressive synth kicks in on the chorus and the second verse. She sings:

Your kiss, my cheek

I watched you leave

Your smile, my ghost

I fell to my knees

When you’re young, you just run

But you come back to what you need

The production, mimicking the sound of the waves rolling in, evokes the sensation of a tide that always comes back, just like the person in your life that won’t stay away, for better or worse.

“I Know Places” starts with the sound of a tape recorder turning on, as if she’s ready to put whatever comes next on record for everyone to hear. The keys at the beginning are the byproduct of a Juno 106 (the same synth used on “Welcome To New York”) creating a sense of foreboding similar to what she’s singing about.

Throughout she talks about running from prying eyes and greedy hunters, and while I guess you could attribute this to a distaste with the paps, it seems a little melodramatic through a hetero lens:

They got the cages, they got the boxes and guns

They are the hunters, we are the foxes and we run

The 1989 tour performance didn’t do much to quell gaylor interpretations that this song alludes to closeting, as she literally weaves in and out of a bunch of revolving doors.

Hetlors tend to cite this line from the 1989 (Taylor’s Version) prologue as a big “gotcha” towards gaylors:

If I only hung out with my female friends, people couldn’t sensationalize or sexualize that—right? I would learn later on that people could and people would.

While for many reasons I don’t think this is the condemnation of gaylorism most think it is, mostly I think it’s because Taylor’s music is generally not about the supposed muses at all. “I Know Places” specifically calls out a toxic standard within our society, one that Taylor was very quickly awakened to especially during the original 1989 era. Also from the 1989 (Taylor’s Version) prologue:

You see—in the years preceding this, I had become the target of slut-shaming—the intensity and relentlessness of which would be criticized and called out if it happened today, the jokes about my amount of boyfriends. The trivialization of my songwriting as if it were a predatory act of a boy crazy psychopath, the media co-signing of this narrative. I had to make it stop because it was starting to really hurt.

It doesn’t matter who Taylor is seen with: male, female, gay, straight—her notoriety often stems from her personal life rather than the work. So while it is true that some of her songs are about her relationships, her entire legacy shouldn’t be bogged down by the notion that she wouldn’t have it were it not for those–even if she does chide on those narratives in service of selling records. Some would argue that is even her right.

Especially when those records can reach someone who really needs it. The final track on the original, non deluxe version, Taylor wrote “Clean” with Imogen Heap, a song about feeling relief after a particularly tough event. It comes in gently, Imogen chiming on an Imbira as Taylor sings along:

The drought was the very worst, ah ah

When the flower that we grew together died of thirst

It was months and months and months of back and forth

You’re still all over me like a wine stained dress I can’t wear anymore

Taylor’s songs are notoriously synonymous with romantic relationships, but what is often overlooked, and very powerful, about much of her discography is its ability to shift and change with the listener’s perspective. “Clean” in particular is a song that fans have related to overcoming various struggles in their lives, from relationships to addictions or illnesses, and it’s a really beautiful end to an album full of vulnerability. The collaboration with Imogen is also one last sonic foray into uncharted territories, a strong and inspired ending to Taylor’s first full fledged pop album.

When somebody criticises you or says something behind your back, those words that they said about you, it’s like you feel like those words are written all over your face, all over you. Those words start to become echoes in your own mind. And then there’s a risk that those words start to become a part of how you see yourself. The moment you realize you’re not the opinion of someone who doesn’t know you or care about you, that moment is when you’re clean. – Taylor’s speech before “Clean” on the 1989 World Tour

Both narratively and amongst the fans, “Wonderland”, “You Are In Love”, and “New Romantics” remain some of the most beloved and emotionally loaded of all of Taylor’s releases. The deluxe edition of 1989 was released exclusively to Target, and included polaroid photos, voice memos of Taylor discussing the songwriting process and unfinished demos for three songs: “I Know Places”, “I Wish You Would”, and “Blank Space”. So no, the voice memos from the Showgirl era were not the first time Swifties had “paid extra” for a behind the scenes look into Taylor’s creative process–some people just haven’t been around! Shocker!

The first bonus track is “Wonderland”, and it starts with this kind of foreboding piano riff before Taylor starts in:

Flashing lights and we took a wrong turn

And we fell down a rabbit hole

You held on tight to me

Cus nothing’s as it seems

Spinning out of control

Didn’t they tell us don’t rush into things

Didn’t you flash your green eyes at me

Haven’t you heard what becomes of curious minds

Throughout the song Taylor talks about finding a “wonderland” with someone despite the chaos or disapproval of the world around them, but given her circumstances, it seems delusion was the only thing really holding the whole ruse together.

I related to this from a very straight context as the main protagonist in a very toxic on again, off again high school relationship. I must have played “Wonderland” for my boyfriend a few times, hoping he’d pick up on how I related Taylor’s woes to our own, and it worked, because he eventually gave me a pin of Alice from Alice In Wonderland which I thought was so twisted and heartbreaking and romantic.

From a gaylor lens, this song holds much more weight. The overall plot of Alice In Wonderland aligns with many themes regarding the queer experience: curiosity, identity, coming of age. Taylor uses this quintessential fairytale to mimic the experiences of being queer in a world far less accepting than it’d like us to believe. The lyrics are riddled with angst and anxiety regarding what the world will think, driving the two lovers mad with unbridled and suppressed desire. During the bridge she sings:

I reached for you but you were gone

I knew I had to go back home

You searched the world for something else

To make you feel like what we had

And in the end in wonderland, we both went mad

There’s these heavy synths on the bridge that make for a really disorienting listening experience, before it totally drops off when she says “we both went mad” then exploding back into the chorus. It’s a sonic roller coaster ride, representing the emotions of the experiences she’s singing about.

Oddly enough, Dianna Agron, a friend and rumored muse from both the RED and 1989 eras, at one point had an Alice In Wonderland tattoo before getting it removed after 1989’s release.

“You Are In Love” is next, and quite the shift from the woes of “Wonderland.” Supposedly Taylor wrote this about Jack Antonoff and then partner Lena Dunham’s relationship. Whoever it’s about, it’s a beautiful tribute to the ways that true love shows up in little ways we take for granted everyday.

And so it goes

You two are dancing in a snowglobe round and round

And he keeps a picture of you in his office downtown

And you understand now why they lost their minds and fought the wars

And why I’ve spent my whole life trying to put it into words

Cus you can hear it in the silence

You can feel it on the way home

You can see it with the lights out

You’re in love, true love

Almost every night on the 1989 World Tour (some nights she swapped it out for a surprise song) she played a beautiful rendition accompanied by just an acoustic guitar, perched high above the crowd.

“New Romantics” is the last song on 1989 deluxe and probably one of the most popular tracks in Taylor’s entire discography. A powerful bookend to the album’s opening “Welcome To New York”, “New Romantics” employs similarly vague but pointed language surrounding the struggles of not quite fitting in and dealing with that feeling of being an outcast:

Baby I could build a castle

Out of all the bricks they threw at me

And every day is like a battle

But every night with us is like a dream

Baby we’re the new romantics

Come on, come along with me

Heartbreak is the national anthem

We sing it proudly

We’re too busy dancing

To get knocked off our feet

Baby, we’re the new romantics

The best people in life are free

For years I pondered the meaning of that last line, not realizing until I’d come to terms with my own sexuality what it could really mean. “The best people in life are free”: free to be themselves, free to be who they are without shame or worry, free, full stop. I am not saying that Taylor wrote this as some kind of gay anthem (that would come later with Lover’s much more explicit “You Need To Calm Down”), but the entirety of 1989 was clearly written with a liberated mindset regarding various facets of her life, and “New Romantics” is an ode to this enlightenment.

1989 (Taylor’s Version)

The re-record came out 9 years after its original release on October 27, 2023. Taylor’s marketing prowess made it so that fans were absolutely chomping at the bit for its re-release, searching high and low for clues of its inevitable announcement and subsequent drop. Night after night on the Era’s tour, fans took to livestreams delusionally taking any minute reference to blue or the sea or any minor potential 1989 easter egg as confirmation that THAT was the night she would announce its release date. Finally at the last night of a six show run in Los Angeles, in set after set, Taylor came out in blue get ups, from the folklore dress to the “Enchanted” ballgown to finally the blue on blue skater set during the opening of the 1989 set during “Style.” When she rose up to the catwalk in the blue outfit, the crowd was so loud you could barely hear the start of the song.

@repudaytionFINALLY THE BLUE DRESS JUST AS I CALLED IT #taylorswift #ERASTOUR #ALEXDAY #repudaytion #swiftie #1989taylorsversion

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A quick gaylor aside I cannot help but include: it’d been years since Taylor Swift and Karlie Kloss had been seen pictured in public together. I’ll get into the potential why in the Lover chapter, but their last seen encounter was during the reputation tour in 2018. That last night of the Era’s run in Los Angeles, Karlie showed up. Karlie was one of the first people to hear 1989, during the pair’s infamous Big Sur trip in 2014. Whatever transpired between these two, which we will likely never know, it says a lot that she flew out, 3 weeks postpartum, to support Taylor at one of the last Era’s shows in the states. We will also likely never know if Taylor knew Karlie would be in attendance–her behavior during the performance leads me to believe she not only knew but was floored–but learning of her attendance was one of the craziest moments of the entire Era’s saga. I guess I really am no better than the vipers dressed in empath’s clothing.

ANYWAY. After all that, 1989 ended up a victim of its own notoriety: 1989 (Taylor’s Version) is probably the most detested Taylor’s Version release to date. While it does sound undeniably identical to the original, 1989 (Taylor’s Version) does feel oddly…hollow. It is missing the bravado and the gall that came from the 24 year old who put everything on the line to make an album no one expected. It’s missing the spirit of the girl who abandoned convention to try something new. The Taylor’s Version saga finally faced its first road bump: you cannot replicate perfection, and 1989 truly is pure pop perfection.

There’s much less intel about the making of the 1989 vault tracks than the originals, and the production on both the original track list and the vault is noticeably more subdued than the original. Whether that was purposeful or due to lack of effort I cannot say for sure. The difference is noticeable enough though that my ideal listening experience to 1989 entails queuing up its original version and tacking on the vault tracks afterward.

The 1989 (Taylor’s Version) vault is its one saving grace, despite being the shortest set of the whole Taylor’s Version event. I’m sure there’s a bevy of reasons why fans love them, but I don’t necessarily know if it’s because people really love 1989 as much as they say they do.

Now that is not to say that the 1989 vault tracks aren’t as good as the other ones. They are very good and may even pack the most punch of all of them so far (I’m very anxious to see how they stack up against the “fire” reputation tracks). But Taylor did such a phenomenal job bringing in a new subset of fans through folklore, evermore, Midnights, the Era’s tour and the Taylor’s Version of it all, it made sense that listeners were eager for more of the indie pop masterpieces that Taylor, Jack, and Aaron created on these projects. People loved Midnights, heck it won album of the year at the Grammys, and the 1989 vault is the closest iteration both sonically and thematically following Fearless, RED, and Speak Now’s respective vault tracks. The 1989 vault tracks definitely delivered, and how they slot into the original 1989 is worth discussing.

““Slut!” (Taylor’s Version) (From The Vault)” is a dramatic place to start, in true 1989 fashion. Purportedly written with Matty Healy of the 1975, but actually written with Jack Antonoff and another Swede, Patrik Berger (Robyn, Charlix XCX), Taylor muses over random and romantic things before divulging a harsh reality check:

Flamingo pink, sunrise boulevard

Clink clink, being this young is art

Aquamarine, moonlit swimming pool

What if all I need is you?

Got lovestruck, went straight to my head

Got lovesick all over my bed

Love to think you’ll never forget

handprints in wet cement

Adorned with smoke on my clothes

Lovelorn and nobody knows

Love thorns all over this rose

I’ll pay the price you won’t

But if I’m all dressed up

They might as well be looking at us

And if they call me a slut

You know it might be worth it for once

And if I’m gonna be drunk

Might as well be drunk in love

Send the code, he’s waitin’ there

The sticks and stones they throw froze mid-air

Everyone wants him, that was my crime

The wrong place at the right time

And I break down, then he’s pullin’ me in

In a world of boys, he’s a gentleman

There’s that ubiquitous you that’s come up so many times before! While he may be a gentleman in a world of boys, he doesn’t know what she goes through in order for the ruse of “Taylor Swift” to remain intact. But the ubiquitous you, whoever it is, does know, which lends some credence to the idea that perhaps this song, and many others, are not who (or what) we believe it to be.

“Say Don’t Go (Taylor’s Version) (From The Vault)” feels like the sister song to multiple tracks on 1989, from “Style” to “I Wish You Would” to “Wonderland”:

Sonically the chorus hits harder in terms of matching the oomph of the original 1989 but still lacks that over the top 80’s vibe. It’s too soft, and I wonder why Jack didn’t just let it rip like on the original. The trilling synth is not bright enough, it needs to be louder and harsher. The bridge, however, makes up for some of the song’s lack: Taylor is yelling in the background vocals, before it all drops off completely before coming back for the final chorus:

Why’d you have to

Make me want you

Why’d you have to

Give me nothing back

Why’d you have to

Make me love

I said I love you

You say nothing back

Up next is one of Taylor’s shortest songs ever, coming in at two minutes and 26 seconds. But even in that short time frame, it sure packs a punch. “Now That We Don’t Talk (Taylor’s Version) (From the Vault)” is kind of all over the place sonically, but Taylor’s specific style of prosody makes it work and I can just see the gears in her head turning as soon as Jack sent her the track.

What do you tell your friends you

Shared dinners, long weekends with?

Truth is I can’t pretend it’s platonic it’s just ended

I like how this one oscillates between being wholly relatable and totally unrelatable, while still retaining that Taylor mysticism: “I called my mom, she said that it was for the best” she sings at one point, “I don’t have to pretend…that I’d like to be on a mega yacht” she sings at another, “And the only way back to my dignity / was to turn into a shrouded mystery / just like I had been when you were chasing me / Guess this is how it has to be” ends the song. Like any good songwriter, even the most outrageous, arcane lyrics can evoke a sense of kinship for the listener.

“Suburban Legends (Taylor’s Version) (From The Vault)” joins the ranks of one of those Taylor songs I can’t quite figure out, but given its lyrics, I think we can assume she’s pointing us back to a narrative that doesn’t necessarily have to do specifically with her but society at large.

I had the fantasy that maybe our mismatched star signs would surprise the whole school

When I ended up back at our class reunion walking in with you

You’d be more than a chapter in my old diaries with the pages ripped out

I am standing in a 1950s gymnasium and I can still see you now

Again, I don’t know why Jack didn’t go ham on this one, a victim of the Taylor’s Version of it all, but the bridge is so delightful: the harmonies, the prosody, the twinkling synth that sounds like a chandelier crashing to the ground. It’s cinema in a song.

Ending the whole shebang with an open ended question, “Is It Over Now? (Taylor’s Version)(From The Vault)” starts off with the croak of a seagull and a resounding “is it”, plaguing listeners with the same question Taylor is asking herself. Replaying the whole experience in her mind, as we get to the chorus any notion of what this could be about becomes muddied:

Baby, was it over

When she laid down on your couch?

Was it over when he unbuttoned my blouse?

“Come here,” I whispered in your ear

In your dream as you passed out, baby

Was it over then?

And is it over now?

A convenient “Out Of The Woods” reference (When you lost control/red blood, white snow) points listeners in one direction (oh lord), but it feels like a red herring. Fans, of course, were quick to make the connection, and Taylor answered their speculations by playing a mashup of the two at the Eras Tour during the surprise song set. It would be the first of many diabolical mashups that confirmed, or confuddled, the theories, rumors and dreams of swifties the world over.

And did you think I didn’t see you?

There were flashing lights

At least I had the decency

To keep my nights out of sight

Only rumors ‘bout my hips and thighs

And my whispered sighs

Oh, Lord, I think about

Jumping off of very tall somethings

Just to see you come running

And say the one thing I’ve been wanting, but no

Why end Taylor’s Version with this song? It certainly has me scratching my head, but I think it hits on the various themes that she addresses on both iterations of the album: struggles with public perception, mental health, her own relationship to these things and how that affects her personal life. I find it interesting how noticeably vague the pronouns are, addressing the ubiquitous ‘you’ for the entirety of the song when she very easily could have slotted in a he, him, or his.

“My name is Taylor and I was born in 1989”

That’s how Taylor opened every night of the 1989 World Tour, a high point of the 2015 zeitgeist. The tour began in Tokyo, Japan, on May 5, 2015, and concluded in Melbourne, Australia, on December 12, 2015. Spanning 85 shows across North America, Europe, Japan, Singapore, China, Oceania and Melbourne, Taylor and her massive catwalk traveled the world, bringing the songs of 1989 to life for tens of thousands of fans every night.

Long gone were the fairytale theatrics of era’s past: she was a city girl now, and the 1989 stage, sets and costumes reflected this shift. The whole show is decidedly more mature than previous tours, with skimpier costumes and scantily clad, all male background dancers, But do not be fooled, there was still glitter, sparkles and red lips galore.

While she’d play a majority of the songs from 1989, she also used the tour as a chance to experiment with different renditions of her previous hits. I particularly love the refresh on “I Knew You Were Trouble” which added an ominous string section and more rock style percussion, with Taylor’s gruffy vocals omitting a far more angry depiction of the lyrics. Another highlight is the performance of “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together,” a hardcore rock variation that belies the song’s campy pop origins and more accurately depicts the angst at the song’s core. She sneaks in a quick ode to Speak Now during the piano portion, starting off with the chorus of “Enchanted” before launching into 1989’s “Wildest Dreams.” Later in the show, she plays a rendition of “Love Story” perched high above the crowd, reminiscent of its performance during the Speak Now tour—only here she plays it on a Juno 6, modulating the massive country hit into a more 1989 tour appropriate tune.

Most memorably, and just like the young girl throwing caution to the wind pitching her demo to Nashville execs, or asking her dream collaborators to work with her, Taylor loved inviting her musical heroes to join her on stage. The list of guests is truly never ending: Mary J. Blige, Alanis Morisette, Natalie Maines (of the Chicks), Lorde, Beck and St. Vincent, Mick Jagger…there was also Fetty Wap, Jason Derulo, Justin Timberlake, Avril Lavigne, Wiz Khalifa, Nelly (feat. the Haim sisters). The list truly goes on and on and on.

There were also a steady slew of onstage appearances not by musical artists but Taylor’s various celebrity friends, including Karlie Kloss, Gigi Hadid, Lena Dunham, Kobe Bryant, Ellen Degeneres, Matt LeBlanc, Chris Rock, Julia Roberts and Joan Baez, Heidi Klum and the United States women’s national soccer team. If whoever happened to be at the show that night wanted to saunter down the massive catwalk, Taylor welcomed them with open arms.

I attended the tour in Cleveland, Ohio. A friends’ parents got us tickets way up in the rafters, but that didn’t stop us from dancing and singing our hearts out the entire night. I remember being so floored at this seemingly new Taylor, pop star Taylor, in her sparkly jacket, skater skirt and chic bob–so unlike the Taylor I’d last seen on the Speak Now tour with her big ballgowns, ringlet curls and melancholy musings. She was a new woman in a way, but when she got to the end of the catwalk and sang “You Are In Love” on the guitar, I again saw the young artist I’d fallen in love with all those years ago.

I could build a castle out of all the bricks they threw at me

1989 was immediately critically lauded. From Rolling Stone to Time to Pitchfork, critics agreed: Taylor achieved something new with 1989. It was the best-selling album worldwide that year, despite its late release, selling 1.3 million copies in just its first week, making her the first in history to have three different albums sell over a million copies in their debut week (following Speak Now and Red). It’s certified multi-platinum all over the world, and has sold over 14 million copies since its initial release.

At the 58th Annual Grammy Awards in 2016, 1989 was nominated for ten awards, winning three for best music video for “Bad Blood,” best pop vocal album and album of the year, making Taylor the first female solo artist to win album of the year twice (following her win for Fearless (2008) in 2010).

The high couldn’t last forever. Just days before the ceremony, the Kanye of it all reared its ugly head. Though the two had seemingly reconciled their fraught relationship, when Kanye dropped “Famous”, that all flew out the window with one line:

I still think me and Taylor might have sex

Why? I made that bitch famous

Taylor was blindsided: she had never consented to the latter line, and was rightfully upset. In a note posted to social media, Taylor stated: “Where is the video of Kanye telling me he was going to call me ‘that bitch’ in his song? It doesn’t exist because it never happened.”

At the time, and still, I agree that being called “that bitch” unexpectedly by someone you thought was a colleague or a friend, in front of the entire world, is upsetting. But even worse, the claim that he made HER famous? The youngest winner for album of the year from the Recording Academy? The brainchild of a historical career at just the age of 24? One of the biggest solo pop acts in the world? HE made HER famous??? I don’t fucking think so buddy. Women are called bitches everyday for no reason—surely this possession of her notoriety, which she was already at odds with but had earned through blood, sweat, and tears, is what really ground her gears.

It heightened the stakes for the Grammy’s all the more. I vividly remember watching the ceremony in my dorm room at Ohio University. That night Taylor took to the red carpet in a fetching two piece orange bandeau and fuschia ballgown skirt. I recall watching starry eyed from bed in my pajamas as she accepted the record breaking award for album of the year. To this day, her speech still makes me weepy:

There are going to be people along the way who will try to undercut your success or take credit for your accomplishments or your fame, but if you just focus on the work and you don’t let those people sidetrack you, someday when you get where you’re going, you’ll look around and you will know that it was you and the people who love you who put you there, and that will be the greatest feeling in the world.

It’s a new soundtrack

Some other moments from the era that warrant mentioning: in July of 2014, Taylor penned an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal stressing the importance of albums as a creative medium for artists. In November, just weeks after 1989’s worldwide release, Big Machine removed Taylor’s entire discography off ad-supported, free streaming platforms, namely Spotify. In a letter posted to Tumblr in June of 2015, she expressed her disappointment in Apple Music’s decision not to pay acts during its free three-month trial for users who sign up.

Today, for better or worse, artists are forced to reckon with the streaming economy’s paltry compensation structure. Taylor’s attempt to reconcile this less than equitable system at the peak of her power was a noble effort, but unsurprisingly she returned to streaming in June of 2017. Since then, she’s become a master of the streaming era, and I am curious to see what direction her advocacy will take in the coming years as more avenues of music distribution arise.

1989 was not the only fruits of her musical labor throughout this era: Taylor penned “Better Man” for the country group Little Big Town; it ended up winning the Country Music Association Award for Song of the Year and Best Country Duo/Group Performance at the 2018 Grammy Awards. The song would also eventually be a vault track on RED (Taylor’s Version). Additionally, she recorded “I Don’t Wanna Live Forever” with Zayn Malik for the soundtrack of Fifty Shades of Grey sequel, Fifty Shades Darker, which peaked at number two on the Billboard Hot 100.

There was also the EDM single “This Is What You Came For”, sung by Rihanna and which Taylor was initially credited under the pseudonym Nils Sjöberg. Taylor hinted her involvement in the song in an Instagram post of her at Coachella Arts Festival in April 2016, wearing a bomber jacket with the single’s artwork stitched onto the back.

Affectionately deemed “Bleachella”, swifties speculated the look was the start of a new era (dubbed “Karma” by the anointed) that was subsequently ditched. The release of “Famous” was just the start of a years-long drama, the next chapter stemming from a video posted by Kim Kardashian in June of 2016. The video (illegally recorded and doctored, for the record) gave the public ammunition to paint Taylor as a liar with an eternal victim complex. Kardashian sent out the clip to Twitter, and followed it up with a post that lives on in infamy in the swifteverse:

The backlash was, for lack of a better word, swift. #TaylorSwiftIsOverParty was trending within hours; her social media was flooded with snake emojis; Kanye was leading chants of “Fuck Taylor Swift” at his Life of Pablo tour. Taylor posted her response and…poofed. She seemingly disappeared. In the 2023 Time Person of the Year interview, she reflected back on the tumultuous time:

“You have a fully manufactured frame job, in an illegally recorded phone call, which Kim Kardashian edited and then put out to say to everyone that I was a liar,” she says. “That took me down psychologically to a place I’ve never been before. I moved to a foreign country. I didn’t leave a rental house for a year. I was afraid to get on phone calls. I pushed away most people in my life because I didn’t trust anyone anymore. I went down really, really hard.”

It would be over a year before the public would hear from her again, and a total of three years post 1989’s release, the longest she’d gone between albums, that she would put out new music. When she came back, the palatable, amicable, girl next door was nowhere to be found.

I haven’t been reading physical books as much lately as I usually do, but I did just start Tropic Of Serpents by Marie Brennan. It’s the second book in the Natural History of Dragons series, a fantasy series written in a memoir style about a woman who studies dragons. It’s super fun and immersive!

Here on Substack, I’ve been reading a lot of , , and any random posts on creativity and music that I can find.

I’m also on the hunt for a copy of the Jurassic Park novel.

For my dad’s birthday, my family went to the movies and saw Project Hail Mary. I’d read the book when it came out, so I was super excited to see the movie. It’s a little different and the book provides more context, but I absolutely loved it and have been watching edits of it nonstop since.

I never thought I’d be recommending something from the TikTok shop, but I just purchased from there for the first time and I love it: I got this flashlight looking thing with different inserts and color settings for photo shoots. I’ll be using it in a music video and photoshoot very soon, but I’m also super excited about it for future ideas.

I am a huge huge huge Jurassic Park fan! The whole franchise including the two kids spin off shows. I just finished rewatching the second of those shows. I’ve also been watching a lot of Jurassic Park edits on TikTok which might sound silly but they range from epic to spooky to sad to funny. This one is a classic:

@space.ae0Jp3 Spinosaurus edit - Animal i have become 4k edit. @itzfkofficial thanks for the cc, scp: @jurassicaepp. For you@dcristucu. Is this hell yeah?! After effects sapphire, bcc, Magic bullet looks (mbl). #jurassicworld #dinosaur #hybrid #fyp #edit #viral #cc #twixtor #aftereffects2020 #4k #aftereffectsedits #movie #prehistoric #spinosaurus #jp3 #jurassicpark #hellyeah #animalihavebecome #alangrant #islasorna Spinosaurus, dinosaur, jurassicworld, jurassicpark, Jp3.

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I also watch a lot of Smosh on YouTube, Tiny Desk before a lot of my gigs, and I recently watched this deep dive on Seaworld Orlando’s Atlantis ride:

So so many things 😅 I listen to music like it’s my job and in some ways, it kind of is. Lately, I’ve been listening to a lot of Avery Cochrane, Taylor Swift, Sydney Ross Mitchell, and Carol Ades. I’m also deeply obsessed with Noah Kahan’s new album and deeply unwell over it. He’s insane.

And then when it comes to my own music, I put together a reference playlist for me and my producers. It has all sorts of different things from Erin LeCount to Taylor Swift to songs from the Stranger Things Original Score. The vibe is catchy pop with a slightly unsettling side, lots of drama, and lots of synth.

Thanks again to Bethany! Don’t forget to stream and purchase her music and subscribe to their substack <333

We feel like songs really have a use in how they feel in the body that could be some sort of physical release. – Jo

It’s been ten years since the three met at the University of Southern California–whose campus is adjacent to the Shrine, marking the shows as a sort of ersatz-homecoming for the band’s anniversary. Throughout the years, Katie, Jo and Naomi have only gotten better at playing to one another’s strengths, and this harmony is even more evident when they’re onstage. The debut performance of the new album granted me a deeper understanding of their latest project, and even MUNA as a whole.

The band’s shows at the Greek in October of 2023, the last stops on the tour for the self-titled 2022 record, were but a preview of their eye for captivating production, and it was fully on display at the Shrine. The first half of the set consisted of the new albums track list from top to bottom. On night one I was near the front and in such close quarters with my fellow MUNA-ites I could hardly hear over the crowd, one of the best ways to experience a show. However on night two, a bit further back, I was able to take in just how spectacular the performances were.

Floor to ceiling screens featured silhouettes of the band, lyrics and other references from the album. Katie’s captivating jives bound across the screens during “Dancing On The Wall”; during “Wannabeher” Naomi’s silhouette is doing their thing on the keyboard while Jo’s is shredding; during “Girls’ Girl” the almost maddeningly catchy prosody of the pre-chorus “a ha ha ha”’s flash in sequence with Katie’s vocals. A camera perched at the front of the stage captured the live action of both the onstage antics and the crowd. As Jo, Naomi, Geo and Sarab crashed through the outro of “So What”, one of the albums many sonic peaks, Katie’s dissociative stare projected onto the massive scenes alongside visuals of the LA skyline.

One of my favorite songs on the album is “Big Stick”, the group’s most overtly political track to date. Seemingly a reference to Theodore Roosevelt’s early 20th century foreign policy of touting “peace” while simultaneously threatening to enforce U.S. interests, “Big Stick” illustrates the tactics’ modern day ubiquity and its repercussions. As the lyrics flashed onscreen in the form of an American flag, police lights glared in tandem as Katie pummeled through the final verse:

Make you want to build an army and wage a war

Make you want to show the world what America’s for

And how America gives more than America takes

We give weapons to dictators in apartheid states

We give kids in Palestine PTSD

But we’ll never fuckin’ ever give them something to eat

And if you’ve got a problem with it, you could end up in jail

Send you to Louisiana, million dollar bail

Because I have a big stick I’m not afraid to use

So I can make you do anything that I want you to

That I want you to, that I want you to

I can make you do anything that I want you to

@munaworldhqBig Stick ❤️‍🔥 #MUNA

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MUNA has never shied away from the politics of their group. What’s so powerful about Dancing On The Wall in this moment in particular is that it’s not an attempt at escapism, but the opposite. Contrary to what some may say, the dance floor is not dead—in fact, MUNA has given it a new life, maybe even a new purpose.

In 40 minutes, Dancing On The Wall very pointedly addresses the madness that is being alive in 2026. To be fully human these days is not finding a way to ignore the horrors that persist, but acknowledging their existence and understanding that your humanity lies in the grey area of not knowing what to do about it all.

MUNA’s outspoken nature has always been a reason I love and respect them as artists, and it’s made me strive to use my privilege for the better, even in small ways. Their work to uplift disenfranchised groups has never been just performance but intrinsic to its’ core as a group. In a time where queer people in America have become a scapegoat for the far right at worst, and a talking point to gain votes for the “left” at best, MUNA makes it clear that queer joy is inherently political. Acknowledging that this joy cannot exist without also cradling the pain and the horrific reality of life in the 21st century, MUNA carves out a space for people of all backgrounds and identities to feel it all.

It’s this refusal to shy away from reality that makes this record so consequential. During the album’s last song “Buzzkiller”, a timer flashed across the huge screens lending a sense of foreboding. In verse two, Katie very blatantly lays out the absurd dichotomy of being full time musicians with the harsh reality of trying to build a better world:

And the band’s doing well

I mean, we’re doing alright

But I’m past my prime, and everyone knows it

I made it to the protest, the speech made me cry

But then I came home, and I still feel hopeless

Yeah, you think I’m so easy to love

Baby, please, you’re just buzzed

I’m a buzzkiller

Wait and see, just give it a month

It’ll fade like a drug

Always does, always will, I’m

Sorry to be the buzzkiller

Sonically “Buzzkiller” feels very much like living in the present moment: repetitive synths on a loop that crescendo in a loud, thrashing, somewhat uncomfortable noise that abruptly ends.

After exiting the stage they returned to play a wonderful array of their prior hits, including “Stayaway,” “What I Want,” “Number One Fan,” “Promise,” “Anything But Me” (featuring Stacy the horse, of course), and “The One That Got Away.”

They wrapped up the show with two of their biggest and most beloved hits. During “I Know A Place”, I listened at rapt attention like a freshly anointed disciple and let the post-bridge interlude, first introduced after Donald Trump’s ascent to power in 2016, wash over me—the closest to something truly holy I’ve felt in a long, long time:

Even if our skin or our gods are different

I believe all human life is significant

I throw my arms open wide in resistance

He’s not my leader even if he’s my president

@itskeelyjooni know a place in 2026 yupp #muna #iknowaplace #dancingonthewall #losangeles #newalbum @whereismuna

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Tying it all together in a perfect, gay bow, they ended the night with their breakout hit “Silk Chiffon”, a song so exquisite it still makes me beam with the giddiness of a freshly out 22 year old. When I first heard MUNA play it, opening for Phoebe Bridgers in 2021 on the Punisher tour, I was almost instantly unencumbered by the shame I’d spent years carrying. “Silk chiffon, that’s how it feels, oh when she’s on me” was all I needed to understand the feelings I’d spent years stifling were not harmful or wrong or disgusting but just…feelings, like ones all people have. It was both a freeing and devastating revelation: all that time I’d wasted convincing myself I was one thing suddenly and unequivocally turned on its head.

All those years ago I couldn’t have known I’d be listening to MUNA’s fourth album driving down the 101, with tickets to their back to back album release shows in a city I would also somehow call home. Time is very strange and funny in that way.

