By Liz Riggs
“Well, I guess there’s no turning back,” a fellow thirtysomething late-adopting Taylor Swift fan named Jess Tantisook tells me over the phone.
She’s talking about discovering the 2020 album Folklore, but it’s impossible to discuss how we accidentally became Swifties without talking about the coronavirus pandemic, or reexamining the last two years fraught with anxiety, grief, and trepidation. “We’re all locked inside. If the world had looked different, maybe it would have passed us by.”
There’s this idea that by your thirties, you’ve more or less figured out your favorites — drinks, songs, artists. Most people my age have stopped “discovering” music and, in some cases, distanced themselves from youth culture as a whole. So to become a Taylor Swift super fan nearly a decade and a half after her debut album dropped — well, it’s fucking thrilling. It’s unique to come so late to a catalog that was written in the moment by someone going through often teenage experiences and emotions. Arriving without that immediacy requires a kind of youthful humility, or at least the ability to say to yourself: I don’t care, I like it.
The path to Taylor Swift, like coming of age itself, is not linear. To truly understand how this happened — and I maintain that in some ways becoming a Swiftie in my thirties happened to me — we must circle back to 2009.
I was graduating from college, getting ready to move to Nashville to take a teaching job. On rotation: Kings of Leon, Blind Pilot, and the new Fun singles. (It’s not lost on me that Jack Antonoff was planting seeds of my Swiftiedom even then.)
Jess was 24, living in Denver, listening to Ben Kweller, Matt Pond PA, and Good Old War. Jenna Vesper, a 36-year-old in Portland, was listening to Modest Mouse, Cold War Kids, and very committed to Pandora’s discovery radio. Michael Carey was 22, getting ready to move to Phoenix, riding a skateboard around his Ohio college campus.
“When you’re a dude in college bopping to Taylor Swift... that doesn't exactly fit with the image I was trying to project,” Michael says, laughing. He was listening to Kanye West, Incubus, and Margot & the Nuclear So & So’s. I was still swooning over the Something Corporate songs I had loved when I was 17. Swift wasn’t really on any of our radars.
“We could have listed the girl bands we liked on 10 fingers,” Jess says. “We just didn’t listen to girls. I felt super drawn to male singer-songwriters.”