For a period during the first half of this decade – ecstatic and life-affirming and over all too soon – I found myself living with a pair of Taylor Swift obsessives. One was my daughter, the other my father. Divided by 70 years and much else, they were united by Taylor, though it was less a case of shared taste than of parallel obsessions with occasional moments of convergence.
My daughter got going first. I remember being in the car on a fourth-birthday outing to a circus, not long before the pandemic. Shake It Off was playing on the Bluetooth speaker. As we reached the spoken-word bridge, I heard my daughter sing, with emphasis to match Taylor’s, the lead-in line about ‘getting down to this – sick – beat.’
After that, Taylor-worship accelerated. On a 2021 playlist, ‘Fruity Fresh’, so named because we were driving to Park Royal to buy some widely mythologised mangoes, six of the 12 songs were hers. The enthusiasm wasn’t driven by new releases. In October 2022, in a five-star review of Swift’s new album Midnights, the music critic Alexis Petridis, noted that she had ‘steadfastly’ declined to serve up ‘neon-hued bangers.’ This was another way of saying that Taylor was no longer catering to my daughter’s appetites. But there was a complicating factor. After Swift’s record label Big Machine sold her master recordings, she embarked on a project of re-recording her early albums. As far as we were concerned, You Belong With Me was new music from the biggest pop star in the world, no matter that it had been written by a teenage country singer almost a decade before my daughter was born.
My father was an unlikely beneficiary of the Big Machine dispute. In late 2021, Swift put out the ‘Taylor’s Version’ of Red (2012), her transitional album, part country, part pop. My father alighted on the final – 30th – track. All Too Well had one key subtitle (10 Minute Version), distinguishing it from the original five-minute track, and another (Taylor’s Version) that was slightly misleading. The only previous recording of the longer All Too Well had been made when Swift ad-libbed the song in early 2011, shortly after the end of her relationship with the actor Jake Gyllenhaal. Swift then worked with the Nashville stalwart Liz Rose to create the five-minute song that appeared on Red towards the end of the following year.
In the intervening period, Swift enlisted the Swedish hit-machine duo Max Martin and Shellback to produce the songs that my daughter loved, like We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together (which is the song that had got me into Swift’s music before I had children). But the five-minute All Too Well was by no means drowned out by the poppy synths and drum pads. There’s a daft talk-show moment in 2017 when Maggie Gyllenhaal is asked about the scarf Swift refers to leaving ‘at your sister’s house’ in the song’s third line. Gyllenhaal replied that she ‘never understood why everybody asked me about this scarf.’ After the ten-minute All Too Well emerged, she explained that she had found her old notebook and ‘restructured the song to the way that it pretty much was’. Pretty much: many questioned whether a ‘Fuck the Patriarchy’ keychain could have appeared in the original.
By the summer of 2023, when I received a text from someone staying at the house saying that my dad was listening to All Too Well, it didn’t even merit a reply. Ten days later, my dad sent me a link to a 46-minute conversation between Swift and the Irish playwright and filmmaker Martin McDonagh, in which she reflected on writing and directing the short film that accompanied All Too Well. He also kept me up to date on claims testifying to her greatness as a lyricist.
My father’s interest in the extended version of All Too Well was no more a niche taste than my daughter’s love of Shake It Off. It became the longest song ever to top the Billboard Hot 100, and was the subject of a ten-week course at Stanford. In 2025, Rolling Stone called it the neatest encapsulation of her ‘genius.’ My daughter would have disagreed. She had many favourites, and All Too Well wasn’t among them. The legend of that song rested on its maturity and vulnerability. She responded to Swift’s catchy melodies, mischievous humour, and tone of defiance. The break-up songs she enjoyed were closer to diss-track territory, and for the most part, she preferred a quicker tempo.
At the risk of sounding parochial, I would claim to really appreciate her achievement you had to be in our house on a weekday evening in 2023 – a seven-year-old in the living room wearing bracelets with Taylor song titles and a t-shirt that asked ‘What would Taylor do?’ while dancing and singing along to Blank Space, a 78-year old in his cubby hole taking a well-earned break from recordings and performances of All Too Well to blast out Taylor’s New York University commencement address, in which she urged the graduating students to learn to live alongside cringe.