While I’d like to say it was as easy as saying “I’m gay” and living that truth, it was not, it is not. Just as MUNA has evolved throughout their 10 years together, I too am growing and changing, and I am grateful to have a group like MUNA to aid in that evolution, parasocial as that may be. Without their work, I don’t necessarily know what kind of life I’d be living, what lies I’d still be telling myself and what miseries those would spawn. Instead, because of MUNA’s willingness to share the lessons and truths they’ve learned, I’ve grown to love this life and self I have. When I could have sunk, MUNA, the greatest band in the world, helped me embrace what I feared and helped me learn to float above it all.

lucky break is a multi-media artist from the Bay area who doodles and creates amazing collages, in addition to making music that is very good. Their debut album made it! is out TODAY, which you can stream and purchase (on gorgeous pink OR silver vinyl) now. A collection of songs written between the ages of 19 and 23, made it! narrates the uncertainty of early adulthood, the end of a first major relationship and the freedom in learning to stand up for yourself. I highly recommend you listen to it and I am so stoked they are here to let us in on what they’ve been into lately.

I just read All Fours () , and then I read The Coin (Yasmin Zaher). I’m obsessed with books about deranged women right now.

I love going to my friends shows. My friends band just played at the Stork Club in Oakland, that was so awesome.

I try to limit my consumption as much as I can - but recently I’ve been learning about the marks of a quality garment, so when I go thrifting i can buy things that will last. I have this wool pea coat that I got that I’m obsessed with and will probably wear forever.

I watched an interview with Miranda July which was suuuuper awkward but fun to watch:

I’m listening to underscores U, all the time

Can always count on for the best recs!

Thanks again to lucky break! Don’t forget to stream and purchase their debut album made it!, subscribe to their substack, and follow on Instagram <333

Very excited to share this month’s edition of the Gaggle featuring picks from Substack sweetie and gold⭐️goose ! Mustard is a beloved condiment who dabbles in poetry and pixel art, amongst other fun creations, at Mustard’s Diner and Mustard’s Museum of Pixel Art. I highly recommend you subscribe to both pages, as Mustard is a lovely condiment who will help you see the beauty of stairs, or pigeons, or even a lineup of jurors. I’m so very honored Mustard took some time out of their busy schedule to clue us in on what they’ve been into lately.

I’m also very excited to announce that the Gaggle will now be a bimonthly newsletter! That’s right: two times the picks, two times the gold⭐️geese, and two times the silly sentiments! That being said, I won’t be including my personal picks in every newsletter. I’m trying to figure out if/when those will fit in, and for now I am happy to feature just the picks of my awesome gold⭐️geese. Join the Gaggle now, you won’t regret it ⭐️🪿

Subscribe now

Mustard is currently reading the Dungeon Crawler Carl series! They are currently on book two and absolutely loving it. This series has helped get them out of their recent reading slump. The world and characters within this series are so vivid and over-the-top in the best way possible. Besides that they try their best to read as much as they can on Substack.

Mustard and Honey Mustard recently celebrated two big anniversaries early! To celebrate we went to Walt Disney World and Universal. Universal happened spur of the moment but Mustard is so thankful we decided to do it with their best friend. We have had an itch to go back since celebrating. This is unrelated but Walt Disney World needs more Muppets and Phineas and Ferb attractions/merchandise.

Mustard recently got diagnosed with Raynaud’s Disease. It is an auto-immune disease they have had their whole life but was unaware of until recently. With their disease cold weather/air conditioning can potentially trigger them. Because of this they would like to recommend you sweat more. Mustard does not like sweat (or the feeling of it) but since being diagnosed they have become more appreciative of it. It is a sign their bottle is warm and they are healthy.

Mustard is a big fan of British television programming. Whether it is Doctor Who or Peep Show they find themselves gravitating towards British shows. They are currently watching spy drama “Slow Horses” on Apple TV and cannot recommend it enough. Mustard is also trying their best to keep up with Taskmaster which can be viewed for free on YouTube!

At any point at any time in any moment they most likely are listening to Carly Rae Jepsen. Outside of Carly Rae Jepsen they enjoy listening to BAD OPERATION, Devon Kay & The Solutions, Laufey, Aesop Rock, JID, and many more. Just yesterday they were listening to the king of Mexican Ranchera music Vicente Ferenadez. Mustard tries their best to listen to a little bit of everything.

Two years after the release of her critically acclaimed, breakout sophomore record Fearless, Taylor released her third and entirely self-written studio album Speak Now on October 25, 2010.

Taylor was 20 going on 21, not even old enough to drink, and coming off the kind of chart success some could only ever dream of. After wrapping up over 100 worldwide tour dates for the Fearless Tour in July of 2010, she kept full steam ahead, releasing “Mine” as the first single in August, reportedly two weeks ahead of schedule due to a leak. She would release two more singles, “Mean,” and the album namesake “Speak Now” before the album’s official release in late October.

Speak Now is a beloved record in the Taylor Swift Cinematic Universe for its reckoning with coming of age, gut-wrenching lyrical storytelling, and whimsical, dreamlike reflections on finding love, experiencing loss, exercising self preservation and acknowledging one’s own imperfections. In Speak Now’s original prologue, Taylor talks about saying the right thing at the wrong time, or vice versa, tossing out warnings about getting to the end of our lives and looking back in regret about the moments we didn’t speak up.

I think most of us fear reaching the end of our life, and looking back regretting the moments we didn’t speak up. When we didn’t say ‘I love you.’ When we should’ve said ‘I’m sorry.’ When we didn’t stand up for ourselves or someone who needed help…The words you stop yourself from saying are the ones that will haunt you the longest.

“For me I write everything that I live,” she’d said. Both incredibly personal yet somehow universally relevant, the way she wrote allowed others to hear themselves in her songs.

Taylor’s work was a means of catharsis not just for herself, but for her young listeners. While this allowed her to foster a more personal relationship with her fanbase, it also turned her into a lightning rod for slut shaming during a formative period of mental development.

There was a growing maturity in her songs, not just in the way she crafted lyrics but their content as well. In both interviews and her lyrics, there is an obvious disdain regarding speculation over her personal life. Despite this, interviewers were often outwardly inquisitive about Taylor’s propensity to write about her relationships. Watching these interviews now, it seems strange that the idea of a young woman writing songs about her life was so novel, as these days it is a nearly ubiquitous practice: Phoebe Bridgers, Olivia Rodrigo, Lorde, Rachel Chinouriri just to name a few of what is likely thousands of young artists telling their stories via song. As older musicians attempted in vain to reach an audience they couldn’t relate to, Taylor was laying the groundwork for a new generation of storytellers.

Since Taylor was a kid, all she had wanted was to sing her songs to crowds of people who would sing them back. Achieving this goal opened up a new can of worms, as Taylor began to realize that a fall from grace was only one viral moment completely out of her control away.

“This is what I’ve wanted to do my whole life,” she says. “It never freaks me out. Never. Ever.” She pauses for a moment. “But you know what does freak me out? When is the other shoe going to drop? I am so happy right now. So I am always living in fear. This can’t be real, right? This can’t really be my life.”

Behind the young woman living her wildest dreams, one need not look too deep to find dissatisfaction brewing. Throughout the original album visuals, there’s a lot of bird cage imagery with Taylor often seen wearing bird necklaces or jewelry in interviews at the time. Additionally, in her first apartment in Nashville, she had a custom, person sized bird cage added to the apartment’s interior. In one interview she sighs in relief, saying it’s much easier to live on her own than with her family. Taylor was keeping up a good front publicly, but reading her body language and actions, I wonder if there was a silent turmoil boiling beneath it all.

Perhaps it stemmed from the hard and fast lesson that the narratives surrounding her personal life could and would quickly spiral out of her control. If you’re a frequent player in the TSCU, you know Taylor’s current publicist Tree Paine as a firebrand who is quick to take down malicious rumors or falsehoods. Of course there’s no amount of success that exempts any public figure from the fame game, but Taylor’s publicist during the Speak Now era, Paula Erickson, was not nearly as active in shutting down definitively false stories or rumors. In his book There’s Nothing Like This: The Strategic Genius of Taylor Swift, Kevin Evers argues this was strategic, a facet of ‘furthering her artistic narrative.’

By weaving her personal anecdotes into her music and then prompting listeners to extend those stories into social media, Swift created a more immersive experience for her fans.1

After just a few years of living in the spotlight, it didn’t take long for Taylor to become savvy of what she fed to the public, both out of privacy and self-preservation—and so our unreliable narrator makes her debut. Keeping this and the very literal title of the album in mind, Taylor begins to blur the lines between reality and the universes that exist within her imagination, trolling everyone all the while.

“I don’t talk about my personal life in interviews but in my songs…I definitely do.”

By now Taylor was still getting more play on country radio than pop. Based on what we’re privy to in terms of Taylor’s relationship to her record label and its top dog Scott Borchetta, I can imagine any discussion of revealing the parts of herself that didn’t align with the good girl persona was shut down immediately. Country music, in cahoots with the Hollywood blender, remained a harbor for don’t-ask-don’t-tell perpetrators.

Taylor would come to learn the hard way that it didn’t matter how hard she tried to appease everyone–there would always be a vitriolic cacophony backed by a society who not only encouraged but thrived on the deprecation of young women.

Just try to never grow up

I was blissfully unaware of the social implications of it all—I was 13 during a Taylor release! Life couldn’t have been better.

I remember the day Speak Now came out like it was yesterday. The opening chords of “Mine” emit flashes of the correlating music video I’d watch everyday after school on CMT. A friend received her copy in the mail a day early, and I glowered in jealousy as she bounced through the computer lab singing “Never Grow Up” with an authority that I, who was going that day with the rest of the peons to get my copy, could not yet claim. I’m sure I massaged my wounded Swiftie ego by assuring myself I was getting the DELUXE version available ONLY at Target, which included several bonus tracks.

I remember going to the Speak Now World Tour with my best friend Mackenzie–our first concert alone. The atmosphere thick with excitement, sauntering like grown ups through the arena as soon as her parents dropped us off at the door—only to spend the evening wrapped in a cocoon of irony, singing our hearts out to all these songs Taylor wrote bemoaning the disillusionment of growing up. We wanted to be grown ups so bad. Of course now we know better.

The consciousness raising I’d gone through during the Fearless album cycle heightened as I became more and more obsessed with all things romance and love, wondering when they’d materialize in my own post adolescent life. Little did I know that love was just one of many adult worries I’d come to blows with. As Constance Grady aptly describes it:

“That’s the age when you begin to realize that you are always being watched, that the world has expectations of you, that you are going to be asked to meet a certain standard; it’s before the age at which you realize the standard is always going to be inaccessible.”2

This was the hope that Taylor’s work, and especially Speak Now, encapsulates: the possibility correlating to life and love, the romance that awaits if you only hope for and do your best.

This youthful hope was present in every sequin, every whimsical set piece, every lyric written up Taylor’s arm, every note played on her turquoise koi fish guitar during the Speak Now tour: it was all yet another iteration of Taylor’s innermost fantasies brought to life.

At the Cleveland stop, the lyrics up her arms read:

Don’t know why I’m so afraid

If you weren’t real I would make you up

These hail from the song “Honey and the Moon” by Joseph Arthur, an Akron, Ohio indie rock artist. Listening today it sounds exactly what you’d expect from a song by an indie rock artist from the early aughts. Taylor would do a different lyric at every show, often picking a song by an artist from the tour stop’s respective city: in Los Angeles, it was the Beach Boys, in Nashville it was Martina McBride, in New York City, her own lyrics from “Long Live”:

Bring on all the pretenders, one day we will be remembered.

Taylor was obsessed with music, and this little gesture was her way of signaling respect to artists of every background, age and genre. Yet despite years dedicated to studying and practicing her craft, people doubted Taylor’s songwriting ability, claiming she couldn’t possibly have written all those songs on her own.

In true Taylor fashion she sought to prove all those naysayers wrong, writing every song on Speak Now by herself. In some interviews Taylor says this wasn’t purposeful, in others she says she wanted to try just to prove she could. Nonetheless, this doubt was the impetus from which Speak Now was born.

One need not look too far back to see the correlation between bad times and good music, and recession pop was in full swing by the end of 2010: Kesha, Lady Gaga, Katy Perry and the Black Eyed Peas made up the bulk of that year’s Top 20 hits. Should Taylor want to match the chart success she’d seen on Fearless, she’d have to decide whether to pivot and lean in to pop. It wouldn’t be long, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

Speak Now

The album opens with “Mine”, whose opening sweeps me right back into the throes of middle school, sitting in my babysitters basement watching music videos on CMT everyday after school. In this first song off her third album, Taylor tells the story of two young lovers from the rearview, starting off in the past tense and working her way to the present at the end. Where Fearless felt lighthearted and low stakes in a lot of ways, already on this first track the subject matter shifts to something more serious, the lyrics more cryptic.

The music video shows Taylor walking into a cafe, followed by a long daydream about meeting a guy, struggling to make their love work, their eventual marriage, having kids and growing old together. At the end it turns out it was all just a fantasy centered around the waiter taking her order, an actor she chose because she saw him wearing a jersey with the number 13 on it in a movie.

While it all may have all been made up in her head, her emotions surrounding love were not. She says she wrote “Mine” about a girl who has seen love fail over and over so she stops looking for it and that’s when she finds it. Based on the scene from the music video that shows a younger version of Taylor looking on as her parents argue, we can glean where some of this disenchantment surrounding love would come from. Her parents subsequently divorced in 2011.

“Sparks Fly” is the next track, a fan favorite with the longevity to prove it. I think Taylor could have made this the opening track but she didn’t want to show all her cards from the jump. After all, starting with

The way you move is like a full on rainstorm

and I’m a house of cards

would be awfully hard for the entire album to live up to.

Taylor wrote “Sparks Fly” when she was 16 and had played it a few times for fans over the years, which turned into demands for its release. It’s interesting that it does not originate in the Speak Now era as it really acts as the kind of sonic and aesthetic representation for the era as a whole: the loud bombastic drums, the whimsical lyrics, the way she slows down in the bridge only to come back one more time for an over the top chorus. Taylor played “Sparks Fly” during the acoustic set the night she announced Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) at the Era’s Tour.

“Back To December” is the third track, one Taylor wrote about “when you learn a lesson too late.” On this one, Taylor takes accountability for a breakup gone wrong and expresses regret for her role. Supposedly this sweet apology of a song was written for Taylor Lautner, who Taylor had a brief “relationship” with during the Fearless era.

“Back To December” was one of the first songs where Taylor was transparent in her wrongs. It struck me as noble, her taking accountability for her actions, and I would come to play this song over and over when faced with my own shitty behavior in relationships. In the bridge she sings:

I miss your tan skin, your sweet smile

So good to me, so right

And how you held me in your arms that September night

The first time you ever saw me cry

There was a September night that my high school boyfriend actually did hold me in his arms as I cried…over the third speeding ticket I got in less than a year, what can I say I craved a RUSH. Connecting my own experiences to Taylor’s lyrics was a rush in itself, like earning Swiftie brownie points. As I grew up, I found more and more I could relate to my favorite singer, and I looked for connections anywhere and everywhere.

The title track, “Speak Now” is one of Taylor’s campiest songs. Talking with a friend (purportedly Hayley Williams) who said her ex was getting married , Taylor asked if she was going to ambush the wedding and “speak now” during the vows—a Taylor question if I ever heard one. An excellent example of Taylor flexing her storytelling skills, “Speak Now” shows the wonders of what can come from letting your imagination wander and putting pen to paper.

Where “Speak Now” gives fiction, “Dear John” feels all too real. An unequivocal track five, “Dear John” is sad and biting, bemoaning the brutal clarity of hindsight. Taylor said this was the song equivalent of sending one last message to someone and laying it all out on the table, just to burn it before sending. Of course releasing it was her way of hitting send.

Weaving her songs together, she calls back to “Sparks Fly” and lays it all out without hesitation:

You are an expert at sorry

and keeping lines blurry

and never impressed by me acing your tests

All the girls that you run dry have tired, lifeless eyes

Because you burned them out

But I took your matches before fire could catch me so don’t look now

I’m shining like fireworks over your sad, empty town

Throughout she bears the burden of blame, singing “I should’ve known”, but by the end she’s found clarity in the pain, reversing the roles and laying the blame where it belonged all along:

Don’t you think I was too young to be messed with

The girl in the dress, wrote you a song

You should’ve known

The “should’ve” of it all comes back around over a decade later in the Midnights era.

Taylor may be resigned and hopeless on “Dear John,” but she bounces back on “Mean,” ready to pounce at any jackass who dares come for her burgeoning talent. “Mean” was inspired by the incessant commentary of critic Bob Leftsetz, clapping back at the cruel words of an old man who messed with the wrong girl:

I can see you years in a bar talking over a football game

With that same big loud opinion but nobody’s listening

Washed up and ranting about the same old bitter things

Drunk and grumbling on about how I can’t sing

But all you are is mean

In the music video, Taylor and her band of country bumpkins (many of which can be found onstage with her during the Era’s tour a decade plus later) go from playing a country saloon to the bright lights of an ambiguous broadway stage. Throughout, we see several other characters are bullied for their differences, only to come out on top at the end of the video: a little girl (played by Joey King) whose a little different, a young woman (Presley Cash) working to pay for college, a young man donned in lavender picked on by the football team for his love of fashion.

Lefsetz clearly had no idea that criticism was but a light under the ticking bomb that fueled Taylor’s determination and vigor. In this way, he was almost doing her a favor. “Mean” ended up winning Best Country Song and Best Country Solo Performance at the 2012 Grammys. In true Taylor fashion, she got the last word, performing “Mean” during the ceremony—the cherry on top of it all.

Next is “The Story of Us”, which would become a single post album release. A more uptempo tune, it became a Swiftie favorite over the years for its relatable themes and clever use of narrative jargon. It’s one of Taylor’s earlier meta creations, using storytelling to outline the actual story of her and her muse. Comparing the relationship to a book whose ending was ruined by a twist of fate is so very Speak Now.

Oh, I’m scared to see the ending

Why are we pretending this is nothing?

I’d tell you I miss you but I don’t know how

I’ve never heard silence quite this loud

The music video is one of my favorites, depicting Taylor and her band causing a general ruckus in the library while she yearns wistfully amongst the stacks:

“Never Grow Up” could be categorized as a lullaby, if it weren’t so sad. Where on Fearless she begins to realize the cons of growing up, on Speak Now she is grasping at the straws of childhood to try and avoid the inevitable.

The second verse is especially devastating as she reminisces on the moments she wishes she could do over—making your mom drop you off at the function, or basking in the sanctity of your childhood bedroom. You can hear the desperation in her voice, as if she is shaking her younger self:

Don’t make her drop you off around the block

Remember that she’s getting older too

And don’t lose the way that you dance around in your PJs getting ready for school

“Oh darling don’t you ever grow up” she begs, over and over. The darling she’s referencing could be herself, her listeners, or even her future child. In one interview she references the young girls at her shows, both the ones her own age, but especially the younger ones:

“I see little girls that are 7 or 8 and I think “There she is becoming who she’s going to be”, forming her own thoughts and dreams and opinions. I wrote this song for those little girls.”

Up next is “Enchanted.” What “Fifteen” is to Fearless, “Enchanted” is to Speak Now. It defines the whole era, and is the only song from Speak Now that secured a permanent spot on the Era’s Tour setlist.

Like stepping into a secret garden where magic blooms around every corner, “Enchanted” is the sonic equivalent of butterflies, turning the flutter that fills your stomach when someone special enters the room into a song you want to listen to over and over again.

Of course, a personal anecdote makes this track all the more near and dear to me: there was this older kid who lived down the street from me that I had a ginormous crush on. One night at dinner with my dad and his friends, Prince Charming happened to be there. My dad and his friends must have seen my cheeks go rosy upon his entrance and called him over to make him take a picture with me. I was deeply embarrassed in the moment, but I cherished that photo, printed and pasted it into my journal and listened to “Enchanted” on a loop for weeks to come. Of course that was as far as the universe would grant our romance go, but I lived on that adrenaline for months.

That’s what this song feels like: it may not even be someone you know or will ever see again, but Taylor’s words gave wings to feelings that needed no legitimacy to be real.

Please don’t be in love with someone else

Please don’t have somebody waiting on you

“Better Than Revenge” remains one of the more controversial songs of Taylor’s early career, supposedly about Joe Jonas’ new actress girlfriend Camilla Belle. Not one for subtleties, Taylor lays into the antagonist of the song:

She’s not a saint and she’s not what you think she’s an actress

She’s better known for the things that she does on the mattress

Based on interviews from this time, Taylor was keen on upholding her “good girl” persona: she didn’t party or drink, didn’t do drugs, and was admittedly not a “sexy” person. In a 2012 Vogue interview, the author quips:

“She has a deeply ingrained sense of appropriateness. She also knows her audience—and knows that they aren’t ready for her to grow up quite yet.”

Maintaining this image was good for public consumption–it kept her family friendly in a way most pop stars preferred to avoid, and obviously helped her sell records.

Whether or not Taylor actually felt this way is up for debate (she was a 20 year old woman after all), but writing a song insinuating your ex’s new girlfriend gets around is certainly not very feminist. Taylor would come to understand the sensitivity of these lyrics, and address it in a very Taylor way: changing them for the Taylor’s Version and acting like the original rendition never existed. The “Picture to Burn” treatment, if you will.

If there’s one thing about Taylor, she wants the last word. On the next track, “Innocent”, she takes the high road regarding the Kanye incident, absolving him of his wrongs by putting them on the same playing field:

Time turns flames to embers

You’ll have new Septembers

Everyone of us has messed up too

Minds change like the weather

I hope you remember

Today is never too late to be brand new

While it would hardly be the last word of the whole ordeal, “Innocent” was Taylor’s way of providing her perspective about that night in September. Talking about it in 2011, Kanye shows little remorse for his actions, saying he was acting as a “soldier of the culture.” As if “All The Single Ladies (Put A Ring On It)” wasn’t already a massive cultural phenomenon and Beyoncé and her legacy needed his protecting. Both women would go on to ensure their spots in the zeitgeist, essentially creating entirely new subsets of it, all without the help of Kanye.

“Haunted” is a song Taylor wanted to sound like the feelings that inspired it: when you know you’re slowly losing someone and the subsequent loneliness of desertion. The host of strings that burst in at the song’s apex were arranged by Paul Buckmaster, a collaborator of The Rolling Stones, Harry Nilsson, Carly Simon just to name a few, and recorded in Los Angeles. The song is intense, darting notes illustrating the unknowing feelings and chaos that ensues when you try to save a sinking ship.

The performance of this song on the Speak Now World Tour was equally as dramatic, Taylor running around the stage in a tattered blood red gown as dancers drop from massive bells hanging from the ceiling. It was like Taylor’s wildest imaginations in live action, a performance I’ll never forget.

“Last Kiss” is track number 13, and Taylor described it as a song that lays out all the hopeless, desperate feelings you have after a breakup, mourning the loss of not only the person you thought you knew but all the memories you had for the future.

I never thought we’d have a last kiss

I never imagined we’d end like this

Your name, forever the name on my lips

Ending the original on a high note is “Long Live”, which Taylor wrote for her “team”: her band, her fans, her family, all the people who made her success possible. A sonic photo album of this period in her life, it captured all the magic that’d played out over the last few years that was unlike anything she’d ever experienced:

Long live the walls we crashed through

How the kingdom lights shined just for me and you

I was screaming, “Long live all the magic we made”

And bring on all the pretenders

One day we will be remembered

Taylor would play “Long Live” on and off throughout the Era’s tour, eventually tacking it onto the end of the streaming release of The Era’s tour movie release. Solidifying the swiftie ideal of Taylor as a fan of the fans themselves, it was an obvious fan favorite.

Listening to the Taylor’s Version, I began to consider what Taylor must have felt recording it at 19 versus at 33. On the one hand, she knew when she was 19 that she wanted to leave a legacy of gratitude, but re-recording it as an adult, I wonder if she looked back on some lines and felt totally detached, or interpreted her own words differently all those years later.

Make no mistake: Taylor has always been adamant of her appreciation for the people who support her, often going above and beyond to show it. But what could it mean, Taylor’s refusal to give “Long Live” a permanent spot on the Era’s tour, her career high point?

What started as a magical connection faced a precarious decline. Over the years, swifties have become notoriously feral—not just in their interactions with other fandoms and anyone who dare even remotely criticize her, but with Taylor herself. No longer was it just people showing up at her shows–now they gathered wherever she was rumored to show up. Long gone were the days of simply connecting through song lyrics—now it was speculating and nitpicking every detail of her personal life to understand the context and subjects of songs, a habit that became commonplace and especially nefarious with the release of The Tortured Poets Department.

The peanut gallery became overly vocal in their opinions, unconcerned there could be an actual person (Taylor Swift) on the other end of their online musings, and insistent that they knew what was best for her when in reality they do not know her at all. One example that comes to my is a 2023 Twitter “campaign” by swifties exclaiming their disappointment regarding Taylor’s “relationship” with 1975 frontman Matty Healy. While I agree that Healy is hardly the beacon of polite society and has made more than his fair share of problematic comments, this incredibly parasocial behavior is just one of many instances of Taylor’s fans making inappropriate, and frankly, unhinged demands of a person they literally do not know.

What was once a point of connection for Taylor over the years ended up a double-edged sword she was no longer able to carefully wield. The Era’s tour itself was a love letter to those who’d gotten Taylor to that apex, but excluding “Long Live” felt like a pointed withdrawal from the Taylor who’d once quipped “the longest and best relationship” she’s ever had was the one with her fans.

The deluxe version of Speak Now, sold only at Target of course, included six bonus tracks. “Ours” was the first, a soft and upbeat tune with simple meditations about moving through unexpected love:

Don’t you worry your pretty little mind

People throw rocks at things that shine

And life makes love look hard

On “If This Were A Movie” Taylor fantasizes about what could have been if everything worked out just the way it did in her head, a relatable compulsive habit for any young person with hormones. The lyrics read like a screenplay, while the arrangement sounds like the score from a major budget film:

Last night I heard my own heart beating

Sounded like footsteps on my stairs

Six months gone and I’m still reaching

Even though I know you’re not there

“Maybe I’ve been going back too much lately” she sings at one point, aware of the dangers of daydreaming about the past but doing it anyway.

“Superman” superficially sounds like a song to someone else, but I hear it as an early instance of Taylor writing about two different sides of herself: Taylor Swift the person and Taylor Swift™, the core of a very lucrative business.

By this point Taylor had her own perfume, greeting cards, a collab with ban.do (relics of the past I once owned and regrettably sold on Poshmark), a custom Taylor guitar collaboration, and a deal with Covergirl. Her responsibilities now included supporting the livelihoods of a whole team who counted on her to keep the train on the tracks. I can hardly keep myself afloat at almost 30, I can’t imagine the pressure of all that on you at 20 years old.

In “Superman” Taylor sings:

I’m far away but I’ll never let you go

I’m lovestruck and looking out the window

Don’t forget, don’t forget where I’ll be

Taylor Swift™ gets to jet all over the world, play shows to crowds of tens of thousands of screaming fans–but at what cost? As I mentioned before, Taylor tends to be idealistic in interviews around this time, saying she can’t complain about her circumstances because this is all she’s ever wanted in life. She was also clear that songwriting was a means of expressing how she truly felt about most things, and who’s to say that didn’t include fame and its negative ramifications? This feels especially pertinent if there were parts of herself unable to be revealed because of the risks it posed to the business side of her art.

The last few bonus tracks are those ubiquitous acoustic versions, including “Back to December” and “Haunted”, followed by the pop mix of “Mine.” Then we get into the Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) vault tracks, another group of unheard songs recorded a decade after their original conception.

Speak Now (Taylor’s Version)

Like Fearless (Taylor’s Version), Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) has six vault tracks, two including features by Fall Out Boy and Hayley Williams. Let me tell you…when Taylor dropped the track list and Fall Out Boy was included, I was absolutely beside myself. Anyone who knew me in middle school knew that Fall Out Boy was everything to me: Under the Cork Tree, Infinity On High…these albums were near and dear to my burgeoning emo heart and to see them in collaboration with Taylor on an album that marked the end of my adolescence was heartwarmingly full circle.

“Electric Touch (Featuring Fall Out Boy) (Taylor’s Version) (From the Vault)” is the first vault track and reads like a follow up to “Sparks Fly”, full of visceral yearning, dramatic metaphors and hesitant hopefulness.

I was thinking just one time

Maybe the stars align

And maybe I call you mine

And you won’t need space

Or string me along while you decide

And just one time

Maybe the moment’s right

It’s 8:05 and I see two headlights

It’s messy, as she admits she knows how bad this person could hurt her but she has to go for it because she can’t not try. She’s treating her relationships like her career–like if she tries hard enough or if the stars align she will be able to convince them to love her.

What’s the significance of 8:05 you ask? 8+5=13, Taylor’s lucky number, of course.

The next song is “When Emma Falls In Love (Taylor’s Version)”. Taken literally, Taylor wrote it about her friend Emma Stone, who she met around the time of the original Speak Now era. In an interview Taylor says if she could be anyone for a day she would be Emma, a sentiment echoed throughout the song:

She’s the kind of book that you can’t put down

Like if Cleopatra grew up in a small town

And all the bad boys would be good boys

If they only had a chance to love her

And to tell you the truth, sometimes I wish I was her

A recurrent theme within sapphic and queer circles is the idea that there’s a fine line between wanting to be her and wanting to be with her—the greatest (and gayest) band in the world MUNA just released a song about it, in fact. “When Emma Falls In Love” is a textbook example of this phenomenon.

The Aaron Dessner touch on this one is strong, but offers a fresh yet accurate take that works much to the song’s advantage. Even outside Aaron’s direct contributions, he brings to the table Josh Kaufman, who’s become a key player in Taylor’s playing circle. He’s responsible for such iconic moments like the Dylany harmonica on “Betty”; he also collaborated on her album Evermore, playing lap steel, harmonica, and mandolin on several tracks. In 2021, he collaborated on Red (Taylor’s Version), playing electric and acoustic guitars, mandolin, and harmonica on the songs “Better Man (Taylor’s Version),” “I Bet You Think About Me,” and “Run”.

All this to say, these sonic contributions are much welcomed. The Taylor’s Version of each record do sound almost exactly the same—even I can’t tell the difference sometimes! And in a lot of cases, the Taylor’s Versions probably sound better. But there is something to be said about listening to the originals—working on the Taylor’s Version’s all those years later allotted a new opportunity to not only create new memories from a time far gone, but also helped Taylor grow as an artist.

“I Can See You (Taylor’s Version) (From the Vault)” is next, one of only two vault tracks with a corresponding video. In it, we see a biblically accurate Speak Now era Taylor–glittery dress, black boots, lyrics up her arm and ringlet curls–locked up in a vault where she paces in her pen, tallying the days on the walls and looking longingly for an escape. Outside the vault, Taylor’s beloved and alleged ex-boyfriend from the era, Taylor Lautner, flips and jumps through the museum, fighting off a crowd of bad guys to help Speak Now Taylor escape from the vault where she’s locked up. There are also two young women in on the heist, Joey King and Presley Cash, two of the stars from the 2010 music video for “Mean.” Repeatedly throughout the video we see them telling Taylor “I can see you.”

In an Instagram post about the video, Taylor says she wanted to “play out symbolically how it’s felt for me to have the fans helping me reclaim my music.” That ties things in a neat bow for the present and the passive swifties, but I can’t help but read deeper into the video’s meaning, as its core plot echoes one that gaylors have popularized over the years: that there are two Taylor’s, the real Taylor and the brand Taylor or Taylor™. In this case, Taylor Lautner represents the real, authentic Taylor trying to save herself from the fate that awaits Taylor Swift™ who is stuck in an endless loop of performance. Finally breaking herself out from under the pressures of public life, the glass cases displaying versions of past Taylor’s, and subsequently the entire building holding it all, blow up.

Harkening back to the bird cage imagery from the original Speak Now era, we can infer this reappearance a decade plus later reinforces she felt trapped in some way and that she was sparking conversation about how she felt during that time in her life. This cage was one she’d partially built, as she’d come to realize on Midnights, and it was her, and only her, who could truly free herself from the grips of her past.

“Castles Crumbling (Featuring Hayley Williams) (Taylor’s Version) (From the Vault)” depicts the woes of a defeated hero losing her empire. It’s quite the jump from the fairytale wonder that makes up a lot of Speak Now:

And I feel like my castle’s crumbling down

And I watch all my bridges burn to the ground

And you don’t want to know me

I will just let you down

You don’t wanna know me now

Whether this was about Taylor herself or inspired by someone else, it spells out an implicit fear of failure and losing the favor of those around you–concerns Taylor has carried from the beginning of her career and up to the present day: she continues to inform listeners they don’t know her and shouldn’t want to know her, a recurring theme on later tracks like “The Archer” from Lover, “Dear Reader” from Midnights, and the eponymous “The Life Of A Showgirl.”

Of course we have to talk about ! Hayley cites Taylor as her “first industry friend.” The two met after Taylor’s mom Andrea gave Hayley Taylor’s number at a 2008 Grammy after party, asking if she’d reach out as Taylor needed more young women in the industry as friends. They’ve stayed close over the years, a friendship surely built upon the mutual experience of growing up under the bright microscope of fame. Hayley’s band Paramore being a pop punk phenomenon, she’d been in and around the industry as long as Taylor. The pop punk scene specifically being a harbinger of danger for young women, Hayley was likely all too familiar with the pitfalls of meeting your heroes.

