The Daily - The Year of Taylor Swift

Episode Date: December 15, 2023

Taylor Swift grabbed many headlines in 2023. Her widely popular Eras Tour, which proved too much for Ticketmaster to handle, has been both a business and a cultural juggernaut. And Time magazine named her as its person of the year.Taffy Brodesser-Akner, a staff writer for The New York Times, explains why, for her, 2023 was the year of Taylor Swift.Guest: Taffy Brodesser-Akner, a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine.Background reading: Ms. Swift’s greatest gift is for telling her own story — better than any journalist could. But Ms. Brodesser-Akner gave it a shot anyway.Fan demand for Ms. Swift broke Ticketmaster, and that was just the prologue. These are the moments that turned her Eras Tour into a phenomenon.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Bilbaro. This is The Daily. Today. 2023 was many different things to many different people. For our guest, Times Magazine writer Taffy Brodesser-Akner, it was the year of Taylor Swift. It's Friday, December 15th. So, I have to say, this is the episode I've been looking forward to the most of the whole year.

What? Which probably says something about the gestation of a daily episode that it's taken us this long to make. So, I have to say, this is the episode I've been looking forward to the most of the whole year. Which probably says something about the gestation of a daily episode that it's taken us this long to make. And the news this year. And the news this year. I have been looking forward to talking to you, Taffy, about Taylor Swift for months and months and months. And I think it's appropriate that this ends up being one of the last episodes we do in 2023. I am so happy to be here talking to you about it. Yeah. And here,

just going to get this out of the way, not objective about Taylor Swift. Neither am I. I'm a fan. I'm a Swifty. We have to disclose these things. We have to. It's part of the rules. Yeah. The ethics guidelines. I don't pretend to be open-minded. I'm bought in. And within the context of, I suppose, fandom, we're going to apply a critical lens. We're going to rise to the occasion. We're going to be journalists. Sure. So I want to understand, in your mind, why Taylor is not someone to just be a fan of, to become entranced by during a commute, workout, cleaning session, and here I'm being biographical,

workout, cleaning session, and here I'm being biographical, but somebody worthy of a journalistic inquiry of the kind that you carried out a little bit earlier this year. My pitch for the story was that we are neglecting our audience if we don't cover this thing that is so big that clearly became what is obviously the cultural event of my lifetime. I remember the way my parents used to talk about Woodstock, which they didn't go to, but they talked about it and I knew about it. And as the summer went on, it was all around me in a way that I don't think anything has ever been all around me. And I began to see first that it was going to be Woodstock, and then it was going to be bigger than Woodstock.

Then it was going to be something like everything else about her that we don't have words to compare to. And that is what Taylor Swift is. Okay, let's put some numbers and some context around this very big year. Just give us the cliff notes of what makes this the year of Taylor Swift. So... Good morning, America. It's Taylor. I wanted to tell you something that I've been so excited about for a really long time.

Taylor Swift announces her new tour. The tour is called the Eras Tour, and it's a journey through all of my musical eras of my career. People try to get tickets. They can't get tickets. I didn't get tickets to the Taylor Swift concert. I know every single album. I know every song. I can sing you every song. They are paying thousands and thousands of dollars. You're hearing about $18,000 tickets. Wow. And then the tour starts.

The tour starts in Arizona. And at first, it's just a concert. And then suddenly, I don't want to say out of nowhere because it's not out of nowhere. She is everywhere. The only thing that exists in any of my feeds, even in certain parts of the newspaper, on television, in conversation, is Taylor Swift. And the tour itself becomes a phenomenon. It becomes its own news cycle. Taylor Swift fans may have taken her hit song, Shake It Off, too literally. Yeah.

When she sings Shake It Off. Shake it off, shake it off. All the shaking. It's what Seattle showed this past weekend. It actually caused the equivalent of a 2.3 magnitude earthquake. That's a new record. There is an earthquake in Seattle that registers on seismographs near the stadium.

