How my daughter made me a Swiftie

According to Spotify, over the past two years, I’ve been in the top tenth-of-a-percent (that’s .01%!) of Taylor Swift fans on the streaming service in terms of listening time. It’s an embarrassing admission, but what’s even stranger is that only five years ago, I thought Taylor Swift was an overrated pop star, blissfully unfamiliar as I was with her work.

A lifelong music lover, my listening was constant and spanned most genres: classical, new age, jazz, classic rock, alt rock, folk music, film scores, you name it—but rarely did I enjoy mainstream pop music. I was a snob and a half, as Cher from Clueless might say, when it came to musical taste.

But when my oldest kid, my daughter, entered first grade, she began to discover pop music. Her teacher played KIDZ BOP songs in class, and Natalie came home asking to listen to Shut Up and Dance, Cake By The Ocean, Dance Monkey, and Taylor Swift. (Taylor Swift was the only artist who garnered an umbrella song request.) Previously, all of our family listening had consisted of Disney soundtracks, especially Frozen and Moana. With those songs so well-worn in my subconscious that they haunted my sleep, new pop tunes were a welcome respite.

To help keep track, I created a Spotify playlist called “Natalie” and added the songs she liked. Unfamiliar with Taylor Swift, I had to do research: I listened to her most popular songs and found that many were kid-friendly; many were also surprisingly catchy. I didn’t find the songs objectionable; if anything, they made me want to dance. To Natalie’s playlist, I added bops like We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together; I Knew You Were Trouble; Blank Space; ME!; and You Need To Calm Down. (I see now that these songs sampled only two albums, Red and 1989. I was barely skimming the surface of Swift’s music, and yet it was a lot, musically, to take in.)

Over time, we continued to add songs to our Taylor Swift listening, until I decided to create a new playlist: I called it TS✨ and added the albums I knew I liked. Gradually, I added more songs and more albums, until the list represented nearly the entire Swift oeuvre. Her music never grew old to my ears, and it struck me as Joe Garcia explained it in his beautiful New Yorker piece: “There was, in her voice, something intuitively pleasant and genuine and good, something that implies happiness or at least the possibility of happiness.”

When I took Natalie to see the Eras movie in theaters, my fandom grew a hundredfold. I’d been to many concerts, but had never seen anything like that performance: the virtuosity, the intensity, the beauty of it was stunning. When I took Natalie to see her first concert, one of the Eras shows in Toronto, she thought it was excellent—but she had no frame of reference, nothing to compare it against. How could I explain to her that this concert, where every fan sang nearly every lyric of every song—where the sole vibe was of joy and gratitude, where women offered her friendship bracelets, while she gave them her favorites—that this was no ordinary concert? And yet, I wouldn’t have enjoyed as much if I hadn’t experienced it with Natalie. She made an exceptional experience a priceless one, a shared core memory for us both.

Years later, my 8-year-old son fell in love with the music of Benson Boone. We had watched Boone’s Grammy performance as a family and were blown away by his gymnastics, his voice and charisma, his powder-blue jumpsuit. When we went as a family to Sam’s first concert, to see Benson Boone last year, it was a new musical experience unlocked: enjoying a live performance together, the four of us singing and dancing and laughing and cheering. Pop music, I had learned, could be shockingly fun.

I can’t wait for the next discovery my kids impart upon their ever-learning mom.