“I appreciated singing that with her too because obviously she’s been through many seasons of that, of people hating her, then loving her, then hating her again. I think the court of public opinion is not only an overwhelming, oppressive kind of feeling but also it gets swayed back and forth and changes so quickly. So I really appreciated being a part of that song.” – Hayley talking about “Castles Crumbling”

“Foolish One (Taylor’s Version) (From the Vault)” is a cautionary tale to those girls with high expectations and overactive imaginations. In it she sings a silly little la la la la la, as if she’s not talking to all of us but singing a little song to herself. It ends on a hopeful note:

Foolish one, the day is gonna come for your confessions of love

When all is said and done, he just wasn’t the one

“Timeless (Taylor’s Version) (From the Vault)” is one of my favorite vault tracks. In interviews from the time, Taylor talks about having these lightning bolt ideas for songs, and I can see her meandering through an antique shop on tour when the premise for this scrapbook of a song hit her. It reminds me a lot of Taylor’s previous songs, especially “Mary’s Song (Oh My My My)” in how she starts off describing another relationship but eventually relates it back to her own story. It’s a quintessential Taylor work where her brilliant depiction of the minutiae of falling in love is so vivid you feel like you’re in the song.

Down the block, there’s an antique shop

And something in my head said, “Stop, “ so I walked in

On the counter was a cardboard box

And the sign said, “Photos: twenty-five cents each”

Black and white, saw a ‘30s bride

And two lovers laughin’ on the porch of their first house

The kinda love that you only find once in a lifetime

The kind you don’t put down

And that’s when I called you and it’s so hard to explain

But in those photos, I saw us instead

…

I had to smile when it caught my eye

There was one of a teenage couple in the driveway

Holdin’ hands on the way to a dance

And the date on the back said 1958

Which brought me back to the first time I saw you

Time stood still like somethin’ in this old shop

I thought about it as I started lookin’ ‘round

At these precious things that time forgot

It’s even more full circle the longer you listen, hearing her familiar songwriting quirk of repeating the song’s first line again at the end, just like “Mary’s Song” or “Love Story.” It’s hard to imagine why “Timeless” didn’t make the original cut of Speak Now, but it feels even more appropriate that it made its way back to our ears all these years later, another fortunate byproduct of the Taylor’s Version saga.

One day, we will be remembered

Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) was the third re-record to come out and the first to be released during the Era’s Tour. By this point swifties were frothing at the mouth after going less than a year without a Taylor’s Version as she veered into the Midnights era at the end of 2022. The night she announced SNTV was absolute chaos: Lucy Dacus, Julien Baker and Matty Healy appeared as guests during Phoebe Bridgers’ opening set; Taylor played “Sparks Fly” on the guitar during the surprise song set, the Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) cover lighting up the massive Era’s Tour screens. People went absolutely cuckoo bananas.

Listening back now, both to the original and Taylor’s version, I realized I didn’t appreciate Speak Now all that much in the moment, but later in high school I applied it to every moderately romantic situation in my life. I wasn’t all that interested in the whimsy that Taylor employed so well both lyrically and sonically. At one point Taylor quipped that she was impressed with her younger self because she wrote about “tiny details in my life in these diaries from a bygone age with such… wonderment. Intrigue. Romance. I noticed things and decided they were romantic, and so they were.” I needed the lesson, and Speak Now provided it.

Speak Now was Taylor’s third album to go multi-platinum, selling millions of copies within its first release week and spending six weeks at number one on the Billboard 200. “Mine”, the lead single, debuted at number 3 in the top 10. The album received nominations at the country and mainstream award shows, including the Academy of Country Music and the Billboard Music awards. “Mean” was nominated for, and ended up winning, Best Country Song and Best Country Solo Performance at the 2012 Grammys. In 2011 Billboard named her “Woman of the Year.”

This was the era we saw her really begin to reach out to other artists, both as peer and fan. She was a big (albeit unexpected) fan of rhythm, blues and hip hop artists like Usher and Nicki Minaj. In a radio interview from 2012, Taylor requested the station play album cut “Superbass” off Minaj’s recently released Roman’s Revenge. What was initially not a single ended up a cultural phenomenon, and Nicki would even join Taylor on the Speak Now World Tour to perform the song in LA.

Nicki wasn’t the only guest to grace Taylor’s stage this era: Taylor was introducing a new generation of listeners to acts like the Goo Goo Dolls, Johnny Rzeznick coming out at Madison Square Garden to do “Iris”; Jim Atkins of Jimmy Eat World joining to sing “The Middle”; and even her namesake, James Taylor. When Taylor came off stage after performing “Fire and Rain” with the eponymous folk singer, her dad tearfully reacted to the performance by telling her she “didn’t know” JT’s impact–as if he would ever have had any chance like that moment had it not been for her. Imagine performing with your dads hero and that being the first thing your dad says to you afterwards. There’s that careless man.

Taylor continued to dedicate endless time to her fans—both online and in person. Fostering a connection with people fit the image she was projecting (that could or could not have been her real personality), but business wise it was also generating buzz on social media, a new kind of currency. By connecting with her fans online, a new pathway to connect was laid, leveling the playing field by creating an opportunity for fans who couldn’t necessarily afford to buy a record or go to her shows.

Ever the spoiled child, I had Taylor bracelets, Taylor Christmas ornaments, Taylor calendars and perfume and posters. I had the official Taylor Swift Baby Taylor guitar, a beautiful three-quarter sized acoustic with a Taylor insignia featuring her preferred salutation “Love Love Love” and the signature that would come to signify these first three eras. I am so lucky to be able to learn so many Taylor songs on it, and it remains one of my most prized possessions to this day.

Despite Taylor’s roots and respect for country, Speak Now was bursting at the twangy seams, toeing the line of genre with reckless abandon. Taylor may have considered herself a country artist at the time, but Speak Now fits right in among the emo-pop records of the time: “I Can See You (Taylor’s Version) (From the Vault)” riffs off Canadian Indie Rock bands “Help I’m Alive”, “Better Than Revenge” is reminiscent of Paramore’s Riot!, “Haunted” evokes the gothicism of Evanescence. Taylor longed to build a legacy as a successful songwriter, mainly because she was someone who just loved music. Speak Now is like her time capsule documenting her stories and their soundtracks. Of course her albums would act similarly for all her fans over time, no matter what genre she chose to prescribe to. As Taylor’s confidence and success grew, she saw an opportunity to expand her audience while also flexing her skills and secure her place in the American pop canon. Given her track record thus far, it was only a matter of time.

Taylor’s propensity to skirt the bounds of genre didn’t sit well with people–some folks wanted her to pick a side. Much like artists before who disregarded the bounds of genre, Taylor was smart enough to know what it took to make a hit. But she also knew there was growth in change.

Taylor’s talent is undeniable—but the effort she’s willing to expel in order to hone that talent and make the most of it is what sets her apart and allots her the longevity to have a decades long career in a historically fraught industry. In an episode of the Switched On Pop podcast, singer-songwriter cites Taylor as one of her influences, saying it’s impactful to see someone who isn’t necessarily effortless, but actually trying really, really hard. Taylor wasn’t a star by chance–it happened with a lot of hard work, sweat, and tears.

With three successful projects behind her, the music itself became a vehicle for experimentation and expressing her thoughts. Teetering along the edge of country and pop, she commandeered attention from all directions. The world watched as she attempted to sustain it and continue spinning her endless tales into threads of gold.

Read the rest of The Monster On The Hill

This month’s gold⭐️goose is none other than my good pal Mahima (she/her)! Mahima (Mahi for short, IF you’re lucky enough to know her) is a social media savant, creative director, content creator, graphic designer, [junior] architect, artist and all around cool girl based in Columbus, Ohio. I’m super stoked she agreed to be our gold ⭐️ goose this month, as she has impeccable taste. Read on to see what she’s been into lately🪿

Mahi’s Pick(s)

Literally nothing tbh. I started Heated Rivalry bc my boyfriend got it for me for xmas, but I keep getting distracted from actually sitting down and reading it. I keep trying to dive into more things on substack bc I’ve found so many articles that are useful but my brain does not want to start using another platform lol

I finally finished The Secret Place by Tana French and this month I’ve been enjoying Marianne Faithfull’s autobiography which is full of juicy tidbits about her coming of age alongside The Rolling Stones (she was only 18 when she first met Mick and Keith). Marianne literally didn’t give a shit about anything, even her burgeoning career as a pop star and I can’t help but respect it.

Mahi’s Pick(s)

I hosted a galentine’s party and that was really cute. All the gals just hanging out and eating, drinking, and bedazzling lighters! I’ve been thinking about how I haven’t been to concerts lately and I forgot I’m going to the 5 Seconds of Summer concert in the summer and I’m deeply excited for that heheh. I’m also in the midst of planning a few trips but nothing set in stone yet. Maybe Cleveland, maybe LA, maybe CDMX, maybe Europe.

I moved into a new spot at the beginning of this month so mostly just been settling in and getting to know my new roommates. I did karaoke and got so drunk and sang not one but two Taylor Swift songs (“Love Story” and “You Belong With Me”).

Mahi’s Pick(s)

obsessed with so much and so little

• generally just crafting! I think we need to be more whimsical, which definitely seems to be a trend these days, but I’m an og crafter. My mom has like handwritten journals of how to make tissue paper flowers etc. what I’ve been crafting: bedazzling lighters, ceramics class (seems like everyone in their 20s is doing this rn), hand made matchbooks (made for galentine’s and also recreated my friend’s save the date as a matchbook)

• also! I want to get into snail mail again! My friend from Columbus moved to LA recently and she mailed me a little letter with a hand-drawn illustration on the front and I want to reciprocate!

• Also enjoying window shopping on depop....

eBay: I got near pristine copies of every Taylor Swift Rolling Stone cover. I’m on the hunt for an original copy of 1989, in due time. I’m also very tempted by the copies of her Beautiful Eyes EP. Nonetheless, there’s a ton of fun stuff on eBay, don’t sleep on it!

Mahi’s Pick(s)

• Bridgerton season 4 (and while waiting for part 2 I re-watched Queen Charlotte)

• a show called PONIES on peacock

• meh i like shitty tv like love island, love is blind columbus (lowkey wild shit), and started watching the newer seasons of Grey’s Anatomy which is wild bc I said I’d stop watching that show

I’ve been rewatching Girls so I’m really enjoying the renaissance happening right here on Substack. I also watched Sorry, Baby which wrecked me and The Hannah Montana 20th anniversary special which I found to be a big let down. Why was Alex Cooper there but not Lily or Oliver? Chappell Roan I love you but where are Jackson and Rico?? Why are you sitting on a podcast set IN FRONT OF THE STEWART’S COZY ASS MALIBU LIVING ROOM??? I have many notes—Disney, call me next time.

Mahi’s Pick(s)

• Gorillaz new album The Mountain–really cool blend of deeply Indian music with whatever their alternative art pop vibe is. Really cool to see sounds that are so familiar to me in mainstream media.

• I also like joji’s new album Piss In The Wind lol

• Recently I’ve rediscovered The Script so like I’m listening to “The Man Who Can’t Be Moved” lmao

• Memory Be A Blade by waterbaby – So tender and easy on the ears, like being wrapped up in a fluffy blanket of song. Then you hear the lyrics and it’s like a knife (...or a blade. So good.

• I’ve Got Nothing To Lose, and I’m Losing It by Morgan Nagler –

• Ricochet by Snail Mail – Lindsey Jordan does it again.

• “Locket” by Villagerrr – Cannot get enough of these Ohio boyz.

• “Dry Spell” by Kacey Musgraves – Lonely with a capital H if you know what I mean…I do very much unfortunately Kacey.

Despite being almost three years into a global pandemic that both reinforced and discarded everyday mundanity, the world somehow kept turning in 2022. Just like a lot of us, the temporary shuttering of life as we knew it knocked something loose in Taylor Swift’s noggin, yielding some of her best work to date. After years of following an effective formula that had led to massive success, the pandemic forced Taylor to try something different. The resulting epic sister albums folklore and evermore, written and recorded remotely with Jack Antonoff and The National’s Aaron Dessner, shifted something in the public perception of not just Taylor’s work, but her place in the popular music canon.

Folkmore (a fandom hybrid term for the folklore and evermore era’s that both took place in 2020) generated a newfound respect, or at least an acknowledgement akin to respect, for her strengths as an artist. Meanwhile, she was also a third of the way through her re-recording project, reinforcing an undeniable worth ethic and growing cultural ubiquity. When she initially mentioned she would be re-recording her old albums, a lot of people thought she was full of shit. And rightfully so, because who would want to go back and rehash over a decade plus worth of work just to prove a point?

Taylor Allison “People Often Greatly Underestimate How Much I Inconvenience Myself To Prove A Point” Swift, obviously.

The flame has caught.

When Taylor took to the MTV VMA’s red carpet in August of 2022, there was a lot of talk of a potential reputation (taylor’s version) announcement—she had been trolling swifties for months with easter eggs all pointing to the elusive re-recording. Collectively the fandom had underestimated our fearless leader, assuming she couldn’t possibly be writing and recording a brand new album with a whole new rolodex of songs while also re-recording her old albums plus vault tracks, right?

The crowd was abuzz with anticipation as Taylor stood on stage in a mini dress mimicking dripping diamonds, what was assumed to be a nod to the “Look What You Made Me Do” music video. Accepting the award for best longform video for the “All Too Well” short film, she said:

I had sort of made up my mind if you were going to be this generous and give us this, I thought it might be a fun moment to tell you that my brand new album comes out October 21st. And I will tell you more at midnight.

Going back through her old works was more than just a nostalgia trigger–it supposedly inspired a whole new album of songs. Announcing the album’s title later that evening on Instagram, she described the new album as “the stories of 13 sleepless nights scattered throughout my life.”

Meet me at midnight? My mind immediately went to “ME!”, Lover’s much derided lead single. “ME!” is hardly Taylor’s best work, but I can imagine the criticism it spawned probably felt like being kicked while you’re down. The entire Lover era was almost immediately overshadowed by the announcement of Scooter Braun purchasing Taylor’s former label, Big Machine Records, and subsequently her entire catalog.1 Losing the potential of owning her life’s work, then being widely ridiculed for a song she thought would be a fun, campy ode to feeling good in your skin, it probably felt as though the world was crashing down around her.

“Whatever makes you, you know it’s just like emo kids, dance sequences, dancers, cats, gay pride, country western boots.” – Taylor talking about “ME!” in Miss Americana

Did this string of events birth another version of Taylor we’d yet to meet? Is that who we’re invited to meet at midnight sharp? Another Taylor, one we hadn’t necessarily seen before?

After a record-breaking Grammy win the previous year, it felt like the juvenile smog that’d trailed her brand to that point was beginning to clear. Or, at the very least, being replaced by a different kind of smoke.

Perhaps it was a by-product of whatever she was looking to set aflame on the cover, one that’s curiously different from previous releases: a little blurry, with a prop (the lighter), and all the standard tracks listed. Was she just trying something different because she could? Why choose this image for the cover? What was she trying to portray?

Taylor entered the Midnights era with a renewed sense of confidence–not just about her work, but her lack of control of the narratives surrounding it. The re-recording of her previous albums allotted Taylor an opportunity to regain some of the autonomy she’d forfeited over the years, and she took it. All those years she’d stood around doe eyed and quiet, avoiding saying even one thing out of line, were long gone. All that work to not make a scene, not cause any drama, not complain, be gracious and prim and proper, hadn’t paid off in the slightest: her reputation was soured over one doctored phone call and her life’s work had been sold to her arch nemesis. It didn’t matter how good, talented, grateful or humble she was—the court of public opinion found her guilty. She was ready to burn it all down.

Going through the process of recording her old albums, Taylor reflected on her past with a new perspective and ten years of experience under her belt. Aaron Dessner, a new collaborator from the folkmore era, had opened doors to new styles of storytelling and writing she hadn’t necessarily considered before either:

What if not all these feelings aren’t about the same person? What if I’m writing about several different very fractured situations, one is about love and one is about a business thing that really hurt and one is a sort of relationship that I considered to be family and that really hurt? – Taylor talking about writing folklore’s “hoax” with Aaron

In that same clip she mentions conflicting emotions within that one song, and how that differentiated “hoax” from the rest of her catalog. Aaron had pushed her out of her comfort zone, and it marked a significant shift in her lyrical composition.

One could argue this also shaped her attitude toward the narratives surrounding her personal life. After years of flailing attempts to control the narrative, what if she just…stopped? What if she split her true self away from the part that inspired such division and contempt, like she could divide muses and inspirations for songs, and just let Taylor™, the showgirl, be the punching bag? The showgirl was quite good at her job, anyway, why not feature her more prominently, give her that starring role so many seemed to think Taylor was so eager for? As she had discovered writing folklore, she’s a mirrorball, and she can be whatever the crowd wants her to be. In his book There’s Nothing Like This: The Strategic Genius of Taylor Swift, Kevin Evers posits “All she had to do was just be and people would make narratives out of it.”2

And hadn’t she really been doing that all along? For most, if not all, of her career, she’d allowed, even encouraged the crowd to project their own stories onto her as a means of relating to them and ultimately gaining their adoration. After years of catering to a fan base that saw themselves in her, would defend her even at her alleged worst, was it finally time for one last hurrah as Taylor Swift™?

Miley Cyrus as Hannah Montana, who also came on the scene in 2006, would come to prove that the double life was cumbersome at best. But would that be enough to spark a desire within Taylor to take down a legacy she had worked so hard to create over the years?

The narratives surrounding her personal life became inextricably intertwined with her work, and the minor semblance of control she had over the years was completely eradicated the bigger she became. The drama proved unavoidable, so why not take advantage of it? If the public always wanted a performance, why not give them one?

While Taylor claims Midnights is about 13 sleepless nights, we’ll never know if they’re actually all her own. After tinkering with fictional storytelling on folklore and evermore, she’d found another means of bringing stories to life, and in a way that was far less intrusive on her personal life. The court of public opinion had also deemed her a liar anyway, so why not prove them right?

Additionally, a pattern that emerged earlier in her career seemed to be spiraling: when she released more fun, upbeat songs, the criticism was almost immediate, but sad songs and melancholy musings always spawned a rave review of her abilities to distill feminine heartache.

Many a journalist asked Taylor if she were worried about her ability to write songs should she ever become “happy.” Years later, during her 2019 Tiny Desk concert, Taylor said she received this question more than any other throughout her career, and that it had the potential to “seriously deteriorate” her mental health. In both 2012 and 2019, she’s adamant that she wouldn’t be happy if she weren’t writing songs; her work is her priority.

I’m 32 so we’re considered geriatric popstars. They try to put us out to pasture at 25 so I’m just happy to be here. – Taylor on Fallon in November ‘22

While I can’t relate to Taylor on many levels, where I can is as a woman nearing her 30’s, finally reckoning with growing up as a person and as an artist, and what that all means for the future. I think a lot about that old chestnut (the future), for others and of course for myself. I am never sure if the balance is there, it usually doesn’t feel like it is. That meme of Jemima Kirke always comes to mind, “I think you’re all thinking of yourselves too much.” During folklore Taylor had supposedly forgotten all about herself, writing these “fictional” stories, but in reality, I think it had ruined her brain just like anyone else. She became obsessed: what her legacy would be, how she would talk about it in hindsight, no matter what the present headlines may say. She had always been playing the long game, and holed up for years during the pandemic, she had a lot of time to plan.

In a lavender haze

Midnights is a departure from the rest of Taylor’s work, even up to the present day. It’s a unique blend of Jack Antonoff’s synth laden sensibilities and Aaron Dessner’s more subdued indie propensities. Jack is credited on most of the tracks, but Aaron’s touch is more than welcome where it appears. Producing not one but two standout folk pop albums in just one year, plus their work together on the re-recordings, the unexpected trio had hit a comfortable stride.

Unlike in prior years, Taylor had the press at her whim, so there was little to no pre-album release intel, just Taylor cryptically announcing the song titles in a TikTok series titled “Midnights Mayhem with Me.” From what can be gleaned from the album credits, other collaborators included Sounwave (Kendrick Lamar), Jahaan Akil Sweet (Kehlani), and Sam Dew, who Taylor worked with on “I Don’t Wanna Live Forever” from the 50 Shades soundtrack. Midnights’ moody, borderline foggy sound was achieved with various instruments and synthesisers, including the Yamaha DX7 and Oberheim OB-8, and analog synthesizers such as Moog, Mellotron, and Juno 6. It wouldn’t be a late stage Taylor Swift™ album without a few random players from the Taylor Swift Cinematic Universe, including Zoe Kravitz, who was rumored to be living with Taylor during quarantine, and Dylan O’Brien, who starred in the “All Too Well” short film in 2021.

No Taylor era can start anew without a proper aesthetic changeup–that’s just good marketing, something she’d mastered over the years. Midnights was a 180 from Lover‘s bright pastels, and folklore and evermore‘s subdued backwoods cosplaying, instead invoking a shadowy 70s vibe in hazy settings with Taylor sitting around looking miserable. It suits her, the long haired hippie look, and I think that’s why it’s one of my favorite eras aesthetically. As we’ll discuss in a bit, this allots a glimpse of how Taylor sees her real self, intel that is very rare, and one that has shaped a lot of the way I view/interact with her entire catalog.

Midnights

The album opens with a deep thumping bass line, and the era defining declaration: “Meet me at midnight,” followed by some high pitched, almost goofy backing vocals. Immediately it’s different from previous releases, but in the first line Taylor addresses that elusive “you” that so often pops up throughout her discography:

Staring at the ceiling with you

Oh you don’t ever say too much

And you don’t really read into my melancholia

I’ve been under scrutiny

You handle it beautifully

All this shit is new to me

Superficially this song is about that honeymoon phase where everything seems to be going swimmingly with a new partner despite any of the assumptions that others may have, and that interpretation surely appeals to the everyday listener. But not me, of course.

Entering this album of sleepless nights, I hear a woman kept awake at night by perception and the anxiety it spawns. Similar to previous releases, one particular line of this opening song acts as the album’s thesis:

I’m damned if I do give a damn what people say

No deal, the 1950s shit they want from me

Opening the album with this song, she’s beckoning us in, hitting play on a years-long act where it’s not her personal life that’s making headlines but the legacy she’s actively building on the Era’s tour. The showgirl is born, the flame has caught.

Taylor said she originally heard the phrase “lavender haze” from an episode of Mad Men, where Don Draper talks about being in love with a woman named Betty, an interesting coincidence given Taylor’s infamous “fictional” love triangle from folklore, which revolves around a girl named “Betty.”

However, the color lavender’s long history isn’t nearly as romantic, harkening back to the “lavender scare” of the 1950s, a fear-mongering campaign employed by the Eisenhower administration to instill contempt for gay people by linking them to communism. The demonization of LGBTQ+ individuals further alienated queer people in everyday life and hindered progress for the entire community (sound familiar?). It would be several decades before the government banned security clearances for gay workers.

Queer people reclaimed lavender as a means of resistance, donning hankies, sashes, and armbands in the color to denote it as a symbolism of queer power.

The “Lavender Haze” video, while far from the pastels, rainbows, and overt gayness of Lover’s singles, embraces queerness in a more subtle manner. There’s lots of lavender, both the color and the actual plant, featured prominently throughout, but there’s also Taylor’s love interest, Laith Ashley, a trans model, actor and activist. Taylor said of the video:

This was the first video I wrote out of the 3 that have been released, and this one really helped me conceptualize the world and mood of Midnights, like a sultry sleepless 70’s fever dream.

Directed by and starring Taylor, there’s a lot of interesting symbolism invoked throughout, some of which carried over into the Era’s tour performance of the song.

The Era’s tour performance opens with imagery on the big screen of Taylor getting out of bed then climbing into a cloud on a ladder. Curiously, this imagery is reminiscent of the cover of “The Ladder”, a magazine created in 1956 by the Daughters of Bilitis, America’s first organized lesbian group.3 During the performance, the Era’s tour dancers push around ladders with clouds atop.

At the end of the video, Taylor pushes down the walls of the room she’s been living in, quite literally breaking the fourth wall, then falls asleep under a blanket of cloud. All these things together, the lyrics, the music video, the inspiration, the symbolism, is one hell of a way to start off a new album.

The second track is “Maroon.” A contradictory follow up to the lavender haze of it all, on “Maroon” Taylors invokes color in a different way to reflect on a love lost.

And I chose you

The one I was dancing with

In New York, no shoes

Looked up at the sky and it was

The burgundy on my t-shirt when you splashed your wine into me

And how the blood rushed into my cheeks, so scarlet, it was

The mark they saw on my collarbone, the rust that grew between telephones

The lips I used to call home, so scarlet, it was maroon

In terms of Taylor songs, “Maroon” is in a league of its own in a lot of ways. It’s sultry, dark, full of vivid metaphors describing the ways a relationship can leave a mark. Although it was not given a permanent slot on the Era’s tour, Taylor played it as a surprise song during the acoustic set nine separate times.

It’s become a gaylor anthem, as there’s no straight explanation for the line “the lips I used to call home, so scarlet it was maroon” —in addition to the many other queer coded bits of the song.

The monster on the hill

The third track and first single from Midnights, “Anti-Hero” holds a special place in my heart, as made evident by the title of this series. “Anti-Hero” is some of Taylor’s best work: in three and a half minutes, she encapsulates the last two decades of her life from both an inner and outer perspective, acknowledging the nature of her outsized place in popular culture and how it manifests in a self fulfilling prophecy only she can truly take the blame for.

The music video also birthed the visual manifestation of a theory that gaylors have been discussing for years, that there are several different “versions” or “characters” that Taylor plays—herself, real Taylor, the Taylor we don’t usually get to see, who is plagued by uncertainty and fear, hair pulled back in an elastic, and eating breakfast for dinner; the showgirl Taylor, Taylor™, who gets off on putting on a show and satiating the never ending demands of the masses; and the last one, gigantic Taylor, a monster shadow that “knocks over buildings and wreaks havoc.”

In the first verse she sings about her arrested development, deciphering actual reality from her personal reality, failed relationships, and all the prices, vices, crises, and sleepless nights that result. In the music video the ghosts of her past meander around her house, taunting her and causing a general panic. As she opens the front door to escape, Showgirl Taylor (donned in a green and orange body suit reminiscent of The Life Of A Showgirl cover) is waiting on the stoop, declaring: “It’s me, hi! I’m the problem, it’s me.”

Taylor and the Showgirl enjoy some shenanigans, taking shots, singing songs, smashing guitars, and engaging in general debauchery. Then the Showgirl teaches Taylor a very important lesson:

In the second verse she continues to lay out her worst fears, ones she alludes to in songs like “The Archer,” “Nothing New (feat. Phoebe Bridgers) (Taylor’s Version) (From The Vault),” and “mirrorball”:

Sometimes it feels like everybody is a sexy baby

And I’m the monster on the hill

Too big to hang out, slowly lurching toward your favorite city

Pierced through the heart but never killed

It’s a multi-pronged metaphor, referencing both her above average stature (she’s 5’11”) and the outsized nature of her celebrity. Her public persona that has grown so grand over the years allows almost no choice but the option to address it, for better or worse. I get it! I’m guilty! It’s me, hi! But it does raise a good point: what is she supposed to do about that, even if she is highly aware of it?

Everyday, how do I make myself among my friends and family not see this big elephant in the room, because i dont want the elephant in the room? – Taylor talking to Aaron about the song “peace.”

Giant Taylor could also represent the perceptions people have of her—what’s assumed about her as a partner, friend, coworker; the worst assumptions that suck up all the air in the room, ones she has to disprove every time she meets someone.

Verse two continues:

Did you hear my covert narcissism

I disguise as altruism like some kind of congressman

I wake up screaming from dreaming one day I’ll watch as you’re leaving

And life will lose all its meaning for the last time

In the video a gigantic version of Taylor, whose outsized presence just drove out a gaggle of dinner party goers, pins a “vote for me for everything!” button to her sweater, covering up a stain from the blue and purple glitter that bled from her shoulder after she was pierced with an arrow just a few moments prior. She tries to empty a wine bottle into her mouth only to find it empty.

Showgirl is figuratively and literally pushing Taylor to the brink, and suddenly all the fun and games from the beginning of the relationship begin to fade. Whereas during the first chorus they’re tossing back shots and smashing shit like it’s no big deal, by the second chorus it’s hitting Taylor a little harder, and she vomits the purple glitter right into the Showgirl’s lap.

The bridge illustrates a new fear we haven’t really heard yet from Taylor:

I have this dream my daughter in law kills me for the money

She thinks I left them in the will

The family gathers round and reads it and then someone screams out

“She’s laughing up at us from hell!!”

This exact scenario plays out in the music video: as her sons Chad and Prestin argue over the 13 cents she left them in the will (the majority going to a cat sanctuary), chaos ensues as Chad accuses Prestin’s wife of murdering Taylor: “She didn’t fall off that balcony, she was pushed!” The camera pans over to the casket where (real) Taylor is peeking through a crack, eventually coming out to observe the chaos in all its petty, outrageous glory.

The whole ordeal is an allegory for fame. The kids represent the different legions of her over invested fans, from swifties to hetlors to gaylors, while the different versions of herself represent the different ways Taylor positions herself not to lose her mind about the constant chatter about her from fans, et al. It’s also a cheeky way to drive home the notion that she not only knows what we talk about, but that she will know even in her afterlife. It will literally haunt her until she dies and after. And that’s why she admits:

It’s me, hi! I’m the problem it’s me

It’s me, hi. Everybody agrees, everybody agreessssssss

The hissing at the end of ‘everybody agrees’ is seemingly a call back to reputation, when the internet flooded her profiles with snake emojis after Kim Kardashian posted a recording of the phone call that propped up an already ravenous campaign to paint Taylor as a lying whiny white girl with a victim complex. She quickly learned it didn’t really matter what she did or how she acted, the real mistake was giving so much credence to people who don’t know her at all.

But that’s the life she chose: she’s reaping what she sowed by giving far too much weight to a society that at its core doesn’t respect women. She knows she cares way too much. If she hadn’t cared so much to begin with, about proving everyone wrong, she’d be on a completely different path. But this is the one she chose, and she has to live with those repercussions.

Most relatable, the video ends with all three Taylor’s commiserating over a bottle of wine.

“Anti-Hero” was Taylor’s longest running #1 (until “The Fate of Ophelia” recently unseated it). It was one of the last songs on the Era’s tour setlist, with visuals of giant Taylor lurking in the background, watching and raging as the Showgirl rounded out another night on the big stage—a depiction of how Taylor perceives her reality, a visual translation of the inner workings of her mind. It’s worth noting that the third Taylor, the real Taylor, is absent from the Era’s tour performance.

Almost as if Taylor is the head gaylor herself, the idea of multiple Taylors aligns with the “performanceartlor” theory, which posits that Taylor’s public-facing life since the beginning of the Midnights era has all been for show, playing out in the little bread crumbs of her public life we’re privy to. When every aspect of your life is considered a part of the aesthetic, a correlating prop to whatever song happens to pique everyone’s interest, why not? If that means less people talking about her actual life, she’s right to run with it.

The follow up to “Anti-Hero” was bound to be overshadowed by its star power, but just the notion of Taylor and Lana on a track together is buzzy enough that “Snow On The Beach” is quite beloved within the fandom. The lyrics perfectly describe the song itself, weird but fucking beautiful. Sarah Chapelle of Taylor Swift Styled posits the song represents one of many instances of duality on the album, specifically the happy disbelief of finding a love like an unnatural gift from nature.4

Fans were incensed when Lana was relegated to mere background vocals on the original version, resulting in a bonus track on the Midnights (Til Dawn Edition), “Snow On The Beach (feat. More Lana Del Rey).” Further proof that taylurking is alive and well.

“You’re On Your Own Kid” is next, a proper Midnights take on the infamous track 5 slot.

Taylor and Jack flex their best here, writing a cryptically devastating song that makes you want to sing at the top of your lungs.

Why did Taylor feel so alone, though? What about her family? Friends? Her six year long relationship? Maybe she isn’t talking about her personal life but her career, and how that’s isolated her in ways that few could ever understand.

A lot of swifties hear the bridge of the song as a walk through of all the different eras:

From sprinkler splashes to fireplace ashes

I gave my blood, sweat, and tears for this

I hosted parties and starved my body

Like I’d be saved by a perfect kiss

The jokes weren’t funny, I took the money

My friends from home don’t know what to say

I looked around in a blood-soaked gown

And I saw something they can’t take away

‘Cause there were pages turned with the bridges burned

Everything you lose is a step you take

So make the friendship bracelets, take the moment and taste it

You’ve got no reason to be afraid

From not feeling pretty or skinny enough to thinking a relationship can make you worthy of the life you want, there’s a lot of relatable sentiments in this bridge. “You’ve got no reason to be afraid” is the line that hits me hardest.

That second to last line also acted like a sort of unofficial theme to the Era’s tour over the course of its 18 month, 152 show worldwide run.

“Midnight Rain” is next, and another example of the multiple Taylor’s theory at work.

He was sunshine, I was midnight rain

He wanted it comfortable, I wanted that pain

He wanted a bride, I was chasing that fame

He stayed the same, all of me changed like midnight

The supposed male muse, “he” represents Taylor’s real self, and the narrator speaking in the first person “I” is showgirl Taylor. She has completely separated her two selves, and they’re at odds because their needs and wants are so different. He’s sunshine, an authentic life in the daylight, away from crowds and prying eyes; I was midnight rain, a dark and damp solitude in the dead of night. “He wanted a bride, I was chasing that fame” speaks for itself. “He stayed the same” reminds me of every time Taylor introduces herself to a crowd or a stranger. “All of me changed like midnight”–her aesthetic, career, trajectory, whole professional life can change on a dime with the release of a new headline, a new photo, or a new album.