Right. The U.S. tour could generate $4.6 billion in consumer spending. That boost then has leaders worldwide requesting their own ERAs tour dates. World leaders are asking her to come and bring her tour to give their economy a boost. At some point, it made a billion dollars. The most we believe of any musician. Ever. We don't know when this tour is going to end. Michael, we don't know if this tour is going to end. And then she announces. Taylor Swift just announced her Heiress tour is headed to the big screen. Oh. That she's going to release a movie

of the concert while she's on tour. And she releases this movie. Ah! It is a bananas hit. Right. I saw it on opening day. I mean, I had a Taylor Swift birthday party.

I turned 48. I invited 35 people. And on the day I published the story, we published seven other stories about Taylor Swift because that's what we do now. We are the Taylor Swift Times. Are you ready for it? We're ready for it. The 2023 Time Person of the Year is Taylor Swift. And then she was named recently Times Person of the Year.

Right. But we picked a choice, someone who represents joy, someone who's taken her own story and made it big enough for everyone. And like everything else about her, when I saw it was her, I saw, of course it was. Who else would it have been? So that brings me to why we are here, you and I. Sure. Not simply to marvel and revel in the bigness of Taylor Swift over the past year, but to really get at the heart of it, to decode it, to make sense of it. Yeah.

And you took on the Taylor Swift phenomenon in a pretty major way this past year for a cover story of the New York Times Magazine. So, I mean, what did you think had been kind of left unsaid? And ultimately, where did you land? I mean, what did you think had been kind of left unsaid? And ultimately, where did you land? The thing I wasn't seeing was the thing I came to understand. As I was watching the concert play out on social media, I had not yet read the definitive account of why she matters on this level. Why these numbers? Why everyone of every age? Why when you see a grown woman there

with a teenage child, you don't know if the teenage child is drinking the grown woman or vice versa. She has these songs that sound like amazing pop songs. She is a songwriting savant. But at some point, if you surround yourself with the music enough, you start to understand what she is doing, which is she is telling the story of girlhood into womanhood. And in her songs, I see it. I see her in real time cataloging the experiences of what it means to grow up. And it's not always apparent from first listen, second listen, tenth listen, because a lot of her songs to the untrained eye kind of all seem like a love song. Like love songs.

They're only love songs. Right. If you're not careful. Except that, yes, they seem like only love songs. What a great trick that you could write about business betrayal and friendship betrayal in a love song. a girl, a female experience. It's that we tend to, and I know I am speaking in a highly subjective way, we tend to take all of that to heart in the same way. You know, times that I've been betrayed in business hurt as much as the times I've been cheated on by boyfriends. It all lives in the same place. And finally, I don't know why it took so long for somebody

to understand that we needed songs about these things. These are the full range of a woman's experience, of any person's experience, and she channeled it. any person's experience. And she channeled it. Okay. So let's, using that framework, approach Taylor Swift and her meaning to you, me, and everybody else through these songs. Okay. Let's decode so that we can better understand what you're really talking about here. Where do you think we should start? So let's start at the beginning. And I'll tell you that she was this very young, ambitious child. She wanted to be a singer.

She lived in Pennsylvania, and soon they moved to Nashville. And one day, she sang the national anthem at a basketball game in Pennsylvania. And she was so proud of that. And she went home, and she called up her friends, and she asked them, do you want to go to the mall with me tomorrow? And they said, no, we're busy, each of that. And she went home and she called up her friends and she asked them, do you want to go to the mall with me tomorrow? And they said, no, we're busy. Each of them.

They were all busy. And her mother said, I'll take you to the mall. Her beloved mother, Andrea, took her to the mall. And guess who was there, Michael? You know who was there. I think I know who was there.

