I’m no “Swifty.” I am, after all, in a demographic group that is almost diametrically opposite the one that provides her with a prodigious fan base. I’m a grandfather in my eighth decade on earth. She celebrated her 34th birthday this week. Millions of her listeners have literally grown up listening to her. Many are in the process of growing up – still.
And flocking to her stadium concerts. And movies of her concerts. And record stores to buy her work. And streaming sites to download her songs. And whatever Swiftian things that seemed to have importance in their own young lives.
As young singer/songwriters go, she has amassed a following and a fortune that dwarfs those of say, Joni Mitchell and Carly Simon at her age.
I’m not going to claim for a second that I’ve long been a fan. Quite the opposite. My acquaintance began in earnest only a couple weeks ago, when Time Magazine slapped her on its cover as the “Person of the Year” for 2023.
There she was with a cat sweetly perched on her left shoulder. I have, ever since, dived eye-and-earfirst into the World of Taylor Swift – her music, videos, videos of her concerts and films, interviews, all the truly exhaustive number of things written about her that are available online.
I’m not going to argue that, as a singer/songwriter, she is the equal of Joni Mitchell or Bob Dylan or The Beatles or Dolly Parton, but her work is very good, indeed, at its best, and you’d have to be blind and deaf not to understand why she is so popular.
If you follow her biography, you discover that she was winning prizes for her poetry before she started creating music, too. She began in country music, where life stories have so often been pervasive.
Her tales of her own life and others – whether autobiographical or fictional – are intimate, realistic and so deeply in the wheelhouse of a young female audience that she seemed to create a whole new subdivision of that audience.
If she didn’t, I still…
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