“Question…?” is next, one of those songs that often leaves swifties scratching their heads. A few lines lead me to believe this could be a relic of the 1989 era, or at the very least a follow up to one of that era’s singles, “Out Of The Woods.” The opening starts with a modulated voice singing “I remember,” a callback to the “Out Of The Woods” bridge.

I remember

Good girl, sad boy, big city, wrong choices

We had one thing going on

I swear that it was something

Cus I don’t remember who I was before you painted all my nights a color I’ve searched for since

That last line feels like another call back to “Out Of The Woods”, where Taylor sings “the rest of the world was black and white, but we were in screaming color.” And that ubiquitous “you” Taylor is constantly addressing is back! Taylor is asking not just one, but many, many questions.

Can I ask you a question?

Did you ever have someone kiss you in a crowded room?

And every single one of your friends was making fun of you

But 15 seconds later they were clapping too? Then what did you do?

Did you leave her house in the middle of the night?

Did you wish you’d put up more of a fight?

When she said it was too much?

Do you wish you could still touch… her?

It’s just a question

On the second chorus, a smattering of applause can be heard after the “15 seconds later they were clapping too” line, almost as if the whole thing is a sitcom or a movie. According to the credits, Jack’s sister Rachel along with Taylor’s brother Austin, and Dylan O’Brien provided the applause.

There’s one reasonable explanation for the inspiration for this song, but we won’t get to that lore until the 1989 chapter. So while outside that context I cannot be totally sure what Taylor is talking about on this song, it is one of my favorites on Midnights because it is just so fun to sing. Taylor’s particular style of talk singing makes for a very satisfying listener experience. The bridge on this really flexes her prosodic abilities.

Next is “Vigilante Shit”, a quintessential cringe Taylor track. What can I say, she’s a millennial at heart, and as one of the biggest artists in the world she is entitled to releasing a silly little song every now and then. I almost never listen to this song when it comes on, and there are about 100 other songs I’d have preferred to hear on the Era’s tour instead of this one. Flexing the fictional storytelling from folklore and evermore, and never missing the chance to further chastise her enemies, “Vigilante Shit” is a fantastical fictionalization of how things would go down if she were to act on her deep desire for revenge.

It is somewhat comical to me, however, that so many swifties used the performance as an excuse to sexualize Taylor in her personal relationships when the subject matter has nothing to do with sexuality but being a huge narc. Like you turned in your arch nemesis to the FBI, the biggest narc agency of all time? Meanwhile swifties are like “Travvy’s favorite part of the show is “Vigilante Shit”!!” (I’d argue his favorite part is when it’s over so he can go back to his boyfriend, Ross).

“Bejeweled” is next, a snappy little song that sees Taylor reclaim her autonomy after being “too good of a girl” for too long. After the purported Joe breakup at the beginning of the Era’s tour, fans heavily speculated that this song had to do with Joe’s propensity for staying out of the limelight. However, the music video invites a different interpretation, one that more closely aligns with the point that Taylor is trying to make.

Perhaps the most important piece of the puzzle in the Taylor Swift Cinematic Universe to date, the “Bejeweled” music video is a spin on Cinderella. House Wench Taylor (deemed “Swifterella”), is exiled to live with her evil step mother (played by Laura Dern) and sisters (played by the HAIM sisters), who torment her and make her their servant. Acting as her own fairy godmother, Taylor decks herself out in jewels, impresses the queen, wins the talent competition, and the keys to her very own castle. OH! and ghosts the prince at the end of it all.

It was assumed at the time that the whole Cinderella schtick was just a clever take on a classic tale, but just a few years later, I am curious if the video was actually a playbook, one that we’re seeing play out in real time.

Let’s run things back a bit. In May of 2025, Taylor announced the retrieval of her master recordings from Shamrock Holdings. A few months later in August, her and Travis announced their engagement. Despite Taylor working essentially her entire career to earn back the rights to her masters, the latter event garnered far more congratulations and attention than the former. Step mommy is right, after all!

This project will have me sounding like a broken record, but “Bejeweled” is actually…not about a man! And why would people want it to be when there are so many more interesting interpretations to consider: for one, it could represent Taylor talking to the general public, that no matter how much grifters try to tear her down, she will always come out on top. It could also represent the showgirl talking to real Taylor, telling her no matter how much she tries there will always be a part of her that loves to perform and entertain, that will always be “bejeweled.” It is the showgirl after all who wins the talent competition, gets the keys to the castle, and ghosts the prince. Almost as if it were never about the prince in the first place! Exiled from the rubies she gave up, she was able to reclaim the land by believing in herself before all else.

Taylor said there’s so many easter eggs in the “Bejeweled” video that she actually had a PDF to keep track of them all. From the dragons flitting around her newly won castle, to the countless jewels on step mommy’s fingers, to the Dita Von Teese cameo, Taylor was hinting at all sorts of things: Speak Now (Taylor’s Version), the showgirl era, an engagement. It was Taylor, after all, who mentioned hinting at things three years in advance. If you fail to plan you plan to fail and all that!

“Labyrinth” is next, a sonic departure from the rest of Taylor’s catalogue. It starts with Taylor’s breathy falsetto, eventually working down to a much lower register. A quintessential Jack track, there’s lots of synths and minimal percussion.

Like a lot of the songs on Midnights, the subject matter is up for debate, but to me I just hear a deeply anxious woman. There’s all this imagery around the fear of falling and recovery and it feels very much like my own bouts of anxiety, which mess with my focus for reasons I can’t quite put my finger on. The repetitive nature of the lyrics gives a sense of pacing or restlessness, harkening back to the sleepless nights she talks about when describing the album.

“Karma” is kind of an anomaly in the Taylor Swift universe. There’s only been one other song where a feature was added after the original version was released (“Bad Blood” feat. Kendrick Lamar from 2015), and similarly no other song where a verse is cut to make room for a feature.

Taylor premiered the “Karma” music video on May 26, 2023 during the New Jersey stop on the Era’s tour, bringing all the dancers who were featured in the video out to sit at the end of the catwalk for a live premiere with the crowd. Taylor brought Ice Spice out to perform the song for the end of the set.

Ice Spice’s additions to the song are noteworthy:

Karma is your chеck’s ‘boutta bounce

Karma is a fire in your house

And she ‘boutta pop up unannounced

And she never leavin’ you alone

Watch her put ya opps on a throne

First, “the fire in your house” feels pointed, especially considering the imagery during the Era’s tour performance of “Bad Blood” shows the Lover house burning down. “Watch her put your opps on a throne” is also interesting as it assumes some level of fault.

The music video is, of course, bursting with easter eggs, from Taylor as Lady Justice, to Taylor as Dororthy from the Wizard of Oz, Taylor as the devil in the depths of hell, to Taylor lassoing the planets, Taylor as a light bulb, Taylor counting the sands of time in an hourglass.

It’s hard to say for sure what her intent was with the imagery in this video. I interpret it as her reconciling the duality of her life: if you try to be a good person and do your best, karma will eventually work in your favor; but if you don’t, which she’s admitted to or at least alluded to many times in her music over the years, it will also not hesitate to come for you. The concept of karma translates well to a generic pop song, and if there’s one thing Taylor does well, it’s songs that speak to the masses.

“Karma” was also the finale of the Era’s tour setlist. During the performance, the image of an orange door hovers down from the top of the huge stage before exploding into a million little bits, just like a mirrorball. Interestingly enough, for the entirety of the tour except the very last show in Vancouver, she doesn’t exit out this orange door, but underneath the stage. And wouldn’t you believe, there was countless imagery featuring this orange door during the Showgirl era, almost as if none of it was accidental.

Second to last on the standard edition of Midnights is “Sweet Nothing.” Co-written by William Bowery, an alleged pseudonym for Joe Alwyn (more on that to come in the folklore chapter), it’s one of Taylor’s more saccharine creations, and for reasons I can’t quite put my finger on, the first few lines always make me weepy:

I spy with my little tired eye, tiny as a firefly

A pebble that we picked up last July

Down deep inside your pocket, we almost forgot it

Does it ever miss Wicklow sometimes?

There’s something so sweet about a little object connected to a sentimental time—souvenirs that don’t necessarily represent a place, but the moment that bore its significance. In addition to the synths used on other songs, there’s also some organ, and the key really suits her vocals. While never confirmed, some fans suggest “Sweet Nothing” was inspired by Paul McCartney’s relationship with his first wife, Linda—Taylor would come to know the legendary musician over the years via a friendship with his daughter Stella. In 2020 the pair would kick off a new Rolling Stone series, Musicians on Musicians, discussing “songwriting secrets, making albums at home, and what they’ve learned during the pandemic.”

The last song on the standard version is “Mastermind.” If you’re even lightly involved in Swiftiedom, you know Taylor loves to plant clues in her songs, music videos, outfits, and appearances. In this song she cops to this cryptic, “machiavellian” behavior, pointing out how she plans every minor detail in an attempt to control the narratives around her life that in reality she has absolutely no say over. The bridge lays out some of her biggest insecurities blatantly:

No one wanted to play with me as a little kid

So I’ve been scheming like a criminal ever since

To make them love me and make it seem effortless

Going back to the album prologue she says:

Maybe you were trying to mastermind matters of the heart again. You’ve gotten lost in the labyrinth of your head, where the fear wraps its claws around the fragile throat of true love. Will you be able to save it in time? Save it from who? Well, it’s obvious. From you.

‘Mastermind’ in this context isn’t a flex, more so suggesting that the true love in her life needs saving from herself. She’s all but saying, again, “it’s me, hi, I’m the problem it’s me.”

The standard, 13 track edition of Midnights came out on October 21 at midnight (eastern time, as most if not all Taylor drops have). Three hours after its release, Taylor dropped an additional seven tracks, calling it Midnights (3am Edition).

The core 13 songs were mostly in collaboration with Jack, but Aaron joined in for the three of the seven bonus tracks, which Taylor compared to the vault tracks from her Taylor’s Version releases.

Up first is “The Great War”, an Aaron produced number whose lyrics compare a relationship to a battlefield. Sonically it aligns with the rest of Midnights, with a few sonic additions such as a subtle inclusion of trumpet (played by Kyle Rensick) and violin (Yuki Numata Resnick).

What this could really be about is anyone’s guess, and of course only Taylor knows. I could see the obvious implication of a fight between romantic partners, but that is reductive given the complexities of other tracks on the standard edition. I personally read this as another discussion between the different Taylors, illustrating the conflicting mindsets of living through a tumultuous public life.

She could be talking about the period of being canceled that inspired reputation, how she went into hiding for a while and had to decide if and when she would reemerge. Or she’s talking about a potential failed coming out due to the sale of her master recordings. The bridge especially feels like something completely out of the realm of romantic love:

It turned into something bigger

Somewhere in the haze, got a sense I’d been betrayed

Your finger on my hair pin triggers

Soldier down on that icy ground

Looked up at me with honor and truth

Broken and blue, so I called off the troops

That was the night I nearly lost you

I really thought I lost you

“Finger on my hairpin triggers” is especially telling, given ‘dropping hairpins’ is slang for dropping hints of queerness. Was someone, perchance the real Taylor, threatening to out her? Who called off the troops?

“Bigger Than The Whole Sky” is next, one of Taylor’s saddest songs. Like a lot of Midnights, I can’t say for sure who or what this is about, but it’s really devastating. The lyrics encompass the painful and overwhelming reality of loss, how so many things can change on a dime and we’re virtually powerless to the universe’s whims.

“Paris” is a fun pop song about being so breathlessly in love it doesn’t matter where you are, as long as you’re with that person, life is worth living. The chorus is a call back to the very first song on the album, “Lavender Haze” where she’s staring at the ceiling with that ubiquitous “you” who doesn’t ever say too much, or read into her melancholia. They’re so wrapped up with one another they have no idea what’s going on in the outside world, so in love Taylor might actually stop breathing. Given the current spectacle of her whirlwind romance with Travis it’s hard to believe there was once a version of Taylor that wrote “romance is not dead if you keep it just yours.”

“High Infidelity” is another elusive Taylor song, one that dangles details of her supposed personal life like a carrot in listeners ears, only to completely contradict any semblance of a truth just a line or two later. “Do you really wanna know where I was April 29?” she sings at the end of the chorus, essentially breaking the fourth wall between her and listeners, similar to how she knocks down the walls in the “Lavender Haze” and “Anti-Hero” videos.

“Glitch” is another standout, not only for its cryptic lyrics, but its sound, a product of collaboration between Jack and Sounwave, the latter of whom is a frequent collaborator of Kendrick Lamar. It features these whiney, loopy guitars that mimic the uneasy content of the lyrics:

I was supposed to sweat you out

In search of glorious happenings of happenstance on someone else’s playground

But it’s been 2190 days of our love blackout

The system’s breaking down (the system’s breaking down)

“Would’ve Could’ve Should’ve” is the second to last bonus track. If we take Taylor at her word that these bonus tracks are from or inspired by past era’s, like vault tracks, I’d say this at face value veers towards Speak Now, but my gut reaction actually says TTPD. There’s just too much happening for it to be about one thing or person, and while it’s easy to pin all the backlash on John Mayer and that one specific (purported) relationship, I can also see it being about all her past lives, and her attempt to abandon her arrested development so she can actually start letting go and moving on.

There’s also a lot of references with other Taylor songs, further calling into question the potential meaning or muse behind the song. Similar to previous songs (and future ones) there are references to war (“memories feel like weapons”), religious imagery (“stained glass windows in my mind”), and death (“If clarity’s in death then why won’t this die”).

The bridge of a song is almost always the last build up before the final chorus, and Taylor is no stranger to an emotionally loaded bridge, but the bridge of WCS revealed a vulnerability that far too many women can relate to, making this song in particular one of her most emotionally loaded songs to date.

If clarity’s in death then why won’t this die

Years of tearing down our banners you and I

Living for the thrill of hitting you where it hurts

Give me back my girlhood it was mine first

Whether she’s referencing a man in an intimate setting, or an industry that takes everything often with little to no return, it’s clear she’s deeply unsettled by whatever experience inspired these lyrics. ‘God rest my soul’ and ‘I fight with you in my sleep’ calls back to the album’s general theme of sleepless nights, while the bridge referenced above is reminiscent of “My Tears Ricochet” (‘If I’m dead to you why are you at the wake’) and “Guilty As Sin” (‘What if I roll the stone away / they’re gonna crucify me anyway’). No matter which way you spin it, patriarchy has taken something from her, namely a life she will never get back.

I always wonder if women who don’t like Taylor Swift also don’t like to admit that they’ve been manipulated by men in their lives. If there’s one thing that Taylor is a poster child for, it’s being a victim of the patriarchy. Now how much slack we should cut her because of this is a different discussion but it is true that she articulates strife with double standard, and general tolerance of bad behavior by men, in society in a way that is accessible to masses of women and that is why she is largely mocked and chastised.

“Dear Reader” is the last song on Midnights (3am Edition). It reads almost like a post mortem of Taylor’s whole career, and ending Midnights particularly with this kind of retrospective tune feels pointed.

Dear reader,

If it feels like a trap you’re already in one

Get out your map, pick somewhere and just run

Burn all the files, desert all your past lives

And if you don’t recognize yourself that means you did it right

Never take advice from someone who’s falling apart

Dear reader, bend when you can, snap when you have to

You don’t have to answer just cus they asked you

The greatest of luxuries is your secrets

When you aim at the devil, make sure you don’t miss

Never take advice from someone who’s falling apart

Never take advice from someone who’s falling apart

So I wander through these nights, I prefer hiding in plain sight

My fourth drink in my hand, these desperate prayers of a cursed man

Spilling out to you for free, but darling darling please

You wouldn’t take my word for it if you knew who was talking

If you knew where I was walking

To a house, not a home, all alone cus nobody’s there

Where I pace in my pen and my friends found friends who care

No one sees when you lose when you’re playing solitaire

You should find another guiding light, but I shine so bright

After a whole album of admitting her weaknesses, flaws, fears, and insecurities, she gives us one last song to wrap it all up, to make certain everyone knows she knows where she stands. I think this was a preamble to the next few years of her life we were about to see, all the tabloid madness with Joe, Matty and Travis, the over the top WAG era, the questionable choices, and her silence in the face of worldwide doom.

A few lines that stand out to me: the greatest of luxuries is your secrets, I prefer hiding in plain sight, these desperate prayers of a cursed man. Taylor is spelling out the more depressing details of her life and career, knowing she has valuable advice to give, but because it’s her not a lot of people will believe or heed it.

There were two additional songs on Midnights, and like any good bonus tracks, they are deeply beloved within the fandom.

“Hits Different” was first released as a Target-exclusive bonus track on the Lavender Edition CD of Midnights on October 21, 2022. The track was later made available on streaming platforms as part of the Midnights (Til Dawn Edition) on May 26, 2023. This song has it all: opening guitar riff perfectly synced up with Taylor’s talk-singing, dramatic scenes from the sidewalk outside the function, a bridge that refuses to quit.

She’s never confirmed where the inception of “Hits Different” lies within the Midnights timeline, but to me it gives 1989, both sonically and in subject matter. I don’t like to speculate on muses, but there’s just a few too many references to a certain blonde supermodel in this song to ignore, these lines especially:

Freedom felt like summer then on the coast

Now the sun burns my heart and the sand hurts my feelings

And I never don’t cry at the bar, yeah my sadness is contagious

I slur your name til someone puts me in a car

I stopped receiving invitations

The bridge is one of her greatest: fun, over the top, god tier lyrical ranting:

I find the artifacts, cried over a hat

Cursed the space that I needed

I trace the evidence, make it make some sense

Why the wound is still bleedin’

You were the one that I loved

Don’t need another metaphor, it’s simple enough

A wrinkle in time like the crease by your eyes

This is why they shouldn’t kill off the main guy

Dreams of your hair and your stare and sense of belief

In the good in the world, you once believed in me

And I felt you and I held you for a while

Bet I could still melt your world

Argumentative, antithetical dream girl

It’s common practice in swiftiedom to argue away the “argumentative, antithetical dream girl” line by saying Taylor is referencing herself (NOW they want to engage with the idea of Taylor talking about herself in her songs, hmph). But the structure of the lyrics just does not suggest that–there’s simply no straight explanation for this song.

Midnights sole vault track, “You’re Losing Me” is last. It was exclusively available on a CD sold at The Eras Tour shows and starting on May 26, 2023 at her New Jersey stops. Of course some trusty swiftie bootlegged the song so more people could listen to it before its release to streaming services months later on November 29, 2023.

This song was also the impetus for one of my favorite phenomena of the Taylor Swift Cinematic Universe, which is Jack Antonoff being messy for no reason. Announcing the song’s debut on streaming platforms, Jack took to his Instagram story to clarify (read: stir the pot) the pair had written and recorded the song in December of 2021. This completely flabbergasted swifties and hetlors alike—how could she have written such a terribly sad and depressing song about the love of her life, Joe Alwyn, almost a year and a half before their purported breakup? Much like previous times where Jack spoke when he maybe shouldn’t have, this sent the fandom into a tizzy trying to understand the timeline of Taylor’s personal life, perfectly throwing them off the scent of the song’s actual meaning.

The general consensus is that this song is about the breakdown of her relationship with Joe, and superficially it does suggest that. Taylor is the master of a good break up song after all. But she’s also the master of a good double entendre, and like many of the songs on Midnights, I think this is Taylor talking to herself one last time, excising the self conscious demon that burrows deep inside the psyche of many young women:

How long could we be a sad song

Til we were too far gone to bring back to life

I gave you all my best me’s

My endless empathy

And all I did was bleed as I tried to be the bravest soldier

Fighting in only your army

Front lines don’t you ignore me

I’m the best thing at this party (you’re losing me)

And I wouldn’t marry me either

A pathological people pleaser who only wanted you to see her

And I’m fading thinking do something babe, say something

Lose something babe, risk something

Choose something babe I’ve got nothing to believe

Unless you’re choosing me, you’re losing me

I interpret this a few different ways: the showgirl talking to real Taylor, who just gets to sit by and ignore the trappings of fame, while the showgirl bears all the brunt of the more negative aspects. Alternatively, I could also interpret it as real Taylor talking to the showgirl, unable to suspend the belief that she isn’t good enough without all the glitz and glamor of her job. It’s all moot considering it is Taylor and Taylor alone that takes all the heat—for the showgirl, for giant Taylor, and for real Taylor. As she told us at the very beginning of the album, it’s her, she’s the problem. Where to go when that is your reality?

On the other end of the spectrum, I could also see this song as one Taylor wrote with the fans in mind. Throughout her entire career she’s been adamant that the fans mean everything to her, at one point saying it’s the “longest and best relationship” she’s ever had. But it’s also no secret that swifties can be a rabid, at times, ruthless group, to the point where Taylor has to publicly announce they should leave her alleged ex’s alone:

“I’m 33 years old. I don’t care about anything that happened to me when I was 19. I’m not putting this album out so you can go on the internet and defend me against someone you think I wrote a song about 14 million years ago.” – Taylor talking about “Dear John” during her Era’s set in Minneapolis, Minnesota in June 2024.

Most interestingly, she says “you think I wrote.” I don’t really care if Taylor’s fans go after John Mayer or Jake Gyllenhall or Joe Jonas, but it’s a slippery slope that quickly turns ugly towards Taylor’s fellow female artists, or anyone even remotely critical of her. For the most part, Taylor rarely confirms who an actual muse is, and if she wants you to know she will. It’s unsurprising that she turned to fictional storytelling, or claimed to, as an attempt to keep the fans off her personal life scent. While throughout Midnights she admits that she is the problem in a lot of ways, the gigantic Taylor that knocks over buildings and wreaks havoc could not and would not exist without the millions of fan ideals holding her to a standard she will never be able to achieve.

Do I throw out everything we built or keep it?

I’m getting tired even for a phoenix

Always rising from the ashes

Mending all her gashes

You might just have dealt the final blow

It was always Taylor and her fans against the world. But after years of attempting to be the exemplary idol so many claimed her to be, despite not knowing her at all, was the jig finally up? If there’s anything to glean from Midnights follow up, The Tortured Poets Department, it’s that yes, it just might be.

Best believe I’m still bejeweled

Shortly after Midnights release in October Taylor announced she would be going on tour after almost 5 years. With four new, untoured albums, plus a back catalogue of six more beloved records , there was a LOT of ground to cover—but that’s a post for a different day.

Midnights was, unsurprisingly, massive, selling 1.578 million first-week units between sales and streams, with nine of the new songs occupying the top ten on the Billboard Global 200.5 In just one day it became the top selling album of the year and broke Spotify’s record for most streams in a day. Rolling Stone gave it a five star review and called it an “instant classic.”

At the 2024 Grammys, Midnights would secure Taylor’s record breaking award for most Album Of The Year wins, in addition to best pop vocal album.

Admittedly I was slightly surprised to see Taylor clinch the award, especially given her competition. SZA’s SOS had a huge year, likely on par with Midnights if not bigger. SOS had five Billboard number ones over the span of almost two years, especially impressive when you consider the musical attention span of the average listener really isn’t that high. The Academy isn’t exactly the pinnacle of objectivity—as Eric from TrackTen points out, if anything they’re known to fudge eligibility to award their favorites. Between the notoriety of the ongoing Era’s tour at the time, and the album of the year win, it was clear that Taylor was the industry darling of the time.

That’s not to say I think Midnights isn’t good. On the contrary, it has a lot of bangers, and I found Taylor’s confidence working with Aaron and Jack solicited a new level of work for her, one that allowed her to power through the years-long spectacle that was the Era’s tour, and everything else that would make up the tabloid frenzy that had become her life.

If you have another few dollars to spare, please share with my friend Wael Tamraz. He’s just 20 year old and has taken on fundraising for the survival of his family of 12 in Gaza. It’s Ramadan this month, which means long days of fasting, and Wael is extremely stressed trying to support his family in what should be a time of reflection. I matched the proceeds from my paid subscriptions this month and sent to Wael and his family. If you can, send them a few dollars here. Thank you ❤️‍🩹🇵🇸

We have some VERY special gold⭐️geese this month! My older sister Kelsey, also known as “Mommy”, is here to give us some recommendations fresh off the birth of her third kid, mister Francesco William. Coming in at 8 pounds even on the second of February, mister Frankie is the newest addition to the Kunce Popio clan and our first Aquarius in the family (with a Leo moon and Capricorn rising if you were curious). I also talked with Marcella and Gio, Frankie’s older siblings, to get some of their picks. Keep reading for this month’s extra special volume of the Gaggle 🪿

Kelsey’s Pick

We Are All Guilty Here by Karin Slaughter

The Secret Place by Tana French – I finally found a Tana French book I CAN put down. I’m sure it’s more to do with packing and starting the Midnights chapter of my Taylor series from scratch, but this one is a slow burn whose ending made no difference to me, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I need to savor reading more anyway, so I’m really going for it I guess. Maybe I’ll finish it next month.

Folklore & Footnotes

Taylor Swift Isn't Elizabeth Taylor. She's Katharine Hepburn

Hi, I’m Abby. I love writing, dancing, and existing in nature. Here on Substack, I share ekphrastic writings and critical essays on Taylor Swift and her lyrics. More than anything, I want to build community, and I welcome both reactions to existing posts and suggestions for future topics…

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6 months ago · 28 likes · 2 comments · Abby Harrison

Kelsey’s Pick

“I had a baby”

Marcella and Gio’s Pick(s)

Marcella had her kindergarten kickoff this month and Gio chased chickens at a farm!

I saw Charlie Hickey open for Hana Eid at the Moroccan Lounge, and then a couple days later I saw Sedona open for Christopher Owens (at the new Sid the Cat Auditorium in Pasadena which is awesome) and she brought out Charlie for a song! Lucky me <333

Kelsey’s Pick

Maximizing your wardrobe for your personal needs and lifestyle. Check out this video.

Marcella and Gio’s Pick

Having a baby brother of course!!

A little brush to clean off your turntable needle – don’t use your finger that is bad!!! Also buying your friends work, look at the amazing print from my friend <333

Kelsey’s Pick(s)

Restarted Bridgerton, The Lincoln Lawyer (on Netflix), based on the books of Michael Connelly.

Marcella and Gio’s Pick

Spidey and His Amazing Friends

I forgot to include it in last month’s volume but I loved the Yacht rock documentary on HBO Max and Being Eddie on Netflix. I also watched If I Had Legs I’d Kick You and Rose Byrne truly is a star, I hope she gets the Oscar. This Letterboxd review conveyed my thoughts exactly (with a slight edit).

Kelsey’s Pick(s)

• Luke Combs’ new album

• The Toast

• Oversharing

Can’t get enough of Villagerrr’s latest album Tear Your Heart Out which came out last March but is new to me. Of course MUNA’s new single “Dancing On The Wall” has also been on repeat and I can’t wait for their new album to come out in May.

Kelsey doesn’t have screenshots because she has two toddlers and a newborn but she did send me this photo that made me weepy:

I’ve already published the first two chapters, an introduction and Fearless—I recommend checking those out before you dive into this month’s installment on Taylor’s fourth LP RED.

It’s October of 2012: “Gangnam Style” is everywhere, Barack Obama would soon secure a second term in office, cups had turned into instruments overnight, and the Mayans were trying to convince everyone the end of the world was nigh.

Or, if you were existing as a 15 year old girl, the Mayans were simply predicting what you already knew to be true: deep in the closet as a sophomore at a catholic high school, learning how to drive, trying to survive the dull buzz of chronic anxiety that orbited my every thought, I always felt the end was near.

Another group of people were acting the same way, but not because of overactive hormones or the calendar ending: because Taylor Swift, then 22 years old, was flirting with the possibility of leaving country music to pursue pop records.

For as much as Taylor ruled the roost on the country side, selling out arenas and winning lifetime achievement awards at 20 years old, it was clear from her previous record Speak Now she had no hesitation embracing multiple genres, including pop, country, or rock. As she looked to the next chapter of her career, there was a desire not only to enter the rooms she hadn’t yet been invited into, but to be worthy of being there.

Solo songwriter in the mainstream is sort of a lost art these days. In the 21st century, only sixteen solo-written songs have gone to number one on the Billboard Hot 100. In 1970, the average number of songwriters per track was 1.7. Now that number hovers around 4.1 Writing all of her own songs, Taylor found a way to differentiate herself.

In 2012, the artists making up the top 3 on the Billboard Hot 100 were Gotye (“Somebody That I Used To Know” feat. Kimbra), Carly Rae Jepsen (“Call Me Maybe”), and FUN!, (“We Are Young”), Jack Antonoff’s avante garde pop project. There were also songs by Kelly Clarkson, One Direction, and Adele in the top 20. Could a self-written, pop-country song, even a really good one, stand out from the rest of these undeniable pop tunes?

Speak Now was a swing at her detractors, an entirely self written album after some doubted she couldn’t possibly have written the songs on her sophomore record Fearless. Speak Now spent 6 weeks at number one on the Billboard 200, with lead single “Mine” debuting at number 3 in the top 10. But Taylor was hungry for a number one hit. She had to confront a fork in the proverbial road: stay in her lane and the safe confines of a genre she was familiar with, or continue evolving to offer something new and different?

On RED she pivoted, looking to quench “a thirst for learning” by working outside the musical realm she inhabited during her previous three records. “I wanted to go in as a student,” she says, harkening back to all those tours she embarked on with the country greats at 16 to observe their habits and practices.

For her fourth album, Taylor showed no intention of taking her foot off the gas. Her particular style of pop-country crossover allotted her a taste of the kind of astronomical success that defined careers and made legacies. As someone constantly seeking approval, not getting it was no longer an option.

She was also fearful that should she fail to reinvent herself the public would grow bored or weary of her work. Despite actually being on the precipice of massive success, Taylor was plagued with uncertainty during the RED era, as if everything could suddenly be ripped from her grasp:

“I felt like I was walking along the sidewalk, knowing eventually the pavement was going to crumble and I was gonna fall through.” – Taylor to Rolling Stone in 2019

I recall people were ready, gleeful even, to kick her out of Nashville altogether. Many would say her departure was inevitable, maybe even planned from the beginning (Taylor does love a plan). But that discredits the reverence Taylor has for the genre and the work of its greatest artists, ones she studied and mimicked in an attempt to attain that level of greatness afforded to the chosen few. Like those before her, Taylor wanted to be remembered, a desire she made clear as early as her first single:

When you think Tim McGraw, I hope you think of me.

People love an ingenue

This is how we enter the RED era, with Taylor eager to prove her worth. While the majority of the album was written by Taylor, RED’s production is stacked with industry veterans. There were the usual suspects, Liz Rose and Nathan Chapman, who played large roles in her last three albums. But also new collaborators and producers, as Taylor looked to experiment with fresh sounds and ideas. Max Martin and Shellback (Brittney Spears, Katy Perry), Dan Wilson (of Semisonic), and Jacknife Lee (R.E.M., The Black Keys, Weezer) all played a hand in curating RED’s sound. Taylor essentially sent out a hail mary to her list of dream collaborators and they all came back yes. Just like that 11 year old handing out demos on Music Row in Nashville, Taylor remained unafraid to look rejection in the eye.

It was more than Taylor’s plucky ambition and audacity, however, that fueled this attitude. Taylor as a recording artist was no longer a solitary entity. Perfumes, brand deals, greeting card lines, and the like all made up Taylor Swift™. What some would dismiss as the diaristic ramblings of a teenager was actually spawning a massive enterprise. Taylor often made it clear that she understood her circumstances were miraculous, and the weight of that was not lost on her. While accolades and attention were certainly a perk that kept her striving for greatness, her attitude reflected less an egotistic drive and more a sense of responsibility.

Because this was, after all, everything she’d ever wanted. Though she’d hardly say it aloud, Taylor entered the post-Speak Now era with a hunger for the kind of success she saw from the Fearless era. She had sold millions of albums by this point, her plaintive songwriting and storytelling speaking to the masses of young women looking to be seen and heard. Taylor saw a gap and filled it. She had toured with dozens of acts, headlined two of her own world tour’s, won eight Grammys and dozens of other awards. With so much momentum in her corner there was opportunity, and she would not squander it.

Taylor couldn’t have known then how massive her impact would become over the years. If anything, she was confused, her instincts and desires pointing her in a new direction. In his book Nothing Like This: The Strategic Genius of Taylor Swift, Kevin Evers posits: if you want to advance and grow you may have to push against your natural inclination to preserve and protect your authentic self.2 As much as Taylor valued being the author of her own story, if there was no one to read that story, what good was it all for? Was there a way to grow and change without losing her authentic self?

In many an interview from the early RED era, Taylor often talks about the intoxicating feeling of hearing a roaring crowd. She describes being enraptured by their deafening screams, and watching her talk about it, it’s almost like a fire’s lit inside her eyes. I don’t think Taylor has ever been obsessed with fame—her own mother said as much during an episode of the 2025 docuseries covering the Era’s tour—but it was clear that spending her mentally formative years under the spotlight was fragmenting her ability to separate adoration from affirmation, and Taylor Swift the person from Taylor Swift™, the business.

