A (psychology) love letter to Taylor Swift…

It is 7:15am and my taxi is weaving in and out of chaotic rush hour in Yogyakarta, a small cultural region in central Java, Indonesia. The journey is short but intense, and outside the car window I see bikes precariously balancing cages of birds, pedestrians nipping out in front of buses, and pay-by-the-hour motorcycles bumbling along the street. "Maybe some music?", smiles the Indonesian undergraduate student who has been assigned to accompany me and my colleague/friend on the journey. "Sure!" I say, before trying to think of an appropriate song suggestion for pre-8am that will unite the car and make me sound interesting and relatable. I give up and instead resort to type: "Taylor Swift?"

Twenty minutes later, we have arrived at the university campus and I have spent the whole journey watching the traffic, happily mouthing along to Taylor and tapping my foot against the seat. I soon realise that everyone in the car is doing the same. At the end of the day, we agree on another dose of Taylor on the drive back to the hotel. This time, pushing my luck a bit more, I request All Too Well (Extended 10 Minute Version). It sees us all the way to our destination. I can hear us all humming the words under our breath.

I am in Indonesia to co-host a workshop about the future of psychology undergraduate education, with a colleague and collaborators in the country. Earlier in the week, I gave a guest lecture to the international cohort of another Indonesian university and used Taylor Swift as a case study to explain the concept of social comparison. I explained the social consequences and strategies for dealing with different types of comparison, using Taylor as an example of a particularly successful target of comparison. At the end of the lecture, I invited questions. A hand immediately shoots up. "Dr Pownall! Did you get tickets to Taylor's Eras Tour?!". [I did not.] We laugh and compare notes on our favourite songs, before I promptly move us back on topic and continue with the academic Q&A.

It is in these moments that I realise the power of the shared language that comes with these various Swift-isms. And, importantly, it occurs to me how deeply psychological this all is. I famously start every one of my lectures on my Feminist Social Psychology undergraduate module at the University of Leeds with Taylor Swift on YouTube, in an effort to hype myself up to teach and create a sense of familiarity for students. I find it sets the tone and creates a fun, feminist vibe to the lecture theatre. After my time in Indonesia, it impresses and surprises me how universal this experience is.

When Taylor Swift's last re-recorded album, Speak Now (Taylor's Version) was released, a viral tweet marked the occasion as a "huge day for 26-year-old teenage girls". As a current self-proclaimed 26-year-old teenage girl, I think there is something significant in bringing a bit of Swiftie curiosity to how we think about psychology and how we conceptualise change and development.

The soundtrack to my life

I have always been a fan of Taylor Swift. She has been the soundtrack to the important milestones in my life. I'm the eldest of three, but I find a familiar, comforting, big-sister energy to her music. I listened to Fifteen on my 15th birthday, I danced to 22 on my 22nd. When I moved to university, I unsuccessfully fought back tears at her song Never Grow Up ("and here I am in my new apartment in a big city, they just dropped me off"). Three years later, when I drove home with a boot full of boxes and filled-up notebooks after finishing my degree, I belted Long Live all the way home ("long live the walls we crashed through, I had the time of my life with you"). When I had my first 16-year-old heart break, I curled up to listen to Dear John on my iPod Touch ("maybe it's me and my blind optimism to blame") and when I fell in love, Paper Rings shot to the top of my Spotify most listened ("I like shiny things but I'd marry you with paper rings").

But it's not just me. Suffice to say, Taylor Swift is having a bit of a global moment now. Her ongoing Eras Tour, which so far has involved 68 shows in the US before coming to Europe next year, is already the highest grossing tour of all time. She is among the Top 10 best-selling artists globally and has had the most number-one albums of any woman artist ever. She's breaking endless records and making endless headlines with her "Swiftomania", heightened, in part, by the TikTok-ification of her Eras Tour.

