My Girl Taylor

It started out so slowly...

I remember driving around Manassas and hearing You Belong with Me and thinking to myself, That's pretty catchy-- I like this song!  Love Story kind of irritated me because I worried Taylor Swift (and her target audience) were all too young and stupid to know how Romeo and Juliet actually ended (hint: NOT happily ever after!).  But I could still admit that it's a pretty fun song.  

I remember chatting with Craig on the phone once when he asked if I'd heard the title of Taylor Swift's newest song, We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together.  We both thought that was pretty hilarious.  And I think I must have heard 22 and definitely I Knew You Were Trouble.  I listened to them if they came on the radio, but other than that I didn't give them a whole lot of thought.  That it was it for the Red album.

When Shake it Off came out, you couldn't turn on the radio without hearing it, and for a while that was great but I got bored with it pretty quickly.  Taylor often seems to have one song on each album that will grab you right away, but then they don't have much staying power.  (See also: Bejeweled, Look What You Made Me Do, and ME!)  But even if I don't want to listen to Shake It Off all the time, I have to admit that the music video for it is HILARIOUS and I never get tired of watching Taylor mess up all the different dance forms she's trying.  Blank Space, on the other hand, has an amazing music video (Taylor pointing out that she can be totally psychotic-- what's not to love???) AND the song has staying power.  Chef's kiss!  I also quite liked Mean, and my kids liked that one, too, so that was fun.  

So, yeah.  By this point, I knew several songs by Taylor Swift that I quite liked.  I wouldn't call myself a big fan or anything, but I was fine with Taylor.  Then my sister Tracy mentioned that she and my cousin Jenna both really liked her 1989 album, and it was free on iTunes (or somewhere? what music streaming did I use then???) so I began listening to the whole thing and it WAS really enjoyable. 

There wasn't a single song that I just hated and would skip when it began playing.  Welcome to New York is a bop (although if that term existed at the time I certainly didn't know it).  Style and Out of the Woods are also really good.  But I think my new favorites were Wildest Dreams and I Know Places.  Those really grabbed me.  

Some time around here I remember visiting with my niece Kamryn.  I was trying to be a cool aunt, and I knew they'd gone to a Taylor Swift concert years earlier, so I asked if she liked her new stuff.  "Not really," Kamryn shrugged (so much for me being cool! 😂), "but," she added, "I really like her song Haunted."  I found it on YouTube and it quickly became one of my favorites.  The way those violins are sawing away, how could you not love it?

When Reputation came out, I was only vaguely aware of it.  I thought the cover was ugly (what is up with her hair in that picture???). 

But eventually I listened to some of it.  Delicate was one of the big releases, and the aforementioned Look What You Made Me Do.  And I liked those just fine.  But this time I found myself listening to Don't Blame Me and I Did Something Bad over and over again.  Don't Blame Me has a really great gospel sound to it that I love.  And in I Did Something Bad, every time she growls, "And I'd do it over and over and over again if I could" and really leans into those R's is just so fun.  And then I pretty much ignored the rest of the album.

I felt slightly embarrassed by the cover art for Lover, the pastels reminded me of the rainbow pages of our Personal Progress books when I was in Young Womens, and the glitter heart on Taylor's face was like a slightly grown up version of the Lisa Frank school supplies my little sister had loved.  Even the name was cringey.  Who uses the word lover any more?  It makes you think of some old, eccentric woman saying it and everyone secretly gagging behind her back.  It was too much.  But.  The actual song Lover was too good!  The lines, "Can I go where you go?  Can we always be this close forever and ever?" and later in the song, "and at every table, I'll save you a seat" are so sweet and exactly how it should feel to be in a happy and whole relationship.  How did she nail it so well in such simple phrases?

And if I liked that song, then I was obsessed with The Archer.  It's the opposite of a bop.  It's hard to even hum the tune, and yet it's so powerful.  When she sings the line, "All of my enemies started out friends" you just want to cry for her.  And even worse, when she's repeating the line, "They see right through me" over and over again and then suddenly it switches to "I see right through me."  Oh, Taylor, you cut yourself down so harshly.  Why, Taylor, why???  I also love her refrain, "Who could ever leave me, darling?  But who could stay?"  I can't even imagine being someone as famous as her.  Who could ever date such a person???  It must be so lonely.

Those weren't the only songs I listened to from that album.  I Forgot That You Existed made me laugh.  You Need to Calm Down was fine, although I thought the music video was obnoxious.  ME is catchy until it becomes annoying.  Paper Rings is a lot of fun.  And once again, those were all I ever listened to from the album.

The pandemic hit and Taylor surprised everyone by releasing two albums, back to back, Folklore and Evermore.  

