This post was written in tandem with Kelsey Swintek over at Lucky Rigatoni, who is one of my favorite people to be in togetherness with around all things Swiftie. She is also a dear friend who writes an incredible weekly newsletter that serves as the highlight of each Tuesday for me. As I’ve shared my thoughts with her about this topic, she invited me to put them on the page; she was also game to complete a very fun experiment with me that is mentioned later in this essay as well as laid out in full on her newsletter today. Head over to LR to experience both of our playlists and our perspectives!
I sit on an uncomfortable bar stool at Voodoo Brewing Company on a rainy night in November, the night before Thanksgiving, and think about how my father would lose sleep tonight if he knew. Not because he worries about me drinking (I almost never do), but because “driving is more dangerous on the night before Thanksgiving than any other night of the year.” I have never questioned his belief on this, never asked whether it is a myth. Usually, the goodie-two-shoes oldest daughter that I am stays home and parrots his warning to my husband on his way home from work, to my coworkers when I used to have them. Tonight, I break this rule for one person only: Taylor Swift.
The friend I met here is just as awkward as I am in public. We have almost no history of hanging out together, not because we don’t like each other but because I suspect that not much else would bring her out of the house on a weeknight either. We are bonded in our introverted bravery by our love for Taylor and her music. The only other time we have hung out 1:1 outside of class or a grad school function was to sit outside of Heinz Field and listen to the Eras Tour when it visited Pittsburgh in June, Ticketmaster casualties that we were. On that night, I crammed into an absolutely packed car on the T and screamed lyrics by heart with the Swifties who left the concert high on confetti and drunk on overpriced White Claws. Like then, I look around and am again surprised by the ways I will try new things, step into a too crowded, too bright, too loud world as long as Taylor’s music is at the epicenter of the chaos.
When two women presumably my age or a little older sit next to us, I find myself smiling at their banter, and then I find myself doing something even wilder than being at the bar with a fellow introvert in the first place: I initiate conversation with these complete strangers. As we wait for the trivia night to start up, we comment on each other’s fan-made merch, trade favorite albums, lament our lack of Eras tickets, and reflect on Taylor (and ourselves) through the ages and the many subcultures within the Swiftie-verse these days. When they invite me to dig through their wristlet to select a friendship bracelet, I realize this is shockingly easy.
I am used to wanting to disappear out in public, hoping not to get stuck in line at a counter too long where I’ll be too visible to those sitting at their tables. I usually make a habit of avoiding eye contact with other patrons, not wanting anyone to mistake a locked glance for the desire to communicate or perceive each other in any way. In this conversation, I worry about none of this. We have to shout a bit over the Speak Now song that is currently blasting, and it hits me that I am experiencing something I never understood about sports in bars before: it is the durable thread that holds the social fabric together, pulling total strangers in for a close knit moment of connection and then cutting them loose when the match is over. Instead of jerseys and hats, I am surrounded by costumes and bracelets made up of colors or symbols that mean something to me and to everyone else in the room without the people wearing them needing to explain a thing. I didn’t need to have nuanced social skills to reach out to the women next to me; the road to connection was already paved and well-lit by the lore and the music and the celebrity persona of Taylor Swift.
Since that night, I have only noticed more similarities between being a Swiftie and being a sports fan. These observations have been humbling for me to continue collecting, as sports were something I used to think I didn’t really understand (and, in all honesty, had a superiority complex about). Sure, I played softball and enjoyed the game when I was actually on the field, but it was mostly just a fun way to move my body and spend time with my dad on the weekends. It wasn’t something that took much of my attention day to day. To have a cloud of depression cast over your whole week because the Steelers lost or to agonize over stats in order to construct a fantasy football team? Unimaginable. To get drunk at Primantis while screaming for the Penguins with the rest of the bar? Confusing. I’ve never once attended a hockey game, but suddenly, I find myself understanding the function of sports because of Taylor Swift.
The same month as the trivia night I attended, Taylor traveled through South America, starting her slow voyage around most of the globe to bring the Eras Tour to as many countries as she could fit into two years. When she was in America, I stayed away from the livestreams in the hope that I might still manage last-minute tickets somehow, wanting the show to be a surprise despite how accessible it was on social media. When the American leg ended without me and the movie was released in theaters, I surrendered, donned my homemade Junior Jewels t-shirt (jersey) like the millennial I am, and finally got to experience the marathon spectacle that is the Eras setlist. It was my 2023 superbowl. I came home with a “stadium cup” and haven’t stopped drinking water out of it every day since.
