Why Does Taylor Swift Matter?
Taylor Swift 101, Part 1
September 30, 2025
Episode Description
Taylor Swift is about to take over the world again with her highly anticipated release of TS12: The Life of a Showgirl. But how did she get here, how did we get here, and why does she even matter?
How did a young girl from Pennsylvania become the most significant, prolific storyteller of our time? Why does she captivate us to the point of madness, why does her music resonate so deeply, and how do her stories reflect our own stories?
In the first episode of the Taylor Swift 101 series, your Swiftie English teacher dives into 5 major reasons why Taylor really matters, and the answers might not be what you think.
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Episode Transcript
Why Does Taylor Swift Matter?
[00:00:00] It’s 2006 and Taylor Swift is pretty much a nobody in the cultural zeitgeist. Her first album wouldn’t drop until October of that year. Her songs aren’t on the radio yet. Her record isn’t on the shelves yet, and Taylor Swift only really matters to Taylor Swift and her family and friends and big machine records.
She said on her MySpace page, if you start a conversation about Law and order, SVU or CSI, with me, we will be talking for at least an hour. I consider myself an expert on those two things, only those two things
she didn’t consider herself to be an expert on anything but Olivia Benson, and at that point she definitely didn’t consider herself an expert songwriter. But here we are now, almost 20 years later, and we are studying her songwriting like it is a sacred text descendant from the heavens. So how did we get here?
You and me and millions of other fans have become united by one thing, Taylor [00:01:00] songwriting. She isn’t just a superstar in the songwriting world either. She’s one of the defining figures of our entire generation.
So how did she get here and how did we get here? Why is Taylor Swift one of the most important and influential artists of our generation? And why does she really matter? Why are we studying Taylor songwriting and not Pinks or Christina Aguilera or Kelly Clarksons or even Beyonce’s? I am Jen. I’m a writer and a former English teacher, and I have been writing about and dissecting Taylor Swift’s work on my website, swiftly s stories.com. I’ve had so many readers reach out and ask me to start a YouTube channel, and though I’m terrified of public speaking. I know, I know I was a teacher, but middle school students are a lot easier to talk to than strangers on the internet.
But I’ve decided to dive in headfirst fearless. But with this topic as massive as Taylor Swift’s career, where do we even start? [00:02:00] I wanna start with the why. Why is Taylor’s work important? Why is it so impactful, and why is it worthy of a million and a half deep dives? So in my very first video in Taylor Swift 1 0 1, we’re gonna answer this question together.
Why does Taylor Swift matter?
So let’s dive in.
Welcome to swiftly sung Stories where we unpack the Taylor Swift Universe one era album and lyric at a time. Think of it like English class, but it’s all Taylor Swift and none of the boring stuff. I’m Jen, your Swiftie English teacher and class is in session, so come on in and meet me in the margins.
Just a quick note before we get started. All of my lessons in the Taylor Swift 1 0 1 series are available in text version on my website, linked in the show notes where you can also find my lyrical analysis of over 250 songs, lyric quizzes, close readings of all of Taylor’s prologues and so much more.
So go and check that out. If you really just wanna geek out about Taylor Swift with me, [00:03:00] please like and subscribe wherever you’re seeing or hearing this. Okay. Shameless self-promotion over. Why does Taylor matter?
I can hear all the swifties out there screaming. She Matters because she has the bestselling albums of all time, or The Eras Tour broke every tour record ever. And Sure. When we talk about Taylor Swift, it’s easy to list the obvious reasons she’s everywhere.
And why she’s important: the sold out stadiums, their record breaking album sales, the massive and very passionate fandom. But when we talk about all that stuff, we’re talking about fame and monetary success. Of course, those things are important because those are the typical ways that we measure success in our modern society.
I. But I propose that Taylor matters for way more than just her popularity. She wouldn’t have her popularity if not for this one thing that she does better than everyone else, and that is her storytelling.
Bringing [00:04:00] me to my first reason that Taylor Swift matters, she’s a master storyteller. And she has, in my opinion, changed the game of songwriting forever. But to understand why Taylor’s entrance on the scene made such a big impact, we have to understand where the music industry was during this era and really what it lacked.
Taylor came on the music scene at a time where music and lyrics weren’t exactly telling relatable tales. When her first album hit the shelves in 2006, 2007, the pop charts were dominated by songs like Daniel Powder’s Bad Day and Shakira’s Hips Don’t Lie. You all know that one: “I’m on tonight. You know, my hips don’t lie, and I’m starting to feel it’s right.”
