Episode Transcript
[00:00:10] Speaker A: You're listening to the weighing in podcast, the show that brings you inside the Daily Gazette's featured news column.
And now here's your host, writer of the weighing in column, Andrew Waite.
[00:00:28] Speaker B: I'm Andrew Waite. Thanks for listening.
In case you're just finding out about this now on the weighing in podcast, Taylor Swift is kind of a big deal. She's been everywhere this year, including the COVID of Time magazine in December as their person of the year. And in that piece, the writer Sam Lansky describes her as the main character of the world. Of course, I don't think anybody is not aware of how big of a deal Taylor Swift has become. And that's certainly the case in our household where my wife is a 35 year old swifty.
We actually saw Swift in concert in 2015 together in Seattle. And I count myself as a fan, though probably not a swiftie. But now it is our six year old daughter who has taken after her mother in her love of Taylor Swift. And it used to be all Disney all the time in our house in terms of songs sung, and now it literally is all swift all the time. That's all my daughter wants to sing. Mostly I get a real kick out of watching her dance and listening to her sing these songs that she only really half knows what the words are about. There's also something that it causes me to take pause in the fact that it's a visual display of her tastes, maturing. I mean, to hear her sing songs about romance and heartbreak, it's very different than hearing her sing Disney songs. And I've been thinking about that for months, really, since she's developed this. True.
Then, you know, there's been so much coverage about Swift, and because my daughter is so into it, and because my wife is so into it, I tend to consume a lot of it. And there was an episode of the Daily last month in which Taffy brodesser ackner basically just talked about how big of a phenomenon Taylor Swift had become this year. And her main thesis was that what Swift is really doing and sort of what has drawn so many people to her is the honesty and specificity that she has employed when chronicling girlhood into womanhood. And I thought, wow. I mean, that's exactly what's happening in our family, where my daughter, a young girl, and my wife, a 35 year old woman, are both finding something in this music. And so I was inspired to write something about it. So here's that piece.
[00:03:10] Speaker A: You'Re listening to, the weighing in podcast with columnist Andrew Wait.
[00:03:22] Speaker B: Recently, my six year old daughter has been singing Taylor Swift songs as often as any devoted swifty, only she doesn't understand what all the words mean, so sometimes she confuses certain lines. Her most notable mix up is in the song cruel summer, acoustic accounting of casual romances, emotional deficiencies. In the chorus, Swift sings it's new, the shape of your body. Then immediately, she undercuts the thrill of fresh love with emptiness. It's blue, the feeling I've got. Here's a snippet of that song.
But when my daughter sings the song, she mistakenly substitutes you for new and shame for shape. So the line my kindergartner ends up belting is it's you, the shame of your body. Unintentionally and unbeknownst to her, my daughter has darkened what is already an honest yet melancholy track and delved into territory. My wife, a fellow swifty, and I, aren't quite ready to tread with a person who can't yet tie her own shoes.
Eventually, though, we'll assuredly be discussing issues as serious as body image with our daughter. Goodness knows we've already had our share of heavy conversations on everything from tempering reactions to big feelings to coping with disappointment when opening presents. So as concerns escalate to issues of self esteem, unrequited love, or whatever else life throws at our family, we'll do all too well to draw on the wisdom Taylor Swift shares in her music. It's wisdom that the world came to fully appreciate in 2023, when the now 34 year old pop icon was seemingly everywhere. Swift has been the subject of party conversations and college courses. She's given the NFL even more fans via her relationship with star tight end Travis Kelsey, and in December, she confidently consumed the COVID of Time magazine as the person of the year. The accompanying profile declares she became the main character of the world.
