My Journey Through Taylor Swift’s Eras
For every Swiftie, there is the story of how Taylor Swift’s music has been the soundtrack to their lives, a companion through the periods of stability and moments of upheaval. This is mine.
I knew some of the songs from Taylor Swift’s first two albums, but it was with the release of her 2010 album Speak Now that her music began to have a larger impact on my life. At the time, I was a senior in college and an aspiring singer-songwriter who had just self-released an EP. I remember walking from my college apartment to the public library, where I checked out a physical CD of Speak Now. I flipped through the liner notes, in awe that Taylor had written every song on the album herself without any co-writers.
I saw the record as a songwriting masterclass and got to work trying to figure out how she wrote such moving and memorable songs. On “The Story of Us,” I loved hearing all the instruments drop out as she got to the end of the line “I’ve never heard silence quite this loud.” And has anyone ever said more with fewer words than “you made a rebel of a careless man’s careful daughter?” The story of two generations in one line! I got a gig playing music at a pizzeria and covered one of my favorite songs on the album, “Back to December.”
By the time Red came out, I had graduated from college and was getting by piecing together several part-time jobs in music, including teaching guitar lessons. Many of my students wanted to learn songs from Red, so I learned how to play the songs myself and then began teaching them to these young people who had been inspired by Taylor Swift to pick up a guitar for the first time.
I would try my best to do justice to Taylor’s delivery of the spoken word bridge on “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” — “So he calls me up and he’s like ‘I still love you’/And I’m like, I just, I mean, this is exhausting,” I would say in the most dramatic voice I could muster while strumming along with my students.
Years later, Taylor would release reputation, a big sonic evolution for the artist. Soon after that, she would begin to be more vocal about her political views, endorsing the Democratic candidate in Tennessee’s 2018 senate race and encouraging, with great success, her fans to register to vote.
I was undergoing some big changes in my life around this time, and it helped to have reputation to pump me up. I was also having my own political awakening, joining local political groups in Atlanta and eventually interning at the state capitol. For the previous few years, I had primarily made a living as a worship leader and church musician. But my initial experiences in politics led me to make a career change, trading music for a master’s program in public policy.
After finishing my master’s, I decided to apply to PhD programs and was surprised beyond belief when I was accepted at Cornell. This was during the pandemic, so I packed my things into the back of my Honda Civic and drove from Atlanta to Ithaca, avoiding human contact as much as possible on the way. I blasted Taylor Swift’s “Welcome to New York” as I left Pennsylvania and entered New York, wondering what awaited me in the state that first welcomed her those years ago.
That first semester in Ithaca during the pandemic was lonely, but folklore was there to keep me company. “And they called off the circus/Burned the disco down,” Taylor sang on “Mirrorball,” lamenting the isolation of that moment in time. But she wasn’t willing to let the loneliness take over: “I’m still a believer, but I don’t know why.” I clung to that belief the best I could during those days.
I recently watched Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour film, and I found myself reliving these eras of my own life over the course of the masterful three and a half hour show. One moment, I was teaching a young guitar student their first chords using Taylor’s songs. Then I was driving up the East Coast, hoping to build a new home for myself in Upstate New York. I was isolated and alone during the first fall of the pandemic but comforted by Taylor singing of August slipping away.
And I was sitting in my college dorm, trying to write something half as good as “Enchanted.”
As I watched the concert film and was transported from era to era, I could still faintly remember a past version of myself performing on a stage — a much smaller stage, to be sure — or alone in my room, with my guitar on my lap and a notebook open in front of me, striving to find the next lyric, the next chord, the perfect way to bring the song to a close.
I’d be lying if I said I didn’t miss that previous life, but I’m chasing different dreams now. Or as Taylor might put it, “everything you lose is a step you take.”