It’s a catchy song and it’s relatable. Is it going out having fun hooking up song? But is it emotionally resonant? No, it’s not. And you all remember a bad day: “because you had a bad day. You’re taking one down, you sing a sad song just to [00:05:00] turn it around.” Should be a really relatable song, right? We all have bad days all the time.
But this person that the song is written for is having a bad day, and we don’t get to know why. We don’t get to hear the story of how they got there. It’s written to be universal, but there’s no emotion behind it because we don’t get any kind of story or backstory. These 2006 pop songs are very catchy, but they’re lacking connection.
They’re lacking storytelling. Now, Taylor didn’t begin on the pop scene. She debuted as a country singer, but the country genre, which is usually known for its storytelling, was similarly kind of bleak in the early to mid aughts.
The chart toppers that year included songs like Rascal Flats, my Wish, and Carrie Underwood’s, Jesus, take the Wheel.
Carrie Underwood sang, “she saw both their lives flash before her eyes. She didn’t even have time to cry. She was so scared. She threw her hands up in the air,” and then you [00:06:00] know the rest, “Jesus take the wheel”.
The song does tell a story. A woman gets into a bad car wreck on an icy road. She relinqueshes control and lets ‘”Jesus take the wheel.” But even though we get the full narrative of what happened, it’s not relatable unless, number one, you’ve been in a near death experience. Or number two, you’re Christian. Not exactly universally relatable.
The other hit Country song of 2006, my Wish doesn’t give us a narrative at all: ” And if one door opens to another door closed, I hope you keep on walking until you find the window.”
The song has a relatable sentiment. They’re wishing someone well, but since we never get to hear the story behind it, it falls kind of flat. Who do they wish will “have all that You want it to?” Why are they wishing this person the best right now? Is this person in a tough spot? Did someone die? Did they get [00:07:00] divorced?
What happened? We never get to know. So unless you’re playing it for a wedding or a graduation where the story is already implied, it just feels kind of empty. There’s nothing wrong with any of these songs. Please don’t get me wrong. I am not bashing these artists. But to see why Taylor matters, we have to look at the context in which she debuted and how she brought something different to the table.
She didn’t just fall out of a coconut tree. The industry wasn’t cranking out emotionally relatable music during this time. It was pushing sexy performers, boy bands, and soulless country tracks. The mainstream music industry lacked a voice for young people during this era, and especially, especially young women
as a woman growing up in this era, well, I was in grad school at the time, so kind of grown, kind of not. But I can tell you firsthand that the pop music scene was pretty bleak. I leaned really far into indie an alternative at the time because the pop scene was just really [00:08:00] unfulfilling. Why? Because mainstream music wasn’t telling stories.
Humans are hardwired to create narratives and storytelling is how we understand ourselves and how we understand the world around us. Storytelling is how we connect emotionally to one another. So used in songwriting, it’s an incredibly powerful tool.
So when Taylor came on the scene, she filled a huge gap in the market because she was using storytelling when other people weren’t. She debuted in the country genre, but quickly gained traction in mainstream pop, and it’s pretty easy to see that this is because she was telling stories that people wanted and needed to hear in mainstream country and pop emotionally relatable.
Songwriting wasn’t the norm, and performers were mostly marketed on sex appeal alone. With Taylor, we got more substance. I. And we glommed onto her because she wasn’t just narrating her own stories, she was telling our own stories. [00:09:00] Her first single Tim McGraw told the story of the nostalgia of First Love and the pain of growing up
her second hit. Our song narrated the thrill of Young love inside the relatable everyday world of a teenager. Um, teardrops on my guitar, told the story of unrequited love and the heartbreak you feel when your crush doesn’t like you back.
Young fans of every genre latched onto these stories because Taylor wasn’t just singing about her own life. She was kind of singing about all of our lives, and we didn’t have that voice elsewhere. Today, if you take a look at the chart topping pop songs, you’ll mostly see songs that tell a story. Artists these days have taken inspiration from Taylor and brought stories into their lyrics because as we’ve seen with Taylor’s success, storytelling matters and storytelling sells because it fulfills our human need to connect and make sense of our emotions.
Reason number two, she matters. Taylor made us part of the story. The best stories, the ones that really resonate or [00:10:00] inspire or make us feel are ones that affect our lives in some way. Say your best friend tells you a crazy breakup story of two people that you kind of know. It’s interesting to hear, but it doesn’t affect your life, so you take note of it and move on.
But what if the same friend comes to you? Bawling our eyes out about her girlfriend breaking up with her in a public super embarrassing way. The story will immediately affect you. You’ll feel her pain and it becomes your pain. You’ll comfort her. You’ll protect her. You’ll wanna berate her ex-girlfriend.
