Cyriel Valeroso
October 27, 2023
Picture this: It’s a rare weekend when you get to go to a mall with your mom. You are surrounded by a cacophony of arcade game sounds, all loud, but partially muffled. In an enclosed (and hopefully soundproofed) space you put your tokens in the karaoke coin slot, and an instrumental of Love Story by Taylor Swift is playing. Everything is fine. You are singing, your mom is smiling, and everything is good, everything is perfect.
I like to think that Taylor Swift stood by me at some of the most important moments of my life.
Physically, as if she was standing there while I visibly contemplated on which Speak Now track should I print lyrics, so I could bring it to my grade 5 class, bragging about my “self-made, customized songbook.” Or when I first heard about love, in all its cheesy glory, as I listened to “Fifteen.” As a naive 12-year-old, I was mentally preparing myself to go through all that thinking it’s a sort of a pre-written narration of my life in the next three years.
Most concepts in my life, especially vague ones they don’t teach you at school such as love, attraction, heartbreak, or anything that involves a process of feeling your emotions, were built around a concept of how they have described it through the media I was consuming as a child.
Considering how much of a fan I was of Taylor Swift at that age, you could say that a great portion of how I viewed life back then relied on how Taylor Swift packaged her life experiences in songs. That is the childhood “Taylor Swift experience,” believing in a preconceived notion of an ideal teen culture where you get to view life through an innocent gaze full of excitement, looking forward to when it is your turn to finally experience it.
At 21 years old, listening to Taylor Swift’s songs did not elicit the same naive, and pure viewpoint I had back then. I’ve had enough experiences to base my entire notion on defining what role concepts such as love, and heartbreak play in my own life. That doesn’t mean that it renders Taylor Swift useless in my experience. Listening to Taylor Swift’s songs at 21 years old, I never felt as much in touch with my youth back then as I’ve ever had before.
In fact, when Taylor Swift began releasing the “Taylor’s Version” of her past albums, conveniently during the days of the pandemic lockdown, I remembered finding solace in rediscovering my youth through listening to songs that were once a huge part of my childhood.
When people ask the question, “What exactly makes Taylor Swift so popular and so great?” You hear several reasons such as “her songwriting skills are impeccable,” or that “most view her as a feminist icon,” “she offers a variety of genres in her discography,” etc. However, what we often overlook in place of her fame is that Taylor Swift was able to repackage herself as a redefined experience that elicits nostalgia, even if it is for the things we haven’t experienced personally.
Hearing her sing songs of our childhood such as “Love Story,” “White Horse,” or the classic “You Belong With Me” we feel as if it’s laced with such longing for the past, we channel our innermost desire to experience these things back then. Similar to a time machine that gives us the chance to finally see the entire picture of this fantasy, one we don’t get to see as children.
Even more so with the release of “From the Vault” tracks, the possibility of tuning these experiences correlated with each of her albums, to a reality we never could’ve imagined back then if it weren’t for the re-recordings is molded, shifting our perspective on these albums, it almost felt like we are discovering Taylor Swift again for the first time.
For as much as everybody else makes it seem like anything connected to her artistry is like a puzzle that is incredibly complicated for anyone to understand, at the end of the day you’ll see that these songs are really just, in their plainest form, mere simple songs.
A simple song to remind you of life, as it was. A simple life that sings about a different moment and yet what you’re seeing and what you’re hearing somehow feels synonymous with today’s you.
The Taylor Swift nostalgia centers on the idea of reminiscing moments of love, girlhood, and childhood, where in a society that in its deepest core only aches to bathe in their most vulnerable yet truest moments, to allude to her audience's rawest desire is to create a personal connection embodied by an imaginary world that everyone wants to get lost in.
At present, it feels gratifying to have Taylor Swift songs encompass certain periods of my life. It's nice to find something you recognize enough to shake hands with, something to relate to. It's my grounding, knowing I experience things as wonderful as how others experience them. In spite of the mundane, may it be haunting or enchanted, memories sparkle a touch of magic to how people remember things. In this case, with a fitting soundtrack that plays along reminiscing it.
And if it still doesn’t sound special enough this time, you get to be the one standing by her as she reclaims her music, all while you get to rediscover parts of yourself you may have lost along the passage of time.
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