Friday morning, 9am, sunlight trickles through the blinds and across my rumpled bedsheets. Today marks one full week since moving in to my new flat.
One week of stretching out into my own solitude after more than two years coddled up in my family home (during one of which we barely even left that home). One week of searching out new routines, carving my presence in to the bones of this place that I will one day be able to sketch with my eyes closed. I still stumble in the dark, hands not yet familiar with the positioning of light switches on walls, feet not yet sure of the creaky spots and corners, ears not yet attuned to the sounds and silences of this particular home.
And there is a lot of silence to get used to living alone for the first time, especially as I’m working from home too. Sometimes I fill those silences with music, or podcasts; sometimes I sit and listen to the bird calls and traffic outside, enjoying familiar noises from a new angle.
On this particular morning, I remember that Taylor Swift’s new, old album has just been released. I roll over, press play on the speakers and start my day.
I didn’t fall in love with Taylor Swift as many of my friends did when we were teenagers. Honestly, back then I found her cringe and a little soppy (despite being a Bruno Mars fangirl – I know, the irony).
But I’ve grown up alongside her music. Superfan or not, I can still belt out every word to ‘Love Story’, or ‘You Belong with Me’ from early album, Fearless, as well basically every hit single from her subsequent eight albums. These songs were the soundtrack to my adolescence, punctuating friendships, romances, and high school parties with a poignancy that I was blind to at the time.
And I still managed to dismiss her. But in 2021 it’s not so easy to overlook Taylor Swift’s talent, tenacity, ‘audacity, gall and gumption’ (to quote the fabulous Tayce from RuPaul’s DragRace UK).
Last year, as the world huddled inside, Taylor Swift gifted us not one but two incredible records, folklore and evermore, both released with very little warning to record breaking sales. These albums marked a new sound for Taylor Swift, with heavy influences from folk musicians Aaron Dessner and Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon.
Taylor herself wrote:
‘In isolation my imagination has run wild and this album is the result, a collection of songs and stories that flowed like a stream of consciousness. Picking up a pen was my way of escaping into fantasy, history, and memory. I’ve told these stories to the best of my ability with all the love, wonder, and whimsy they deserve. Now it’s up to you to pass them down.’
Just as creating these dreamy songs were an escape for Taylor, listening to them became one for me. ‘the last great american dynasty’ is a masterpiece of storytelling which has you instantly transported to a world of Gatsby-esque glam, and maligned women. An experience only enhanced by the knowledge that the song’s protagonist ‘Rebekah’ is in fact based on Rebekah Harkness, the controversial and glamorous heiress and divorcée who previously owned Taylor Swift’s Rhode Island Mansion and whose cruel portrayal by the press Taylor seems to relate to.
Then there’s the high school love triangle between ‘James’, ‘Ines’, and ‘Betty’ which weaves a compelling, nostalgic and quietly devastating thread through the album. The first time I listened to the lyrics to ‘betty’:
‘Betty, I won’t make assumptions
About why you switched your homeroom, but
I think it’s ’cause of me
Betty, one time I was riding on my skateboard
When I passed your house
It’s like I couldn’t breathe’
my heart leapt to hear the stereotypical tropes of high-school romance, friendship, betrayal and first love applied to a queer relationship by such a mainstream artist. Taylor has since revealed that the song was intended to be understood from James’ perspective but regardless, it’s still my favourite on the album, and for me, it’s still the queer ‘Romeo and Juliet’ that I first heard.
Taylor’s latest album titled Fearless (Taylor’s Version) comes off the back of years of legal battles with her former label Big Machine, with whom she recorded her first six albums. Taylor is now in the process of re-recording her first six albums in order to fully own the rights to the songs that launched her career.
Long story short, it was a bad time, but you can read more about that here.
Listening to Taylor’s older, wiser voice belting out the lyrics she wrote at 15-years-old was a surprisingly cathartic experience for me. I found myself dancing round the kitchen with the strangest, melancholic nostalgia growing in my chest.
To hear a 30-year-old and thriving Taylor sing the words: ‘in your life you’ll do things greater than dating the boy on the football team’ had me thinking of all the things I would say to my fifteen-year-old self if I could, and reflecting on how far my friends and I have come since those early days of big love, big hurt and all-encompassing sisterhood.
On the release of folklore Taylor wrote:
‘A tale that becomes folklore is one that is passed down and whispered around. Sometimes even sung about. The lines between fantasy and reality blur and the boundaries between truth and fiction become almost indiscernible. Speculation, over time, becomes fact. Myths, ghost stories, and fables. Fairytales and parables. Gossip and legend. Someone’s secrets written in the sky for all to behold.’
While Taylor has created a fictional, fantasy world with folklore and evermore, it is hard not to read further into these words with the release of her latest album. Fearless (Taylor’s Version) is the work of a fully empowered woman who, after years of abuse, rumours and gossip at the hands of the press, is writing her own story. As someone who knows all too well how the ‘boundaries between truth and fiction’ can become indiscernible and how speculation becomes fact, she is changing up the narrative and adding her own voice.
So let the folklore and legend of Taylor Swift be this:
As I dance around the kitchen on my own to her new, old album, along with nostalgia, I’m struck with the overwhelming sensation that I’m entering a new chapter of my life. I’m finally letting myself love the things I love without worrying about what other people think, whether that is cheesy pop music, Jane Austen books, or trash TV.
I feel like I’m getting to know myself all over again outside the structures of school or university, and, like Taylor, this time I’m writing my own story. Why not take a leaf out of Taylor’s book and write yours too?