The Eras Tour is fascinating, psychologically speaking. The setlist involves three solid hours of non-stop Taylor. There are internet threads of fans discussing in detail their strategies for when to schedule bathroom breaks to avoid missing the big hits. It is a cultural phenomenon. Fans carefully curate niche song-themed outfits and turn up with homemade friendship bracelets to swap with strangers in the crowd. Droves of women arrive to the tour with glitter in their hair and diamantes hot-glue-gunned to their boots and the number 13 Sharpie-d on the back of their hand (a throwback to Taylor's lucky number in her early country music days).

Her popularity might be unsurprising to some. Her now-famous process of re-recording of her old albums to regain copyright rights fuelled a renewed media energy and interest in her discography. On the surface, her appeal makes sense. Taylor Swift is a pretty White woman who writes poppy, cute songs for the mass market and sells the kind of music that people are happy to add to their Spotify shuffle. But, to me, what Taylor Swift is doing with her music is much more profound than this. Granted, she does have some certified bangers that dodgy DJs like to wheel out at wedding dance floors (Shake it Off, I'm looking at you). But most of her songs do something fundamentally different to this.

A work-in-progress person

To me, Taylor Swift is popular because she articulates what it looks and feels like to be an imperfect, trying-my-best, work-in-progress of a person. There is an undercurrent to her songs that is fundamentally all about navigating the weird and complex and messy world of growing up. And, importantly, her view of growing up extends beyond where most artists (and, indeed, most psychologists) stop. This is why I think she's doing something interesting, psychology-wise.

There are plenty of songs in Taylor Swift's repertoire that are explicitly about childhood, like The Best Day ("I'm five years old, it's getting cold, I've got my big coat on") and Mary's Song ("I was seven and you were nine, I looked at you like the stars that shine"). But most of her songs capture the weird in-between-ness that happens after childhood and after adolescence. The growing up that happens after the books and articles about the formative years have dried up and you're on your own, left to figure the rest of it all out.

Taylor sings about what is it like to be perceived as immature and misunderstood (like in Cardigan; "when you are young they assume you know nothing"). She sings about feeling yourself change and morph in adulthood (in August; "back when we were still changing for the better. Wanting was enough. For me it was enough". She sings about feeling your adolescence slip away (Would've Could've Should've; "give me back my girlhood, it was mine first"). She sings about parallel lives and yearning for the lives that you can't live (The 1; "you know the greatest films of all time were never made").

Attending to liminality

I think there's a useful lesson here for us, as psychologists. We are very good as a discipline at paying close attention to the important developmental pinch-points in people's lives. We spend a lot of time and funding and effort to understanding childhood and late adulthood, in an attempt to pinpoint how things like cognition and social identity and experiences of the world morph and develop during this time. We are maybe less good, however, at attending to liminality. To the stages of life where there are no huge milestones. When the first steps and first words and 21st birthdays have passed. When we're fully formed, living, breathing people who aren't quite young enough to be hitting developmental milestones anymore, but not quite old enough to be declining. The liminal, in-between bits are perhaps the most interesting parts of life and Taylor Swift has forged a career celebrating these moments.

That is, if Taylor's music tells us anything, it's that there is value in attending psychologically to the time in life that have are, on the surface, developmentally 'uninteresting'. There is something profound in acknowledging how identity and relationships and self-expression all shift rapidly throughout our lives. I think Taylor invites a childlike curiosity to these often-neglected parts of human experience.

The advent of Taylor Swift's popularity invites a reflection on people's need to have their inner I-don't-know-what-I'm-doing teenager to be nurtured. I think we would have a better, more nuanced view of constructs like imposterism, self-concept, and belonging if we listen to what the popularity of Taylor Swift is trying to tell us. I am aware that one day there will come a time, possibly in the not-too-distant future, where my Taylor references become tragically outdated and undergraduates roll their eyes at another Elder Millennial wheeling out the same pop culture reference. But until then, there is clearly a universal need to be heard in a way that Taylor's music allows people to be heard. And as she sings in a recent song that broke my heart, before putting it back together again: "You're on your own, kid. You always have been".