Girl Crush: Taylor Swift
Photo credit: @isamoreo
Is there anything worth remembering of 2020? Yes. I can actually name two.
One of the few highlights of last year can easily be the back-to-back releases of Taylor Swift’s sister albums, Folklore, and Evermore.
These two albums were the perfect soundtrack to navigate the tumultuous year of 2020. Like many, I spent hours listening and re-listening to Swift sing beautiful, magical, and heart-wrenching songs that spoke to the moment of life in an ongoing pandemic. When words fell short of articulating the grief that we all experienced at one point or another, she miraculously found the perfect ones and created not one masterpiece but two.
It’s only January of the new year, but Swifties everywhere will remember these albums to be the things that helped us get through the ongoing pandemic.
Aside from the music, there is so much more to Miss Taylor Allison Swift that we can’t help but girl crush over. Here are just a few reasons why it’s never too late to become a Swift stan.
She fights for equality
In a scene in Taylor Swift’s Netflix documentary, Miss Americana (Check it out if you haven’t), there is a tense moment when Swift finds herself at odds with her management team and tries to express her need to speak out on politics.
Swift first started out in country music and went along with country music ethos of not getting political. In Miss Americana, we see Swift lend her voice to the fight for equality for all and openly makes her stance known about the Tennessee Senate Race back in 2018.
More recently, we’ve seen Swift use her platform to speak out in support of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. She’s posted and even baked homemade voter day cookies to encourage people to cast their ballots.
“I need to be on the right side of history.” -Taylor in Miss Americana
She makes learning fun
In both Folklore and Evermore, we witness Taylor Swift donning the hat of a wordsmith.
Fans on Twitter have shared the unprecedented need for a dictionary to grasp Swift’s latest lyrics properly.
I now have her to thank for a few of my new favorite words: hoax, incandescent, precipice, and unmoored; emphasizing how beneficial it is to be a student well after graduation.
Contrary to One Republic, It’s never too late to apologize
As much as we’ve seen Taylor Swift shade and call out people on their crap, she also owns up to her mistakes.
You may remember the time Swift admitted on the Ellen DeGeneres show that she went too far calling out her ex, Joe Jonas, at a previous taping.
On DeGeneres’ show back in 2008, Swift shaded Joe for breaking up with her during a 25-second phone call. She later admitted her regret during a reappearance on Ellen’s show in 2019 during a segment of “Burning Questions.”
As public as she was shaming Joe, Swift was just as equally public at acknowledging her wrongdoing.
In “Invisible string,” a song of Folklore, Taylor drops this nod to the relationship and shows a heart change. “Cold was the steel of my axe to grind / For the boys who broke my heart / Now I send their babies presents) And she really did send a present.
A gifted musician
With her arguably successful discography and incessant muses, Swift continues to offer something fresh by exploring new facets of herself and the world around her.
From her vocals to her ability to play the guitar, ukulele, banjo, and piano – to her involvement in writing, recording, producing, and directing her music videos - Taylor does it all. You can’t help but admire a persons’ dedication to their craft that is ultimately reflected in their music’s caliber.
She whole-heartedly loves her fans
Taylor Swift is known for her continual interactions with her fanbase on social media. During meet and greets, she always stops to sign and takes selfies but goes the extra mile to engage with fans and make a personable connection.
For the release of her album 1989, Swift invited fans to hang out at her house and listen to the new album. She invited fans to her home in Rhode Island, New York, Nashville, and London and entertained guests with a night of homemade cookies, dancing, selfie-taking, and of course, playing with her cats.
She creates a haven for listeners
Swift is not afraid to bleed in her music. She has shared her own stories of love and heartbreak, as well as betrayal and despair. She has the gift of creating poetry out of moments of pain and joy.
You can count on Swift’s music to be the figurative shoulder to lean on. Her music is the kind that listeners can instantly turn on out of necessity when at their most vulnerable. Her songs are not just her stories; they are our own. We can insert ourselves in the narrative and, at the moment, find tranquility knowing that someone else gets it.
She makes lemonade out of lemons
Swift has had a few public feuds in the past year alone, but that doesn’t keep her down for long.
We love watching movies like Spiderman, Harry Potter, and The Dark Knight because we love rooting for the protagonist who has suffered many blows but always comes back inviolable.
Swift could have stopped things all together after her release of 1989, but she used her pain and came back stronger with Reputation. She didn’t try to fake it or act as nothing happened. She had to face her pain head-on and decided she wasn’t going to let the Kanye West feud get the best of her.
“Everybody has that point in their life where you hit a crossroads and you’ve had a bunch of bad days and there’s different ways you can deal with it and the way I dealt with it was I just turned completely to music.”- Taylor Swift.
The feud wasn’t going to be the defining moment of her career. It would only be a moment.
Taylor has moved on from the days of seeking revenge and instead learned to speak her truth and let karma take care of the rest as she alludes to on track “long story short” on Evermore “I wanna tell you not to get lost in these petty things/Your nemeses/Will defeat themselves before you get the chance to swing.”
