I've been a Taylor Swift fan for as long as I remember. However, growing up, there wasn't really anyone around me who enjoyed her music as much as I did. I was even teased by my peers for listening to Taylor Swift. I guess she was seen as this popstar whose fan base only consisted of emotional teenage girls whose only concern was to know whether the boy they liked actually liked them back.
And they weren't exactly wrong, as Taylor Swift was a teenager when she first started to make a name for herself in the industry. I mean, what can you really expect from a 17-year-old white and privileged American girl to write songs about? Since I was also a teen when I first started to listen to her songs, I immediately felt a deep connection. It felt like she was narrating my life, relationships, and all the struggles I was going through at the time.
However, I believe what is misleading is still thinking about Taylor Swift in the same way we did a decade ago. Yes, she was writing about teenage love and heartbreaks, but as she has grown over time, I think the way she wrote about love got deeper and more sophisticated. In fact, I don't think an 11-year-old teenager can connect to her latest albums "folklore" and "evermore" the way an adult can do. The songwriting in those albums is just so intense, poetic, and sophisticated that it can be a bit overwhelming to a teenager.
And this is what kept my connection with her even after a decade. She was perfect at keeping up with my personal struggles in life through each stage and staying relevant even at the most complicated times.
And here I am, at the age of 23, attending a Taylor Swift-themed listening party with a recently formed Taylor Swift society in my university. It was the third event since the formation of the society in November 2021. The first event happened the day after the release of the album Red (Taylor's Version). We just sit on the grass, listened to the whole album, and got to know each other. It was one of the most unforgettable days in my life. Meeting with other Taylor Swift fans and listening to her music was one of my biggest dreams, and I'm still having difficulty processing that this actually happened/is happening.
This week, we arranged again a listening party, this time for the Reputation album. Since this album has a night-time, dark, and edgy vibe, we decided to arrange the event in a party format with drinks and loud music at a pub near our uni where everyone could sing-along, drink, and dance at the same time.
Although it was so much fun, the music was not loud enough due to the audio system of the pub. We ended up singing all of the songs without hearing the music, but it was still very uplifting to sing the lyrics to the songs and dance with everyone else. In fact, I sang too loudly that my throat hurted so much following the next 2 days. But it was totally worth it!
Since the pub had to close at 12 am, we went to another pub nearby to have some more drinks and finalize the night. That pub didn't play Taylor's music, but we still enjoyed the rest of the night by drinking and talking.