At times, it could seem as if Taylor was circling us. In the spring of 2023, she had a brief romance with someone who lived at the end of our road, an affable, dopey-seeming guy with whom I had had a handful of good-natured encounters. (He always asked how the kids were doing.) Taylor’s love life gave my daughter an early lesson in living alongside cringe. Her tribute to Joe Alwyn, London Boy, begins with an Englishman talking about going around on ‘mah scoota’, and reports that Alwyn ‘took me back to Highgate’ to meet ‘all of his best mates,’ and that she now loves ‘high tea and ‘stories from uni,’ and watches rugby in the pub. My daughter was no more impressed when Taylor started dating Travis Kelce. ‘Taylor should not be with an American football player,’ she said. Her older sibling asked her if she liked the look of him. ‘Why would I? He looks like he’s bold.’
There were elements of Taylor’s output my father and daughter enjoyed equally. An often-watched clip came from an appearance on Graham Norton’s chat show, from October 2014, when she was promoting 1989. (‘Not a twang on it,’ Norton said. ‘This is pop, pop, pop.’) John Cleese, sitting on the sofa with Swift and the cricketer Kevin Pietersen, said he preferred cats to dogs – ‘They’re unpredictable and cussed,’ then turned to Swift and said, ‘like women, you know.’ Swift didn’t stir, then replied, in a sing-songy intonation, ‘Oooh, we don’t wanna do that,’ prompting hysterics from Cleese while Pietersen applauded. Her zinger soon became a catchphrase in our house.
The crowning moment of this Taylor fever never quite arrived. To my shame, I failed to get tickets for any of the eight Eras tour nights at Wembley. We had to make do with the 170-minute concert film. When it was released in October 2023, before the Eras tour had reached London, I bought my father and daughter tickets to see it at the IMAX. They were £26 each. That felt like sufficient outlay, and made me feel less bad about failing on the concert itself. (When my father and I had gone to see Oasis at Knebworth Park, about a quarter of a century earlier, the tickets were £22.50.) In any case, the film did the trick for both of them. Of the 39 songs performed, 23 were ones my daughter loved, while my father was satisfied by what followed Swift’s explanation: ‘There is one more song I was wanting to play you from the Red album, if you happen to have about ten minutes to spare?’ Afterwards he reported that ‘a lot of children were dancing in the aisles’ but that my daughter ‘just sat very still with her legs up on the seat, covering her knees with her jacket.’ She said that ‘it was the best thing ever.’
When the Wembley tickets had been released the previous summer, there had been lots of coverage about what a nightmare it all was. But as the dates came nearer, everyone we’d ever met seemed to be going. My daughter wouldn’t allow anyone to mention the Eras tour – at least not the European leg. On the first night, 21 June 2024, I drove her and her sibling to the stadium complex, and we listened to a bit of Shake It Off with the car windows open before they told me that this was a crap idea and we turned around and went home.
But by then, she was beginning to move on. A 19-song-strong playlist from our summer holiday in 2024 created by my daughter’s older sibling, titled ‘France’ and accompanied by emojis of a croissant, the Tricolore and a fleur-de-lis, began with La Marseillaise, and featured songs by Chappell Roan, Sabrina Carpenter, Charli xcx and Olivia Rodrigo – but no Taylor. We didn’t listen to her new album The Tortured Poets Department, not even the songs supposedly about the guy from our road – his love of weed and typewriters and tendency to behave like Dylan Thomas. The following summer, back in France, any car journey would begin with Brutal, the first song on Olivia Rodrigo’s debut album, and unless anyone objected, we would listen to the whole thing. On our Spotify Wrapped for 2025, Rodrigo had an unprecedented five songs in the top ten. Taylor crept in with Lover, at 95.
We’re on a new adventure now, and the signs are good. I managed to get tickets for Rodrigo’s forthcoming Unraveled Tour, which is in April. When her third album you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love came out in June, we listened to all 13 songs before leaving for school. It is hardly a revolution in taste. In 2021, Rodrigo played Elle’s game ‘Song Association,’ in which you are given a word and must find a relevant lyric. Five of her ten answers came from Swift’s catalogue. (‘I just have her lyrics, like, tattooed in my head.’) My father acquired a new Gen-Z taste of his own. In February 2025, he texted me to ask if it ‘could be right for someone 79 and nearly 11–12ths,’ to spend the ‘afternoon watching chicken shop dates.’
On a recent Friday, the friend who gave us the Taylor t-shirt was having a party, and I was gathering my things to go out. My father was in the kitchen re-watching a documentary about Linda Ronstadt, a pop and country singer with a mere 11 Grammys – a total which Swift overtook when All Too Well: The Short Film won Best Music Video. My daughter called me in, and I went to sit on her bed. She was grimacing. I told her she would fall asleep any minute, and that I’d be there in the morning. She reassured me that she didn’t mind about the party. ‘But can you get him to turn it down?’