Some indie record that’s much cooler than mine

My relationship with Taylor was different when RED came out in 2012. I was developing an insufferable taste consisting of whatever made up the Alt Nation Alt 18 countdown that week. Those “indie records that are much cooler than mine” Taylor decries would eventually become some of my favorites. Oh, how I feigned superiority with my love of the Black Keys and Catfish and the Bottlemen and CHVRCHES. Lana Del Rey’s Born To Die dropped in January of 2012 and became a staple for indie and alt girlies all over. I even saw the 1975 perform sometime around then, Matty Healy smoking cigs on stage, drinking red wine from the bottle, and gnawing on a piece of raw meat. Ever the performer, Matty will make multiple appearances in the Taylor Swift Cinematic Universe a few years down the line.

I wanted so badly to be different, like any other Tumblr girlie wearing tights underneath her jean shorts. Lorde’s Pure Heroine was my bible, the soundtrack to every drive and daydream. Due to these factors, my love for Taylor took a backseat. Kind of like Woody when Buzz comes to Andy’s bedroom, I shoved her in a chest with the rest of my toys and acted like I didn’t care.

I held no issues with her changing genres, but was this really the direction she was going in? I was admittedly as confused by “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” as others—what is with the talk singing? What is going on in the video? Is she really coming for Harry Styles in the bridge? “I Knew You Were Trouble” was even more confounding to me, with its over the top production, voice dubs, and the like. Is THIS her attempt at a foray into pop music? These songs and others came about with the help of Max Martin and Shellback, two industry veterans with dozens of number ones under their belt. Taylor had aspirations beyond what country music could deliver and it was only a matter of time before she would defy the genre altogether. That she went to such extremes right out the gate though was jarring.

Me? I wasn’t defying much. Most of what I recall of this period was the time spent with my boyfriend, an oddball senior I eventually broke up with when he went to college. One time he was over and I cried to him that I wasn’t at the RED tour happening concurrently in Pittsburgh that night; he said something along the lines of “If you’re going to cry about Taylor Swift instead of pay attention to me, I’ll leave” and I said “Okay you can leave.” I don’t have a lot of regrets, but missing that tour haunts me to this day. He could never understand.

Even when we inevitably broke up, RED wasn’t an album I turned to, despite it entering the cultural conversation as a, nay THE, “breakup album.” I wasn’t sad, I was relieved. This wasn’t my breakup album, at least not at the time.

Taylor was in her early twenties when she wrote the songs on RED. When RED (Taylor’s Version)3 came out in 2021, I was approaching a quarter century. Technically older, but not knowing what that really meant. I haven’t really changed all that much, from high school to 2021 to now: I don’t really have “style” I just wear what I like and feel good in (until I don’t). I love books and records. I didn’t smoke pot in high school, but I desperately wanted to and acted like it was capital B bad just because I wasn’t cool enough to get my hands on some. I got drunk for the first time when I was 16—on white wine, hiding in the closet with one of my best friends. I’d also lose my virginity that year. Not to her, but it did happen in a closet.

Coming back to Taylor’s Version presents an opportunity to revisit memories, feelings, and other ephemera from these periods of my life. It’s a bit different each time. As I listened to RED with another decade under my belt, I truly felt its emotional tumult and was overwhelmed. Had I ever listened to these lyrics? It felt like no, I hadn’t, even though in reality I had heard all the songs a thousand times. Revisiting RED now, for technically the third time, I found there were themes I didn’t relate to at all in high school, but in adulthood they colored my whole listening experience: the loss of innocence, the unavoidable pull of adulthood, all those feelings of wanting to be older and wiser and not knowing what a curse that can be.

Like Swift, I’ve grown quite a bit since RED came out in 2012, and I still have a lot of growing to do. I am a firm believer in reincarnation and karma, and I love how these re-recordings act as a sort of reincarnation of Taylor’s past selves, here to guide us the way she wished someone would have guided her. Red (Taylor’s Version) came just when I needed it, and now it’s my version too. – From my 2021 reflection on Red (Taylor’s Version)

This is what makes RED, and much of Taylor’s catalogue, so popular. It can be reignited over and over and like a kaleidoscope, it shifts and changes with every angle you observe it from. Seen through a new lens or experience, the songs can become something different entirely.

The more universal the work, the more endless the possibilities of interpretation. Not unlike today, rumors about her dating life were rife, with staged pap walks, cheeky nods to supposed lovers, and headline after headline questioning why she couldn’t find love or who her next victim would be.

Attempting to win this losing battle with the tabloids deeming her a boy crazy serial dater, her whole persona stunk of a prudish femininity. Throughout the RED era, there’s a lot of hand-wringing and shy girl mannerisms, and her shift from sun dresses and cowboy boots to tea-length dresses, midi skirts, kitten heels, and demure strands of pearls was almost immediate. In interviews Taylor dodges question after question about her dating life, like a robot repeating the same rehearsed phrases over and over: “I would prefer to keep my private life private.” Taylor was trying to make her own rules, so young and optimistic about her ability to control a game she was only a pawn in.

Seeing Red

Describing the color red as bold and powerful, she’d use the new album to regain some of the agency she had lost over the years. RED is not Taylor’s first use of color as an emotional descriptor but it does see her fully embrace color as feeling as a central theme, testing to see just how many different ones she could paint with.

Taylor cites Blue by Joni Mitchell as her inspiration, that timeless and iconic record of another supremely talented young singer-songwriter.4 Mitchell’s Blue stands the test of time, a product of a period that churned out endless classic records. What is it about the 1970s that inspires such nostalgic longing? I find myself reading about it often, romanticizing, and ruminating over it. I’m not ashamed to admit I moved to Los Angeles so I could cosplay as a lady of the canyon every now and then. It seems that Taylor was harboring similar fantasies when putting together RED, unabashedly vying for that level of greatness.

Talking to Rolling Stone in 1979, Mitchell said:

The Blue album, there’s hardly a dishonest note in the vocals. At that period of my life, I had no personal defenses. I felt like a cellophane wrapper on a pack of cigarettes. I felt like I had absolutely no secrets from the world, and I couldn’t pretend in my life to be strong. Or to be happy.

Taylor similarly wore her heart on her sleeve on the entirety of RED—or more like, she ripped it out of her chest and pinned it to her lapel as a badge of honor. On RED Taylor talks about love like she’s going to battle: there is only right and wrong, good and bad, and the sum of our entire being is made up of these experiences.

RED

“State of Grace” kicks off the album with the deep, familiar beat of a drum, like the thump-thump of your heartbeat as a crush walks past. Taylor would go on to say this track sets the tone for the entire album with just one lyric:

The beginning of the second verse evokes more battle imagery:

You come around and the armor falls

Pierce the room like a canon ball

And all we know is don’t let go

We are alone just you and me

Up in your room and our slates are clean

Just twin fire signs, four blue eyes

So you were never a saint

And I loved in shades of wrong

We learn to live with the pain

Mosaic broken hearts

‘Mosaic broken hearts’ is an undeniable Taylorism, capturing a lifetime of experiences into a short phrase. “State Of Grace” is the perfect opener for this album full of similarly evocative lyrics; in it, Taylor sets the scene emotionally, offering a preview of the highs, lows, and uncertainties to come. “I never saw you coming” she sings: for someone so attuned to control, planning, operating on a moment by moment schedule, what to do when someone comes into your life out of nowhere and throws that all off course?

Even today, the eponymous track “Red” triggers the dopamine sensor in my brain, immediately taking me back to maniacal dance parties in my bedroom. I knew every word despite my forced nonchalance.

Answering fan questions during the album’s announcement, Taylor said: “There’s nothing beige about any of those feelings, so I am calling the album RED.” On its title track, she uses color to describe all the stages of a chaotic relationship:

Losing him was blue like I’ve never known

Missing him was dark grey all alone

Forgetting him was like trying to know somebody you’ve never met

And loving him was red

Taylor would continue to use colors throughout her career not only as a way to describe emotions, but to plant clues, categorize songs, and enact other codes for fans to dissect and (over) analyze.

So the story goes: Scott Borchetta, CEO of Taylor’s first musical home Big Machine Records, heard “Red” and thought it needed something else. Apparently that something was Max Martin and Shellback, who Borchetta thought could give the album the “type of lift” (Swedish?) that had catapulted so many artists to the top of the charts. It’s flabbergasting to me that Borchetta had enough industry cache to even secure a call with Martin, but I imagine it had mostly to do with Taylor’s potential worldwide sensation status.

It’s interesting to me that the album’s turn to pop was not, as I had assumed, totally at Taylor’s discretion. While I’m sure it was a dream come true to collaborate with industry titans like Martin and Shellback, I wonder: would Taylor’s career have taken such a definitive turn had it not been for Borchetta’s insistence the tunes needed a Swedish lift? Was it Taylor who felt an outsized need to expand to the pop charts, or her boss?

Going strong, track three “Treacherous” is a result of the litany of musical hail mary’s, with Dan Wilson of Semisonic joining to co-write and produce this and another RED track “Come Back…Be Here.” It has always been one of my favorites because as a fellow Sagittarius I deeply resonate with the tendency to chase scenarios that will likely end poorly despite my better judgement (yes I have a playlist for that).

Now old enough to mess around with boys who couldn’t care less if I lived or died, I was able to assign meaning to almost any Taylor song, even in the rearview. “Treacherous” I likened to a long time crush I’d been nurturing. We would drive home from school together and listen to the Velvet Underground while I feigned indifference, while inside I was absolutely dying to mash our faces together. Eventually we did.

I did not know what was coming the first time I listened to “I Knew You Were Trouble”, and it still catches me off guard sometimes, sends my heart rate up a tick or two. According to Taylor, her goal was to evoke the emotional chaos that ensues when you get tricked. Taylor was laying it all out there lyrically, those personal details she refused to reveal in interviews embedded into every song:

And the saddest fear comes creeping in

That you never loved me, or her or anyone or anything

“I Knew You Were Trouble” did decently on the charts, peaking at number two on the Billboard Hot 100 and spending seven weeks at number one on the Pop Songs chart. It also flies high enough on Taylor’s radar that it was allotted a spot on the Era’s Tour, a choice I find questionable. I’m partial to the rendition she performed every night on the 1989 World Tour.

Love is so short, forgetting is so long.

Any Swiftie worth their salt would know what’s next based solely on the track number and melancholic opening piano chords. The most beloved track five, “All Too Well” is consistently named as Taylor’s magnum opus, despite going largely unacknowledged after the album’s initial release.

Rob Sheffield says of the song:

If you’ve got five minutes to persuade a jury to convict her of being one of the all-time greats as a singer, songwriter, tortured poet, oversharer, bridge crafter, chorus yeller, the works, it’s the one you play.5

That is true, of course, if we boil it down to the bones. But I am not of the camp who believes this was one of those songs that Taylor wrote with the notion of greatness in mind—those are easier to weed out. It was clear with “I Knew You Were Trouble” or “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” that she was seeking some kind of commercial approval—not because she was the chart hounding fiend people painted her out to be, but so she could still write and release songs with less mainstream appeal like “All Too Well.”

Talking about it during her Tiny Desk concert in 2019, Taylor said when RED came out she was certain she would be the only person who loved “All Too Well”, that it was so personal and emotionally loaded that people wouldn’t enjoy it. She also called it “a sad song about fall” which is one way of putting it, sure! I, of course, have a little more to say.

Taylor starts off the album foreword for the original version of RED with a quote from Pablo Neruda’s 1924 poem “Puedo Escribir”, or “Tonight I Can Write.” In it, the narrator talks of a love lost, trying to delude themselves that this will be the last thing they’ll ever write about her as if it hasn’t colored everything in their life already.

Love is so short, forgetting is so long.

Taylor goes on to say this kind of love is ‘treacherous, sad, beautiful and tragic. But most of all …red.’ She also opens the “All Too Well” short film with this call back to the original era.

Taylor wrote and directed the 14 minute long “All Too Well” short film, shot on Kodak 35mm Ektachrome and Vision3 film. It was the first of many videos for her own songs she would direct, who better to create the visual manifestation of Taylor’s inner mind than Taylor herself?

It premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2021, with Sadie Sink and Dylan O’Brien playing the leads of “her” and “him” respectively. We watch as Sadie and Dylan fall in and out of love and the reckoning that ensues. I don’t think it’s a coincidence these actors’ ages at the time aligned with Taylor and Jake Gyllenhaal’s when they purportedly dated. But not for the obvious implications, a specialty Taylor has employed in many of her self-directed music videos over the years.

It is very cinematic: picturesque autumnal backgrounds, romantic, candle lit shots of intimate moments between lovers, tears falling in synchronicity with the score. Taylor Swift sure knows how to tell a story, or whatever Time magazine said.

At face value, it’s about romantic heartbreak, something a lot of people can relate to. I certainly could when the film came out, in ways I hadn’t before. In 2021 I was in the throes of a years-long situationship with someone ten years my senior, saturating everything around me in the vivid, emotional hues splattered across the title track. I suddenly related to “All Too Well” in a completely different way. I saw a young woman being upfront and unashamed of the ways she was taken advantage of. Not only was she bringing up the past, she was cauterizing it with a hot poker.6

Like any good gaylor, I do ponder if there’s a narrative behind this notorious song that the broader public hasn’t considered, one that Taylor conveniently covered up with the kind of salacious celebrity gossip that satisfies the everyday listener.

Taylor will be the first to tell you she’s tired of double standards. So sure, when I hear “I get older but your lovers stay my age” from the ten minute version, I initially think about Jake Gyllenhaal consistently dating women 10-15 years his junior. Which is icky. But I also think about this quote from Taylor in the Miss Americana documentary from 2020:

Women in entertainment are discarded in an elephant graveyard by the time they’re 35. Everyone’s a shiny new toy for like two years. The female artists that I know of have reinvented themselves twenty times more than the male artist. We have to, or we’re out of a job. Constantly having to reinvent, constantly finding new facets of yourself that people find to be shiny.

The phenomenon Taylor describes reminds me of one that Rayne Fisher Quann has deemed “being woman’d:”:

It’s a system that builds women up into untouchable fantasies just so we can watch in glee as the facade inevitably crumbles; it’s a perpetual cycle of ritualistic idolisation, degradation, and redemption that serves only to entertain the masses and generate profit for the powerful.

“I’ll get older but your lovers stay my age.” Maybe Taylor was talking about an ex, or maybe she was talking about the nagging feeling that she could lose this once in a lifetime opportunity at the drop of a hat. Maybe, just maybe! It’s not about a man at all, but Taylor’s much more complicated and nuanced relationship with unprecedented success as a woman in an inherently patriarchal society. Yelling “Fuck the patriarchy” every night during the Era’s Tour with tens of thousands of fans a decade after the songs initial release certainly drove this point home.

At the end of the film, spoiler alert, Taylor (who plays the older version of “her”) ends up an author, turning all her experiences of pain and heartbreak into books loved by the masses. In other words, her life is a manuscript—the professor said to write what you know, after all.

Whatever its true inspiration, “All Too Well” was once a song Taylor didn’t really play because it resurfaced such painful emotions. But as the years wore on, she began to pick it back up, crediting the fans for changing her perception of it over time, and eventually becoming one of her favorites to perform. It would also go to #1 on the Billboard 100, breaking Don McLean’s nearly 50-year record for the longest #1 song with his 8-minute and 37-second “American Pie”, and joining the ranks of the Beatles, whose lengthy (7-minutes 11-seconds) “Hey Jude” spent nine weeks at No. 1 on the Hot 100, longer than any Beatles single both in chart dominance and run time.

I think it’s pretty obvious that Taylor has done the work to secure her spot among some of the greats of our time (as of writing this it was announced she would become the youngest woman ever inducted into the songwriters hall of fame). We didn’t need to hear the ten minute (and 13 second) version to know this. However, deciding to release this sonic odyssey after almost a decade was also indicative of Taylor’s new mindset, you know the one she opens up folklore with? She’s on some new shit, she is unloading it all because what does she have to lose?

Just as quickly as we become beaten and battered, a soldier who’s returning half her weight, we’re on the up and up, dressing up like hipsters and making fun of our exes. Taylor says “22” represents a time where she was hanging out with her friends more than ever, calling it one of the happiest of her life.

“22” would soon change for a lot of us. What was once a wonted age became redefined by Taylor’s hyperbolic lyrical creation and a pair of heart shaped sunglasses.

Yeah, we’re happy, free, confused and lonely at the same time

It’s miserable and magical

If you knew me post RED and you had a 22nd birthday, you were getting a GIF from the “22” music video: jumping on trampolines, Keds collab on full display, confetti cannons and sparkles, cat ears and cake, Vanessa from Gossip Girl! This video had it all, like a 2013 white girl treasure trove.

In Icons of Style, Glenys Johnson touts that the style of RED was era defining, starting with the impulsive bang cut that happened on a Vogue shoot in 2011.7 Taylor’s style definitely broke itself off from the ringlet curls, sparkly dresses, and black riding boots from the Fearless and Speak Now eras. While this certainly signaled Taylor’s willingness to deliver something new to keep the crowd engaged, it was also indicative of a young woman’s natural desire to shift her style.

I was familiar with the phenomenon. In 2012 I had taken up thrifting, going to Goodwill looking for jeans to cut off, dip dye then stud or wide brimmed hats to sport with my Steve Madden combat boots. I couldn’t have been farther from the new aesthetic Taylor had adopted, which veered towards a refined east coast grandma look TikTok girlies are dying to replicate now.

My mind goes to an interview with David Letterman from 2012. In it Taylor is wearing an elegant Oscar De La Renta fit and flare illusion dress with a pair of Valentino peep-toe pumps, her perfectly coiffed ponytail to the side and bangs placed just so. She looks like she could be a politicians daughter, or wife. Letterman starts off the interview asking about the election, if Taylor is happy with the choice of candidates (Barack Obama and Mitt Romney). She replies with a canned answer:

“It’s my right to vote but it’s not my right to tell other people what to do.”

They fist bump, Taylor looks down at her hands. Years later they’d include the clip in the 2020 Miss Americana documentary, while Taylor’s voiceover talks about that time in her life: “I was so obsessed with getting in trouble that I was like ‘I’m just not gonna do anything that anyone could say anything about.’” Despite being a worldwide act, whatever environment Taylor found herself in still felt like an uncontrollable force, one that bound her words and gagged her desires. Her decidedly reserved wardrobe choices mirror those feelings.

, the mastermind behind the definitive Taylor Swift Style blog, makes similar observations in her book Taylor Swift Style. Namely, she points out how Taylor’s wardrobe acted as a counterbalance of reservedness to make up for the brash bombast of her unexpected, new pop sound.

As though she’d been swept off the set of I Love Lucy, Taylor’s Red style further entrenched her in the sweet “All American” image she had worked so hard to cultivate. Even as she began to tentatively distance herself from the country music genre she had rooted her career in, she retained her recognizable, good girl image.8

So while her outfits and aesthetic painted a portrait of a soft spoken, prim and proper young woman, her lyrics told a different story.

We have made quite a mess babe

It’s probably better off this way

And I confess babe

That in my dreams you’re touching my face

And asking me if I want to try again with you

And I almost do

The way she sang about forbidden love was so delicious to me, but did always leave me scratching my head: what does she have to hide? Now a few years removed from both RED and its re-record, I’ve been enlightened by my fellow gaylors. Listening to songs like “I Almost Do” and many others through a queer lens (and an open mind!) makes more sense than any hetsplanation available.

“I Almost Do” is one of few RED tracks that rank in my top Taylor songs, climbing even higher with the release of Taylor’s Version. RED’s original release was bogged down by the pressure of choosing a side: pop or country. After a decade, Taylor gained the confidence to execute a song on how she knew it would sound best, without the confinement of the unspoken bounds of genre; these small yet significant changes are what make the re-recordings special.

“We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” was the first single off RED, beginning a confuddling, years-long tradition of Taylor picking the least impressive single to kick start a new album cycle. The music video is undeniably a product of its time: quirky animal costumes, 2-D paper backgrounds and faux glasses frames. Taylor described the song as “what the moment sounds like when you no longer care about your ex anymore.”

I wasn’t wholly impressed, looking at Taylor’s foray into pop as inextricably tied to country, wondering if she was unable or unwilling to teeter over the edge to where her pop sensibility surely lay. The synthy banjos and playground inspired chorus apparently did something for the public, because it would go on to become her first #1 single on the Billboard Hot 100.

Up next is the saccharine sweet “Stay Stay Stay”, one of very few perpetual skips for me. I won’t say I don’t like it. It’s a fun song that uses a cacophony of bouncy strings and subtle claps as makeshift percussion, a nod to RED’s underlying theatre theme. What’s a Taylor album without a little fanfare?

Nowhere was this more evident than the RED world tour stage. The RED tour spanned 86 shows in 12 countries across Asia, Europe, and North America. Replete with theatrical and circus adjacent whimsy, the production featured clowns, ringmasters, tightropes, tutus. Just as her life outside work became a circus, her performances mimicked the chaos. The lines between Taylor Swift the person and Taylor Swift™, the showgirl, continued to blur.

“The Last Time” is a duet with Gary Lightbody of the Snow Patrol, produced by longtime Snow Patrol collaborator Jacknife Lee. It starts with these haunting piano chords, then goes back and forth between Gary and Taylor, an almost insane attempt to reconcile what is clearly a forgone relationship. At the song's conclusion the two repeat over and over: “This is the last time I’m asking you this”, driving home the point that it would, in fact, not be the last time.

Things pick back up again on “Holy Ground”, a percussion heavy tune that features some of Taylor’s god-tier lyrical ranting:

I was reminiscing just the other day

While having coffee all alone and lord it took me away

Back to a first glance feeling on New York time

Back when you fit my poems like a perfect rhyme

Took off faster than a greenlight, go

Yeah you skip the conversation when you already know

I left a note on the door with a joke we’d made

And that was the first day

And darling it was good

Never looking down

And right there where we stood was holy ground

In true Swiftian whiplash, on the next song we’re back to more haunting and melancholic musings: “Sad Beautiful Tragic” opens with soft guitar strums accompanied by a sparse picking pattern (a ukulele, according to the credits). Comprising a simple chord progression in standard tuning, Taylor continued to use uncomplicated arrangements, leaving room for her songwriting to shine. With a slight ringing in the background during the bridge, you can feel the panic rising in her words:

Distance, timing, breakdown, fighting, silence

The train runs off its tracks

Kiss me try to fix it

Could you just try to listen?

Hang up, give up for the life of us

We can’t get back

On the last chorus the music dims almost to background noise, ensuring it packs one final punch. With dreamlike vocals talking in past tense, it’s as if she’s a ghost relaying the story.

“Sad Beautiful Tragic” was produced by Nathan Chapman who did most of Fearless and Speak Now, making this track more reminiscent of previous era’s. For every bombastic pop tune, there was one for the OG Swifties who loved her previous music.

“The Lucky One” is a nod to Britney Spears, whose 2000 hit “Lucky” tells a similar story of a young woman disillusioned with fame. Before this song’s performance on the RED world tour, Taylor appears onscreen done up like an 50’s starlet lamenting life under the spotlight:

Isn’t it strange how it all happens? All my life I dreamed about it: bright lights and big city. They tell you its gonna be glamorous and that you have everything. They tell you you’re lucky. No one tells you how lonely it’s gonna be. And they don’t tell you when you’re twirling in front of the mirror as a child what the papers are gonna say about you someday. Because they don’t tell you they’re building you up just to try and knock you down.

But they haven’t yet.

Some say RED represents a turning point not only in Taylor’s musical journey, but her personal one as well. “The Lucky One” specifically demonstrates Taylor’s awakening to the dynamics of Hollywood, what it takes to get and stay on top, and the reality that there’s a line out the door ready to replace you if you can’t hack it.

Using the roundabout songwriting device often featured in country music, where in the end the singer is actually talking about oneself, “The Lucky One” is also a nod to Taylor’s roots.

It was a few years later, I showed up here

And they still tell the legend of how you disappeared

How you took the money and your dignity and got the hell out

They say you bought a bunch of land somewhere

Chose the Rose Garden over Madison Square

And it took some time, but I understand it now

‘Cause now my name is up in lights

But I think you got it right

“The Lucky One” is seemingly a precursor to “Nothing New” (a vault track we will get to shortly) and “Clara Bow” from 2024’s The Tortured Poets Department. Like the latter, in “The Lucky One” Taylor uses each of the three verses to pay tribute to musical heroines from years past, outlining different paths they took and where they ended up. By the end of the song, she looks longingly at someone who supposedly has it all figured out. Could she be talking about Joni, the album’s inspiration? Chely Wright, who had just recently come out of the closet as the first openly gay person in country music? Britney? Herself? All of the above?

The home stretch of the original album takes a hopeful turn, and features the record’s second duet. Hearing “Everything Has Changed” with Ed Sheeran feels like opening a time capsule to the RED era, unleashing all those feelings of change lingering at every turn of the album and that time in my life.

The music video is so sweet, featuring mini clones of Taylor and Ed becoming best friends on the playground. Despite this attempt to bolster a very hetero fantastical boy crazy version of herself, the lyrics are indicative of a budding queer relationship. The bridge especially:

Come back and tell me why

I’m feelin’ like I’ve missed you all this time

And meet me there tonight

And let me know that it’s not all in my mind

Not being sure if someone else feels the same way about you, feeling victim to lost time—those are very queer themes if you ask me.

Second to last on the original version of the album is “Starlight”, an upbeat pop tune supposedly inspired by a photo of Ethel and Robert F. Kennedy dancing as teenagers in the 40s. It’s her attempt at a song as period piece, imbuing the lyrics with old school dialect:

Oh my, what a marvelous tune

It was the best night never could forget how we moved

The whole place was dressed to the nines

And we were dancing like were made of starlight

“Starlight” clearly demonstrates Taylor’s active imagination, how she can pen entire stories from just a glimpse of a moment in time. Who’s to say she couldn’t, and didn’t, employ this skill in any of her other songs?

“Begin Again” is last, wrapping up this jam packed breakup album in a perfect bow. There’s a light pedal steel, one last salute to her country roots, as Taylor sings about new beginnings. Superficially those of a new relationship, but I also see it as an adieu to Taylor’s former ideas of herself, shedding those in favor of moving on to something else.

I’ve been spending the last eight months

Thinking all love ever does is break and burn and end

But on a Wednesday in a cafe

I watched it begin again

There were several bonus tracks on the deluxe version of RED, released the same day but only in Target.

“The Moment I Knew” is the first of the deluxe tracks, a dramatic song calling back to “All Too Well” in that very Swiftian way. She paints this very pathetic scene of a young girl who can see the train coming to run her over but can’t stop it–and she’s embarrassed and pissed she didn’t see it coming before. In the outro, she sings:

​​You called me later

And said, “I’m sorry, I didn’t make it”

And I said, “I’m sorry too”

And that was the moment I knew

“Come Back…Be Here” is a quintessential Taylor song: the lyrics, the chord progression, the hurried bridge, the explicit details. Taylor can describe the irrational feeling of falling head over heels for someone who is essentially a stranger unlike anyone else.

No Taylor’s Version track thus far has confused me personally more than “Girl At Home.” As I mentioned before, we know there’s a version of Taylor that abandoned the restrictions of genre in a respectful way, but whatever she did to “Girl At Home (Taylor’s Version)” felt like a sonic affront to longtime fans.

Nonetheless, let’s examine some of the lyrics because there’s nothing Taylor does better than handing a shitty man their ass on a silver platter:

I just wanna make sure

You understand perfectly, you’re the kind of man who makes me sad

While she waits up

You chase down the newest thing and take for granted what you have

And it would be a fine proposition

If I was a stupid girl

And yeah, I might go with it

If I hadn’t once been just like her

Embarrassing for them!

RED Deluxe included two demos, “Treacherous” and the original recording of “Red” that supposedly prompted the album’s shift. Both are good, but I am especially partial to the “Treacherous” demo. Like the last bonus track, an acoustic version of “State of Grace”, these renditions are much closer to their original form, just Taylor and a guitar.9

“Ronan” is one of Taylor’s most heartbreaking songs, an ode to Maya Thompson and her three-year-old son Ronan, who died of a neuroblastoma in 2011. Using the words from Maya’s blog, Taylor translated unimaginable loss into a sonic memorial of a mother’s love for her baby boy.

“She got it in a way that most people don’t. She took the time to take the intimate parts of things I’d written and put them into the song.” – Maya Thompson to MTV in 2012

To this day, Taylor’s only performed the song twice, during the Stand Up to Cancer event in September 2012 and when Maya attended the Glendale stop of The 1989 World Tour in August of 2015.

Released as a charity single, “Ronan” generated $100,000 for cancer research. The Thompson’s story stuck with Taylor, or her subsequent giving habits in the future said as much, frequently but quietly finding fan’s GoFundMe pages and donating the entirety of campaign goals.

Backstage after an understandably emotional performance of “Ronan” at a Stand Up To Cancer event, paps captured a private moment of Taylor openly sobbing. That the photos circulated so quickly and remain readily available is of course just the nature of the internet, but their novelty is telling: up to this point in time, there was little to no evidence of Taylor being this human. The closest we got was when Kanye rushed onto the stage during the VMA’s in 2009. Even in that moment Taylor was unusually composed, thrown off for sure, but she didn’t cry or furrow her brow or say anything at all. Like the rest of her private matters, much of her emotive truth lies within her songs. So while the photos were an invasion of privacy, the performance, the song, all of it, humanized Taylor in a way she really hadn’t been yet, and wouldn’t again as explicitly until Miss Americana in 2020 and the recently released Era’s Tour docuseries.

RED (Taylor’s Version) included 9 vault tracks, the most of any TV thus far. First is “Better Man (Taylor’s Version) (From the Vault),” a country tune of the highest caliber, proven by Little Big Town’s recorded version—it won a Grammy for Best Country Duo/Group Performance in 2018. The lyrics are simple and to the point:

Sometimes in the middle of the night

I can feel you again

And I just miss you and I just wish you were a better man

Heartbroken at the muse’s inability or refusal to change, Taylor sees no reason to dress the pain up. This straightforward songwriting and storytelling feels very country to me. It’s also a great song for Taylor’s particular range, one that remained officially unsung by its author until its 2021 release: no full version of Taylor singing it existed, just a clip from a surprise performance for the anniversary of the Bluebird Cafe in Nashville. In it, Taylor sings alongside Country Hall Of Fame songwriter Craig Wiseman. It was a lovely inclusion on RED (Taylor’s Version).

On RED (Taylor’s Version) release night, I remember anxiously approaching “Nothing New (feat. Phoebe Bridgers) (Taylor’s Version) (From The Vault)”, unsure whether or not Phoebe’s rising notoriety would warrant a proper feature. According to many a Reddit user, I was not the only one worried Phoebe would be relegated to background vocals. But alas! A full verse, chorus and half the bridge were allotted to Miss Bridgers, as close to a symbolic passing of the torch as we’ve gotten in the TSCU to date. It was a beautiful hand off, but a sad one too. In the first verse, Taylor sings:

They tell you while you’re young

“Girls, go out and have your fun”

Then they hunt and slay the ones who actually do it

Criticize the way you fly when you’re soaring through the sky

Shoot you down and then they sigh, and say

“She looks like she’s been through it”

Lord, what will become of me

Once I’ve lost my novelty?

In the chorus, I see why Taylor kept this off the original release of RED. That young woman working so hard to maintain an aura of gratitude and grace wouldn’t have been caught dead complaining about her circumstances. That Taylor chose to release it all these years later feels like throwing a stone at the glass facade she’d worked so hard to keep from shattering.

I’ve had too much to drink tonight

And I know it’s sad, but this is what I think about

And I wake up in the middle of the night

It’s like I can feel time moving

How can a person know everything at 18 but nothing at 22?

And will you still want me when I’m nothing new?

Phoebe’s gentle falsetto chimes in for the second verse:

How long will it be cute

All this crying in my room

Whеn you can’t blame it on my youth

And roll your eyes with affеction?

And my cheeks are growing tired

From turning red and faking smiles

Are we only biding time ‘til I lose your attention?

And someone else lights up the room?

People love an ingenue

I’ve had (I’ve had) too much to drink tonight

How did I go from growing up to breaking down?

And I wake up (wake up) in the middle of the night

It’s like I can feel time moving

How can a person know everything at 18 but nothing at 22?

Will you still want me when I’m nothing new?

They volley back and forth on the bridge:

(Taylor) I know someday I’m gonna meet her, it’s a fever dream

(Phoebe) The kind of radiance you only have at 17

(Taylor) She’ll know the way, and then she’ll say she got the map from me

(Both) I’ll say I’m happy for her, then I’ll cry myself to sleep

I like to think Taylor learned a thing or two from Phoebe about the trappings of fame. Over the years, Bridgers and her boygenius bandmates, Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus, somehow fended off the more restrictive parts of stardom even as their group skyrocketed to global phenom. Within the indie and rock worlds, the boys are all darlings worthy of their own acclaim, but they learned to balance the less savory parts of the job with the more enjoyable ones.

Their symmetry is equally as special as their differences. Taylor wrote “Nothing New” around age 22, when she was fueled by an eternal fear that something would dismantle everything she’d worked toward. At the time of recording, Phoebe’s popularity was growing rapidly following the release of her sophomore album Punisher. Despite her successes, Phoebe also had a complex about her age, having released her debut at 22 years old rather than entering the industry earlier.

“The fear that you have when you’re a young woman in music is unmatched. I think I definitely fetishized my own youth. I was like, ‘Maybe I can’t be the best songwriter in the world, but if they always say how young I am, then they’re going to be really impressed by me.’”– Phoebe talking about “Nothing New” on CharliXCX ‘s podcast

Charli and Phoebe concede it’s hard not to fall for these kinds of narratives in the music business, a sentiment Taylor would surely agree with. Both Taylor and Phoebe also speak to a historically overlooked demographic within their respective genres, Taylor at first in country music and Phoebe in indie rock. Taylor wrote songs about teenage girls in a genre absolutely dominated by a male centric ethos, while Phoebe battled against the misogynistic bedrock of the indie genre, excoriated even more than usual given her music speaks to young women especially.

