Taylor Swift: A Tortured Poet Comes Home

Then would you paint a matchless dame,
Whom you consign to endless fame?
Invoke not Cytherea’s aid,
Nor borrow from the blue-eyed maid,
Nor need you on the Graces call,
Take qualities from Donegal.
—Jonathan Swift, “Apollo’s Edict”

Dean Swift, the headmaster of any tortured poets department, would surely be intrigued – as, apparently, is our entire world – by the 34-year-old American singer, songwriter and spectacular performer who shares his surname. Were he sentient, the Reverend Swift, interred in St Patrick’s Cathedral, might be able to register the presence of Taylor Swift at Dublin’s Aviva Stadium at the end of June. After all, tens of thousands of fans dancing at her enormous stadium concerts have literally caused the earth to quake in Los Angeles and Seattle. Looking at her current set-list, ‘Shake It Off’, her 2014 hit single from the album 1989, might just be the moment when the still waters of the Grand Canal develop a bit of chop, and the bells of St Mary’s, Star of the Sea, Sandymount sound out in accompaniment.

As anyone reading this article likely already knows, Swift is in the midst of her sold-out, billion-dollar-grossing Eras Tour. The three-and-a-half hour show began its run on St Patrick’s Day, 2023, and features a set list of fortysomething conceptually performed songs from all Swift’s studio albums to date. For the 2024 leg of the tour, this now includes The Tortured Poets Department, her new double album released in April. Swift announced the debut of this new “era” at her Paris concerts in May as “the new Tortured Poets section of the Eras Tour (aka Female Rage The Musical!).” There’s a different, lavish set for every record “era,” and a head-spinning number of costume changes.

Her opening acts are headliners themselves; and her accompanying dancers, backup vocalists, and band members, men and women, have their own myriad fans by now. Those lucky enough to get tickets in the controlled lotteries for same ­– or wealthy enough to pay astronomical scalpers’ prices (thank heavens for Ireland’s 2021 Sale of Tickets Act) – have been dazzled, transported, and delighted by the evening. Many announce on social media that their lives have been changed by seeing the show live. Praise for the Eras Tour has been near universal, even from some of the narkiest music critics.

To accommodate her fans who could not get to the shows, while also allowing those who did to relive the moment repeatedly – and raising her already titanic global profile into the bargain – Swift produced the film Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour, which was released in October 2023 and which has already become the highest-grossing concert movie ever. When Time announced Swift as Person of the Year for 2023, the magazine’s West Coast editor Sam Lansky summarised the un-summarisable:

“There are at least 10 college classes devoted to her, including one at Harvard; the professor, Stephanie Burt, tells TIME she plans to compare Swift’s work to that of the poet William Wordsworth. Friendship bracelets traded by her fans at concerts became a hot accessory, with one line in a song causing as much as a 500% increase in sales at craft stores. When Swift started dating Travis Kelce, the Kansas City Chief and two-time Super Bowl champion, his games saw a massive increase in viewership. (Yes, she somehow made one of America’s most popular things – football– even more popular.) And then there’s her critically hailed songbook – a catalog so beloved that, as she re-releases it, she’s often breaking chart records she herself set. She’s the last monoculture left in our stratified world.

How did the phenomenon of Taylor Swift come to pass? Here’s some clues: a very early start with immensely hard work; some lucky breaks; and talent fueled by a determination already legendary, that only seems to be intensifying with her increasing success. But, of course, there is a lot more to it than that…

WORST-CASE SCENARIO

Taylor Swift was born in Pennsylvania on December 13, 1989, the first child of a Merrill Lynch broker and an advertising agency manager. She was named after singer and songwriter James Taylor. Her family’s roots are English, Scottish, Italian, German, and, on her mother’s side, she is descended from the Finlays of Harold’s Cross, Dublin.

Indeed, the Irish Family History Centre at EPIC museum has uncovered that the Findlay family had an upwardly mobile, artisan background in Ireland.

Her father’s father – Dean Swift was truly his name – served valiantly in World War II; her mother’s father, Robert Bruce Finlay, was a naval aviator in the war and married Marjorie Moehlenkamp, an opera singer and television performer with a fine coloratura voice. Swift has a little brother, Austin, 32, with the same brilliant blue, slightly almond-shaped cat’s-eyes. Her grandmother’s career inspired her own, and Swift began singing as a toddler. The Swifts lived on a Christmas tree farm in Berks County, Pennsylvania, and in a stately white Georgian house built during the Jazz Age. The little girl with bright blonde hair in a sometime perm was characterized, according to contemporary reports, by an unwavering determination.

