I have grown up listening to and admiring Taylor Swift. My first memory of loving her music stems all the way back to 2012 when I made my mom buy me the original Red CD at Target. Ever since then, I have been obsessed. Although I’ve had to bear many people telling me that she sucks or that she’s “not even that good,” I simply have had to just tune it out. No matter what, I will always love her music and nothing could change that. Taylor’s music helped me through so many points in my life; positives and negatives. For me, Taylor Swift’s songwriting is so important because she has written about so many different hardships and experiences most women have dealt with and could relate to. I think that people who have heard her lyrics- not just listened to- truly understand her writing. So many critics water her down by saying she “only writes about her boyfriends,” which is entirely untrue if they actually listened to most of her albums. You may ask: “What makes people love Taylor Swift so much?” Taylor has songs that span across many different subjects such as friendship, her family, her personal struggles with fame and mental health, how the music industry treats women, and more. Not only does Taylor have a lot of talent when it comes to songwriting but she has also shown to care for her fans and community a lot. She’s visited fans in the hospital, invited fans to her house to listen to her albums before they were released (pre-covid,) her team used to pick random people at her concerts and bring them backstage to meet Taylor, she gave millions of dollars in bonuses to the truck drivers that drive her tour trucks, and she also gives money to food banks in every city she’s performed in on the Eras Tour.
My favorite albums by Taylor are folklore and evermore; these albums came out in the midst of the covid-19 quarantine. For me, being in high school at the time, those albums helped me get by those rough times of being locked away from the world. Taylor created a fantasy world of both fictional stories and stories true to her. These two sister albums, in my opinion, are her best lyrical works of all time. In folklore, she writes about depression, anxiety, and addiction struggles on “this is me trying.” She writes about the innocence of childhood from the perspective of a little girl who has a friend with an abusive father in the song, “seven.” She also created a high school love triangle that spans across the songs: “cardigan,” “august,” and “betty.” Each song is told from the perspective of each person involved in the love triangle: Betty, Augustine, and James. Having been released in July, folklore has lyrics referring to summertime and the instrumentals give the feeling of a hot summer day. On the other hand, evermore was released in December and has more wintery instrumentals. She writes about the feelings of being in a relationship where you give all of your love to someone who just tolerates it on the heartbreaking piano ballad: “tolerate it.” She describes a failed proposal in a relationship where the woman deals with mental health issues on one of my favorites, “champagne problems.” Swift writes about her late grandmother on “marjorie” and describes the feeling of losing and missing a loved one. Evermore is a beautiful album full of heartbreak, loss, remembrance, and healing.
Delving into her most recent work, The Tortured Poets Department, many critics were quick to jump onto some cheesy lyrics and pick her apart for them. Even for me, it took a couple of listens for the album to grow on me but once it did, I couldn’t stop listening to it. When she says “Put narcotics into all of my songs and that’s why you’re still singing along” in “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?” she was probably right. I still have the album on repeat even 5 months after its release. Especially when she dropped the anthology version of the record which included 15 extra songs, I ended up falling in love with TTPD. My favorite songs from TTPD are hard to narrow down but these are my top 5: “Chloe or Sam or Sophia or Marcus,” “Fresh Out The Slammer,” “loml,” “The Black Dog,” and “Peter.” Taylor’s knack for describing her emotions within her lyrics is one of her biggest strengths and is what makes her fans connect with her so well. A lot of her songs are poetry with metaphors, descriptive imagery, and references that can be deciphered in many ways. I can agree with people who just don’t care for her music because everyone can have their own opinions and not everything is for everyone. The thing I cannot agree with is the people who do not know the depths of her music who judge people that do enjoy her music. A lot of her fans love her and her music so much because of how deep, powerful, and meaningful most of her lyrics are. I can talk about her writing for hours and dissect each of her songs but this article would be a million miles long. No matter what, fan or not, you can’t deny Swift’s genius when it comes to being a songwriter and a businesswoman.