Dear Taylor,
I've always been a highly reflective person. Not in the sense that I have any talent writing songs, but in that I like to look on each moment in my day, each day in my life, etc. and try to see how something, anything really, is part of the bigger picture that shapes who I am. One of the ways I tend to do this is through photographs; I took many during my years in high school and college to capture moments I thought I would want to remember forever...the football games, the sorority mixers, the spring break trips, etc. But more recently I have come to realize that as much as I love photographing the events of my life, I have become significantly happier with the life I have built that exists in the photographs of my mind. Like a scrapbook of many elements, I am taken back to the days of my youth with the smell of a bonfire, the sight of my childhood street, the sound of crickets chirping when I wake up in the morning, and so on and so forth. I often marvel at the fact that exposure to even the slightest of one of the senses takes me back to these photographs in my mind.
I guess maybe I should circle back to the point. You see, a few months ago (the date was April 25 to be exact), a friend's sister posted on Twitter that she could remember where she was and what she was doing each time a different "era" began. A few months later (it was around July 7 I believe), I was talking with another friend when it came up just how lucky we felt to have had the opportunity to grow up with such incredible music. And how, just as the eras came and went with their respective tastes and reputations (come on, I had to!), so too did we grow up within and between them, capturing our own memories and milestones along the way.
I was 12 years old when I heard Tim McGraw for the first time on the radio. My dad had come from work, and we were getting ready for dinner when he announced he heard a "terrific new country artist" on the radio and that I "would absolutely love her" because she was "not much older than [me]." I don't remember the exact duration between that conversation and the time I heard that song, but I remember I was in the car with my dad going to school when it came on the radio. It was sometime in October of my 7th grade year; I was wearing my blue oxford button-down uniform top and a khaki skirt. It was somewhere in the middle of the commute because we were in the part before the expressway where the road was lined with dozens of trees. I was indifferent at the time - pop music was all the rage at that time - and little did I know the impact that teenage would have on my life years down the road.
I was 13 when Taylor Swift Deluxe came out. Just the day before, I had been informed I was 1 of 6 girls cut from the field of 18 to make the middle school competitive dance team. I heard The Outside and A Place In This World and immediately felt understood. I had connected with an artist on a personal level for the first time. It was a Friday in October, I was home from school for a 3-day weekend.
I was a freshman in high school when Fearless the album came out. My mom and I had preordered it through Taylor Nation, at a time when you could preorder the CDs for their arrival the day of the album release. We were driving across town so I could get a haircut when Fifteen came on. I kid you not, for as much as I felt "connected" to an artist before, it took all of half a lyric "it's your freshman year..." for me to realize it was something more than a fandom. It was something raw and real, and my high school anthem was born on that November day.
Speak Now was the first album I listened to in its entirety when I got my driver's license and first car. While the place I grew up does not necessarily get all that cold, I can still remember to this day hearing Back to December every time I drove home from school that winter.
Red came at a time when I was feeling-for lack of a better word-red. I was a freshman in college, and my first semester experience up until that point had basically been defined by a hurricane and a roommate situation that left me living alone in a 2-person dorm while looking for someone new to share the space with. I remember thinking Begin Again was the best song I had ever heard, and it was the first song that really pulled me out of a funk that had me hating everything around me. It was raining that day, and I played it on repeat for the entire day, doing everything from working out to studying to falling asleep.
1989 I remember being the first era that my friends started publicly sharing their like of this music. Shake It Off came out the week I helped work new student orientation, and the video was the first thing I remember watching in my new apartment. It was the first album I felt like an adult fan...I was an upperclassman in college, living with roommates "off campus" and primarily listened to in the car. I also remember feeling like a "fake fan" for not being able to attend the concert tour because I had to make adult/life decisions like studying abroad for the summer and prioritizing things like student organizations and GRE prep.
Look What You Made Me Do came out the Friday before I started graduate school, and for the first time in what felt like my whole life it seemed I knew less than everyone else what was going on in the universe. My reactions went from confused to intrigued to excited, and I remember thinking it would be the perfect song for a workout playlist. It ended up on the final cut of the playlist I listened to in my first ~marathon~ a mere 4 and a half months later.
It probably seems I am rambling at this point, and if there's one thing you should know about me as a blogger it's that I am absolutely terrible at conclusions. So to make up for that, I will leave you with this. Music tells many different stories. There is the story that inspired the artist to write the song. There is the story that went into writing the song. There is the story the listener perceives, the critics contemplate, the general public summarize. But without each of us, and our little life experiences (like wearing a uniform on the way to 7th grade or walking in a rainstorm to Ed Psych class), there would not be the million stories that music has allowed us to live and tell as the listeners for whom the music served as the soundtrack to our lives.
Long live the magic we made and bring on all the pretenders. One day we will be remembered.
LoveLoveLove,
Hannah
