#8 – On Taylor Swift
A love letter to the queen
It is a strange thing to feel that you have grown up with someone you saw only once in real life from a distance of approximately 2.5 million light years.
But it is a singularly beautiful thing to be transported to all the different times and places of your life as you watch a concert film in a theatre on a Sunday night while surrounded by hundreds of screaming and dancing fans.
Over the past decade, one of the constants in my life, all through its different seasons, has been Taylor Swift’s music. What started out as a teenage interest has turned out to be a permanent soundtrack of my life.
Swift has dissected, deciphered and described so much of what growing up is like that it feels easier to count the situations she has not sung about than the ones she has.
Whether it is exhilarating in a move to a big city (“Welcome to New York”), feeling like you don’t have any real friends (“Mean”), dealing with feelings of growing up (“Never grow up”), revelling in youth (“22”), handling critics (“Shake It Off”), breaking up and having fun (“WANEGBT”), breaking up and regretting it (“Back to December”), or breaking up and wondering What If? (“I almost do”) – there is a good chance that Swift has sung about a situation if it relates to the growing pains of being a human.
Although Swift has written about a vast range of subjects, it is her love songs — and her own love life — that become the focus of headlines, speculations and rumours.
But as I watched Swift’s Eras Tour movie in October, I witnessed another kind of love story ignite the darkened hall of the theatre. It was the radiance of Swift’s fans coming together – dancing, jumping, screaming and singing their hearts out.
Three hours can feel like an eternity on any given day, but under Swift’s spell, it felt that even time has decided to temporarily give up its illusory construct. Before I could fully take stock of every bit of this entire extravaganza, the lights turned on, and the credits started rolling.
Long Live (Taylor’s Version) starts playing. The bridge goes:
Hold on to spinning around
Confetti falls to the ground
May these memories break our fall
Will you take a moment?
Promise me this
That you'll stand by me forever…
There is an intimacy to it and a singularly effervescent elation to it.
As I stood there enthralled by the familiar tunes of Long Live, memories of times gone by flashed through my mind. And I realized that the love story that define Swift’s career and life might just not be the one in the headlines, but the one created by Swift’s fans who listen to her every song and etch every single lyric on their hearts like oath kept sacred.
In a darkened hall of a movie theatre on a Sunday night, I felt the kind of love Swift mused about in Red – love that doesn’t fade or spontaneously combust but shines golden like starlight.
PS: If you ever want to talk about T-Swift, please know that my DM is open 24/7/365 days of the year (or rather 366 days since 2024 is a leap year! lol)
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"it felt that even time has decided to temporarily give up its illusory construct" and "etch every single lyric on their hearts like oath kept sacred" are my favorite snippets in this piece!