All those friends and they were together. And she... The cruelest imaginable cut to a young person. This was a wound. She just started bleeding there in the mall. Her mother turns around and said, we're going to a better mall. They go to the King of Prussia mall. And she writes about that incident in a song called The Best Day. And the song is about what happened,

but it lives in the space of not the mall and not the other mall, but the car ride where she's sitting next to her mother and having the sort of experiences you could only really have next to your mother. She has all of these horrible emotions about what just happened. But by the time she's writing it, she also has this gratitude, so much so that she will eventually call the song The Best Day. I don't know who I'm gonna talk to now at school

But I know I'm laughing on the car ride home with you. Pop songs always exist in this glamorous space where the subject of the song has to somehow boost the performer's image as well. And this is not. This is not self-aggrandizing. This is the opposite of self-aggrandizing. What is? Yeah. It's de-aggrandizing. The antonym for self-aggrandizing is going to the mall with your mom.

That's the phrase. Right. Right. And window shopping afterwards so much that you can finally forget the names of the friends who were so cruel to you. Right. Don't know how long it's going to take to feel okay, but I know I had the best day with you today. I had the best day with you today. So from early on, from the very beginning, what Taylor Swift is up to is processing the very personal pain of girlhood through her music.

It's very biographical. And what you're saying is really distinct about it is that it makes no attempt to glamorize or pretend that these were wonderful times. It's a real admission of just kind of the awfulness of being alive. And it's not taking anybody's word for what a song should be about. It is saying, this is my unique experience. I wonder if anyone else has had this experience.

And it turns out. Everyone has. Everyone has gone to the mall and seen their friends hang. my unique experience. I wonder if anyone else has had this experience. And it turns out everyone has. Everyone has gone to the mall and seen their friends hang out. Like, in America, everyone has gone to the mall and seen their friends hanging out without them. Right. I mean, I still have those feelings. Instagram, Jesus, why wasn't I invited to that party? Yeah. Okay, so what is the next song that we should decode? And here, I guess, just to stipulate for the listener, we are not going to be going through the entire Taylor Swift catalog here. We're a half-hour show, so we're just going to be talking about a few of these songs to explain your thesis. So,

which one should we talk about next? Okay. So, let's talk about All Too Well. I see from the haunted look in your eyes that you, too, love All Too Well. Yeah. She released a 10-minute version years after. This was already a sort of secret fave of people's. And then it became sort of everyone's favorite. So All Too Well was a song that came out on Red. We're talking about a few meaningful years after. Sure.

Yeah. Best day. Yes. Came out on Red. She's already a pop star. She's dating famous people. This song is allegedly about Jake Gyllenhaal, her relationship with Jake Gyllenhaal. And All Too Well is a journey of someone who is saying the most intimate, explosive things about a relationship after she sort of comes to.

Like, she was in love, and for every bit that she was in love, she is now aware of how she was manipulated, how this was never going to work. Well, talk about the lyrics because I think it's an incredibly exhaustive, like, encyclopedic kind of afterstudy of a failed relationship. Right. And something about her as a songwriter, she loves to upend a cliche. Her understanding of cliche and language and metaphor, listen to this. You call me up again just to break me like a promise. And then she says something that is so withering, so casually cruel in the name of being honest. It is like there is nobody who has ever been in a relationship who does not remember the time somebody said something honest to them that was actually cruel. And how you hate yourself for appreciating the honesty first before you understand how completely awful it was. Those lyrics are so

staggering to me in a way that when someone else is writing your songs for you, it never quite goes there. Because what leaves when someone else is writing music for you, what leaves when you're trying to figure out how to make a hit is specificity. Specificity is out the window because you want every song to be a number one. You want everyone to understand it. And what she understands is that actually it's specificity that we've been missing from our songs. Right. That specificity is what gives us the complexity, the nuance, and all the feeling that we get from a Taylor Swift song. It's a stunning song. It's a stunning song, and yet another song made very popular by her fans that's confessional

and about rejection. Right. And she proceeds along this path, and she becomes even more famous. And usually, by the way, at this point, every pop singer becomes ridiculous because they're too famous to be living regular lives anymore. So they could only write about their fame. Right, not their interior. And not their interior. Or also, new things aren't happening to them anymore. They're just like...

