It's me, hi, I'm a reluctant Swiftie

I guess I’m in my Evermore era now?

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For the last couple weeks I’ve been listening to Taylor Swift albums like I’m cramming for a midterm, all in preparation for tonight, when my second-grader and I have IMAX tickets for The Eras Tour concert film.

As somewhat of an erratic Swiftie I had—a lot of catching up to do.

In 2014, when 1989 was released as an immediate pop-cultural juggernaut, I must confess thought I was too cool for Taylor Swift altogether. While many of my friends breathlessly declared their allegiance to our new queen of pop, I didn’t even try to get it.

But if you’re a mom to girls, you can’t avoid her forever.

It would take a year or two for my daughter to come around to the joys of 1989. Specifically, Scarlett was in second grade when she declared herself a Swiftie and started bemoaning the fact that radio stations never seemed to play Taylor’s songs—forcing me to admit that there were, actually, other options on the dial besides the alternative station my radio never budged from. Once we started listening to top 40 together in the car, even I could admit “Shake It Off” and “Bad Blood” were pretty damn catchy. In Scarlett’s TS phase, we took a mother-daughter trip to New York City during which we tried to find Taylor’s Tribeca loft building. We never did spot her, but we brunched at Sarabeth’s, supposedly one of the pop star’s favorite spots to eat.

In 2017, after literal years of eager anticipation for the release of Taylor’s next album, Scarlett and I huddled in front of my laptop to watch the music video for “Look What You Made Me Do,” the first single from Reputation. Seconds in, she burst into tears, terrified by the visuals of her idol as a zombie and a declaration that the old Taylor was dead. And I was pissed on her behalf. We’d been patiently awaiting a pop confection and were met with taunting, seething indignation.

Still, Scarlett soldiered through her initial trepidation and stayed firm in her desire to see Taylor in concert, so I surprised her with birthday tickets to the Reputation tour. In preparation for seeing these new songs live, I listened to the album on repeat. Unexpectedly, I found myself enjoying these songs more than my daughter had. Way more.

Taylor’s early brand of young puppy love and breakup anthems had never done much for me, perhaps because so many of my earliest love stories were unrequited, but these songs, with their ridiculous feuds and petty jealousies and insecurities, resonated somewhere deep. The night of the concert, under a magical July sky, I lost my voice shouting every single word from the Reputation-heavy setlist.

By the time Lovers came out in 2019, Scarlett had moved on from her Swiftie phase and, therefore, so had I. The following year, I was not in the headspace to appreciate the pandemic-era double whammy of Folklore and Evermore. To be frank, the very idea of someone having the time, space, and energy to conceive, write, and record two albums during 2020 filled me with rage, as did attempting to watch the Folklore concert doc where I learned Taylor got to hole up in a cabin-slash-recording studio for months to sing and write—BASICALLY MY DREAM SCENARIO.

Around that time I read a take on Reputation as the perfect artistic encapsulation of the Trump era, and it made me feel kind of icky about my Taylor Swift phase. This was before she became politically active, and back when her lack of a stance was being interpreted by some as a tacit endorsement of you know who. And at a time like this, the writer wailed, who could possibly think to obsess over old grudges and gossip? At a time like this, who could possibly think to be filmed in a bathtub overflowing with diamonds? Who was she, Marie Antoinette?

One of the magical parts about having daughters so far apart in age, though, is the chance to cycle back through some of the childhood phases I’d forgotten about. Which brings me to today, as mom once again to a second-grader who has dragged me back into another Taylor Swift phase. I’m not sure why second grade is the age when kids seem to level up from Katy Perry and Meghan Trainor to Taylor Swift, but I’m guessing it can be explained by a nascent understanding of social hierarchies and crushes, both of which are essential parts of Swift’s catalog.

In preparation for tonight’s movie with June, I’ve been making my way back through Midnights, Folklore, Evermore, and Lovers. I suppose I’m in my Evermore era now, if that means a liminal time in my life when I disappear for months at a time and even my closest friends have no idea what I’m up to. But still I find myself most drawn to the darker songs of Reputation—which, for me, capture perfectly the drama of being in your twenties, the kind of drama that defined by my drinking years.

And even though I’m no longer in my Reputation era, that I can look back on the messiness of those songs—and, in turn, on that time in my life—with genuine love and care feels revelatory.

P.S.

I had not felt a similar urge to revisit the Taylor’s Version reissues of her earliest albums. That is until just the other day after school, when June and I sat, enraptured, as her classmate sang every word of “Our Song,” her sweet voice nailing young Taylor’s Southern drawl, and it made me want to go back immediately and listen to that debut album.

Damn you, second-graders.