“It’s really inspiring for me and a lot of musicians,” she said. “I think a lot of people make a couple of records [and are] like, ‘Oh wow, I hit the top, I’m great now,’ and the fact that she just has always wanted more from the world -- like, “No, no, no, f*** you, I’m going to make it again, I’m going to make it better, and it’s going to belong to me’ -- is the coolest.” – Phoebe talking about Taylor’s rerecording project in 2021

People still like to hurl these critiques at Taylor’s music to this day. While The Tortured Poets Department certainly isn’t the piece de resistance that was folklore, it is still a notable chapter of Taylor’s songwriting journey, one that is rife with the woes of a woman absolutely exhausted by expectations, something millions of other women can certainly relate to.

It’s not easy to deprogram all the ways patriarchy continues to lead us astray. This song also feels like an acknowledgement of the way women’s minds continued to be warped by misogyny, Taylor’s included, and the shame and fears that follow giving into this way of thinking.

I’ve had too much to drink tonight

And I wonder if they’ll miss me once they drive me out

It’s a mountain she’s yet to conquer, as even at the top of the summit she’s still on the defense. My mind goes to a recent interview with Stephen Colbert, where she addresses the different perspectives of her career so far, two of which she often sees are: impressed with her longevity or the suggestion that she “give someone else a turn.” To the latter she responds with a petulant “I don’t want to.”

On the one hand: I don’t blame her for not wanting to be shoved into a corner, and I’d argue that there is room for more than just her. But on the other hand, even at 36 it feels as though she’s lacking the self awareness to understand when her arrested development is at the wheel. Like most people, Taylor is full of contradictions and complicated feelings. I don’t think any of us would enjoy having these picked apart by millions of people on the internet, but I digress.

We’re back to the breakup tunes, “Babe (Taylor’s Version) (From the Vault)” up next. This was originally released as a single by Sugarland in 2018, accompanied by a cinematic music video with a Mad Men-esque treatment and complete with Taylor cosplaying as her publicist, notorious redhead Tree Paine. Just kidding, but she does play the other woman to Jennifer Nettle’s betrayed housewife.

Now that an official TV is available, I must say I haven’t listened to Sugarland’s in a long time, and revisiting it for this chapter I am definitely going to work it back into the mix. Jennifer Nettles voice is just perfect, and I love the way Kristian Bush and Taylor’s backing vocals add depth and even narrative to the song.

Taylor also played it as a surprise song when I saw her on the reputation tour in Detroit. I remember thinking how fun it was to denote a song for every city, to switch it up and give the fans something they weren’t expecting, a deep cut or a cult favorite. Taylor has always been brilliant at catering to her fans’ every desire—if she ironically played your favorite song on the b-stage the night you were there, it was clearly meant just for you. She knows you, she sees you. “Surprise songs” would become a beloved tradition on the Era’s Tour, with millions of fans tuning in every night on various social media livestreams of the show as Taylor conducted TSCU symphonies at the end of her massive catwalk.

@hollyfreed13In honor of #NationalSnakeDay and #reputationStadiumTourCLE five years ago today, i present to you…. My footage of the first time @Taylor Swift ever played Babe’ featuring lots of screaming from myself and @Carly Neely #erastour #eras #erastourtaylorswift #rep #reptour #reputationstadiumtour

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“Message In A Bottle (Taylor’s Version) (From The Vault)” is a Martin and Shellback number, made obvious by the trilling synths that open and feature throughout. I find this to be another loudly queer anthem, where she talks about sending a message off to someone and terrified that they will actually receive it:

I know that you like me

And it’s kinda frightening

Standing here waiting

And I became hypnotized by freckles and bright eyes

Tongue tied

“I Bet You Think About Me (feat. Chris Stapleton) (Taylor’s Version) (From The Vault)” is one of my favorite Taylor songs of all time: charming in its self-awareness, and somehow also a lack thereof, with Stapleton’s feature a nod to the album’s country side, it’s smug Taylor at her absolute best.

3AM and I’m still awake

I’ll bet you’re just fine, fast asleep in your city that’s better than mine

and the girl in your bed has a fine pedigree

and I’ll bet your friends tell you she’s better than me

Well I tried to fit in with your upper-crust circles

Yeah they let me sit in while we were in love

Always sitting round talking about the meaning of life

and the book that just saved em that I hadn’t heard of

But now that we’re done and it’s over

I bet you couldn’t believe

when it turned out I’m harder to forget than I was to leave

And I’ll bet you think about me

It’s really interesting to think that for all the primping and Kennedy cosplaying Taylor was doing at the time, it still wasn’t enough for whoever she was courting here. It’s almost as if her public persona had nothing to do with who she was when the cameras weren’t there.

Oh, block it all out

The voices so loud, sayin’

“Why did you let her go?”

Does it make you feel sad

That the love that you’re lookin’ for

Is the love that you had

The song also feels like a nod to one of Taylor’s inspirations, the legendary Carly Simon, whose 70s juggernaut “You’re So Vain” consists of a similar premise:

You’re so vain

You probably think this song is about you

Carly even joined Taylor onstage in 2013 during the RED world tour for a performance of the song. Taylor surely learned a thing or two from Carly, who put up with endless bullshit in the male dominated 70’s Hollywood pop and folk rock scenes.

The accompanying music video for “I Bet You Think About Me” is absolute cinema. Miles Teller plays a groom whose every waking thought is inculcated by the memory of his ex-girlfriend, even on his wedding day. Throughout the video we see Taylor, in various burning red get ups, popping up unannounced and taunting said groom, teaching the flower girls lewd hand gestures, and cracking jokes during the best man speech. It’s one of Taylor’s best songs and/or videos because she meets her own insecurity with humor.

One of my favorite tinfoil hat theories is that Taylor used the video as an opportunity to let us in on some of her future plans. At one point she claws the front of a massive wedding cake with the numbers 6, 13, and 26 piped on in icing. Funnily enough, those numbers make up the date she and Travvy reportedly picked for their big day. Coincidence? Well Taylor did say she could drop hints about things years in advance during a 2023 appearance on Jimmy Fallon, so I wouldn’t put it past her.

Come on, walk with me! Now I’m not saying Taylor knew it’d be Travis all those years ago. It truly could have been any man. Some gaylors think she’s poking fun at the nuptials of her former bestie/"roommate” Karlie Kloss and her groom Joshua Kushner. I personally interpret it through the lens of a long standing gaylor theory that Taylor often refers to her true, authentic self as ‘the man.’ The muse in general is irrelevant, and that’s the point, because more than anyone, this song, the video, all of it, are really about Taylor.

During a few shows of the Era’s tour during “22”, Taylor sported this version of the shirt mimicking the one she wore in the original video. I would love to get into the nitty gritty of “ME” but that will have to wait for the Lover chapter. So for now I’ll say: “I bet you think about me”? I really fuckin do Taylor.

The next track, “Forever Winter (Taylor’s Version) (From the Vault)”, is the opposite of “I Bet You Think About Me.” Following a melancholy chorus of horns, she describes her relationship with someone fighting an internal battle:

All this time I didn’t know

You were breaking down

I’d fall to pieces on the ground

If you weren’t around

Too young to know it gets better

I’ll be summer sun for you forever

Forever winter if you go

It feels like an artifact from the Fearless or Speak Now era, the composition a bit clunky in the first half, but by the second verse she finds a better flow. I’ve heard speculation about who this could be about, perhaps someone in Taylor’s life fighting a mental illness or addiction. But I can see this as the two Taylor’s going back and forth, “he” being the real Taylor while the Taylor that’s singing is Taylor™:

He seems fine most of the time, forcing smiles and neverminds

His laugh is a symphony, when the lights go out, it’s hard to breathe

I pull at every thread, tryna solve the puzzles in his head

Live my life scared to death he’ll decide to leave instead

There is a part of her that believes her job is all sunshine and rainbows, but without the authentic parts of herself, what is there, really, to live for? If “he”, Taylor’s true self, were to go away, there couldn’t be Taylor Swift™.

“Run (Taylor’s Version) (From The Vault)” is another duet between Taylor and Ed, a soft and sweet call to run away from the prying eyes of naysayers. Like the note from a locket that you keep in your pocket, this song is a sweet memento from a time of hopeful naiveté.

“The Very First Night (Taylor’s Version) (From the Vault)” stands out from the rest of the album for a couple reasons. First, its production credits: it is the only track on the album Taylor wrote with Espen Lind and Amund Bjørklund, Norwegian producers with credits on tracks by Train, Leona Lewis, and Beyoncé.

Second, and a frequently cited piece of gaylor lore (evidence? You decide), there’s a noticeable flaw in the rhyme scheme at the end of both verses:

They don’t know about the night in the hotel

We were riding in the car when we both fell

They don’t know about the words that we whispered

They don’t know how much I miss you

Taylor uses pretty straightforward songwriting practices, canonically favoring ABAB rhyme schemes interspersed with slant rhymes here and there. It just makes no sense that she would abandon basic songwriting principles out of nowhere unless she was trying to make a point: she’s intentionally breaking the rhyme scheme to infuse innuendo about the muse, which, if we’re basing it off the lyrics, should be a “her.”

There’s a couple other specific turns of phrase I find interesting while we’re gayloring: “we broke the status quo” for example, and how she repeatedly says “take me away” at the end of the song, not with a negative connotation like in “Fortnight” off The Tortured Poets Department, or “Hits Different” off Midnights. No, she’s saying “take me away to you” —"you,” that ubiquitous, mysterious muse typically very difficult to pin down.

It’s interesting that Taylor refrained from releasing this with the original album, instead including it on RED (Taylor’s Version), surely aware that listeners would be hip to the lyrical hiccup. She’s adding fuel to the fire, if you will.

Despite Taylor literally saying in an interview during the RED era time that she dates both men and women, hetlors (or, Swifties who consistently try to explain away any possibility that Taylor is queer) will argue with a wall that this, and many other queer coded pieces of Taylor’s songwriting have nothing to do with her sexuality. Throughout the process of re-releasing her records, Taylor continued to plant clues like this and many others that make the reality of her true self increasingly undeniable.

The Lucky One

Critical reception of RED was mixed, but the positive reception of the more pop forward tracks likely gave Taylor assurance she was taking the right path trying something different. One critic commented the production is a striking feature of RED that proved Taylor as more of a pop star than a country singer: “It was never a question of whether Ms. Swift would become a pure pop star; the only question was what sort.”

Even with the genre switch looming, Taylor remained a country darling: in 2012 the Canadian Country Music Association awarded her with the Generation Award, recognizing her work in pushing country music forward and “introducing the genre of music to new audiences.” She was also honored at the 85th anniversary celebration of the Grand Ole Opry for her commitment to the legacy of country music.

RED would become the number one country album in the Billboard 200 in 2013 and number 2 on the overall chart. It was nominated for Album of the Year at the 2013 Country Music Association Awards, and Best Country Album and Album of the Year and at the 2014 Grammy Awards, the latter of which she lost to Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories. The loss only fueled her intuition that it was time to shift to a different gear.

The rollout for RED (Taylor’s Version) may have been even bigger than the original, and it paid off: it re-entered the Billboard 100 at number 15, ranked number 32 on the billboard 2010s decade-end charts, number 11 on the adjacent country chart, and number 23 on the Australian adjacent.

During the original RED era, Taylor further entrenched personal ties with her biggest fans. For the release announcement, Taylor handpicked a group of fans to come to her home in Nashville, in addition to live streaming the whole ordeal worldwide. During the event, she takes questions from the room, but also online spectators, like Katie from Cleveland, Ohio who asked about her cat Meredith much to her delight. She seemed genuinely excited, albeit slightly nervous, to share the new songs, offering fans a first look into her new sound. In this way, Taylor signaled her awareness that success, and this ability to shape shift, would have been impossible without their support.

Watching it back now, there’s a few moments I cringe at: one fan asks how her life has changed since her debut album came out six years prior, which Taylor answers with something along the lines of: “Everywhere I go it’s a more social situation… once you adjust your brain to that it becomes more normal.” Already, she was dismissing her boundaries in favor of being the “good girl.” This attitude would continue to set an unhealthy precedent amongst the public regarding her personal space and life.

During a pre-concert radio event on a RED tour stop, a guest named David Mueller reached beneath Taylor’s skirt and groped her. The event being a photo op, they literally caught him on camera. After Taylor’s team reported the assault to his place of work he was fired. He subsequently tried to sue Taylor for defamation, to which she countersued for $1 and won.

Talking about the assault and subsequent years-long trial later during the reputation tour, Taylor thanked her fans for their support:

“I guess I just think about all the people who weren’t believed or who are afraid to speak up because they think they won’t be believed. I just wanted to say that I’m sorry to anyone who ever wasn’t believed, because I don’t know what turn my life would have taken if people didn’t believe me when I had said something had happened to me.”

It’s a bleak but powerful point, a bullet she was able to dodge. It was one of her more self aware moments, acknowledging that many, many more women typically aren’t granted the same privilege.

Knowing what we do about Taylor’s disposition at the time, that she chose to confront this man for his wrongdoing signals growth. She felt empowered enough to be frank about the assault, even years after when the trial took place. It’s a little disappointing that now, during her WAG era, Taylor’s been very publicly affectionate with Brittany Mahomes, who has openly defended her brother in law who accused of sexual assault.

Events like these began to mold Taylor’s doxas, the “unwritten norms and behaviors that draw fans to an artist and govern the fandom.”10 Sharing her struggles via songs was her whole schtick–was it possible to ditch that niche but still retain her reputation as a skilled songwriter?

Considering all the work Taylor had put into fostering relationships with her fans, her doxas became an outsized facet of her public image, one that was growing increasingly ungovernable. Building these relationships with the fans was good for business, for Taylor™ but what about Taylor the person? Focusing on what would appeal most to a growing audience, the RED era is when Taylor started to lose sight of her true self, the cacophony of noise rising so quickly it was hard to hear anything else.

Or at least that’s how I interpret the string of events that we are privy to. A journalist during the original RED era asked Taylor if she were worried about her ability to write songs should she ever become “happy.” Years later, during her 2019 Tiny Desk concert, Taylor said she received this question more than any other throughout her career, and that it had the potential “seriously deteriorate” her mental health. In both 2012 and 2019, she says she wouldn’t be happy if she weren’t writing songs—her own way of saying that her work is her priority.

It goes to show what her persona was to the public: as much as she likes to think she’s a consummate professional who takes her job very seriously, to everyone else she’s just an emotional teenage girl who got a lucky break and now gets to write vengeful tales about her ex dalliances for revenge. It was never about that—it was about the songs, the lyrics, and catharsis through music. But the gossip was always just too delicious, and it kept people coming back, so why not fuel that fire so she could continue doing what she loved the most: writing songs?

In an August 2013 journal entry, Taylor struggled to reconcile her emotions surrounding her newfound success

This week…I spent a significant amount of time feeling incomplete, then wondering why because I have the life I’ve always wanted. Then hating myself for feeling in any way ungrateful for this mostly perfect life.

The simple days of writing and recording songs were over, and Taylor’s planned crossover was the nail in the coffin. Rather than pursuing a public life of authenticity, she focused on securing her livelihood and legacy, the beginning of a long and winding process of losing, finding, and discovering herself again.

It seemed the tales Taylor relayed in “The Lucky One” were coming to fruition, and as she predicted, success was not all it’s cracked up to be. But still Taylor sought more, and as the years progressed, it became obvious that the RED era was merely Taylor dipping her toes into the pop pond. Her dalliance with crossover country-pop was nearing its inevitable end.

is this month’s gold⭐️goose! Eric runs one of my favorite publications on here, TrackTen, where he gets into the nitty gritty of pop music. Subscribe to his newsletter for breakdowns of the Billboard Hot 100, weekly chart roundups, concert bingo—there’s something for every pop music connoisseur.

I’m very excited to present you Eric’s pics for this month’s volume of the Gaggle 🪿

Eric’s Picks

I got to read way more than usual this month because of some time off around the holidays!

• Finally read The Hunger Games prequels (Sunrise on the Reaping and Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes) and really enjoyed both—was so nice to return to a familiar world but also to see they kept up with the original books themes and built on them.

• Slooooowly reading Wuthering Heights in anticipation of the movie, by which I mean the new Charli album.

• I liked Audition by Katie Kitamura way more than I expected—it kept me guessing the whole time.

This month I took my time with through two books: Faithful Place by Tana French (I can’t get enough), and Angela Davis’ autobiography. The latter is a powerful narration of Davis’ perseverance in fighting the U.S. government plot to make her pay for her dissent with her life. Davis’ bravery in the face of the empire never wavered. I highly recommend, especially as we watch the seeds of fascism sown by Reagan to try and stifle Davis and her comrades come to fruition now with the occupation of Minnesota by federal agents.

The Weekly Work

Kanye’s WSJ Plea To All The CEO’s He’s Loved Before

Is Kanye really sorry and is he really healing, or just feeling left out now that CEOs have a new favorite bigot to throw their millions at…

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7 months ago · 59 likes · 5 comments · culturework

LOOSEY

Are Influencers Ready For The Warfare Economy?

How should a person be in 2026? My social media feed is telling me that I should be prepared. Between the onslaught of fancams featuring Hudson and Connor of the rapidly developing Heated Rivalry fame, I am being served something different amoung my usual cocktail of TikTok Shop pull-up bars and ring lights: warfa…

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7 months ago · 172 likes · 7 comments · Brendon Holder

Eric’s Picks

• I saw Robyn at the Brooklyn Paramount on NYE - confirmed that she is an all timer and that I don’t need to be going out on NYE again in the near future lol

• I went ice skating at the new Gottesman Rink in Central Park which was perfectly wintry

• Made stops at both the Met (found a new to me room of Ottoman Empire rugs that was great) and the Neue Galerie which had great stuff but was pricey

I took a quick trip to the Huntington in San Marino. It was a gorgeous day and I didn’t spend nearly as much time as I should have, so I’ll definitely be back.

Eric’s Picks

My sunrise alarm clock - I was a nerd and went with the wirecutter rec (Phillips SmartSleep) instead of hatch, but it’s made my winter mornings so so much better

I’ve been TV free for over 5 years now but finally bit the bullet on a projector! It’s from XGIMI and hits the sweet spot of not always being constantly aware of another screen but being able to have cozy winter movie nights

Read more zines!

Eric’s Picks

I like many have become Heated Rivalry-pilled - truly obsessed!

Finally watched Sinners (avoided it because I’m not usually one for horror) and was pleasantly surprised how much I liked it

Also lots of football? Perhaps controversial but I decided to actually watch Eagles football this year (I was very loosely a fan before) and am kind of loving the ritual of Sunday football (which is sadly now over for the birds…)

I watched Sorry, Baby and it blew me away. I haven’t really seen such a honest and tender depiction of the topic of assault in a long time, and it made me remember what movies are capable of. Really looking forward to seeing what else Eva Victor will do.

Eric’s Picks

Lots of 2hollis in preparation for seeing him at Gov Ball in June, “I’ll Believe in Anything” (as featured in Heated Rivalry lol), getting into fakemink, new Robyn songs, and the Ringer Philly Special podcast as I develop my football fandom

I’ve also been listening to a mix of things this month, catching up on albums I didn’t have time or energy to give my full attention to after their release last year. Snocaps, Flock of Dimes, and Way Dynamic have been in heavy rotation, along with this Diogo Strausz record and the new Snail Mail single.

I’m trying out the Deezer free trial and I should have switched months ago. It feels so good to be free from the grip of Spotify! Follow my Gaggle playlist for new picks weekly on Fridays.

Follow me on Deezer

Eric’s Pick

I’d also like to draw your attention to a few folks looking for support if you have the time or means:

• Wael is 19 and trying to support his family of 12 living in Gaza. Donations have been scarce, so if you have anything to give, please do so here.

• Help Gigi and her family who are living in a tent in Gaza. She has a small child and is expecting a baby girl soon.

• Quick call to action to show support for Nick Tilsen, Oglala Lakota, Founder & CEO of NDN Collective. Get in touch with the prosectors office over the phone, via form, and sign the petition to demand the charges against Nick be dropped.

• For any of my Columbus subscribers: my friend and former candidate Morgan Harper is leading the charge in an ongoing battle to stand up to AEP’s manipulative behavior. Corporate greed has grossly inflated electricity costs meaning less money in the already stretched thin pockets of central Ohio residents. There’s a few ways to help:

  • sign the petition demanding the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio reject AEP Ohio’s proposed rate increase

  • donate here to support utility organizing

  • RSVP to join as the coalition attends a PUCO meeting to state their demands.

Okay time for pics! My lens has gotten very foggy—if you have any tips for remedying that let a goose know.

• Help families in Gaza get clothes and other supplies

• Help Wael and his family of 12

Marco Colmenares is this volume’s gold⭐️goose! Marco is an artist, designer, barista, and dj who lives in Columbus, Ohio. He’s also the owner/operator of a new coffee pop-up coming soon, @ruinsofpaint, and you can follow him on Instagram @plmno.97.

Marco is one of the sweetest, funniest, and hands down coolest people I know. I always leave our conversations feeling enlightened, and try my best to soak in all of his unencumbered cool every time we hang out. He’s always able to knock loose the parts of my brain that feel stuck, especially when it comes to creative practices, and I love all his work from drawings on cafe receipts to writings to t-shirts. I am so excited he agreed to share some of his picks with our gaggle—let’s get to it!!

Marco’s picks

I tend to read a mix of things! these past few months has been:

• Thomas Bernhard’s The Loser

• Dostoevsky’s Notes From The Underground

• Inventory Press’ The Electric Information Age Book by Jeffrey T. Schnapp & Adam Michaels

• Orwell’s 1984

• Hubert Selby Jr.’s Last Exit To Brooklyn

• Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx’s The Communist Manifesto

• Lev Zlodey’s Here... at the Center of the World in Revolt

It took me about two to three months but I finally finished Jon Savage’s mammoth The Secret Public: How Music Moved Queer Culture from the Margins to the Mainstream and it was one of the best books I read all year. From the Beatles to The Who to Little Richard and David Bowie, Savage’s account is a thorough and fascinating record of all the ways gays helped to shape pop culture throughout the mid 20th century. Highly recommend to all my fellow gay music nerds.

Additionally I adored Beth Macy’s Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America. Macy reckons with the changes that have rocked her small Ohio hometown of Urbana—from the opioid crisis to the erosion of our school systems, Macy approaches all sides of the stories with the utmost nuance and empathy. A beautiful book.

I also thoroughly enjoyed God Of The Woods by Liz Moore which I picked up from the library after hearing Taylor Swift listening to the audiobook during the first episode of her Disney+ docuseries The End Of An Era. And rounding out the year I read The Heebie-Jeebie Girl by Susan Petrone, a sweet supernatural whodunit that takes place in my northeast Ohio hometown, Youngstown.

State of Siege

The Nativity Under Bombs: Christmas Three Years into Genocide

In Gaza this year, Christmas arrives without its most essential ingredient: joy. The churches still stand, however partially destroyed, the prayers are still whispered, and candles still flicker against the darkness. However, the celebration feels incomplete, interrupted by grief that has no place to rest. For Gaza’s small Christian community, the holid…

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8 months ago · 92 likes · 5 comments · Ahmad Ibsais, Alana Hadid, Huda Skaik, Palestine Deep Dive, and Drop Site News

Soph

Heated Rivalry: women and mlm romance

With the recent meteoric success of Crave’s gay hockey romance Heated Rivalry, the inevitable conversation about women’s interest in mlm fiction has resurfaced. While I often feel like this conversation is being had in bad faith, I do think it is a phenomena that says a lot about the way we view gender, sex and romance…

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9 months ago · 120 likes · 18 comments · Soph

Marco’s Picks

I thoroughly enjoyed leaving my corporate retail jobs lmao. I just also took a trip back home to LA and hung out with family and close friends I haven’t seen in a minute. Really a reflective trip that felt like it was needed at the right place, right time. It gave me closure for change and anticipation of opportunities for growth I realized I want to achieve.

In accordance with the holidays, December was all about friends and family. Like Marco, I also took a trip to my hometown(s), spending some time in both Columbus and Youngstown, and hitting up all my favorite spots, including Used Kids in Old North (where I scored two INCREDIBLE Taylor Swift bootlegs), Spoonful Records, Seventh Son, and of course Club 185 in German Village.

Marco’s Picks

The Delta gameboy advance emulator on the iphone is craaazy. def taking me back to the jailbreaking days we had to do to get the same feature and now it’s on the app store, very wild for sure.

I’ve also been carving out an hour of my mornings to do whatever I want. It started out as an hour of writing but naturally, became a creative hour for free expression via design, drawing, or writing. Throw on the headphones, tune in, drop out.

Thrifting xmas supplies: from cookie plates to ribbon to ornaments to wrapping paper to gifts, scoring stuff secondhand makes me feel a little better about indulging in the commercial aspect of the holiday. Plus the old stuff is usually way cooler anyways.

Marco’s Picks

One of my all-time favorite recorded media is a graffiti documentary I used to watch a lot as a kid growing up doing graffiti, it’s called infamy -- highly recommend!

Penelope Spheeris’ The Decline Of Western Civilization is also another thing I watch routinely to reaffirm I’m not alone in the way I feel.

To no one’s surprise, I was under the spell of Taylor Allison Swift with the rollout of her Disney+ docuseries The End Of An Era. It was six episodes and I could easily have watched six more, even though I cried through the entire thing.

If you want to keep riding the nostalgia high of the Era’s tour, you can read the first (second) chapter on Taylor’s sophomore effort Fearless as part of my series titled The Monster On The Hill now.

Marco’s Picks

The Replacements have been on the rotation every now and then. Dexter Gordon, Basic Channel, shoegaze, ambient, and blues has also been the soundtrack of these past few months. Other than that, nts sets every now ride the groove every other day.

I spent a lot of this month listening and writing about my top 9 albums of the year–you can read all about them here:

Marco’s Picks

If you know me in the slightest it won’t be hard to figure out what it is, but for now I’m keeping my veneer of mystery (which doesn’t really exist…much like my muse). – From my May 2025 essay “A TikTok witch helped me start writing a book.”

Reading books about music, musicians, the recording and music industry, et al. is my favorite pastime. So is interpreting the lyrical stylings, creative choices, and narratives from one of the biggest and most divisive artists on the planet—one Taylor Allison Swift. So it feels appropriate that my first crack at a book length project examines Taylor Swift’s body of work, album by album, dissecting, interpreting, and ruminating on every “era”, mixing my personal perspective with a journalist approach. I’m calling it The Monster On The Hill, a lyric from the self-effacing third track and lead single “Anti Hero” off Taylor’s tenth studio album Midnights.

Why not something more light-hearted, more positive, from a Swift apologist such as myself? Well, much like the highs and lows of Taylor’s career, this series won’t be all rainbows and butterflies. Over the last few years, I’ve been reckoning with the fact that the woman I’ve idolized for nearly all of my life is someone I don’t know in the slightest; that the expectations I’ve held her to, whether that be with her work or her personal life or her politics, are unreasonable no matter whether they’re in good faith or not. Because I don’t know Taylor Swift, and I never will.

What I do know is how her work has made me feel—and that is something I can speak definitively on.

So far this project has been about a year in the making. Even before I began this mammoth undertaking (mammoth only because I am incapable of brevity, especially when it comes to TS), my feelings and opinions on Taylor were shifting. As I’ve been radicalized, I veer more and more from the girl I was 5, 10, 15, or 20 years ago, in good ways and bad, but I refuse to condemn her for feeling so connected to something that made her feel seen and heard. I’ve been listening to Taylor Swift for nearly as long as I’ve been listening to music in general, essentially. Taylor’s music felt like something that was truly, undeniably for me.

There will be parts of this that may come off as over the top (“cringe” is the word the internet likes to use). But more times, I feel with such force that what I got from being a Taylor Swift fan outweighs the need I feel for validation that my interests or tastes were/are “cool” or whatever. I’ve made so many amazing memories and fostered so many connections, all because of the work of this one blonde lady, and I am far from the only one. I think that’s worth celebrating, or at the very least, worth examining.

This has been fun but it isn’t easy. I am, whether or not I’d like to admit it, a weepy person, and watching back old videos and listening to these songs in a pointed way instead of with the usual passivity made me cry a lot, because it makes me long for a time I’m never getting back. In a way I guess this is a kind of farewell to my youth.

I’ve grown a lot over the years, which often means examining uncomfortable and unpleasant truths. There is unfortunately a part of me now that feels like many of Taylor’s actions, and lack thereof, in the face of the harrowing realities for many of her fans has ruined my relationship with her in ways I wish weren’t true. Is there any value or validity or worth to the parasocial relationship I’ve fostered over the past 15 years?

It’s a sticking point that I would like to get past, and this series has been a way of helping me work through all the ways that my attachment proved fruitless, sure, but also incredibly fruitful: I’ve learned so much about songwriting and lyrical interpretation, the music industry, pop music, queer history both in the entertainment industry and the culture at large. I’ve garnered a greater appreciation for musicians, live music, and my friends, who often sit and listen to me ramble about this public narrative or that fabricated controversy. There was a time that rambling about Taylor Swift wasn’t as fraught a topic as politics. But, as I’ve come to learn, pop music is in a lot of ways political. However, as you’ll come to learn (if you join me on this journey), it was Taylor who first told me about the artists that would really crack open my worldview and help me become the woman I am today. Without Taylor, I wouldn’t have found MUNA, Phoebe Bridgers, Carole King, Carly Simon, James Taylor and dozens of other artists who make up a good chunk of the soundtrack to my adult life. I have to reckon with these things, and this is my stupid corner of the internet, so I’m going to do it god damn it!!

If it wasn’t already clear, this isn’t a Penguin Classic, nor is it trying to be. But in terms of length and effort, this is the closest I’ve gotten thus far to my lifelong dream of writing a book. This isn’t solely a story about Taylor Swift, but about ME! and my relationship to Taylor over the years. I think for me, it’s the only subject I feel like I can speak on with a weathered authority, because as I said, as much as it is about Taylor Swift, and a lot of it is, even more of it is about me.

In addition to providing anecdotal and cultural context around Taylor’s catalogue and career, I’ll weave in what age I was at the time of this album release or that tour, what my favorite songs were and why, how Taylor influenced my life from the instruments I played to the songs I listened to, to the boys I kissed (and the girls I didn’t) to the clothes I wore and the major I chose to study in college.

The point of this project is not to argue over why one album is good, and another bad, or why one album is my favorite and another isn’t. I am not in the business of ranking Taylor albums—I see people doing this all the time with her discography but not for anyone else’s. What’s the point of weighing what makes The Life Of A Showgirl the worst and Fearless the best when they all mean something different to everyone, including Taylor? I hope to touch on some of these points for every album, all of which make up a unique and important facet of Taylor’s long and remarkable career.

A career that right now, it feels like, Taylor is actively trying to sabotage, and I don’t necessarily fault her for that. It’s so much different now than even a year ago, and I have to remind myself not just for me. Taylor’s public life is not a real one: it’s a kaleidoscope of the images we, the crowd, have made of her in our head. No matter how we feel about her, the image was always going to be blighted because it’s not based on facts but assumptions. Taylor wrote songs about her own life because it’s what she knew, but the more successful she became and subsequently the more self-assured, her critics got increasingly louder and louder. And of course not just about her music—her looks, her relationships, her every move was put under a magnifying glass. A self-admitted pathological people pleaser, she focused on being a “good girl.” As she found her agency, and as people continued to underestimate her, she became increasingly hell bent on proving everyone wrong.

I don’t think I’ve ever stated this for the record here, so I’ll lay it out real quick so we can all be on the same page: right now, I think she is trolling everyone, hard. The whole facade with Travis is a charade, a really convenient and lucrative one that helps Taylor live out a semblance of normalcy in her personal life for the 95% of the time the cameras aren’t watching. For the last several years, she’s been consistently planting not easter eggs, but lies, explicitly showing the contradictory nature of life in the spotlight, at the hands of the crowd, half of which are chanting “more” and the other half who would take pleasure in the lights smashing her to bits.

On release day for The Life Of A Showgirl, I was “Crashing Out” as they say, going on a rant about the performance art of this whole era of Taylor’s life, how it’s all a ruse, how we’re all being duped, etc. etc. A friend of mine who said she’s a fan (who I personally wouldn’t have categorized as a fan but was pleasantly surprised at the admission) said she was confused because if it was as I say, that she is fucking with us, why should we as fans have to suffer through this superficially hetrifying train wreck of a narrative?

The main answer is one none of us want to admit, but it’s because we love it! Collectively, we eat that shit up! It gives us something to talk about that makes us feel superior, like we have a definitive authority on (it’s me hi!) because it’s a topic that’s grown so fraught it is simply too far from saving. Of course it is just gossip to us, and to an extent in this particular climate we are entitled to our less than worldly pleasures when Miss Swift is flying private for a day trip to the city. We get to talk shit, she gets to make her art and, eventually everybody moves on.