I honestly couldn't tell you which album contains which songs, but I can tell you that almost ALL of the songs are good.  Like, really good.  At this time, we'd somehow gotten Apple Music for free for a few months, so I took this opportunity to really listen to both albums in their entirety.  And before long, I was loving pretty much all of the songs on them.  It would actually be easier to tell you the few songs I don't like than to list what I love.  (But that's too negative, so I won't.  Absolute top songs would be (from Folklore) cardigan, hoax, the last great american dynasty, exile, this is me trying, epiphany, (and from Evermore) willow, champagne problems, gold rush, no body no crime, ivy, evermore, it's time to go.  And my absolute favorite from the two is right where you left me.  I had no idea I enjoyed listening to the banjo so much.)  The only problem with these albums is that it's like Taylor finally discovered the f-word, and used it in the middle of a bunch of songs I otherwise really liked.  BUT THEN I LEARNED THAT I COULD GET THEM CLEANED UP!  

And if I'd been a haphazard fan before, now I was full steam ahead fangirling Taylor Swift.

By the time our free subscription ran out, I knew I needed a way to keep this music in my life.  And that's when Bentley persuaded to us to share his Spotify account with him.  He showed me how you could search for playlists and I found one of clean Taylor Swift songs that had 13.5 hours of music (!!!!).  I listened to it on long road trips and began learning all her older songs that I'd never bothered with.  Eventually I compiled my own playlist of the new ones I now loved.  My playlist (as of this writing) is only 8 hours, so it's not like I like ALL of her songs.  Just, you know, a lot.  Around the same time, I also stumbled upon a Rolling Stone article where the author ranked all of her music (ALL HER MUSIC).  I don't agree with a lot of his opinions, but it was fun to see his thoughts and compare how I felt.  There were a few that he ranked WAY up there that I hadn't bothered with, so I made sure to give those another try.  It was this list that finally got me really listening to the 10-minute version of All Too Well.  That was her #1 song according to him (out of 229 songs!!!!).  The first time I heard it I was like, What's the big deal?  But he was so effusive I figured I needed to hear it a few more times (which is how I am for all new music-- I hardly ever like anything the first time I hear it, or if I do like a lot the first go-round, odds are good that it doesn't have much staying power).  And oh was he was RIGHT.  Now it's my favorite, too.  And it's really hard to even explain what it is about this song that makes it so glorious, but it is.  It just is.  Fans know it (all too well).  (Of course I had to.)

Among other songs, these two compilations really got me loving the following: I Bet You Think About Me; Afterglow; Dear John; Cruel Summer; Death By a Thousand Cuts; Miss Americana and the Heartbreak Prince; Daylight; The Story of Us; We Were Happy (truly one of the saddest songs ever); Come Back... Be Here; Nothing New; Forever & Always (a delightfully angry song, despite the cheerful-sounding title!)...  I also really liked the quiet haunting sound of Carolina, which she wrote for Where the Crawdads Sing.  That is in NO WAY a complete list.  Just some of my newest absolute favorites.  

All this to say, I've been SO excited for Midnights to come out. 

This is probably the first time I've ever paid attention to an artist releasing an album and anticipated its arrival.  The first thing I did that morning was begin downloading all the songs and looking for cleaned up versions of the explicit ones.  It took me a few times listening through it, but I finally have a pretty good idea of how I rank the songs on that album.  There are a few I don't really care for (Paris Karma, and Vigilante S***); a lot of the songs are great, and if anyone else released them, I'd be super impressed, but they get sort of drowned in the rest of Swift's oeuvre.  And then, as I hoped, there are a few that are absolute killers.  My sister Rachael clued me in that fans are speculating that Bigger Than the Whole Sky could be about a miscarriage, and when I listened to it with that interpretation in mind, it actually made me tear up.  The Great War is amazing.  Snow on the Beach is so good (and the opening bars sound vaguely Christmassy, which I appreciate).  You're On Your Own, Kid is fantastic.  But I think the best song, the one that absolutely slays me, is Would've, Could've, Should've.  When she cries out, "Living for the thrill of hitting you where it hurts, Give me back my girlhood, it was mine first" I want to sob for her and whatever messes she's lived through to get to where she is.  Being famous must be awful.  But she sure has given us a huge gift with all this music I love so much.

Anyway.  At the end of the year, Spotify gives you stats about what you listened to and all that.  Mine was messed up a bit because the kids were all using my account for months before Craig finally set up accounts for each of them (it turns out, when you're vacuuming listening to music and it suddenly stops because Ryder is playing AJR on his echo dot, it's really frustrating!).  But even with all that, it put me in the top of 0.05% of Taylor Swift fans.

So that's where I am now.

A really freaking huge fan of Taylor.

And what a journey it's been.