In 2024, I now join the hundreds of thousands who tune in every night that Taylor puts on her show, waiting to see what surprise songs she will play and texting friends about what it means that she mashed up “White Horse” and “coney island.” Some mashups are homeruns, others are foul balls, with each of us being the umpire who makes the call. I have an app that tells me when the surprise song set is going live, and unless I’m in a work meeting, I drop what I’m doing to tune in, adopting behavior that I previously only witnessed being acceptable for men who were checking in on their star fantasy football player’s performance. After each show, I tune into Instagram to see what “commentators” are saying as they analyze her outfit selections that night and make predictions for the next show. (I owe my father an apology for asking him, “What is the point of ESPN?” so often in my sassy college years.) My latest addition to these rituals is spending a few minutes myself predicting what outfits she is going to wear and what songs she is going to sing at the next show by submitting an entry to the app’s Mastermind game — essentially a fantasy league where outfits and songs serve as players.
As if all of this isn’t enough, the locations of Taylor’s concerts, as well as her romance with Travis Kelce and subsequent attendance at (13, of course) actual football games over the past year continues to pull these parallels into even sharper focus as both the Eras Tour and her involvement with Kelce continue. It was surreal to see her amidst the jersey-clad masses of the NFL, enjoying games in stadiums she had just filled herself a few months prior. Shortly after the “real” Super Bowl in February, I listened to my two favorite Swiftie creators complete a draft together as a send-off for Midnights and in anticipation of The Tortured Poets Department release. I eagerly asked Kelsey, my playlist bestie and the only friend I have who follows sports and Taylor, to put our cherished friendship at risk and complete a draft of Taylor’s full discography with me. Whiteboards on the table, color coded dry erase markers at the ready, and Spotify on deck, we took turns picking “our teams” for each album, losing some stars to the other along the way, and ultimately having a night where we didn’t have to think about the parts of ourselves we were losing at work or what headline would drop in the news tomorrow.
I continue to feel humbled as I peel back the wallpaper (whether its plastered with Taylor Swift lyrics or NFL logos) and examine the process underneath fandoms. In the spaces I frequent online, celebrity and sports fandoms are under scornful scrutiny these days as national and global events become more stressful, more dangerous, more televised and commented on than ever before. I want the world to change, I reject capitalism, I don’t want billionaires to exist, and… I enjoy Taylor Swift. Can all of these things be true at the same time? Can listening to someone’s music, and connecting with friends and strangers through the creative worlds the musician built for us occur while we also challenge the systems that make that musician a billionaire? What if her music provides me with enough relief from life’s hardship to keep showing up and attempting to make change in my little corner of the planet?
I worried about writing something that would reveal my level of engagement as a Swiftie, wanting to be “taken seriously” as a writer and a thinker, not wanting to seem ignorant of all the national and global tragedies unfolding all around us. Despite that hesitation, I accepted Kelsey’s invitation to write this anyway, not only because thinking about Taylor’s songwriting, public persona, and our own relation to each is something I deeply enjoy sharing in our friendship, but also because there are hypocritical and sexist undertones to the idea that it is not serious or worthwhile to write about this. There is a notion I come across online that suggests Swifties are all the same -- we are vapid, shallow, spoiled, silly, oblivious, careless Barbies who cover everything in rhinestones and leave a trail of glitter behind -- but the truth is that Swifties are just as diverse as most other subgroups, and we all have our own reasons for being here.
Everyone has their own balm for surviving this life, and for me, getting together with a good friend and drafting tracks to make (even more) Taylor-themed playlists was joyful and grounding and fun. Playing this game with a friend gave me the levity I needed to go back out into the world and think about the complexity of being human, to feel through the heavy grief that has increasingly burdened all of us at the personal and societal and planetary levels.
So, if you’re a Swiftie too, what are your draft picks? If you’re not, is there another artist you’d choose to sweat over while a friend gets first pick on your favorite album? In general, what is your balm? What soothes you through the pain of being alive, and is it okay to sometimes indulge in the soothing? What makes sports such a socially acceptable comfort in most spaces? Which balms do we criticize, who typically engages in those, and when do we let them rock v. when do we scoff at their devotion?
It’s just a question. (or six)
XOXOXO,
Ash 💛