But I’m still at the restaurant. I miss when being a Taylor Swift fan wasn’t colored by any of this. When release day entailed being overtired from staying up to listen til 3 am then getting up for school and counting down the hours until my mom would take me to Best Buy or Target or wherever to get my physical copy, then spending the next 24-48 hours decoding the secret messages hidden within the lyric packets, then memorizing every lyric until it felt as though I’d written them myself, then spending every waking moment listening to that record until the announcement about the new one came out and then listening to them all collectively until a new one came out and then repeating it all over again.

Things are certainly not the same as they were before. For as many fans as I see joining the fandom, I see even more becoming disillusioned with her, especially since her latest release The Life Of A Showgirl. And that sucks, because I get it. I waxed poetic for like 3,000 words about how torn I was over this record. And even if it is the grand labyrinthian concoction of public performance that I speculate it is, I still long for the days when Taylor release days were not soiled by the cacophony of the peanut gallery. Not too long ago I would listen to Taylor Swift and be swept up in her narrative songwriting, taken back to the days of sitting in my childhood bedroom, earbuds at full blast, oblivious to the woes of the outside world, unconcerned with the damage being done to my eardrums. I used to listen for hours, days on end, the same albums over and over. I didn’t give a shit what anyone thought.

But as Taylor said, nostalgia is a mind’s trick.

That’s why I’m still chasing the high of these sacred memories. I’ve tried, but there really is no replicating hearing a new Taylor project for the first time. There hasn’t been a drop that I didn’t stay up for that I can recall, even the Taylor’s Version’s. I remember junior year on reputation’s release day, I hung out with my friends that night. We walked to the bar and I said my goodbyes at the door—everyone thought I was kidding when I said I was going home to listen to Taylor Swift’s new album, but I couldn’t have been more serious. I can still picture sitting in my bedroom, hearing “so it goes” for the first time and shrieking at Taylor’s newly unveiled sexuality. I made these memories on my own with Taylor on the aux, and there are hundreds, if not thousands, of these moments packed away in my subconscious.

A Place In This World

Ever since I was little, I have ached to be seen. The third of three girls, I didn’t know where I belonged: not quite with my sisters, who were close in age while I was five years younger; not usually with kids my age, an “old soul” some would say. Because of this I never really had courage or confidence, and that could often feel like the equivalent of not being there at all.

But when I’d hear a song by Taylor Swift, that feeling seemed to take a back seat. Taylor believed in herself and her words and her feelings enough to write them down and share them with the world—something I struggle with even to this day. As a kid I thought that takes courage, and that’s why I admired her. And I was hooked.

A lot of bad faith criticism of Taylor’s work comes not from a place of genuine dislike (if everyone really hated her so much they’d quit bringing her up), but from a seedier unspoken truth: she’s primarily popular among young women. Sorry!! Two truths can exist that Taylor Swift is one of the most privileged women in the world and she’s still a victim of the patriarchy!! As posits, “Women’s choices are pulled under the microscope, not to evaluate their quality, but to signal that anything shaped by feminine taste, by mass appeal, by comfort, by desire, is automatically suspect.” It’s not that Taylor’s music is bad (music especially is a subjective form of art, there’s no good and bad! Except Morgan Wallen and Benson Boone of course), but that so many women derive joy from her body of work often means it’s discredited and made the butt of many (bad, lame) jokes.

What’s worse, and one of the main catalysts for my writing and publishing this series: it’s usually men who are given the responsibility or task of writing seriously about Taylor. For example: Rob Sheffield’s coverage of Taylor is respectable enough, but there is something to be said about a man doing a woman’s job. It’s not surprising, but it is annoying as fuck when a man who’s spent a large portion of his career interviewing Taylor gets her lyrics wrong in a book that is literally all about her. And that’s not to say that he doesn’t ever do a good job—there are some passages of his work that very accurately distill the impact of Taylor’s work on the millions of girls and women who adore her music. But at the end of the day, Rob will never know what it felt like for Taylor to awaken the woman inside who felt like she wasn’t worthy of being heard. Many would agree that Taylor has an incredibly personal style of artistry (I also agree but in a different way than the general public, we’ll get there) and yet no one that I’ve read, and I’ve read a lot on this subject, seems able to translate, forcibly and with depth, how or why her work speaks to and contributes to the personal stories of millions. So much of who I am is wrapped up in the Taylor Swift Cinematic Universe because when it felt like no one was listening to me, at least my favorite artist was a force that couldn’t be argued.

Or so I thought. It’s been sad to watch her work year after year to prove herself to a society that inherently devalues the work of women. Even following the massive success of the Eras Tour; her subsequent acquisition of her lifetime’s work; despite often using her platform to bolster fellow artists, often female and queer; despite all this, we critique one woman instead of the systems that tries its hardest to push her, and women of far lesser status and wealth, to the margins of culture. Taylor Swift is her own cause du jour because if she, one of the most successful and powerful women on the planet, cannot get the praise and respect she deserves, then what fucking chance do the rest of us have?

Because for as often as we praise women, there’s always a caveat, a fine mist of patriarchal dust coating the accolades and compliments. Despite years of beating back the assumptions and stereotypes that accompany her ability to represent young women’s feelings and experiences, so much of her notoriety still stems from her adjacence to men. And I’m fucking sick of it!!!

I know a lot of people these days think she is an evil-aryan-MAGA princess-in-disguise billionaire who only ever looks out for herself. And every so often I agree. But there are also days when she is the comfort I crave when my brain is so full of noise that I can’t stand to hear it anymore. There have been days when it all would have been too much had I not been able to turn on Fearless or shuffle Taylor’s vast discography. Where some people have an emotional support animal or blankey, for a very, very long time I had Taylor.

And not just the music, but the Taylor Swift Cinematic Universe. I can get lost in the stories she writes, the tales she weaves, the uncanny way she draws you in with the worlds she builds, often in a way that is so catchy you forget how vague and elusive she can be. When I could be overthinking my own life, I turn on her albums and listen for myself there instead, relate my own experiences to hers, and find solace in camaraderie, even if she is fibbing a whole lot. She’s only cryptic and machiavellian because she cares.

So I am doing this series because I am tired of men doing women’s jobs—look at where that’s gotten us so far. There are few things I feel confident enough that I am an expert in. That it is Taylor Swift (the musician, not the person) is something I refuse to be embarrassed about anymore, and that makes me emotional because it’s my childhood self working hand in hand with my present self to heal something in me I didn’t know was broken.

The only thing that’s left is the manuscript

I’m not out to convince anyone to change their mind about Taylor as a person or a cultural phenomenon (again, we don’t actually know this woman at all anyway and never will). My hope is that you will read my reflections on Taylor’s work, interlaced with many correlating anecdotes from my coming of age, and see not the famed boy crazy teenager, or model squad leader, or a snake, or Travis Kelce’s fiancee, or climate criminal billionaire, or cowardly white feminist. But the woman who helped myself and millions of other young women find their agency over two decades and counting.

And if you’d give Taylor (read: me) a chance, you’d maybe come to find out perhaps her entire catalogue ISN’T her whining over boys. In fact, it’s pretty brilliant how she’s able to engage in such deep introspection through all these cryptic, labyrinthian, and entertaining stories, ones that millions of people love and relate to personally.

Recently I was listening to a podcast with Yasmin Zaher, whose debut novel “The Coin” features a protagonist that isn’t all that likeable or relatable. At one point during the talk Zaher says she found it much more fun to write somewhat problematic characters, and it reminded me of something similar Taylor said once during the 1989 era regarding “Blank Space”—that these “unlikeable” characters are much more interesting to write. It would hardly be the last time Taylor brought it up either. In the foreword poem of The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology, Taylor writes:

“In summation it was not a love affair!”

I screamed while bringing my fists to my coffee ringed desk.

It was a mutual manic phase.

It was selfharm.

It was house and then cardiac arrest.

A smirk creeps on this

poet’s face.

Because it’s the worst men I write best.

It’s going to be a while before I can explain why Taylor is referring to herself as a man, but my analysis of The Life Of A Showgirl is a good place to start in terms of explaining how and why Taylor has split herself into pieces. Over the years I believe she’s used this strategy of compelling (albeit misleading) narrative songwriting to hook listeners and cement her legacy as one of the greatest entertainers of all time.

Much like my opinions and feelings about her, Taylor is many things, often contradictory, but definitely more than the tabloids have made her out to be: she’s the showgirl, the mirrorball, the director, and more. That’s why I find gaylor, or the camp of Swifties who believe Taylor is gay, and performance-artlor, the idea that Taylor’s public life for the last 4-10 years is all a show, so compelling.

Recently there was some light discourse online debating why Taylor is such a force within the sapphic community despite the fact that she’s often deemed the “straightest woman alive” (clearly the people saying this have never REALLY listened to “Maroon”), and why she isn’t as popular within male queer spaces like Madonna or Lady Gaga. Whether or not it’s because she’s actually queer, the fact that the stories she writes can represent love of all kinds makes me believe that her legacy was not a total blight on the existence of history like some would like to believe.

Maybe I’m part of the Sarah’s and Hannah’s in “But Daddy I Love Him” clutching their pearls, or the ubiquitous “they” in “Wi$h Li$t” that wants that complex female character. Perhaps I’m projecting, but she DID say she was a mirrorball—her words, not mine! Very much like Taylor’s narratives, this series will have a lot of grey area: there will be portions where I am undeniably part of the problem, thinking that if anyone understands this celebrity stranger, it’s me. But there’s a lot of me that’s desperate for some kind of semblance that the last 20 years wasn’t a wash. And maybe it was! That’s fine! But, before I call it, I need to get this all out. I DO want your closure, Taylor.

I was hoping Miss Swift would give us Taylor Swift (Taylor’s Version) before the end of the year so I start from the beginning. But Fearless was the first release of the Taylor’s Version recordings, and it being my favorite Taylor album to this day, I think it an appropriate place to start.

I want to take a moment to acknowledge I would be nothing without the vast and delightful insights of my fellow Gaylors (and sometimes Swifties) that make up my side of the internet, and I’ve tried my best to cite them all accordingly (via links) which I am not ashamed to say is a lot of Tumblr and Reddit. Many pictures, interviews, quotes and other references I make throughout this series would be lost to time without these archives.

I also make reference to a few books in particular that I want to point out (which are cited in the footnotes):

• Heartbreak Is The National Anthem by Rob Sheffield

• There’s Nothing Like This by Kevin Avers

• Taylor Swift Style by Sarah Chapelle

• The Official Taylor Swift | The Eras Tour Book

So if you’re a lover of music history of any kind; if you’ve ever gone red in the cheeks when someone says they hate that artist or this song or that album but were too timid to say anything; if you miss simpler times when running out of storage on your MP3 player was your biggest problem, I hope you will stick around, indulge my nostalgia, and maybe learn something.

Read, like, share with a fellow Swiftie and buckle up to travel through 12 different eras of my life and that of Miss Taylor Allison Swift!

Read the first (second) chapter of Monster On The Hill now!!!

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Without further ado!!! I present the first (second) chapter of The Monster On The Hill!!!

There’s something about the way

The street looks when it’s just rained

There’s a glow off the pavement

You walk me to the car

And you know i wanna ask you to dance right there

In the middle of the parking lot, yeah

So goes the first verse of the eponymous track of Taylor Swift’s sophomore album. After what I can only imagine was a whirlwind couple years writing, recording, and touring her debut, self-titled album, Fearless came highly anticipated, particularly by sixth grade me.

As if a sign from above, the year at hand started off the one of Swift: at the beginning of 2008, I was 11 years old and Taylor’s third single off her debut album “Our Song” held the number one spot on the Billboard 200 for four weeks. “Teardrops On My Guitar” and “Tim McGraw” also made pop crossover debuts at some point before the release of Fearless in November 2008. By this point, Taylor had become the most successful country artist on the Billboard 200, with three songs on the chart: “Our Song” at 41, “Teardrops on My Guitar” at 48, and “Love Story” at 81.

While my parents hardly monitored what I watched or listened to (my favorite things to watch were the movie musical adaptation of Rent and The Girls Next Door on E!), a newfound obsession with Taylor meant that everyone around me was getting a taste. Yes I have always been this annoying.

Of course it wasn’t just me who loved Taylor: by this point my older sisters and many of my friends were just as jazzed on her as I was. We all had our favorite songs and our own ideas about what they meant or who they were about. I think more than anyone, I longed for a life where Taylor’s words applied to real situations. Just like Taylor, I was in a hurry to grow up, and I longed to experience the big feelings she talks about in her songs.

I was also finding out I might also have a way with words, just like Miss Swift. After reading an assignment out loud for class, my fifth grade English teacher let me know I’d done a good job. I don’t remember what project it was–all I remember was feeling excited that I’d done something well enough that it warranted singling out. By this point I was obsessed with storytelling, a pastime that had always called to me as a kid. I found immense comfort in books, constantly reading and very at home in Youngstown’s various beautiful local libraries. Taylor’s songs became another means of escape, and I was more than happy to dive in.

It was also around this time I experienced a consciousness-raising, suddenly aware that what you listened to or wore or read said a lot about who you were, at least to some people. Considering this was before the idea of a “basic bitch” had entered the cultural lexicon, I was more than okay being known as the “Taylor” girl. I probably did more than necessary to make sure of it, actually. I’d sit in class, Taylor album booklet open on my desk, decoding the secret messages Taylor hid within the lyrics. Why pay attention to school when the real work of understanding my greatest inspiration had to be done?! I had no room in my brain for diagrams of the nucleus or pre-algebraic equations, but I knew every Taylor lyric by heart, forwards and backwards.

In There’s Nothing Like This, Kevin Evers dissects Taylor’s transformation from singer-songwriter to “unprecedented modern cultural phenomenon.” In the Fearless chapter he notes that Taylor’s “core differentiators” were solidified as fans, like myself, fell in love with her songwriting, relating to a subset of the population the establishment, country music, was not interested in serving.1

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What drew myself, and so many other girls, to Taylor specifically? Looking back, she wasn’t so different from the other pop artists at the time. 2008 was a big year for the girlies: Amy Winehouse took home five Grammy awards; Britney Spears would make a comeback with Circus, released on her 27th birthday just months after Rolling Stone published its infamous “The Tragedy of Britney Spears” cover story. Topping the charts was Alicia Keys, Katy Perry, Adele, Rihanna, and Lady Gaga. Although these women are not far from Taylor in age, to a sixth grader like me, the things they sang about felt like a different set of experiences than mine. Taylor, a teen from rural Pennsylvania, had that je ne sais quois that made her more accessible than other acts.

In his book of essays about Taylor, New Romantics, Rob Sheffield observed that it was during the Fearless cycle, nearly 20 years ago, when the persona she’s still largely associated with today came to life—one she’s “reacted against in so many ways since…always falling in love, bedeviled by the boyfolk, making the thrills and spills of a weeklong high school romance sound as torchy as one of Patsy Cline’s divorces.”2

He continues: “...these songs aren’t really about boys at all. They’re about girls, the topic Taylor has pursued more relentlessly than any other pop artist in history. She’s written more songs about girls than anyone, even Paul McCartney, and like Paul, she has nearly no interest in male characters…Fearless is full of these vibrant girls she’s spent her life creating.”3 From the beginning, Taylor was a storyteller focused on capturing all the previously disregarded experiences of young women everywhere.

“Everybody in music has their own sort of niche speciality thing that they do that you know sets them apart from everybody else. My storytelling is what it is for me, and without me writing my own songs I wouldn’t be here.” Taylor in the Miss Americana on Netflix

After the critical and chart success of her debut, Taylor already faced a lot of pressure to deliver on the follow up. Taylor’s music was no longer just popular, it was economically advantageous, which was good, because her dad was looking to make a return on his heavy-handed investment into her success. Determined and unafraid to try and top herself, she stuck to the relevant themes of her life, and doubled down, appealing to a previously untapped teen market. Taylor was already wise to the formulas of success—she had been studying after all, all the while building an entirely new one of her own.

“You have to believe in love stories and prince charming’s and happily every after.”

To the naked eye, Fearless is generic, featuring tropes of dramatic young love, Shakespearean-esque tales, and all that silly stuff we expect from young women. But it could also be wildly personal. Listening to Fearless Platinum Edition to this day still makes me cry sometimes.

I was always kind of a melancholy kid, and chronically anxious. I cried a lot, especially when I had to go somewhere without my mom, my babysitter Jo, or sisters. I didn’t do many activities outside of piano lessons, I wasn’t exactly athletic and I wouldn’t leave my mom long enough to go to practice or dance lessons anyways. Often listening on my own, I grew to love the less than subtle somber musings of emo and pop punk bands like Fall Out Boy and Panic! At The Disco (both, much to my delight, would eventually enter the Taylor Swift Cinematic Universe many years down the line). My sister Kelsey broadened my musical horizons by burning mix tapes with track lists that truly ran the gamut, including everything from alternative rock (Linkin Park and Breaking Benjamin) to pop (Christina Aguilera and Maroon 5) to show tunes (Rent and Wicked) to hip hop and rap (50 cent and Usher).

However, whatever journey I was on, sonic, personal or otherwise, stopped dead in its tracks with the release of Fearless.

I Don’t Know How It Gets Better Than This

Few things are as nostalgic to me as the opening notes of Fearless. “Fearless” plays, and instantly I am transported to my childhood bedroom, off white furniture covered in endless childish bits and bobbles, window seat overlooking the back yard with nothing but green, green grass. My guitars in the corner, a poster of Taylor’s March 2009 Rolling Stone cover watching over me every night as I fell asleep.

The namesake and opening track sets the scene: the pavement is damp, the breeze is blowing through the open car windows, the desire is palpable, the conditions are ripe for falling in love. This simple, upbeat, pop country song is the perfect opener to an album full of girlish impulses, and right off the bat Taylor is so head over heels she’s doing things she doesn’t even understand. If you were anywhere near Swift-Tok during the Era’s tour, you surely saw video after video featuring the last line of the song’s second verse:

In this moment now

Capture it, remember it

It’s lines like these that have the potential to hold not only her story, but yours too.

We’re just one song in and already Taylor sets the bar for bridges high, launching into a minor key change and pummeling through her thoughts, running out of breath to make sure she gets out every single one:

Well you stood there with me in the doorway

My hands shake I’m not usually this way but

You pull me in and I’m a little more brave

It’s the first kiss, it’s flawless, really something

It’s fearless

Here was someone telling me the thing I least wanted to hear: that the things worth doing, like being vulnerable and falling in love, are scary. For some reason I didn’t doubt her in the least, and this trust made me want to launch into my own life headfirst, fearless.

“Fearless to me does not mean the absence of fear.” In the foreword for the original version of the album, Taylor rattles off what constitutes the word:

Fearless is walking into your freshman year of high school at fifteen. Fearless is getting back up and fighting for what you want over and over again...even though every time you’ve tried before, you’ve lost. It’s fearless to have faith that someday things will change. Fearless is having the courage to say goodbye to someone who only hurts you, even if you can’t breathe without them.

At 12 years old, her words spoke to me in ways my teachers, parents, and peers couldn’t touch. I was blown away by this girl putting it all out there, and people listened! Maybe people would want to hear what I have to say too.

No Taylor song captures the vibe of its respective era quite like the second track off Fearless—“Fifteen,” one of those songs that solidified Taylor as the girl with a guitar. Opening with a comfortingly familiar guitar riff achieved with the simple lift of a pinky and a D chord, we can feel the anticipation Taylor sings about, the quick strumming pattern mimicking her rapidly beating heart as she takes a deep breath and walks through the door of the first day of high school.

Taylor narrates what it’s like to navigate the experience of going from girl to woman, often an unexpected and premature jolt, at 15: going to high school, the first time feeling of falling in love and all the silly, cliche motions that come with it, losing your virginity! It wasn’t at all about dating the boy on the football team, but the power and relief in finding out you’ll do things better than that.

There’s almost no time for reflection before the soft twang of a banjo guides us up a set of castle stairs, where Taylor leans out a window and serenades the sun setting in the sky:

We were both young when I first saw you

I close my eyes and the flashback starts

And OH do the flashbacks start. If you have never heard “Love Story”, I am really…not quite sure how you ended up here but I am more than glad to explain why it is one of Taylor’s most beloved, infamous songs.

Part fiction, part autobiography, part Shakespeare, part Bonnie and Clyde, “Love Story” became the sensation that it is, first and foremost, because it’s just a good song. The lyrics keep you on your toes, while the melody draws you along, beckoning to the next part of the story to see if the star-crossed lovers make it or not. In a first bridge (yes there’s two!), we’re led to believe maybe not, maybe the end of the road has come. But then, there’s that banjo again, and then wait, Romeo has arrived, and wait he’s kneeling to the ground, and wait there’s a key change, and wait he talked to her dad!!! It’s a “Love Story” baby, just say yes!!! At 17 years old Taylor had boiled down all the tropes of the greatest love stories and written her own ending.

This is a Taylor song you cannot help but sing along. As you will come to find out, I am a sucker for a key change, but what really makes this song amazing is Taylor’s world building around the two lovers who were not so star crossed after all, and willing to challenge fate. “bUt ThAt’S nOT How RoMeO And JuLIET EndS.” That’s the point, dumbass!

One of my favorite Taylor songs comes next, a chronically overlooked banger whose only fault is residing amongst a ridiculous array of equally perfect songs. The humming at the beginning, the bouncy guitar, the general sentiment of having a crush that is absolutely irresistible. For a song often deemed A side “filler” it is impeccably catchy and perfectly captures the immeasurable feeling of being powerless to someone’s prowess:

I can’t help it if you look like an angel

Can’t help it if I wanna kiss you in the rain, so

Come feel this magic I’ve been feeling since I met you

Can’t help it if there’s no one else

Oh, I can’t help myself

Adding some extra flare to the “Hey Stephen” lore was its Fearless tour performance: every night while silly sketches featuring Taylor and her band played on the big screens, Taylor would book it from backstage and across the arena, popping up at random in the crowd, guitar in hand and playing “Hey Stephen” right in the middle of a sea of people. Then she’d walk right through the crowd to get back to the stage. I’ll never forget the night I went with my sisters. I sat with my oldest sister Kelsey, but my other older sister Abbey also went and was sitting elsewhere with a friend. Taylor ended up walking right by their row and all the way home, it was “I touched Taylor’s hand” this and “she walked right by us” that. I was soo pissed.

“White Horse” is next, the second iteration of the infamous “track five” that would come to devastate generations of listeners. In this track, Romeo is not coming to save anyone because this isn’t a fairytale after all. The veil has been lifted and as the song fades out she literally and figuratively bids her muse goodbye:

This is a big world

That was a small town

There in my rearview mirror disappearing now

And it’s too late for you and your white horse

To catch me now

It is impossible to talk about the Fearless era without discussing track number six, “You Belong With Me.” While “Love Story” is rife with whimsy and fantasy, “You Belong With Me” paints a more realistic portrait of what being a teenage girl is really like: feeling overlooked for someone seemingly cooler, prettier, better.

“You Belong With Me” is also the perfect pop-country crossover: it kicks off with a bouncy banjo riff, Taylor singing low, then picks up the beat and the tempo in the pre chorus before fully embracing the music as if she is dancing around in her bedroom singing into a hairbrush.

Sound familiar? The music video would also become a treasured part of the TSCU4, with Swifties of all ages dressing up in pajama pants, big glasses, and DIY “Junior Jewels” t-shirts at Taylor shows for years to come. It would also, of course, be the catalyst for the longest, most notorious drama Taylor would be embroiled in.

“You Belong With Me” was nominated at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards for Video of the Year. That night Taylor would open the show with the song: at first she’s on a New York City subway in a trench coat before exiting the train car to a platform where her band awaits. She ditches the coat for a dashing red dress and makes her way through the city into the awards ceremony.

Being a fan voted event, Taylor was sure to have a good night. When Taylor Lautner and Shakira took the stage to announce her the winner of the Best Female Video, Taylor looked genuinely shocked (her open-mouthed gape remains a consistently fraught topic) and who could blame her? She was a 19 year old country act who just beat out Beyoncé, Kelly Clarkson, and Lady Gaga for one of the biggest awards of the night.

What happens next I think we all know: Kanye West saunters up on stage, takes the microphone off Taylor, who looks on in confusion. He says: “Taylor Imma let you finish but Beyoncé had one of the best videos of all time.” Of course she did Kanye, but could it really not have waited until after the show? Could all this have been avoided had one grown man resisted not making it all about himself for one minute?

Speaking about the experience a decade later to Variety, Taylor said:

“As a teenager who had only been in country music, attending my very first pop awards show, somebody stood up and sent me the message: ‘You are not respected here. You shouldn’t be here on this stage.’ That message was received, and it burrowed into my psyche more than anyone knew. That can push you one of two ways: I could have just curled up and decided I’m never going to one of those events ever again, or it could make me work harder than anyone expects me to, and try things no one expected, and crave that respect — and hopefully one day get it.”

Talking in the 2020 Miss Americana documentary about that night, Taylor says: “When you’re living for the approval of strangers and that is where you derive all your joy and fulfillment, one bad thing can cause everything to crumble…For someone whose built their whole belief system to clap for you, the whole crowd booing is a pretty formative experience.”

Taylor saw the incident not as a warning (or a ticket to lifelong victimhood as some like to argue), but an impetus to work harder for the crowd’s fondness instead of retreating, a habit she’s been unable to shake to this day.

In a post VMA’s interview a reporter asks Taylor if there’s any hard feelings to which Taylor replies: “I don’t know him, I’ve never met him. I don’t want to start anything, I had a great night tonight.” You can see her light back up when they finally ask about her performance, immediately crediting the fans for making it special. As someone asks, “Are you going to reach out to Kanye?” she is whisked away by her team, surely unaware the situation was far from over.

The next Fearless track, “Breathe,” shows a more mature side to Fearless as Taylor begins to understand the prerequisites of growing up. Taylor wrote “Breathe” with Liz Rose, who was a frequent collaborator on Taylor’s debut including similarly emotive songs like “Teardrops On My Guitar” and “Cold As You.” “Breathe” also includes Taylor’s first feature of another artist, Colbie Caillat, whose songs “Bubbly” and “Realize” share a similar pop sensibility to Taylor’s.

Where Taylor feels detached and resigned on “Breathe”, she is pissed off on “Tell Me Why”. Taylor and I both being fire signs (Sagittarius), this song always spoke to me. I even sang it in front of a crowd of my peers once at a workshop and my teacher loved the high note jump in the chorus. That I even attempted it means I was far cooler as a kid than I am now, no surprises there.

It really wasn’t the notes or the melody that spoke to me, however. All those big feelings I mentioned earlier bubbled to the surface on “Tell Me Why”, and showed me that people can manipulate your big emotions and try to make you feel stupid for them. As a young girl, I heard another young woman being frank about being mistreated:

You could write a book on how to ruin someone’s perfect day

I get so confused and frustrated

Forget what I’m trying to say

Even in her mid teens Taylor faced the cognitive dissonance that comes with loving someone who treats you like shit. Could we speculate the inspiration for this song came from a romantic relationship? Sure. But in hindsight, both personally and knowing what we do about Taylor’s early professional life, I sense this song could easily have stemmed from a frustrating relationship with, say, a patriarchal figure or close acquaintance whose name rhymes with rot.

“You’re Not Sorry” was the first Taylor song, and first pop song for that matter, I learned to play on the piano. I knew it had to be from the moment I heard the opening piano chords and how they carried the song throughout. You can glean all you need to know about the implications of the song just from the title: Taylor isn’t accepting the BS apology, but nice try!

Much debated in the TSCU, “The Way I Loved You” is a sprawling story of a previous whirlwind romance, a roller coaster kind of rush. In the present, Taylor talks of this ‘he’ who does everything right: he’s on time, he’s charming, he’s comfortable, he can talk to her parents. But there’s a ubiquitous ‘you’ that soils the whole facade–who it is or where they went, Taylor hardly gets into. But by the end you, the listener, are cheering for the other side, insisting that Taylor ditch whoever ‘he’ is and embrace the screaming and fighting and kissing in the rain.

This was one of those songs I’d heavily project onto my sixth grade boyfriend. I wanted exciting roller coaster rushes not begging for a hug after school—I’m not feeling anything at all!! Where is the wild and crazy, frustrating, intoxicating, complicated, got away by some mistake love??? I may have only been in sixth grade, but Taylor sang with such conviction I felt it in my bones, especially that bridge.

Taylor would continue to spill out every lost thought into her iconic bridges, and “Forever and Always” was certainly no exception. One of the first songs that really saw a “confirmed” muse assigned as the inspiration (Joe Jonas), “Forever and Always” is one of the sad bangers that Taylor would so effortlessly master throughout her career.

A fan favorite, Taylor played “Forever and Always” every night on the Fearless tour, mirroring the drama within the lyrics in her onstage antics: before the bridge Taylor huffs out of a huge red couch and in a deranged fit of despair tosses it off the second level of the stage. At one show Taylor, so obviously pleased with another successful depiction of female rage, happily skips away post toss only to miss a step and fall directly on her tush. Gifs of both of these moments remain frequently referenced in every online Swiftie space.

“Forever and Always” is fast-paced and upbeat, and the main cadd9 chord gives it the quintessential TS sound of the time. Fearless features a lot of the same chord progressions as debut, but it was the cadd9 that would become a staple in Taylor’s simple yet effective repertoire, one she would utilize even during the Era’s Tour surprise song performances, often on a gorgeous koa wood guitar with “Taylor” inlaid in mother of pearl along the neck.

Second to last is “The Best Day”, a sweet song honoring Taylor’s mom Andrea. One of those songs that need no interpretation, it offers some intel on Taylor’s view of her family, or at least how she is willing to present them to an audience of listeners:

I have an excellent father

His strength is making me stronger

God smiles on my little brother

Inside and out he’s better than I am

I grew up in a pretty house and

I had space to run and

I had the best days with you

That she chose to write a song about her family is fitting for the image she was projecting: sweet, innocent, down home country girl. And who am I to say it’s not a genuine depiction of her family dynamic? I am not all cynic when it comes to Taylor’s more earnest creations. “The Best Day” is a lovely tribute to her mom who, to this day, Taylor deems her greatest and best friend. However, I must skip it most days because it conjures up too many feelings around the inevitable, which is that my own mommy is mortal.

The last song on the original version of the album is “Change”, an anthemic ballad that stands apart from the rest of the album lyrically. The song talks about breaking down walls and fighting for what you want. As the story goes, Taylor wrote it about her experience as a Nashville “underdog” at a small label. I can see this, especially with Taylor being a young woman in a largely male dominated genre. According to Reddit, she supposedly completed it the night she won the CMA Horizon Award and looked out to see Scott Borchetta crying in the crowd as she accepted the honor.

Of course I find the potential gaylor implications of the song far more compelling and sensical just based on the lyrics. Taylor was 16 when she wrote “Change.” Sure she could have looked at the challenge that is breaking into the music industry as the “fight of our lives.” But I don’t think it’s far-fetched to believe Taylor felt unable to voice her desires to live authentically, challenged by the toxic norms of the country genre, with the walls that kept her from succeeding as her honest self (queer, in some way) closing in. Additionally, knowing what we do about her desire to earn respect and admiration, there was likely an internal debate: do I want to be myself or do I want to be successful? In Taylor’s ideal world, these two things aren’t mutually exclusive, but that is not reality.

At the song’s end, Taylor repeatedly sings “hallelujah”, an addition so ironic it’s almost comical (a device she will constantly employ especially on her latest The Life Of A Showgirl). While she’s appealing to what was surely a largely Christian audience, it feels more spiritual than clerical. A lot of Taylor’s music can, her followers more than willing to bow at her altar.

Fearless quickly went platinum, selling nearly 600,000+ copies within just a few months. To mark the occasion, Taylor released a deluxe version featuring six additional songs–the Taylor’s Version before the Taylor’s Version, if you will.

I truly didn’t know how it could get better than Fearless–but then Taylor released the Platinum edition and I became even more smitten. As a sixth grader, “Jump Then Fall” was my heroin–I wanted it injected straight into my veins. To this day, listening to this song is a treat and feels different every time. Perhaps it’s because it first taught me the value of a good bonus track, or it could just be that syrupy sweet synthy banjo at the beginning mixed with the bouncy rhythm and vocals. Perhaps it’s because it opened a portal to another 30 minutes of pure, sixth grade listening bliss. Whatever it was awoke something in me–I wanted it on a loop, forever.

Up next is “Untouchable”, the one and only cover in Taylor’s entire discography. Originally written and performed by a Nashville group called Luna Halo, the lyrics stayed largely the same for Taylor’s version, save for a few minor changes due to being a little too raunchy for her good girl persona (even though we know from her MySpace posts at the time she was just as horny as the rest of us). Legend has it that Luna Halo appreciated her lyrical adjustments so much that they eventually changed the lyrics to her version.

Taylor played this as a low and slow ballad, beginning the arrangement with a simple guitar picking pattern. Easy enough for even me to pick up, I’d play in my room, printouts of the chords on a music stand I bought for a dollar at a garage sale, and act like I was singing to a crowd:

In the middle of the night, when I’m in this dream

It’s like a million little stars spelling out your name

That last line is somehow not a Taylor original, but it absolutely could be. “A million little stars spelling out your name” is as Swiftian an idiom as any. “Untouchable” fits perfectly within her discography and I can’t imagine the original Fearless era without it.

Included as the third bonus was a piano version of original Fearless track “Forever and Always.” Taylor would go on to add piano iterations as bonus tracks on multiple albums, and while I don’t typically gravitate to the piano versions over the originals, I do think they’re a great showcase of Taylor’s ability to create something from nothing, bones and all.

