Everyone knows who Taylor Swift is. Here’s why.

By Jan Atanacio

 

Most people I know fell in love with Taylor Swift’s music like a John Green metaphor: slowly, and then all at once. Then again, most people I know have been listening to her songs since her self-titled debut album Taylor Swift dropped in 2006. They’ve taken the time to pick apart the singer’s “southern american” accent and country-pop beat, and used these older tracks as a basis of comparison when Swift’s iconic album Fearless swept through the globe in 2008. I remember a time when everyone in my small-town high school (including the teachers) were singing You Belong with Me with the ease that can only come from hearing the same song everywhere.

Like most Swifties (Swift’s official fandom name), my high school peers followed the unspoken rule of addressing the singer as just “Taylor” “TayTay”, or another iteration from her pool of nicknames. There’s a closeness to it that fans thrive in. Like greeting an old friend.

Nowadays, much of this familiarity stems from the longstanding relationship of fans who have followed Taylor’s life and music career for the past seventeen years. Understandable. Seventeen continuous years is a long time to hear someone’s voice. But a huge chunk of it is borne of the relatability that fans experience through Taylor’s honest and seemingly confessional way of writing lyrics.

When Taylor’s first song Tim McGraw hit the charts in 2006, it was to the tune of a wistful teenage girl amid a breakup – the Georgia stars, her dress, a chevy truck, and a breathy voice singing “when you think Tim McGraw, I hope you think of me”. The descriptive storytelling of her lyrics and the catchy, upbeat tunes they come along with turned out to be a common theme in Taylor’s work, attracting a huge fanbase from all over the world. A lot of them were teenagers and young adults who claimed that Taylor seemed to have read through their diaries with the way she so clearly captured the sentiments.

Looking back, I see now that I was a bit late to the hype. The first time I heard a full Taylor Swift song–from Taylor herself–was in 2009. It was Love Story, a death-free retelling of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet from Juliet’s perspective.

The concept is cute if a tad too sappy for some. But twelve-year-old me will never forget the novelty of hearing the strumming of an acoustic guitar slowly make way for gentle percussion of cymbals and a floor drum. It was repetitive and unassuming; an ensemble of instruments barely lasting 16 seconds before Taylor’s voice floats in to sing “We were both young when I first saw you”. As a young girl, it struck me as both genius and incredibly bold to put a modern and decidedly more feminine spin on a classic without fear of being ridiculed.

And ridiculed she was, as critics ruthlessly tore down Taylor’s work by calling it cliché and unprogressive, to say the least.

Critics aside, the most blatant opposition Taylor faced came in the form of Kanye West. A prominent musician in his own right, West infamously came up to the stage and snatched the microphone out of Taylor’s hand in the middle of her acceptance speech at the VMAs in September 2009. He claimed that the Best Female Music Video award should have gone to Beyoncé, and while others agreed, no one really approved of the way he expressed his opinion. Especially Beyoncé, who, in the middle of accepting an award for a different category, gracefully invited Taylor to the stage and gave her a chance to speak uninterrupted. In an interview with Harper’s Bazaar, the event’s organizer, Via Toffler, later claimed that Beyoncé and Taylor were both found crying backstage.

In a world where a teenage girl was both celebrated and punished for being herself, Beyoncé seemed to have been a beacon of empathy and strength for 19-year-old Taylor.

The moment quickly passed as all industry blunders do. Taylor, tougher and a year older, released Speak Now in 2010, with its more-pop-than-country tunes selling over a million copies during the first week, making it one of the fastest selling albums in the US by a female country artist. After two short years of touring, she released her official-pop album, Red in 2012.

The thing is plenty of people are in the business of making music. Pop stars rise to stardom and drop off the face of the Earth every so often. For many reasons, it’s the norm. Artists are encouraged to take breaks, live their lives, and come back a few years later with a new image.

What makes Taylor Swift a constant figure in pop culture, other than her glittery dresses and creative genius, are two simple things. First: she decided to make music, and she never stopped.

In the span of seventeen years, Taylor has written and performed about 229 songs. Even when her old feud with Kanye took a worse turn in 2015 and turned public opinion against her, Taylor addressed the issue by doing what she does best – writing songs. At the height of the pandemic, Taylor wrote two albums in the same year. Folklore was released in July 2020, and Evermore in December. Although this productivity is made possible by her security and privilege in an otherwise difficult time, there’s no denying that Taylor is nothing short of consistent with her passion.

Second, is the fact that it is her life. We witness Taylor go through her many loves and heartbreaks, we know the songs she’s written for which ex. Her introspective lyrics offer honesty and insider knowledge about her identity and how she’s changed from the 17-year-old country girl with a guitar, to the world-weary 33-year-old musician she is now. Every single album and song represent a different stage in her life which the public has been privy to. She sings, “wind in my hair, I was there, I remember it all too well,” to a crowd of thousands, and it rings true.

As Taylor busies herself with The Eras Tour, a one-and-a-half-hour long concert that cycles through all her albums and “eras” in her life, I can’t help but think of how many of my own memories are tied to her songs. How Long Live was our high school graduation song in 2012, how Sparks Fly was the song I performed for my grandma’s 60th birthday, and the countless times my friends and I sang along to her songs during road trips.

My friends and I, like most of her then-teenage fans, now navigate the uncertainties of adulthood. Taylor, in true diary-reader-fashion, sings “You’re on Your Own, Kid” from her latest album, Midnights. She offers comfort by echoing these fears, and saying, sure, you’re alone. But you can face this. You always have been.

Taylor effortlessly took us through her life’s dreams in a feat that no other artist has done so seamlessly. Everything from the good, the bad, to the ugly. And if we’re lucky, we’ll have her music with us through the next eras of our lives.