Yeah, they're cosseted. They're protected. They're surrounded by people who just agree with them. And they're just sort of statues to what they used to be. Not Taylor Swift because things keep happening to her. Right. So then the next thing that happens is the thing that everyone knows happens. Yo, Taylor.

I'm really happy for you. I'm going to let you finish. Which is Kanye storms the stage at the VMAs and starts talking about Beyonce in the middle of Taylor Swift's acceptance speech for a VMA. She's humiliated. But a few years later, Taylor and Kanye seem to reconcile. They are seen out to dinner together. They take pictures together. They're hugging at award shows.

Then... I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex. Why, I made that bitch famous. God damn! I made that bitch famous. Things take a turn when Kanye says some terrible things about Taylor Swift in his own song lyrics. And when Taylor objects, Kanye says he had her permission. And then it gets even uglier when Kim Kardashian comes to her then-husband's defense

and she releases videotape proving, allegedly, that he had Taylor's permission. The videotape is later revealed to be edited. But in the meantime, Kim calls Taylor a snake. And Kim Kardashian's many, many fans are unleashed on Taylor. And Taylor, a digital native who knows not to throw good money after bad, gets the hell out. She goes dark. And she disappears. And then a few months later, her social media comes back on

with just the image of a snake. Taylor announced her new album. It's titled Reputation. She broke the news on Instagram Wednesday with a series of images. Now this comes following her... The snake becomes this image of what this album Reputation that she's about to release is going to be.

A confession, a mourning, a self-own. It is the rawest, most brutal album of self-loathing. She lays it out to everybody. And I cannot tell you what my favorite song on that album is, because if you press play on it, you'll just lose me. But let's start with Look What You Made Me Do. The song starts like this. I don't like your little games. Don't like your tilted stage. Which is a reference to Kanye West. Yes. It's all a reference to Kanye West, and then it's a reference to everyone else who came after her.

But then ultimately, it's a reference to herself and her own understanding of her role in how this all happened. She is talking about how she had this kingdom of fame, of approbation. It was taken from her. She befriended Kanye after the VMAs, and then he did this to her, and she felt so stupid and used, and then started asking herself, why was I even willing to be friends with this person who humiliated me? Like, what is the need that I had? And this song is born from the self-loathing of realizing that you were willing to sit with the people who hated you just to get them to stop hating you. I don't know anyone who can't relate to that. But then here are the other lyrics. I got smarter. I got harder in the nick of time. Honey, I rose up from the dead. I do it all the time. And there she is saying,

this was going to kill me, but I was going to come back as whatever it is I am now. And that is as someone with regret, with anger, with passion. I'm not a little girl anymore. I'm not trying to please everyone anymore. Never again will she roll over so that she will be loved. Now she is going to do things on her terms because there are no rules anymore. There's no one else who has been this famous. There's no one else who has been this maligned and come back from it.

So now she's making her own rules. And now, Michael, now we are in Taylor Swift's world. We'll be right back. So, Taffy, where we left off before the break was a defiant Taylor Swift taking yet another painful moment of her life and using it to rebuild herself and to depart from one era of life to another. So, what happens next for this reborn, tougher Taylor Swift? So what happens next is that Taylor Swift, who now understands that there is no precedent for her or for the career that she is going to have, something terrible happens to her.

Again. Again, something terrible happens to her. And it's some music insider baseball here. something terrible happens to her. And it's some music insider baseball here. Taylor Swift finds out that her masters were sold to someone she doesn't like without her knowledge or permission. Just explain that. Okay. So the masters are the original recordings of your songs. And whoever owns your masters, which in a traditional recording contract is the record company, that's the entity that profits off of your music. You could become very rich performing, but when we play music,

the money generally goes to the owner of the masters. So when we listen to Taylor Swift on Spotify, Apple Music, and someone makes money, it's the person who owns the master. So when we listen to Taylor Swift on Spotify, Apple Music, and someone makes money, it's the person who owns the master. Yes, for the most part. And she claims that she woke up to learn the information that the masters had been sold. She knew that the masters might be up for sale.