The story will stay with you because you know the storyteller and you feel the emotions of this story.
Even though we don’t know her personally, she is not our best friend. This is the type of storytelling Taylor does. She makes us feel as if we know her and like she’s writing about her own lives. She does this in a really clever and unique way. She makes us part of the story, and she [00:11:00] did it from the very beginning of her career.
Taylor made one tiny decision in creating her debut album that would change. Everything. She spelled out secret messages in the liner notes. She left us Easter eggs right from the start. The secret message in picture to burn was “Date nice boys.” In teardrops on my guitar, it was, “he will never know,” and my favorite: in should’ve said no, it was “Sam, Sam, Sam, Sam, Sam, Sam,” spelling out the name of the person who cheated on her. This both added an air of mystery and made us curious, not just about the stories, but about the storyteller. It’s in our DNA to piece together narratives to make a cohesive story. And that’s exactly what the secret messages allowed us to do.
Eagle eyed fans could decode these messages to find out what was really going on behind her lyrics and in her life. Who was the song really about what happened to make her write it. [00:12:00] This small little mystery may have seemed inconsequential at the time, but its impact was huge.
It made her stories transcend songwriting, and they came alive in the real world in those CD booklets. Suddenly, Taylor wasn’t just telling stories about people we don’t know. She was telling us stories about herself and her private life, and made us feel like we really knew her.
This made her fandom an interactive game. It wasn’t just, here’s my music. I hope you like it. It was, here’s my music and I left you a puzzle. If you figure it out, you’ll get to know more about me and more about these songs.
It made us feel like we knew her and therefore made her lyrical stories resonate in our own lives. Then enter the world of social media, and we had more access to our favorite artists than ever before, which made them feel, again, more like our friends than our idols. This was especially true for Taylor and her fan [00:13:00] base.
We felt like we really knew her because she wrote about what she was going through. We felt that connection. I. She became a part of our lives pretty much instantly, and her stories affected us as if they were told by our best friend. What started in secret messages has grown into the world’s biggest Easter egg hunt.
Today. Taylor has one of the largest and most dedicated, some might say, crazed fan bases in the world, and her clues have become much more cryptic, but the result is the same. It connects us to these stories. Taylor tells us stories we wanna hear and tells them in a way that makes her stories our own. Her art doesn’t just live on a record or inside a streaming app.
It lives inside our lives. And that’s because we have become part of the story. My very favorite example of this is You’re on your own kid, which began with this simple lyric: “Make the friendship bracelets, take the moment and taste it.” It’s [00:14:00] such a relatable line. We should savor these moments while we’re living in them.
But then all of a sudden, the friendship bracelets jumped out of the lyrics and came alive. We were all making friendship bracelets together, trading them, posting them, collecting them. The lyrics, transcended the music and became a part of our story, a part of our lives.
And in wearing and trading those friendship bracelets, we were reminded over and over again, “Take the moment and taste it.” Remember this time in your life because you’ll never get it back. It’s a physical manifestation of Taylor’s lyrical stories. She has allowed us not only to see ourselves in her stories, but to become part of her story.
She is a part of our lives in a way that no other artist has ever been. And from here on out, I can guarantee every pop artist will try to recreate the Swiftie effect. I don’t know whether they will achieve it or not, but if they can make their stories, our own stories, they just might.
Reason number three, she’s not [00:15:00] just a songwriter, she’s a writer, writer. This reason is my favorite, and it’s not just because I’m a writer myself. This is what we’re gonna cover for the majority of Taylor Swift 1 0 1. But first I wanna play a little game. I’m gonna give you three quotes and I want you to tell me which one was written by Ms.
Taylor. Allison Swift,
number one. “And so being young and dipped in folly, I fell in love with melancholy”
number two. “A dreamer, I walked enchanted and nothing held me back.”
And number three, “I tapped on your window, on your darkest night, the shape of you was jagged and weak.” now hardcore Swifties will already know this, but just look at it on the surface, it’s pretty hard to tell, right? They all sound literary. They all sound a bit Victorian and they all have great imagery and metaphors. So which one is it? If you pick number three, you are correct. Those are the opening lines of Renegade by Big Red Machine, written by Taylor Swift and Aaron Desser.
[00:16:00] The first two quotes are by the other great writers, Edgar Allan Poe and Daphne de Maurier, but it’s pretty convincing, right? The fact that Taylor’s lyrics can sit alongside Poe and Du Maurier and hold their own. That isn’t just a coincidence.
