Taylor Swift: The Genuine Mastermind
“I sew, too! I also bake with sourdough! And I’ve been known to say “How lucky am I?” a lot in the last few months. So, are Taylor Swift and I basically the same person?”
Those were some of my thoughts while I watched Taylor Swift’s two hour appearance on the New Heights podcast, announcing her twelfth album ‘The Life of a Showgirl’ this week. Never before did we – the Swifties – get to see her talk so much, so genuinely and so openly about her life.
Taylor Swift’s superpower is to make her fans feel seen and understood through her music. This has the effect that many fans (me included clearly) would liken themselves to her: “In an alternate universe, we would be friends” or “My toxic trait is to believe TS and I would be besties if we met”. This psychological phenomenon is known as projection: “the mental process in which an individual attributes their own internal thoughts, beliefs, emotions, experiences, and personality traits to another person or group” (Wikipedia).
Lyrical experts explain that Taylor’s songs ”reflect her own life and her own emotional conditions.” The imagery of her music is hyper-personal to her life. Think, for example, about the lines in All Too Well about the scarf she left at their sister’s place and dancing round the kitchen in the refrigerator light. Yet, the feelings she evokes so skillfully through these images are very relatable to many people.
It offers a space for people to see themselves in her music, but taken a step further it makes us think: She went through this tough breakup (Dear John); she had a casual fling (Cruel Summer); she experienced sexism (The Man) – and I do too! She sees me and I see her, so if we met in real life, we could relate to each other.
The podcast interview had the same effect. We got more than a small glimpse of Taylor herself, her love and her upcoming new music. In my group chat of a few fellow Swifties in Denmark, the consensus was just how relatable she is and how we would all be friends with her.
It was interesting to see how everyone picked up and attached to something else. While for me her sewing and baking stood out, it was the fact that she seems to be a home-body for someone else. Yet, another one related to the fact that she went down a rabbit hole for her sourdough making, which is just like them.
It shows just how big the projection surface on Taylor Swift is. But it feels like she is genuine in what she likes, how she is, what she does. So, how come that still so many people project their own interests, traits or beliefs on to her?
It is about the way she makes people feel – through her music, her words, her being. She is authentic. She is vulnerable. She is honest. She is simply herself.
The fans can feel that and it is this feeling we attach to. A feeling we want for ourselves in our own lives. And we can! We might need a role model, but we can not only attach to those feelings through her but we can embody those traits ourselves.
How often have I said something I didn’t mean, just so that the other person would think of me as ‘cool’?
How often have I not said something out of fear of rejection?
How often do I pretend to like something I actually don’t just to be included in the group I want to belong to?
It doesn’t have to be like that. I don’t have to be like that. We don’t have to be like that.
If Taylor Swift teaches us one thing, it’s that it is okay to be yourself.
(Or maybe I am projecting my own ideals onto Taylor Swift and all of this is made up… I guess we’ll never know 😀)