The Journey Of Becoming A Taylor Swift Fan In Your Thirties

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, although 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 indoors. If the world had looked different, maybe it would have passed us by.”

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There’s this idea that by your thirties, you’ve more or far 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 be a Taylor Swift super fan nearly decade along with one half soon 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 sort of youthful humility, or at least the ability to mention to yourself: I don’t care, I like it.


The path to Taylor Swift, like coming of age itself, isn't linear. To truly understand how this happened — and I sustain 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 willing 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 devoted to Pandora’s discovery radio. Michael Carey was 22, getting willing 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 attempting 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 any time Whenever I was 17. Swift wasn’t really on any of our radars.


“We could have listed the girl bands we fancied on 10 fingers,” Jess says. “We just didn’t listen to ladies. I felt super drawn to male singer-songwriters.”


In hindsight, there was a lot of internalized misogyny wrapped up in my music taste at that time. I argued that Swift wasn’t talented. I thought she didn’t write her own songs — and although I’d spent all of my teen years worshiping NSYNC, whose lack of writing credits I was prepared to overlook. Or perhaps I just didn’t care about the craft any time As soon as I was 13 — either way, it’s a double regular I maintained for years.


Swift wasn’t on my radar not only because she was a country-music singer (the other Swifties I talked to were also not big nation fans) yet because she was a woman. I was naive and myopic, shouldering exhausting anti-feminist sentiments that I wouldn’t completely unpack and unlearn up until later, ignoring companions and bands simply because I thought I preferred the firm and voices of males to females. You can mention I had a little bit of growing up to do.

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“I knew ‘Bad Blood’ because I’d heard it on the radio a bunch,” Jenna tells me — attempting to recall how familiar she was with Swift before November 2021. “And the one song I did download hers a number of years back was ‘[You Need to] Calm Down’ because it’s so catchy… Yet that’s it, and I’m a queer person and I was like, this is cute.”


Michael — and I noticed “Love Story” first — while it didn’t make me feel anything, I thought it was catchy.


“The first Taylor Swift song I heard where I was like, oh my god, I sort of like this was ‘Wildest Dreams,’ Jess says. “I think it would have been an one-off, although then Ryan Adams covered that album and I thought: This is in my wheelhouse, let’s listen to the acoustic indie version of this.”


Jess would call this moment a “small permission” — an extension from the universe to change your mind about something, to like something you’re not supposed to. Or maybe to adore music your younger self didn’t. Permission, in 2014, to give 1989 a listen.


Another tipping point: Taylor’s NPR Tiny Desk Concert in 2019. Historically an outlet reserved for smaller, up-and-coming bands as an intimate showcase possibility, it offered the best inroad to an indie fan base and also a slightly older crowd. I’d watched Local Natives perform on it. Michael had watched The National and Mandolin Orange. I didn’t realize major pop stars ever performed there.


I watched the Tiny Desk in Paris, overseas on a fellowship, reeling over my own stalled writing — a novel in progress strewn desperately across my desk Whenever I streamed the efficiency on my work computer. She played “Death By a Thousand Cuts” (a personalized sleeper favorite: Swift intent on writing a sad song although she wasn’t sad at the time). I was listening to Lover’s sharp, sophisticated songwriting by this point; not only was she  finally ready to write about drinking and slipping more cursing into her lyrics, although she was in love—happy. Another song she performed at the Tiny Desk: “All Also Well.” I’d never heard “All Also Well” before, so it probably goes without saying that this is the moment in which I learn that I, for one, am fucked. Swift has me.


“I listened to that song because I listened to the Tiny Desk concert,” Jess says. “And then ‘All Also Well’ reminds me of a relationship in high school that is unresolved.”


Things began to spiral a little. Folklore and Evermore came in 2020. Michael — whose spouse is a longtime Swiftie — listened due to the production from The National’s Aaron Dessner. Jenna wasn’t on board although. Jess likens Folklore to slipping into a fantastic novel. I listened on repeat, walking laps in my East Nashville neighborhood. Taylor seemed to have gone full indie. I sunk completely into fandom. A YouTube rabbit hole, 1989 voice memos. Kaylor Tumblr posts. Fan accounts. A meal party: No one mentioned anything bad about Taylor nevertheless I shouted about her songwriting. The cardigan arrived in the mail; I treated it like a residence shawl, draped over my shoulders like I’d knitted it myself.