In fact, it’s because she’s not just writing songs, she’s writing literature. She’s writing poetry. She’s writing stories. She may be a singer and a performer, but she’s a writer first and foremost, and if it weren’t for her writing, she would absolutely not be where she is today. Her lyrics use the same techniques that you’d find in novels and poetry, literary devices like imagery, metaphor, symbolism, point of view, even narrative structure.
In fact, one of the reasons her music connects so deeply is because it reads like a story or a poem or a three act play. Just told over a beat with a melody. Her albums, much like [00:17:00] novels and plays, come with a prologue, and the tortured poets department even has two prologue poems and an epilogue poem.
She is a writer. Now, she’s absolutely not the first artist to write lyrics that read like literature. Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Patty Smith, all very literary songwriters. But in my opinion, Taylor is the first artist to really bring this type of songwriting into mainstream pop music. She’s worthy of this huge amount of study and dissection because she really is doing it differently than her predecessors.
She’s put the writing and the lyrics first and the rest last. Now in the rest of the videos in this series, we’re gonna break down each of the literary techniques that Taylor uses including narrative structure, imagery, metaphor, symbolism, point of view, character development, motifs, and themes. But when you stack all of these elements together, what you get isn’t just a catchy song. You get incredible writing that can stand [00:18:00] on its own. Taylor songs aren’t just little pop ditties that float in and out of the zeitgeist. Her writing, just like the work of Poe and Du Maurier lasts and it lasts because her focus has always been on her writing, on her words, on her stories, and that’s also why we feel so seen in her lyrics.
That’s why her songs last she matures because she flipped the focus of pop music from writing catchy beats to writing relatable lyrics and relatable stories.
Reason number four is her evolution. Is this girl the same as this girl? And is this girl the same as this girl? For those of you listening to the audio only version, I just showed photos of Kid Taylor and Grownup Taylor, and photos of Young me versus grownup me. Are we the same person when we grow up that we were when we were little? Kind of, but kind of not. And [00:19:00] one of the biggest reasons Taylor Swift matters and keeps on mattering is because she evolves, and I don’t just mean switching from country to indie folk to whatever genre she’s feeling next week. I mean real meaningful growth as a writer and as a human and as an artist.
Yes, her chameleon marketing tactics are brilliant, and they’ll be studied in business schools for decades. But for fans, her evolution hits on a much deeper level. Remember, in reason number two, I said she made her stories our own. This is the same thing. Her growth is our own. Her growth is our growth, and her change is our change.
We didn’t just stick around because she kept reinventing her sound or reinventing her looks or her songwriting style. We stuck around because she kept growing and we grew right along with her. We watched her make mistakes and try new things, but this [00:20:00] evolution matters for a few big reasons. First, it reflects real life. We are evolving too, all the time. Watching Taylor grow in maturity, in confidence in her talent. This makes her music feel like a mirror.
It keeps her storytelling deeply relatable. At every stage of our lives, no matter where you’re at, there is an album and a series of songs that narrate exactly what you’re going through in Taylor’s catalog.
But second, her evolution keeps things interesting with every step. She surprises us just when we think we know what’s coming next. She pops up and gives us folklore or reputation or midnights. She’s always moving forward, but her relatability and the emotions that she writes about will always be there to meet us wherever we’re at.
The core of her storytelling always remains the same. And we can’t wait to see what stories she tells next.
And finally, her constant shape [00:21:00] shifting opens the door for more and more of us to connect. Each shift in sound or style or theme brings new listeners into the fold from country loving teens who are listening to debut or indie vibe. Millennials with folklore on repeat or literary-minded grownups dissecting the tortured poets department.
Taylor’s fan base is so massive because her constant evolution makes space for all of us and welcomes more and more of us. With each shift, there really is something for everyone, which is incredibly, incredibly rare to come from just one artist. But her evolutions in her eras aren’t just surface level either.
Each new era reflects this like deepening of her craft of this new layer in her storytelling. And just like in your life, a series of events have occurred that landed you where you are today. With Taylor’s work, we can see the exact steps that she’s [00:22:00] taken to get where she is and the lessons that she learned along the way.
So whether you first met her in high school with fearless or connected later through her reflections on grief and identity, it’s the journey, the entire journey that gives us permission to do the same, to change, and to grow and to become new versions of ourselves. We can look to the past to learn, but we don’t need to live there.
And Taylor’s evolution as an artist and all of the art that she’s made along the way becomes this sort of shared timeline. It’s a way of marking the chapters in her own lives, through hers and her music.
Finally, reason number five, Taylor Swift matters. She is a damn cultural force. Let’s do a quick recap of all of the reasons I’ve covered so far.