“Come In With The Rain” is one of my favorite Taylor songs, one that reminds me of sitting at home listening to Taylor because I had nothing else to do. It’s just one of many references to precipitation on Fearless. It’s almost uncanny how many times she brings it up, like she can’t help the impulse to set the scene:

• Fearless – There’s something about the way the street looks when it just rains // in a storm in my best dress

• Forever and Always – it rains in your bedroom

• Hey Stephen – Can’t help it if I wanna kiss you in the rain

• The Way I Loved You – But I miss screamin’ and fightin’ and kissin’ in the rain

• The Other Side Of The Door - Wait there in the pourin’ rain, comin’ back for more

• You All Over Me - Once the last drop of rain has dried off the pavement

• Bye Bye Baby - The rain didn’t soak through my clothes

“Come In With The Rain” is sad enough that it probably could have qualified for a track 5 slot, but putting it near the end is much more devastating in the larger context. She goes from being ready and willing to sing for someone early on in “Hey Stephen”, but by “Come In With The Rain” she realizes that grand gestures mean nothing if the person already doesn’t care. What to do when someone doesn’t care in the slightest, and all you do is care?

Taylor’s people pleasing tendencies were just one of the traits that made her relatable. On “Superstar”, Taylor shows that she is just one of us at the end of the day, daydreaming about falling in love and running away with the lead singer. The bridge showcased Taylor’s affinity for a key change, constantly heightening the sonic stakes, grabbing listeners ears just one more time before the last chorus.

It seems as though Taylor left the most that needed to be said for the last slot of the deluxe album. Giving us a decade early sneak peek to the uninhibited lyrical deluge that is 2024’s The Tortured Poets Department, “The Other Side of the Door” is one of Taylor’s wordiest songs, going on and on until the last second as she gasps for breath to get in every last word.

I said leave but baby all I want is you

To stand outside my window

Throwing pebbles, screaming “I’m in love with you!!”

Wait there in the pouring rain

Come back for more

And don’t you leave cus I know

All I need is on the other side of the door

With your face and your beautiful eyes

And the conversation with the little white lies

And the faded picture of a beautiful night

You carry me from your car up the stairs

And I broke down crying

Was she worth this mess?

After everything and that little black dress

After everything I must confess

I need you

Waiting until the end to give these grand declarations feels especially cinematic, a quality that peppers many of Taylor’s works.

If you’re listening to the Taylor’s Version of Fearless, this is where you’d hit “Crazier” and “Today Was A Fairytale”, both of which were featured in films from around the era that Taylor was also in: The Hannah Montana Movie (2009) as herself, and Valentines Day (2010) as Felicia, whose love interest was played by Taylor’s then-rumored boyfriend Taylor Lautner (and, in another plot line, a closeted football player comes out of the closet, funnily enough!!).

And then you get to the real gold: the vault tracks. Fearless (Taylor’s Version) was the first installment of the re-recording process that Taylor committed to once she learned she would not regain control of her master recordings after Scott Borchetta sold them in 2019. Taylor could have released Fearless (Taylor’s Version) with no vault tracks and fans still would have flocked to purchase the re-record simply out of spite and solidarity. However, adding the unreleased, bonus “vault” tracks was not only a genius marketing ploy but a delicious means of rubbing salt in the wound of Scooter Braun and Scott Borchetta’s petty, and ultimately thanks to Taylor’s uninhibited business savvy, largely fruitless exchange.

Initially listening to the vault tracks in 2021 was like stepping back in time to the original Fearless era. After more than a decade, it felt almost like a betrayal that Taylor locked these six songs away, hidden from my longtime, obsessive Fearless devotee heart. While the 1989 (Taylor’s Version) vault tracks are likely the fan favorite so far, Fearless (Taylor’s Version) certainly gives them a run for their money.

First up is “You All Over Me (Feat. Maren Morris) (Taylor’s Version) (From The Vault).” I wish I were being silly, but this is actually how all the Taylor’s Version vault tracks are titled. Taylor is not really one for subtlety, I can’t help but dig it.

Despite being one of my favorite vault tracks, I do fear it fell victim sonically to the Taylor’s Version of it all. That doesn’t change that it is inherently a Fearless track. It opens:

Once the last drop of rain has dried off the pavement

Shouldn’t I find a stain? But I never do

The way the tires turn stones on old county roads

They leave em muddy underneath, reminds me of you

Harkening back to where this whole journey started, Taylor references the events of the very first song off the album. Whereas “Fearless” was filled with naive hope, now she knows the end of the story. On “You All Over Me”, she traces the stark reality of time into the future that fades with it, how one person can blow through, upend your whole world and leave without so much as a trace. The presence of Maren Morris is an honor, one that should have been appropriately acknowledged with a full verse. Maybe we could bully Taylor into releasing a “You All Over Me (Feat. More Maren Morris)” (If you think I’m exaggerating, this happened after Lana del Rey was not given a full verse on “Snow On The Beach” from 2022’s Midnights).

Even more so than “Forever and Always,” “Mr. Perfectly Fine (Taylor’s Version) (From The Vault)” is the musical embodiment of the infamous video of a 19 year old Taylor describing the end of her relationship with Joe Jonas (when he broke up with her on the phone in approximately 20 seconds). It’s the perfect petty breakup anthem, Taylor seeing no issue using songs as catharsis, an attitude the general public usually found abhorrent for a young woman. Taylor would quickly learn about double standards—she would also quickly disregard them, frequently using them as a means of bolstering her often individualist brand of feminism. To me, at 13 years old, it came across as empowering, even comedic.

Like when she took the stage at 30 Rockefeller as both the host and musical guest of Saturday Night Live in November of 2009, a job bestowed on less than two dozen people over the years. Taylor didn’t shy away from the controversy surrounding her public breakup with the frontman Jonas Brother—instead she embraced it. In a 2023 interview, Seth Meyers relayed the story of Taylor showing up to the first table read for her SNL debut with the fully fleshed out “Monologue Song”. Much to the astonishment of the writers, they had no work to do–it was perfect. This version of Taylor was clearly uninterested in euphemisms:

I like writing songs about douchebags who cheat on me

But I’m not gonna talk about that in my monologue

I like writing their names into songs so they’re ashamed to go in public

But I’m not gonna say that in my monologue

La la la

La la la

To Swifties, Taylor’s entire discography is like one big riddle–and the Taylor’s Version concept only adds fuel to the ever-growing fire of the Taylor Swift Cinematic Universe. For example, in the chorus of “Mr. Perfectly Fine” (which again, was written in the Fearless era but released later in 2021 as a vault track), Taylor sings, ”Hello Mr. Casually Cruel”—knowing ALL TOO WELL (ahem) that fans would undoubtedly recall a lyric from the beloved track five “All Too Well” from her 2012 release RED. Tying all these little pieces together is like a puzzle that Swifties simply cannot help but try to solve–and Taylor is more than happy to act as conductor of the madness. “Are you not entertained?” she’d later quip in her 2023 Time Person of the Year interview. Of course we are, Taylor.

The next vault track is another Liz Rose number. “We Were Happy (Taylor’s Version) (From the Vault)” definitely could have been an early 2000’s country hit, a reflection on fonder times when reality is shit. Even though this wasn’t released until 2021, “We Were Happy” could easily find itself on 2008 Fearless.

Seemingly written as a duet, “That’s When (Feat. Keith Urban) (Taylor’s Version) (From The Vault)” is a conversation between two people who cannot escape one another no matter how hard they try. The thought of one other is simply ubiquitous, an uncontrollable force that leaves Taylor almost a loss for words, the bridge one of the shortest on the album (and maybe in Taylor’s entire discography) with just two lines:

And you said honestly

When you were gone did you ever think of me?

Initially, I feared the Fearless of it all on this one was spoiled by the Antonoff effect, but upon further consideration it fits within Fearless’ general country pop crossover sensibilities. The production is there but it’s light enough that it doesn’t distract from the pedal steel and acoustic guitar. Where Taylor Swift featured brash, uninhibited percussion, the genteel pitter patter of the drums on “That’s When” shows Antonoff understands the importance of a reserved and soft sided country tone.

Where one song benefits from the Antonoff effect, another falls victim, and unfortunately “Don’t You (Taylor’s Version) (From the Vault)” is the track to fall on the sword. “That’s When” has balance between new and old, while “Don’t You” immediately opens with a light pulsating synth all too indicative of its 2021 revival. It sounds like a Taylor’s Version–that’s not to say it isn’t a good or worthy addition. But its production makes it stand out amongst the other vault tracks and takes you right out of the nostalgia of it all. This wouldn’t be so bad if nostalgia weren’t a main draw of the whole re-recording process.

Lyrically, however, “Don’t You” fits right in with Fearless and especially spoke to me in my early 20’s. On “Don’t You”, I heard Taylor figuratively jabbing her finger into the chest of her agitator, and it validated my heartbreak. Those real experiences I’d longed for in sixth grade were all of sudden coming to fruition, and still Taylor was there to walk me through it over 15 years later.

Rounding out the Fearless (Taylor’s Version) era is ”Bye Bye Baby (Taylor’s Version) (From The Vault)”. That’s 26 tracks, by the way, if you haven’t been counting. Ending with this song, which truly reeks of early 2000’s pop country, is appropriate for many reasons. Mainly, it sounds like an OG Fearless song, not because of the production but because it is soo dramatic:

The picture frame is empty

On the dresser vacant just like me

I see the writing on the dash

Like many a song to come in the future, here Taylor compares the end of a relationship to getting out of dodge, of having to leave home and the isolation of fading into the obscurity of someone’s memory. By the end, she’s beside herself, saying over and over:

Bye bye

To everything I thought was on my side

Bye bye, baby

I want you bad but it’s come down to nothing

And all I have is your sympathy

Because you took me home

But you just couldn’t keep me

You took me home, I thought you were gonna keep me

Bye bye, baby

It’s hardly a happy ending, but as Taylor mentioned in the foreword of Fearless all those years ago, it’s fearless to keep believing in love and fairytales and prince charming despite the heartache you’ve experienced before. Taylor knew it was only the beginning of her journey–with life, love and music. Ending the re-record of the album that catapulted her life into massive fame and success with a sad song was not an omen but rounding out a chapter she’d written so long ago.

We Were Both Young When I First Saw You

Fearless OG debuted at the top of the Billboard 200 and spent 11 non-consecutive weeks at number one, the longest run of the 2000s. It holds the record for most weeks at number one for a female country album and the album with the most top-40 entries on the Billboard Hot 100 (13, her lucky number, naturally). On the Top Country Albums chart, Fearless spent 35 weeks at number one and became the female album with the second-longest stretch at number one, behind Shania Twain’s Come On Over. Need I go on? I must, for the story is only beginning.

In November of 2009, Taylor won Entertainer of the Year, and three other prizes, at the Country Music Association Awards, making her the youngest performer ever to earn the prestigious honor and the first female to win since Shania Twain in 1999.

Taylor was also nominated for eight Grammy awards, the second highest number of nominations, trailing only Beyoncé who had 10. Taylor would win four awards that night: Country Album of the Year, Best Female Country Vocal Performance, Best Country Song, and the biggest award of the night, Album of the Year. At the time, she was the youngest artist ever to win the latter award, and the first solo female country singer as well (Kacey Musgraves would go on to win the exact same set of awards in 2019 for Golden Hour, another album that would prove formative for me).

In 2009, Taylor embarked on her very first headline tour, The Fearless World Tour, which would span 105 shows across four continents. Opening acts were Kellie Pickler, Gloriana, and Justin Bieber. All at once, Taylor’s biggest dreams were coming true.

During the press junket before the first stop of the tour, someone asked Taylor if she feels lucky. She responded:

“Walking around and seeing my face on a truck, or like, twelve trucks for that matter. It’s like, really? This is actually happening right now? And so many times I look around and I’m like, this actually worked?”

I personally went to the Fearless tour twice, in Pittsburgh and Cleveland. My sister Kelsey bought us tickets for my birthday, floor seats which cost around $100 a piece. I also went with my bestie Mackenzie and her parents in Cleveland. I was the luckiest girl in the world!

Every night on tour Taylor would perform for tens of thousands of screaming fans, a large majority of which knew every word to every song. Do not be fooled—the hype of the Era’s Tour does not exist in a vacuum. Taylor’s fans (myself included) have always been rabid. Not only did Taylor’s songs speak to us on a visceral level, they were also our direct line to the woman who wrote them. The more we could tap into our own personal experiences with Taylor’s lyrics, the closer (in theory) we could become to her. Tour was a magical means of fostering this connection.

How, you ask? Taylor’s concentrated effort to give as many fans the most amazing experience possible. Every night, Taylor’s mom, along with a couple members of Taylor’s team, would scope out lucky concert goers—those wearing outrageous costumes, holding over the top signs or just generally having a good time—and bestow upon them a coveted pass to the backstage “T–Party.” Featuring whimsical draperies, colorful area rugs covering the floor, comfy couches, snacks and photo ops with THE star of the show herself, Miss Swift, the T-Party was every Swifties dream. From this very first headline show Taylor was adamant it was the fans that made it special and she spent hours after each show expressing her gratitude to these chosen few.

Taylor would continue this tradition of showing appreciation for her fans in increasingly personal ways over the years. What else set Taylor apart in this regard: there was no option to buy a meet and greet pass, it was simply up to fate (or Taylor’s algorithm). Taylor has never sold meet and greet passes, and from backstage gatherings to listening parties at her own home (RIP secret sessions) to the Era’s Tour movie premier, Taylor hand picks the fans that attend.

‘Taylurking’ would become a well-known term in the lexicon of Swifties, describing Taylor’s act of scouring the internet to check on and interact with her fans. Of course I was not immune to the lure of attracting Taylor’s attention, taking to Tumblr only to see what she was up to (reverse Taylurking I guess you could say) and hoping maybe one of my overly earnest cries of admiration would be met with a coveted Taylor Nation direct message inviting me to a secret event. It never has happened, and these events have mostly fallen off, what with COVID and Taylor’s astronomical rise to fame. A girl can still dream…and I did, still sometimes do, every so often wishing on an eye lash or birthday candle.

Fearless era Taylor would have met every single fan of hers if it were possible. During the CMA Music Festival in 2010, Taylor did a 13 hour meet and greet, talking to over 2,000 fans during the course of the day. In a video from the event, as person after person approaches, Taylor asks “You’ve been waiting HOW many hours?”, like she also hasn’t been standing all day, signing autographs and talking to complete strangers completely awestruck by her presence.

Knowing what I do about Taylor’s uninhibited ambition, this could stand as a testament to her willingness to do whatever it took to get her name out there. It certainly was a brilliant marketing move. But her dedication to the fans has never been purely a publicity stunt; she just genuinely loved meeting and spending time with people, especially those who supported her and made her dreams a reality.

This willingness to connect with her fans would ultimately become a sticking point in her relationship with fame. Over the years, the craze has only gotten more out of hand, with throngs of fans flocking to wherever she may supposedly show up—her New York apartment, recording studios, friends’ weddings. Swifties may love Taylor, but they certainly don’t give a damn about her privacy or her boundaries. The complicated dynamic this wrought would go on to become one of the more devastating themes throughout Taylor’s work—one a lot of Swifties tend to overlook in favor of keeping the ideal of Taylor they hold intact.

Like the fans, the media had their own version of Taylor to throw around like a rag doll: she’s boy crazy, vindictive, disingenuous, a victim above all. Here was this talented young woman on the precipice of a lifetime of achievement, breaking records and winning awards left and right…and all anyone wanted to ask about was Kanye West or Joe Jonas. It simply was not enough to be excessively talented—the peanut gallery demanded she be exceptional and Taylor would stop at nothing to achieve approval from the masses, even at her own expense.

All this was easily concealed by the veneer of girlhood: sparkly dresses and rhinestone guitars, 13 sketched on a hand and filled in with blue eyeliner, confetti cannons exploding hearts out over a crowd of adoring fans. All she wanted was to be wanted–and now tens of thousands of people were beginning to want more and more of her.

Taylor’s rise after Fearless was astronomic. Certainly fueled by both the critical and public acclaim and disdain, nothing would get in the way of stopping the now 19 year old songwriting savant from reaching accomplishments beyond even her wildest dreams. Now she was met with the age-old challenge faced by countless women who came before her: how could the next project possibly top the massive success of Fearless? And despite the way the public often made this pursuit a fruitless one, she would meet it with unmitigated resolve and savvy, even as the light that shone from the heart of the once precocious child began to fade.

I’m designing a little zine page for each chapter of this book—if you want a blank hmu and I’ll send one your way <3

Addison – Addison Rae

Probably TMI, but my menstrual cycles have been absolute misery this year. Whatever the cause, I know the end of my period is near because I’d put on Addison and dance around my apartment and feel sexy again. Addison and her (nearly) all women team really knocked it out of the park. I don’t have anything more to say except that pop music is BACK!

Favorite track: “Times Like These,” “Headphones On”

Who’s The Clown – Audrey Hobert

I remember getting back from a weekend in Palm Springs over the summer and taking a walk around the Hollywood Forever cemetery to listen to Audrey Hobert’s debut album. There’s many initial listens I don’t really remember, but this one was hard to forget: from the jump it’s kind of weird (the opening track is titled “I like to touch people”), but also instantly comforting, the kind of album you immediately want to start over once its brief 35 minutes expire. Audrey, like the rest of us, is all over the place but she doesn’t really give a shit in trying to hide it—obviously deeply insecure but somehow also assuredly confident. Her songwriting is candid, sure, but she’s not necessarily doing it for consumption: watching her perform (on TikTok only as I am unfortunately not in the place to shell out $400 for an hour long show), it’s clear these songs are about catharsis first and foremost and she could give a fuck what everyone else thinks. She’s so fucking cool. I was really bummed I didn’t get to catch her when she was in LA this past month because I know she’s only going to get bigger and bigger.

Favorite track(s): “Wet Hair,” “Thirst Trap”

If You Asked for a Picture – Blondshell

I didn’t anticipate that Blondshell’s highly anticipated sophomore album would be in such heavy rotation all year, but I think I listened to at least one to three songs daily since its release. Blondshell opened for MUNA night 2 at the Greek in October 2023, but I missed most of the set as I was eating chicken fingers and conversing with two lesbians about living in LA. Nonetheless, Sabrina Mae Teitelbaum has me wrapped around her finger this album cycle. On If You Asked For A Picture, she’s somehow even more blunt than her debut and I am totally here for it. I love her no nonsense attitude, both towards herself and those around her. She’s also funny as fuck. Despite being bookended by painfully gut-wrenching lines, “We need the Steely Dan-ification of this operation / somebody needs to get fucked or get a toy” is one of the funniest lyrics I’ve heard all year and deeply satisfying to sing along with.

Favorite track(s): “Thumbtack,” “Toy,” “Model Rockets”

Getting Into Heaven – Sedona

Sedona’s always been a songwriter, her first ever tune written for a newt found in her back yard as a kid. While that song may be lost to time, the songs on her debut LP Getting Into Heaven are ones I personally can see myself listening to for years to come. Combining different genres–pop, rock, folk, blues–it highlights Sedona’s unique vocals and seasoned musical prowess. Getting Into Heaven is Sedona’s first full length project, one whose creation and release she funded herself, making it that much more special. Talking about the project, she says she hopes it’s “a source of healing and respite in life in whatever anyone else is experiencing or perceiving, and they can project their own meanings onto the songs.” I always find this to be the best type of songwriter, not because they’re looking to cater to a large audience, but because they understand the power of music better than anyone. Sedona certainly does.

Favorite track(s): “Underneath,” “Every Once In A While,” “Baby Run”

Good Story –

I don’t remember how I found Eliza’s music, but ever since it has been a north star in my own creative work. Sometimes when I think that perhaps some things aren’t meant to be divulged, I remember her Salt Circle EP, or more recently records like “Suffering” or “Every Year” and I’m reminded what the hell is life if not to find camaraderie with others in the messy parts of ourselves? As she posits in one of the most gut-wrenching and moving songs on Good Story, “Talisman”: ‘What is there to do except to write it down?’ So true queen, never stop.

Favorite track(s): “California,” “Good Story,” “Forever, Like That”

Could’ve Been Anyone – Charlie Hickey

Charlie Hickey could produce a Kidz Bop album and I’d eat that shit up. All 2025, Charlie was racking up the killer producing cred, in addition to releasing his sophomore record, Could’ve Been Anyone. I was lucky enough to see him not once but twice in 2025, for his record release show at Scribble in March, and at the Pasadena Eclectic Music Festival in May. From bouncy insecurity ballad “Kansas City” to the droning desperation of “No One’s Gonna Love You”, to the brilliant, wry reflection on finding meaning in modern times that is “Jesus Pieces”—Could’ve Been Anyone is a sleeper hit that deserved far more kudos than it received.

Favorite track(s): “Feel Nothing” (one of my top played songs this year)

I Don’t Know How But They Found Me! –

From top to bottom, Jensen McRae’s sophomore album is one of the best pop records to come out this year. She’s incredibly emotionally intelligent, transmuting feelings of malice into indifference, and then writing those experiences into catchy tunes that feel universal. Not that this record is the first example of this phenomena—my mind goes to a track from her last record, “Good Legs”, and how deeply I related to it in my early 20’s. I caught her tour earlier this year when she played in LA and her vocal chops are on par her songwriting prowess. It’s unsurprising that everyone from the LA Times to Rolling Stone cited I Don’t Know How But They Found Me! one of the best releases this year—it lives up to the hype.

Favorite track(s): “The Rearranger,” “Novelty”

Earthstar Mountain – Hannah Cohen

There’s usually one album every year acts like a sonic time capsule to that time in my life. Though Earthstar Mountain is mainly inspired by Hannah Cohen’s life in the Catskills, it will always remind me of my first full calendar year on the West Coast. From the whimsy of opening track “Dusty” to the funky groove of “Summer Sweat,” I don’t think I’ll ever listen back and not recall nights at the Hollywood Bowl or the pacific ocean cresting my bare feet.

I can’t remember how I came across Hannah’s music, but reading Angela Martoccio’s profile on her from earlier this year, it’s probably because there’s a lot of overlap in my existing interests and Hannah’s work and inspirations for this record: the albums’ opening track is named for one of my favorite iconic old school vocalists, Dusty Springfield; over the years she’s produced for some of my favorite artists like Palehound; Clairo and her claironet are featured on “Una Spiaggia”; she pulled inspo from a warped Sly and the Family Stone compilation tape for the bass-heavy “Draggin’.” Cohen is a musicians’ musician, my favorite kind of artist, and though I wasn’t familiar with her work prior to Earthstar Mountain, I like to think the universe brought it to me when I’d appreciate it the most.

Favorite track(s): “Dusty,” “Mountain,” “Earthstar”

Welcome to my Blue Sky – Momma

Momma, the coolest band to ever do it, does it again. I was, of course, immediately jacked for this album cycle when the band announced the lead single “Ohio All The Time,” and Welcome To My Blue Sky certainly delivered. According to the bands lead gals, Allegra Weingarten and Etta Friedman, the album is primarily about summers ‘22 and ‘23, navigating breakups with longtime partners, fresh starts in NYC, and new romances. The bands 90’s inspiration and subsequent sound is sometimes a point of contention (Paste in particular says the troupe’s sound isn’t as “innovative or experimental” as their peers like Wednesday or feeble little horse), but to me that’s not a ding. Making indie rock that’s catchy, accessible, and cool is a feat—one that Momma tackles effortlessly, often with a beer in hand.

Favorite track(s): “New Friend,” “Ohio All The Time,” “My Old Street”

And of course, the honorable mentions, of which there are many more even outside this list.

• Dreamsicle – Maren Morris

• Dog Eared – Billie Marten

• Super Pedestrian – Annie DiRusso

• Forever Is A Feeling – Lucy Dacus

• Ego Death At A Bachelorette Party –

• Virgin – Lorde

• You Are The Morning – Jasmine4.T

• Horror – Bartees Strange

• Moisturizer – Wet Leg

• Sable – Darci Phoenix

• Believer – Sister Ray

• Hope Handwritten – Hope Tala

• Double Infinity – Big Thief

• Bleeds – Wednesday

• Belong – Jay Som

• Paw – Avery Tucker

• Patching – Runo Plum

• Fingers Crossed – Ren Martinez

• God’s Favourite EP – Georgia Maq

• Wishbone – Conan Gray

• Every Mile EP – Eve Coffman

• Made From The Dirt: The Blooms – Kassi Ashton

• Humanhood – The Weather Station

• My Way EP – Yola

• Blue Reminder – Hand Habits

• Heaven Is In You – Chrissy

• Sweetness - Girl Puppy

• We Could Be Brave - Michael Cera Palin

• Send A Prayer My Way - Julien Baker & Torres

• Lost Dog – Olive Klug

• Moneyball - Dutch Interior

• Planet Popstar - Wishy

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I remember one summer when I was 14 or 15, I loved the way my air dried hair looked, usually opting not to brush it much because it turned my wavy curls into a ball of frizz. I think my mom hated it, not necessarily because it looked bad (it did), but because it looked like I was wearing a poorly groomed version of her own hair. Nonetheless, one evening we headed out the door to attend a party at the local country club, and in a huff she said something along the lines of “You need to brush your hair Natalie, you look like a hippie.” I don’t think she meant it as a compliment, but I certainly took it that way.

As thrilled as I was at the accusation, I was a mere poseur yet to discover all the brilliance that spawned from the hazy hippie days of the 1960’s and early 70’s pop culture, and all that followed. As a kid I loved female songwriters—Taylor of course, for whom Mitchell was a major muse, and also Carole King, Tapestry being a generation and personally life defining album. I also loved the Mamas and the Papas, Fleetwood Mac, and James Taylor.

So you’d think by adulthood I’d have a little more awareness of Joni Mitchell’s catalogue outside “River” and “Big Yellow Taxi”. But I didn’t, until junior year of college when I took a class studying Bob Dylan’s discography. In line with the folk singer-songwriter boom of the period, one week we covered Joni, namely Blue, and for our weekly assignment I wrote about “The Last Time I Saw Richard” (I wish I could read it, I can’t find it in my archive). That introduced me to Mitchell’s wide ranging (and sometimes controversial) catalogue, but it wasn’t until Clairo’s “Bags” (‘Pour your glass of wine / Mitchell told me I should be just fine’) that I started extensively listening to Joni. Since then, I’ve tremendously enjoyed immersing myself in the heyday of Hollywood’s folk rock scene, essentially making a hobby of learning about Joni and her peers’ impact in books like Sheila Weller’s Girls Like Us, Hotel California by Barney Hoskyns, and Wild Child by Chelsea Cain.

The early 70s churned out some of the most iconic records of all time, from Minnie Ripperton’s “Loving You” and Eagles’ “Take It Easy”, to James Taylor’s “Fire and Rain” and Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On.” Mid-decade the culture would shift to the hedonism and sparkle of disco, but for those few years prior, it was a whole lot of free love, peace, and flower power. I dreamed of going back in time, scampering around in bellbottoms, crochet tops, and waist length hair, dancing with all the groovy gals and guys who made up the hundreds of thousands that gathered to roll in the mud and smoke dope at Woodstock.

It’s easy to romanticise that time, despite the realities of the period. America was doing what America does best: sacrificing thousands of young men and civilians abroad to uphold imperialism and fuel the war machine, all in the name of “freedom.” There was major political upheaval, with the assassination of John F. Kennedy Jr. and Martin Luther King Jr. both taking place in 1968. Tens of thousands of Americans were taking to the streets to demand civil rights for Black people, queer people, and women. It was a monumental time in American history.

The momentous buzz of the time was unequivocally mirrored in the artistry of the day, and Joni’s feat lay in carving out a space for women to be taken seriously, both in the music industry and outside it. A young, outspoken folk artist from Saskatchewan Joni wrote songs that were not just beautiful or catchy, but unprecedented in their candor and vivid with emotive storytelling.

Despite how industry players and the country writ large may have wanted her to present herself, Joni was hardly a helpless little lady who needed protecting. She was full of fire, an unassailable flame who cared little for what, or who, she burned in the process.

Five decades later, that flame is still burning as bright as ever when Blue plays. From the beckoning strums of the dulcimer on the opening “All I Want”, to the timelessness of the opening chords on “River”, to the reflective storytelling on “The Last Time I Saw Richard,” there is a lyric, sound, note, or moment on every song from Blue that proves Joni’s preponderance.

And, as I’ve found over the years, a lyric, sound, note, or moment for many memories of my own life. One that comes to mind is dancing to “Carey” in my living room in the midst of the pandemic, replacing “Carey” with my cat’s name, Teddy, feeling at one with self-proclaimed cat lady Joni.

I listened, awestruck, at all the different ways Joni used words to describe the daughter she gave up for adoption in “Little Green”; my favorite being ‘Just a little green, like the night when the northern lights perform’—an undeniable Joni-ism to describe a once in a lifetime love

During many an unemployment walk earlier this year, I’d trudge up the Laurel Canyon hillside and think to myself: Joni probably once walked these same trails, maybe hummed the melody to “California” every once in a while as she took in the majesty that is the vast Los Angeles landscape.

When I first considered moving to Los Angeles I couldn’t help but picture myself doing exactly this: strolling under a leafy overpass, listening to Joni as my new life unfolded quietly around me. I did not consider I’d have the chance to actually witness Joni, now 81, perform some of these songs–let alone experience a nearly three hour “Joni Jam” at the Hollywood Bowl.

The show was fifty plus years after Blue’s release, marking Joni’s first performance in LA in 24 years. It was a concert, yes; a jam, most definitely; but mostly it was a comeback. Joni suffered an aneurysm in 2015 and that performance was the first where she took the reins, sometimes if only for a line or two, for every song on the 27 track setlist. It was clear her flame has never wavered—at no point was this more evident than when at one point during the show she quipped “Fuck Donald Trump.” I don’t take for granted that it was probably one of the greatest musical events I will ever witness.

It was a collective “pinch me” moment for the entire crowd. The feeling of awe was palpable: there were older folks who likely saw Joni at some point during her heyday, but also people around my age who weren’t even alive the last time she performed. Of course, the musicians up on the stage were captivated just as much by her presence, taking incredible care in playing her music and singing her lyrics. You could cut the emotion with a knife. All the while, Brandi Carlile kept us close to the earth, peppering the show with commentary we were surely all thinking such as “Holy shit, I can’t believe we just heard Joni Mitchell sing [insert life changing tune here].”

Joni’s entire body of work, not just Blue, has bridged gaps between generations, validated the emotions of millions of women, and fostered a sense of meaning in our experiences. I can see her being curmudgeonly about me (or anyone, for that matter) wax poetic about the impact her work has had specifically on women, but it cannot be denied that she not only broke through the boys club of the 70’s rock scene, she busted the damn door down, paving the way for generations of artists to come.

Joni’s body of work is unique in a way that can only stem from a staunch refusal to remain stagnant. While sometimes it was wonderful and beautiful and irreplicable, it didn’t always manifest in the most savory ways. I am referring to the Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter era in which Joni frequently did black face (on the album’s original cover photo too, which she quietly replaced several decades later), and subsequent years where she insisted she “experienced being a black guy on several occasions.” Yeah…no. It wouldn’t be a piece about Joni if I didn’t bring this up! As I’ve mentioned before (in my first ever Substack post), it is my duty, actually. Because it is important to me to hold my favorite artists accountable, and it is somewhat unbelievable to me that someone with the emotional range and awareness to write an album like Blue could also be so daft. An honest listening experience must take these things into consideration.

The good and the bad of Joni’s legacy has made me a better music appreciator in a lot of ways. She took a lot of chances—whether it was the sonic oddities of Hejira or the experimental synths of Dog Eat Dog, it didn’t really matter to her what everyone else thought. While some of those didn’t always pay off or were completely out of line, as is the case with Don Juan, she was forthright in her role as an artist (she considers herself a painter first), as someone making things not solely for consumption but for arts sake.

“People just really ascribe a certain “siren of the hippies” role to her…She can contain multitudes—that’s a thing.” – singer songwriter Madeline Kenney talking about Joni’s 1985 rock album Dog Eat Dog

Joni is stubborn in a lot of ways, a trait she shows no hesitancy to copping to in her work:

I’m so hard to handle, I’m selfish and I’m sad

For so long, women were not afforded the option of being complicated. Society’s reluctance to acknowledge the rights of women as individuals in the mid 20th century meant that women were expected to settle down, find a husband, have a couple kids, and shut the fuck up. In the canon of rock and pop culture, Joni was the opposite: she not only played alongside her male counterparts, oftentimes she showed them up. Joni released three albums prior to Blue, which were all remarkable in their own ways, but it was Blue that signaled her difference in disposition from the norms of the time. As Reddit user rowdower put it: “It [Blue] always made me feel like the path of being true to yourself without compromise was often a lonely one that didn’t come easy.” That’s not a concession that’s comfortably made, and I imagine rowdower is right, that it was incredibly lonely at times.

I hold that in my heart quite often—the notion that to become who you are meant to you must bypass comfort to an extent. I wasn’t brave or channeling my destiny by not brushing my hair, but I was taking a step in getting there, even if it was a minor one. Had I not, had my mom not tossed that ‘hippie’ accusation my way, who knows? Maybe I’d never have made it out west. I don’t know, but Joni taught me I have to be open to it all, and that to box myself in would be a disservice to the many possibilities that exist.

Read the other posts in my Gaggle retrospective series: