🌻I listened to Taylor Swift for the first time

Friends, begin preparing your "I told you so"s...

Homies, I come to you on a momentous occasion: I have listened to Taylor Swift. 

Yes, my Swiftie friends, I mean for the first time ever. I have never willingly listened to a single Taylor Swift song until now.

Some of you will be wondering why, most of you will be wondering HOW I have avoided America's sweetheart for so long. 

Obviously I'm about to tell you. And then I will give my honest outsider’s review of the eras.

But first, my (non) Love Story.

I, like Taylor, was born in 1989. I’m eight months older.

Her first hit, "Teardrops on My Guitar" came out in 2006. A senior in high school in the Chicago suburbs, I don't even remember hearing it. There was no country music in my world.

By college, “Teardrops” had infiltrated the pop stations, and I remember hearing it allllll the time on the radio that played in the freshman dorm bathroom (which I could sometimes hear from my adjacent dorm room). 

It was a real eye-roller. I was already generally a country music hater (see again: Chicago suburbs) but this song seemed extra cheesy.

Sophomore year (2008-2009), I had a roommate who was from rural Illinois, and was actually a Taylor Swift fan. As far as I know, this was my first (and for a long time, only) encounter with one. I was still a bit of a hater, though I was certainly belting out every word of “Love Story” on Friday night with the best of them. But Taylor Swift, in my mind, was still some teenager writing cheeseball country songs that did not need any further attention from me.

Then the dang "she wears short skirts, I wear t-shirts" song came out and I haaaaated it.

For the uninitiated, the song’s narrator is in love with her guy friend, who is dating some popular pretty girl who “doesn’t even like his music.” It contains lyrics like “she’s cheer captain and I’m in the bleachers.” 

Why did I hate it? One of the most popular, prettiest, basic b**** girls on the planet is now singing about how she's not popular. She’s wearing fake glasses in the music video, as if that convinces us she’s ugly. Come on. 

Worse, it solidified in my mind that her music had one singular theme: boys. Lots of music is love songs, obviously, but this felt different. Shallower. Her whole personality, it seemed, was whether the boy she liked was paying attention to her. Her only goal in life was to get married. She was either sad because the boy didn't love her, or she was happy because he did, in a very small-town, grade-school-crush sort of way.

It wasn't just that this music was not for me, it actively rubbed me the wrong way. It was just so old-fashioned, and the more popular it got, the more annoyed I got. Girls, don't listen! You can have a life of your own! Friends! A career! Hobbies! Anything! Don't let a boy's opinion of you rule your life, you have more depth than this!

Not until I started writing this did I realize the other reason “You Belong with Me” rubbed me so wrong: The girls that liked the song were the preppy popular girls. The girls listening to T.Swift WERE the girls that didn’t like their boyfriends’ taste in music and are the villain in the song. The whole thing was backwards, and on some level I was always thinking: No, I’M in the bleachers listening to the same music as my guy friends, and we all think this song sucks!

Six months after “You Belong with Me,” the world was gifted “Bad Romance,” and I found my own pop queen. Gaga was edgy, not traditionally gorgeous, and was definitely the actual weird kid. And when she sang about boys, it was stuff like "I want your horror, I want your design, 'cause you're a criminal as long as you're mine." What does that even mean! I was OB. SESSED. Gaga was the anti-Taylor.

I've had this 2010 article bookmarked for over a decade: Why Taylor Swift Offends Little Monsters, Feminists, and Weirdos (check the editor’s note, too, though — foreshadowing). It’s long and brutal; here’s a taste: 

“Listen up; if I ever get my life together enough to reproduce other life forms, they will not be joining Taylor Nation — they will be brave, creative, inventive, envelope-pushing little monsters who will find a pretty, skinny white blonde girl in a white peasant shirt strolling through nature-themed screensaver-esque fantasylands singing about how ‘when you’re fifteen and somebody tells you they love you, you’re gonna believe them’ not only sappy, but also insulting to their inevitable brilliance. I don’t want my unborn grandchildren to listen to the story of how Taylor Swift won a Grammy she hadn’t earned. I want them to set pianos on fire.”

