September 16, 2025

It’s a Love Story

My friend sent me a message on Monday: “How much is love really like driving a new Maserati down a dead end street?????” And it’s a good question, I think, one that underlines just how much Taylor Swift is a songwriter on par with Bruce Springsteen (which is saying a lot). The line that open Swift’s song “Red” from her 2012 album of the same name, and continues, “Faster than the wind, passionate as sin, ending so suddenly/ Loving him is like trying to change your mind/ Once you’re already flying through the free fall/ Like the colors in autumn, so bright, just before they lose it all.”

Fall is Taylor Swift season for me now. Okay, all the seasons are Taylor Swift seasons for me now—(Forever) winter, (Cruel) summer, spring a time of lavender hazes and purple pink skies, new beginnings. But oh, fall, the season of Evermore. Plaid shirt days, as we start the countdown back to December and also anticipate a brand new album forthcoming in just over two weeks. I can’t wait.

2025 marks ten years of me being a Swiftie, of us being a family of Swifties (with a short hiatus when Reputation came out, and we thought we didn’t like her anymore. [We were wrong]). Ten years ago this summer, my six-year-old daughter came home from day camp and told us she liked a song called “Bad Blood,” a song I’d never even heard of, although I’d heard of Taylor Swift—I heard “Love Story” for the first time on the radio in 2009 when I was driving to pick up a second-hand crib off Craigslist for her when she was a baby; I remember hearing “I Knew You Were Trouble” playing on the radio in a candy shop while I toted her in a carrier on my chest.

But Taylor Swift never really permeated my consciousness until “Bad Blood” and we bought the 1989 album, and my memories of that summer have that album as the soundtrack, my kids still so little, in carseats in the backseat. (Which reminds me of her lyric from “Cruel Summer,” “I’m drunk in the back of a car/ and I cried like a baby coming home from the bar.” And how my kids were so confused wondering why a baby was coming home from a bar, and what had happened at the bar that had upset the baby so much.) I loved it all, but especially fell in love with “Shake It Off” and the idea that my children might grow up with music in their minds saying, “It’s gonna be alright.”

Which has been what Taylor Swift has meant for me every since (Reputation era notwithstanding, although it grew on me). I remember listening to her Lover album in July 2020, and being so grateful for it as some light in the darkness. And then she went and dropped her Folklore and Evermore albums (on July 24 and December 11), both of them such gifts when everything was sad and hard, to get lost in her storytelling, characters like Dorothea; Rebecca Harkness; Marjorie; Betty, Jame, the narrator of “August” (plus that notorious gossip, Inez). Every August since, I’ve spent the month humming lines about salt air and rusty doors. And now I think of summer’s turn into fall as the “August” to “Cardigan” transition. All of it so bittersweet, beautiful and ephemeral.

Last November was a nightmare, the results of the US presidential election terrifying for reasons that have come to pass, and I feel like it’s part of why everyone dove in a bit extra when Taylor Swift arrived in Toronto for her Eras tour dates over the course of that month. There has never been a more joyous, fun and creative time to experience Toronto, which came alive with (non-tortured) poets in the streets, Swift-themed pop-ups, a street temporarily renamed Taylor Swift Way, shops, restaurants and tourist destinations getting in on the Swiftie action. (Our Swiftie family took first prize in the Royal Ontario Museum’s Taylor Swift Scavenger Hunt, WHICH WAS NOT EASY, and we continue to celebrate this as one of our proudest accomplishments.) Tay-Ronto was pretty darn obnoxious to all the haters (and the liars and the dirty dirty cheats in this world who could have been getting down to this sick beat), I realize, but for the rest of us, it was a beautiful display of community and solidarity, and so much fun. It was music in my mind saying it’s gonna be alright.

So yes, I cried when her engagement news dropped. (I don’t claim to be sane or level-headed. The last ten years have broken me into pieces.) I love her. I love her happiness. I love how my daughters love her, and I love that we can love her together.