By the time she was 10, Swift was singing in public; as she told Country Music Television (CMT) News back in 2006, “Every single weekend, I would go to festivals and fairs and karaoke contests – any place I could get up on stage.” A failed first trip to Nashville didn’t deter her, and when Swift became a teenager, the family moved to Tennessee. She got a deal as a songwriter first, and in 2005 signed a record deal with Scott Borchetta of Big Machine Records. Her first single ‘Tim McGraw’ about a sweet-talking summer lover with a Chevy truck, co-written with Liz Rose, went to number 6 on the Hot Country Songs chart and shipped double platinum in the United States. Swift’s gentle, tuneful voice and easy delivery of an angsty but already-nostalgic teenage love when she was only 16 herself set her career on an upward path that has never dipped down for very long.

“Basically, it’s about a guy who cheated on me and shouldn’t have because I write songs,” Swift said, describing ‘Should’ve Said No’ (2016). Boys and men have not listened to this advice; up to and including tracks on Tortured Poets Department, Swift keeps burnishing her title as pop’s princess of passion, goddess of grief, diva of Desolation Row. Who couldn’t – or wouldn’t – appreciate this? We all love a good he-done-me-wrong, she-done-me-wrong song, a staple of the country music on which Swift cut her perfect white all-American teeth – and we also love a sting in the end, as a singer pronounces revenge or self-recovery. Her melodies may be straight-forward – like Status Quo, she had long favoured the good old three-chord progression, until more recently setting out in search of that fourth chord. Her lyrics were relatively straightforward too – until the pandemic lockdowns, that is.

Swift spoke of having more time to read widely, and also to revise her own writing, then. On her albums since 2020, Swift has used enough multisyllabic and in some cases archaic words to have whole websites devoted to her vocabulary, with the venerable dictionary Merriam-Webster weighing in on some of its favourites: clandestine, incandescent, Machiavellian, albatross, antithetical. Of course, big words, and allusions to Romantic poetry and Renaissance essayists, are not unknown to songwriters – to a certain Nobel laureate in literature, for example. But if Swift, pop queen of the tweens, is using her own expansion to lead her listeners into bigger vocabularies and reading things she likes (Lyrical Ballads, Jane Eyre, and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s books—she has a cat, the one draped around her neck on her Time cover, named after his reverse-aging character Benjamin Button), more power to her.

The sweet-faced, knowing-eyed little girl, pretty in pink, has not only become a wordsmith, but a knife-keen businesswoman, and champion of women’s rights. Do not forget her earlier appearance on the cover of Time as a Person of the Year, as one of 2017’s “silence breakers” along with Ashley Judd, Susan Fowler, Adama Iwu, and Isabel Pascual. All had spoken out against sexual harassment, abuse, and bullying, spearheading the #MeToo movement in different realms. Scooter Braun bought Swift’s first label, Big Machine Records, in June 2019, thereby acquiring rights and future sales profits from the old masters of Swift’s recordings. “All I could think about was the incessant, manipulative bullying I’ve received at his hands for years…  Essentially, my musical legacy is about to lie in the hands of someone who tried to dismantle it. This is my worst-case scenario,” Swift wrote in a public post.

She immediately set about reclaiming her own art and legacy with the “Taylor’s Version” re-recordings of all her albums, with additional perks for fans who support them (previously unreleased tracks; limited-edition vinyl in tangerine, moonstone-blue, jade green and, of course, red). She regularly shares her thoughts, as well as new music, on Instagram, where she has been active since summer 2017. She has 283 million followers there now. Increasingly, Swift lends her public voice to causes – and politicians – she supports. Should she choose the political arena one day – as far lesser-known performers have done with victorious results – she might well be elected to high office. Her native states of Pennsylvania and Tennessee have both supplied, and themselves elected on a national level, infinitely less deserving choices in the past.

BIGGEST SUPERPOWER

However, Taylor Swift is certainly not in need of any more public platform than the ones she struts onto almost every night these days. In the week before arriving in Dublin, she’ll have played three nights at Anfield (Liverpool FC’s stadium), one at the Principality Stadium (formerly the Millennium) in Cardiff, and three at Wembley. Hundreds of thousands of fans, in these colossal sports arenas. From Dublin, she heads on through Europe, looping back for five more dates at the 90,000-seat Wembley, before concluding the Eras Tour with a sweep through North America that ends in Vancouver in December 2024.