🔥🔥🔥

Anna and H.B. at the Monster Ball tour, September 2010.

I completely wrote off Taylor. For years, I would literally change the radio station if she came on. Get out of here with your bubble-gum sorority-sister search for a husband! *hisses*

Sidebar: Have you seen the goats singing Taylor Swift? It is worth 24 seconds of your life: Taylor Swift - Trouble (Goat Remix)

Anyway, this all sounds very dramatic, but in reality being a Taylor-hater was, for many years, not a big deal at all. I only knew maybe two real fans (shout out to K.J.) so my hatred almost never came up, and if it did, nobody cared. It's like if I told you right now that I didn't like Katy Perry, you'd probably say, “sure, whatever,” you know? No big deal.

Then we moved to Kansas City.

I'm not sure what Taylor Swift wormhole we traveled through in January 2021, but I suspect there was some magical convergence of Folklore and Evermore both dropping in 2020, meeting a bunch of girls 5-10 years younger than me, and meeting a bunch of people who grew up in places a shade more red-state-rural than me.

EVERYONE in Kansas City is a Taylor Swift superfan. Everyone.

I can name like 30 people who went to the Eras tour. I have never experienced anything like this.

People here grew up with her. They don't just like her, they adore her. They don't just like the vibe of the music, they think she's a musical genius. A brilliant songwriter. You should hear the way they talk.

If I have to sit through one more "what's YOUR favorite era?" conversation I'm going to flip a table.

But admittedly, I've been feeling a little left out. There is a real social pull toward wanting to know and love the music that your people know and love. 

Plus I’m starting to realize that, if Taylor doesn’t go away soon, I’ll be embarrassed when my grandkids ask me what it was like growing up the same age as Taylor Swift (#1989) and telling them, “Actually, I haven’t even heard her music. I plugged my ears for decades because I hated her early singles.” 

It's pretty overwhelming to even think about catching up, being 10+ albums behind and all. Plus I'm also pretty sure I might hate at least some of the music. What if I legitimately hate all of it?

But even my pre-KC friends, who were with me through my Gaga era, have come around to Taylor. "She's come so far since those early days," they say. "C'mon, at least try Folklore," they say. My girl H.B., who went with me to the Monster Ball in 2011, went to Eras twice.

Friends, it's time.

I'm going to start at the beginning. I want to fully experience this alleged glow-up. Studio albums only, I've only got so many hours for this project 😅

Swifties can catch my complete song-by-song commentary in a separate post, but I'll summarize here for everyone else. OK brb.

*10 hours later*

Well.

I won’t beat around the bush: Yes, you told me so. Yes, she’s fine or great or brilliant or whatever. Fine!!! FINE!!! Ugh.

So TL;DR, Taylor's got 10 studio albums. The first three are country. For my taste, Fearless (#2, 2008) is actual hot garbage.

But after that, each album was better than the last. She started to write songs I genuinely liked by Speak Now (2010), started to really shift during Red (2012), and had me fully on board by 1989 (2014). 

Folklore (2020) gets the no-skips award from me. I’ll have to listen 100 more times before I can confirm where it ranks in my top albums of all time, but the fact that I’m even saying these words is flabbergasting. Evermore (2020) was also great.

Midnights (2022) is less my style, but they can’t all be winners. I’m not even mad. I can see there might be times when this is the vibe I’m feeling, just not day to day.

Folklore, though. Jeez.

So, what have we learned, friends? Maybe nothing except that I was being needlessly stubborn on this particular issue, and in doing so only hurt myself. I could’a should’a would’a gone to Eras with you if I had known. Not like you didn’t tell me, because oh boy you did. 

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go listen to Folklore 100 more times.

✌️

Y’all I spent way, way too long on this.

For my full song-by-song commentary, from Tim McGraw to Mastermind, head to part II: [Bonus] Song-by-Song, First-Listen, Taylor Swift Review.