She says she asked for the opportunity to buy them back. She says that she was not given the opportunity to buy them on her own. And the worst part of all of this was that the person who sold it was someone she really trusted. And she couldn't bear it. So she did what she always does when she is having a revelation, a deep moment, heavy emotion. She writes a song about it. Well, she also winds up re-recording all of her songs one by one to retain the rights and to profit from them.

Right. Huge amount of work. Which was genius. But she also wrote a song about it. The song is called My Tears Ricochet. And again, she has not confirmed that this is what it's about, but we all know that this is what it's about. And I don't even know which lyrics to pick for you, because this feels like a love song. So you can read it. This could be about your ex-boyfriend. This could be about a guy you just broke up with. Or even more importantly, it could be about any time that

someone who was in charge of looking out for your best interests that you were working in good faith for pulled the rug out from under you and betrayed you. So here we go. I didn't have it in myself to go with grace. Because when I'd fight, you used to tell me I was brave. I didn't have it in myself to go with grace. Because when I'd fight, you used to tell me I was brave. So what she's saying here is that she couldn't just let this happen. The way, by the way, everyone's masters get sent around and nobody ever involves the world in the drama. But she didn't have it in herself to just do it.

She just couldn't do it. It's not in her. And then in that next line, because when I'd fight, you used to tell me I was brave. She grew up with the guy who sold the masters. He was the one who was always telling her to be spunky and to fight for what she wanted. And so he's partly to blame for the fact that she didn't have it in herself to go with Grace. And then there's this beautiful bridge. I can go anywhere I want. Anywhere I want, just not home. You could decide that home is her master. But actually, I think home is this innocent place where she did not have to struggle.

She did not have to bring her entire fandom into this fight, which she did. She can go anywhere she wants. She's a global superstar. But her home was the place where she knew she was being taken care of, where she felt safe. It's gone now. And because in these relationships, they call you, they're in my family. This guy's like a father to me. And he just betrayed her. And she didn't understand yet. Throughout all of this, she had not yet understood that this business will always break your heart.

That somebody will always act in the interest of profits. Then there is, so I'm going to just finish the bridge and then go into, I'm sorry, please let me indulge. This is a very personal song for me. So I could go anywhere I want, just not home. And I still talk to you when I'm screaming at the sky. And when you can't sleep at night, you hear my stolen lullabies. Of course, stolen is the word she uses to describe what happened when her masters were sold. It's such a terrific song that I'm embarrassed to say that I didn't listen to it much because I thought the title was terrible. I thought My Tears Ricochet is like the strangest, soapiest, most on-the-nose title. Right, tears don't ricochet.

What are you, a physicist? I know, I know. title. Right, tears don't ricochet. What are you, a physicist? I know, I know. And I didn't pay it much attention until the week before the concert when I started just making sure I was going in, as a New York Times reporter does, knowing everything I need to know. So this is a week before you somehow got tickets to go see Taylor. I got tickets. IRL. IRL. And I traveled to California. This is a few months ago. This is a few months ago.

This is in July. I traveled to Santa Clara. And on that night where I thought I was going to be sort of riveted by various aspects of it, the religious experience I had at the concert was during my tears ricochet. Religious how? You know, I'm 48 years old. And I've been working for a long time. And over the course of my many years working, you know, I'm a competitive person. working. You know, I'm a competitive person. I've found myself betrayed by people who loved me,

appreciated me, and acted in their business's best interests. The job I had before this was at a magazine. I learned that I wasn't just being underpaid at that job. I was being paid roughly a third of what my male colleagues were being paid. I was beloved by them. But also, I loved them. I loved them so much. And when I hear this song, I cry. And I cry here reiterating it because I can't believe that happened to me. It was such a betrayal of me.