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By the time Red (Taylor’s Version) arrived in November, Jess, Michael and I were ready. Jenna had still not fallen all of the way down the rabbit hole, nevertheless she would soon.


“I can't believe for the last 10 years I’ve been walking around not knowing that Jake Gyllenhaal didn't go to Taylor's birthday party,” Michael says, referencing the backstory beyond some of the most poignant cuts on Red. “It’s a real scarf!”


Swift, obviously, had been building the hype for her re-releases well, as if she didn’t already have some practice in this arena. Somehow, I felt excited for an album that came out nearly a decade ago — everybody was. I canceled my plans one Saturday night to watch her perform on Saturday Night Live. The rumored 10-minute “All Also Well” version was coming, short film and all.


“Watching that video, the ‘All Also Well’ short film, on Friday night — I came residence from the Free Britney rally. I didn’t know shit, didn’t know it was going to be 10 minutes long. I watched it and was so livid at this man [who broke her heart] and the entire thing,” Jenna says.


“I like what it stands for,” Jess says. “It’s cool that she’s going the additional mile to be like, fuck the system… I can relate to all those things so it doesn't seem dumb. Same with Olivia Rodrigo. I’m not getting myself a drivers license, nevertheless I remember these emotions,” Jess says.


I remember those emotions, also. In 2012, some of my friendships were fraying, I hated my job and was picking up the pieces of a long-distance entanglement with a musician. In short: I was 25. My ex had gone overseas for a couple of many years and since returned — my first experience with the irregular elasticity of time, that two years could feel insurmountably long and then suddenly vanish, and I’d managed somehow to move on. Swift intrinsically understood time like this since she was a teenager. I wish I’d gotten to know her earlier.


In hindsight, I don’t really know how I got through that era without “All Also Well.” I guess I had other breakup anthems, however I wish I’d had that one.

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“The way we talk about Taylor matters,” Michael tells me. “Taylor is one of our icons, and it also matters the way we talk about her art, those little microaggressions that we place on her because she’s a women artist. The way that we talk about her matters for future artists, although not only that: It’s how we view females in all roles.”


there really is a feminist clarity in these re-releases, a fuck you to a male-dominated industry while Taylor simultaneously puts an arm around the younger versions of herself.


“I think my feelings about Taylor now are so easy to jump into because of inhabiting the discourse about how Britney Spears was really wrongly treated by all of us. Because we do inherently treat things that females like badly,” Jenna says.


We don’t often have much grace for our younger selves, either. This is what makes listening to Red (Taylor’s Version) so interesting, because Taylor doesn’t revise; Swift has mentioned that songwriting is like putting a picture frame around a feeling you once had. I didn’t desire to acknowledge (or frame) the romantic dreams I dreamed of Whenever I was younger, yet Swift has habitually been straightforward with us in her songwriting. She distills being young like few others can. She wanted a fairy tale as a teenager, nevertheless she was ready to admit as soon as her views changed in later songs. That is maybe the truest form of growth.


Even though her music wasn’t the soundtrack to our twenties, it will be the soundtrack to our thirties. Swift reminds me of the exact pain I need to pull from for my own writing, and nevertheless I get to do it — as she gets to with these re-releases — with a decade’s worth of perspective. She had an ax to grind for the gentlemen who broke her hearts; right now she sends their babies presents. Is there some peace in listening to her re-record these earlier albums, knowing how the story ends?


Maybe, for me and these fellow late-blooming Swifties, Taylor Swift is like a friend you meet later in life — different than someone you’ve known forever, although just as critical. You come to the new friendship with wisdom, so you have the chance to learn so much about each other’s past. The sort of relationships that can often more intimate any time as soon as you have a decade of emotional maturity under your belt. It’s a companionship you’ve longed for, a saudade sentiment for something you didn’t know existed. And then it arrives, and nostalgia isn’t the correct word. Gratitude, probably. Contentment, perhaps. Golden — as in case you were tied with each other by an invisible string all along.