All of this happened as Swift completed a 66 date, record breaking tour in the United States, grossing more than $1 billion and inciting local economic benefit with each stop. That came to be known as the Taylor effect, the revelry extends beyond the concerts in the capital region. There are at least five Taylor Swift themed events this month alone. In our family, the Taylor effect meant 2023 was the year our daughter developed into a true swifty, dispensing with Disney favorites such as let it go in favor of Swift's Enchanted and welcome to New York. My daughter's fandom no doubt derives from my wife, Kathleen, who proudly claimed Swift as her top Spotify artist last year and has yet to fully recover from not getting a ticket to the heiress tour. Spontaneous Taylor Swift dance parties break out regularly in our living room. Even the two year old participates with his signature up and down bop. But as I've mostly delighted in my daughter and wife's new shared bond, I've taken some pause in the hair splashes and intense facial expressions my six year old makes as she mimics the dance moves she saw in the era's tour film with my wife the night it opened. In those living room performances, I see my firstborn's childhood bleeding into tweenhood and toward the inevitability of adolescence. Then again, as Swift sings in shake it off, my daughter, like time, keeps cruising, can't stop, won't stop moving. So in reality, as a father, I'm left with little recourse but to take part in my daughter's dance toward maturity through every love story, all the bad blood and whatever wildest dream she can conjure. Thankfully, I'm comforted by the kind of role model Swift appears to be. Unlike stars before her, who sometimes seem trapped in Peter Pan like existences, Swift may be the best doshant on the path to adulthood that we could ask for in a megastar. She is a song writing savant, but at some point, if you surround yourself with the music enough, you start to understand what she's doing, which is she's telling the story of girlhood into womanhood, the New York Times'Taffy brodesser Ackner, who covers Swift, said on the daily podcast last month. In her songs, I see it. I see her in real time, cataloging the experiences of what it means to grow up. Swift has been writing songs at a high level since she was a preteen, when she was not all that much older than my daughter. And unlike many artists who either rely on songwriters or else favor generalities in an effort to garner broader appeal, Swift leans into specificity. In its piece explaining why time picked Swift as person of the year, the magazine's editor in chief, Sam Jacobs, wrote, she held up a mirror to her own life, helping people better see themselves. So beyond all of Swift's admirable attributes, it's Swift's willingness to be emotionally vulnerable that endears her to so many. That ability is reflected in some of her earliest days as a songwriter. For instance, when Swift was still living in Pennsylvania, she asked some friends to go to the mall. When the friends all told Swift they were too busy, her mother, Andrea, volunteered to take her. But once at the mall, they ran into the same friends who said they were too busy. Swift's mother immediately came to her defense and drove her to a different mall, but this was a wound, Brodesser Ackner, a self proclaimed Swifty who hosted a Taylor Swift themed 48th birthday party, explained on the daily. As she does, Swift later wrote a song about the mall experience. But instead of focusing the lyrics solely on the betrayal, Swift wrote about how much she appreciated her mother. I don't know who I'm going to talk to now at school, but I know I'm laughing on the car ride home with you go the lyrics of the best day. This kind of candor and strength has continued throughout Swift's career, whether she's writing about a crush or about being crushed under the weight of career dips. When I hear the mall story, I first smile at the fact that my daughter and wife are bonding over songs written by an artist who writes about her relationship with her own mother. But I also think about the universality of the rejection and feel in Swift's uncertainty the same self doubt that crept in every time I was rejected in career pursuits or in romance. Swift's experiences aren't ours, but our feelings are hers, says Brodesser Acner. 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 these are the full range of a woman's experience, of any person's experience, and she channeled it. My daughter, like any kid, has already faced difficulty. She struggled to be part of a soccer team. She's had friends tell her they don't want to play. There's comfort in a superstar like Swift writing about similar pain.
Maybe this is the real Taylor Swift effect that she gives people, many of them women, particularly girls, who have been conditioned to accept dismissal, gaslighting and mistreatment from a society that treats their emotions as inconsequential permission to believe that their interior lives matter. Sam Lansky wrote in Time that for your heart to break is a valid wound and know you're not crazy for being upset about it or for wanting your story to be told. In the Times profile, Swift told Lansky her response when anything bad happens in life is to persist. Keep making things, keep making art, she said. Keep writing lyrics that explore life's real vulnerabilities, heartaches and joys. So as my daughter continues to navigate this complex, confusing and sometimes hurtful world, I hope she keeps dancing. I hope she keeps singing Taylor Swift songs at the top of her lungs, even if she's still figuring out the right words.
[00:11:15] Speaker A: You're listening to the weighing in podcast with columnist Andrew Wait.
[00:11:29] Speaker B: And now it's time for reader response.
Last episode was about an update on the migrants and asylum seekers who've come to Rotterdam. There's some 230 people living in the super eight motel in Rotterdam, and in July, when the bus loads arrived, there was a lot of outrage, uproar, frustration. People were kind of saying that they were worried that their town was going to be overrun with migrants, and it was a lot of fear mongering, really. So at year's end, I wanted to write a piece, essentially checking in on the situation. What we found is that the students, there's some 70 students who are from the migrant community who are now part of the Mohanisan Central school district. They've integrated pretty seamlessly into the school district and fears about them being criminals just have not come to fruition. So I wrote an update and a column basically saying that the fears weren't warranted. So that generated some response. So here's some of what I got. Here's from Doug in Amsterdam. Read your article today. I'm for legal controlled vetted immigration. You left out what happened to the poor american New York state families that were evicted, thrown out of their home in a very short period, and forced to find affordable, close housing in schools. That's the rub with me. Open borders and sanctuary cities are coming home to roost. This is just the start of many issues that will be multiplied. Enjoy your articles. And then for kind of a different side, Todd from Rotterdam wrote, I love how you circled back to the super eight asylum seekers to show that all the outrage directed at them was nonsense. So that's what I've got for this week. Thanks to Aaron Palaya, who handles marketing for this podcast, and Jim Gilbert, who is a magician on the production side. I'm Andrew Waite. Take.