And it was such a betrayal of what I thought of myself. That's the worst part of it, is that if you'd asked me, will these people act in their best interests, it was a magazine company. Of course it would. It was a publishing company. Of course it would. But did I think I was the kind of person that this could happen to? I didn't. And when I hear this song,

I am right back there. I am right back finding out in the most stunning way that I am being so comparatively underpaid. And that's why it hurts to listen to this song, and that's why it helps to listen to this song. Because also there's this part of me that now that Taylor Swift feels that way, it allows me off the hook a little bit. If it could happen to Taylor Swift, why wouldn't it happen to me? Thank you. What you have clearly just demonstrated is that the Taylor Swift project of internalizing pain and turning it into music has the effect that you're describing

on tens of millions of people. It makes them see anew a lot of the pain in their lives, to look it squarely in the face and to try to better understand it, and to have a catharsis around it. Right. I can't stay, don't give up my tears for sure. And I can go anywhere I want, anywhere I want, just I want. Screaming, I can go anywhere I want, anywhere I want, just not home.

Screaming, I can go anywhere I want, just not home. Because what happens is, you look back at all of your triumphs, and now they're tinged, now there's an asterisk to them. Look how underpaid you were. Look how you were being taken like a sucker. Look at your kids' basketball games that you missed when you were on the story. I was so lucky to have work. That's what I tell myself. I was so lucky to be building my career. I was so lucky I was writing stories that got attention. But then I'm in a stadium, and it all comes over me. And I am with 69,000 people that something happened to. And I once did a story on a megachurch, and I suddenly understood what it meant to be

an evangelical Christian who was saved. Like, had she said, who would like to come up here and get saved, I would have made my way up to the stage and let her put her palm on my forehead. And I would have said, I am saved. You're saying all around you are people. I'm assuming many of them are women and many of them are boys. But they're all... Some of them are boys. They're all... A couple of them are boys.

They're all identifying with a moment where their triumph, their moment of joy is recognized for its flaws. Yeah. For its portrayals. Yeah. For its undermining quality. Yeah. Everyone is singing that same lyric. And it was something different for everybody. But in that moment, I knew what Taylor Swift has known all along, which is that this emotion is universal. The more detail you give, the more I will find myself in it.

Mm-hmm. The more detail you give, the more I will find myself in it. The more you trust me as a listener and let me into your life, the more I will find myself the way you have rendered a life. And I will be so grateful for the rest of my life to have been able to sing that and to be able to have some sort of catharsis around it. Clearly it wasn't enough because here I am crying on the daily. All great art is the art that sees you. And I know this from doing a million celebrity profiles. And I know this from my understanding of fandom, that if you, if you show somebody that they are real, you have them for life. She has me for life, and I really want to thank you. This has been a wonderful conversation. Michael, it's been so great to be here to talk about my favorite subject with my favorite podcast host.

Thank you, truly. And happy holidays. Happy holidays to you. The Do you think we should end with Michael and I singing all too well? Yes. Is that a yes? That might be. And I was never good at telling jokes, but the punchline goes, I'll get older, but you're lovers. Wow.

Wow, Mike. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. The Times reports that the Biden administration has told the Israeli government that it must wrap up its large-scale ground campaign in Gaza by the end of the year. That message reflects the U.S.'s growing unease with the number of Palestinian civilians who have been killed by Israel in response to Hamas's terror attacks on October 7. The U.S. is now asking Israel to transition to a new phase of the war that would involve using smaller groups of Israeli commandos to carry out targeted missions such as killing Hamas leaders and rescuing hostages.

And on Thursday, leaders of the European Union officially opened negotiations to allow Ukraine to join the economic alliance. The process of joining the EU could take years, but would represent a triumph for Ukraine's leaders as they try to deepen ties to the West and build financial support for their war Today's episode was produced by Sydney Harper, Eric Krupke, and Summer Tamad. It was edited by Michael Benoit, contains original music by Pat McCusker, Dan Powell, Diane Wong, and Marion Lozano, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Diane Wong, and Marion Lozano, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Rundberg and Ben Leodfork of Winderly. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you on Monday.