People who couldn’t get tickets tailgate, or, rather, Tay-gate, in parking lots and in nearby hotels, restaurants, office buildings, on balconies and fire escapes and rooftops. I am wondering if the American Embassy in Dublin, so close to the Aviva, will have folks on the rooftop to hear the show. What is Dublin doing to celebrate? Liverpool has had Tay Day at the University of Liverpool, an all-day academic conference on Swift and her music. So far, I've heard of the Friday after-party dubbed "Church of Taylor Swift" at The Well, just up from Grafton Street, on St Stephens Green, and a Sunday pre-concert brunch at NoLita on Great George's Street. I sincerely hope that Tayto Snacks, as popular as they already are in Ireland, have not missed a once-in-a-lifetime promotional opportunity. One thing does concern me about the Dublin shows. Given the announced start time of 6pm on the dot for support act Paramore, and the just-past Midsummer sunlight lingering, will it be dark enough for her most intimate, fantastical eras – Folklore and Evermore – to glimmer and shine?

Folklore floated out to comfort us in June 2020, when we were all locked down. Its sister album Evermore was released in December, as the first covid vaccines were becoming available. We were enforcedly cocooning, happier or sadder to be so depending on the day, and the other people in the house. Millions of people were working from home. Unable to go out at night, we were in front of the television and computer, in our case, rewatching historical fiction television series of earlier times – my husband and I went back through all of Poldark and Sharpe – and hours of films based on novels. When Swift announced that signed copies of the Folklore cd, with its cover images of her wandering in the ghosts of American-pioneer days, might have “complimentary cat hair stuck inside the pages. Or the aromatic scent of white wine I occasionally spill while signing,” her words resonated. I felt them.

I spent many pandemic days curled up in my desk chair or on the sofa trying to work, bedecked not with cat but dog hair, and sometimes, yes, white wine occurred at the end of that working day. On the stage in Edinburgh, Swift confessed that Folklore was in part born of her own lockdown viewing, laughing about her creation of a “foresty, mossy, beautiful, natural world which I now realise is probably just based on videos I’ve seen online of Scotland.” She made her mythologies, fables of the reconstruction, and Tay-lores on Folklore and Evermore out of those already known and dear to us, as well as from her own feelings, experiences and imagination. This ability to mix is her superpower.

What Taylor Swift does so well, and with a genuineness that’s hard for even the most cynical to deem fake, is that she both connects with us, and connects us. “I care” can be among the hollowest words said together. But Swift demonstrates on a daily and nightly basis that she does. On the Eras Tour, she rejoices in and is visibly humbled by the jubilant reactions to her songs. After Ana Clara Benevides, 23, collapsed before a concert in Rio, and later died of heatstroke, Swift postponed the next night’s show because of the extreme heat, and made a statement of grief and loss “with a shattered heart.” She is beyond vigilant from the stage in watching as much of her audience as she can see. Last week in Edinburgh, Swift stopped mid-song until a fan in distress could be helped, and suffered a perhaps sympathetic hand cramp in the chill cold air a little while later.

Her announcement on Insta – though I should surely say Ins-Tay! – when she released Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) is a perfect example of how Swift makes her fans her collaborators, includes them, and lets them know we matter: “It’s here. It’s yours, it’s mine, it’s ours. It’s an album I wrote alone about the whims, fantasies, heartaches, dramas and tragedies I lived out as a young woman between 18 and 20. I remember making tracklist after tracklist, obsessing over the right way to tell the story. I had to be ruthless with my choices, and I left behind some songs I am still unfailingly proud of now. Therefore, you have 6 From The Vault tracks! I recorded this album when I was 32 (and still growing up, now) and the memories it brought back filled me with nostalgia and appreciation. For life, for you, for the fact that I get to reclaim my work.”

Unlike so many popular artists and famous people, Swift takes out the me and uses we. It’s not a distancing royal “we,” though, it’s one that indicates her kinship and kindness – and that is how it is received with joy, night after night, by tens of thousands of people. Venues that are among the largest in the world are made to feel intimate by the tall young woman on the ever-changing stage. Finally, at the end of every Eras Tour show, Swift sends over 50,000 souls out into the night purely, simply happy. Maybe that is her biggest superpower of all.

• 'From Roots to Records: Taylor Swift’s Genealogy Journey' will be broadcast on Facebook/Insta Live, on the EPIC accounts, on Wed. 26 June at 5pm. Contributors include Fiona Fitzsimons (Founder & Director, The Irish Family History Centre at EPIC Museum, and Caroline Kelly of Hot Press).