She is a storytelling savant. She’s made us her audience, part of her stories, she’s put the writing back into songwriting and she’s constantly [00:23:00] evolving. And the final reason is sort of the sum of all of these, and that equals. She’s a cultural force. She matters because she has a huge impact, not only on the economy, but on our entire culture as a whole.
She’s not only writing hit songs, she is rewriting what it means to be an artist, what it means to be a woman, what it means to be in the public eye, and rewriting what it means to be a storyteller in the 21st century. I’d argue that the impact of her art isn’t only limited to the music industry. It isn’t even just about pop music.
It’s about power and presence. And what happens when one artist really taps into the emotional pulse of an entire generation? Her influence goes so far beyond music, beyond, uh, charts and tick sales and fashion. She’s changed how we think about vulnerability. Change how we think about community and ownership and female identity and empowerment. [00:24:00] So let’s break down this reason a little bit more into some sub-reasons here. What I think are four key ways that Taylor Swift’s cultural impact goes so far beyond music.
Number one, she’s made vulnerability powerful again. From the moment she first stepped on the scene, she was incredibly, incredibly vulnerable and should have said no. She told us a story about a boy who cheated on her, and then she hid his name in the liner notes, which is number one iconic. But number two is she brought this new emotional aspect into music that didn’t really exist in pop culture at the time.
She put raw feelings back out there. And I’d argue that in the decades since she’s encouraged other artists to do the same. The content of songwriting these days is much, much more emotionally honest and candid than it has ever been. And I think a lot of that is due to Taylor making this blueprint for artists to share vulnerability and being successful, sharing [00:25:00] vulnerability.
And second, she’s built a community, not just a fan base. She has achieved this level of community building and music that I can only compare to one other artist. And that is the Grateful Dead Swifties are what Deadheads used to be. And I say that as a woman who has a dancing bear tattoo.
But she did this without the advantage of the free love hippie movement. She did it in an age of social media where we have less and less togetherness and community than we ever have before. She started telling stories. She made those stories universal but personal and invited her fans to connect not only with her, but with one another.
She’s built an entire universe. That invites us to participate and actively fosters this community, not only with her songs, but with every aspect of her career.
We aren’t just listening to music. We’re decoding and [00:26:00] theorizing and building friendships. Swifties don’t just belong to a fandom. We belong to each other. And Taylor is the reason that we have found community, and that’s a powerful thing. And third, she’s redefining the music industry. She has reshaped the rules of the game.
They will never be the same again. She fought for artist rights with Apple way back in her reputation era. Then she made massive headlines, rerecording her stolen albums, then ended up buying back all of her music, which by the way, isn’t the norm in the music industry at all to even own your own art. She challenged traditional album rollouts, flipping between surprise drops and elaborate clue filled campaigns that go on for months, both of them equally successful.
She’s made albums with 19, 20, even 30 songs that still top the charts. And in changing on the rules, she has shown that mystery and meaning and storytelling matter just as much [00:27:00] as the music and maybe even more so. And finally, she has erased the expiration date. For women, for decades, women and pop were expected to burn bright and then burn out.
They’d have a good three or four albums then be shuffled off the stage and replaced by someone younger and hotter. But Taylor totally flipped that script. She is thriving in her thirties. She’s still reinventing herself. She’s still topping the charts, and in doing so, she’s proving that talent doesn’t come with a time limit.
And that evolution isn’t the end of a career. It is the career. She’s been telling us the story of her life all along. And we still wanna hear more. The story doesn’t just end when you hit 35 or 40 or 45. You don’t have to fade out into obscurity. You’re just like a middle aged mom doesn’t have to start wearing mom jeans and chop off her hair because she has some crow’s feet.
I have a feeling, and I hope that I’m [00:28:00] right. The Taylor’s career will now set the tone for how we treat women as they age, not as an afterthought, but as smarter worldlier, and more powerful versions of ourselves, because that’s exactly what we are. We don’t grow old, we grow up. I hope you found this content insightful, and if you did, you’re gonna love what’s coming next.
We’ll be diving even deeper into Taylor’s writing techniques and. What makes her one of the greatest storytellers of our time. So if you haven’t already, please hit subscribe so you don’t miss the next chapter of swiftly sung stories.
And just a reminder, I have all of this content on my website, swiftly sung stories.com, that’s linked in the show notes. But before I go, I wanna hear from you. Why does Taylor Swift matter to you?
When did you find her? How have you connected with her music and how have you grown alongside her? That is the most important part of all of this is what she means to you, [00:29:00] not what she means to me, not what she means to all the Swifties, what she means to you. Drop it in the comments. I would love to hear from you.
