I’m a Thirtysomething Woman And The Eras Tour Reminded Me You Don’t Have To Outgrow Fandom
They were there among the photos of the friendship bracelets and the blue jumpers, the rhinestones and the winged eyeliner; there among the shaky videos of the surprise songs and the '22' hat; there among the city-sized stadiums, bodies blinking with light-up wrist bands like a town seen from on high. There, alongside all the things we think of when we think of Taylor Swift's Eras tour, were the girls. Photos of prepubescent girls in Oxford shoes, photos of them with glitter smeared on their cheeks and racing up the venue steps in their pre-purchased merch, messy tousled hair down the back of T-shirts screen-printed with Swift’s face.
I love these pictures. I continue to 'like' every single one of them on Instagram. I think—I genuinely believe this—that these girls might be the best thing about the Eras tour.
They've also made me wonder whether this show–and Swift herself–is for me.
Like Swift, I was born—albeit much less famously—in 1989. Musically, my adolescence was a montage of what the boys around me liked: Dave Matthews Band and Red Hot Chili Peppers and basically anything that appeared on Guitar Hero. But then along came a girl—exactly my age—who sounded world-weary and wise the way I imagined I did in my own internal monologue. I was 17 the first time I heard 'Tim McGraw'; in a pop ecosystem defined by the male perspective, in a music economy where the most important currency was how desirable you were to men. Here, at last, was a singer who understood how exhausting it was to be a girl. I was hooked.
For the next two decades Swift soundtracked my life: 'Love Story' in the car with my mum (the very first time an adult told me they liked my music); 'Long Live' in my headphones while biking across campus back to my university halls, the shape of my largely unhappy college experience shifting in the wistful haze of that track; Red over and over and over, five times through as I drove across four US states to visit the long-distance boyfriend who would eventually become my husband. While my childhood dolls were put into storage, the posters taken down from the walls of my bedroom and nearly everything that 'defined' me as a girl faded in its significance, one thing remained: Taylor Swift.
As many fans will know, part of the trouble was (or is) that for much of Swift's career, it has not been cool to be a Swiftie. Her 'who, me?' award show reactions were lampooned on SNL. The talk show hosts deemed her annoying, too skinny and dating too many men. The public (or, rather, the Internet) could not decide whether she was a prodigy or a fraud, a preternatural 'good girl' or a calculating villain. It didn’t help that she dressed like (in her words) 'a 1950s housewife.' For many non-Swifties, everything the singer touches seems heavy-handed, try-hard and cringe. But most of all it did not help that her fans—by and large—were girls. And art for girls and women—even when it is statistically successful, as Swift’s was—has never been widely accepted as serious.
For many years, I learned to love her, if not in secret, exactly, then, at least, less openly. After all, I was supposed to be growing up. I spent the 1989, Reputation, and Lover eras teaching high school English. My students loved, hated, then quietly, privately adored Swift. Together, we listened to 'Wildest Dreams' while we wrote, 'Delicate' during study hall and cringed at the ridiculousness that was 'Me!' over lunch. I turned 27, 28, 29, and then all of a sudden Swift and I were both in our thirties. I soon started attending dinner parties where baby monitors blinked all evening on the kitchen counter.
Among my friends who were once die hard Swifties, they stopped playing her music for themselves, rather for their daughters. Meanwhile, I had made the choice not to have children and was beginning to discover what I already knew in theory: That society does not know what to do with a childless woman; that no one gets stuck in a kind of protracted girlhood the way a childless woman does. I began to question whether my tenancy in the house of Swift was finally up.
As Swift's name has hit headlines more than ever this year, I've begun to watch more diligently for all the things that have made me seem trapped in a childlike state of my own making. Unmanicured nails. Never having the right bag. Laughing too much. Loving Swift unironically, unacademically, without the excuse of a daughter. What is now seen as adorable in my friends' camera rolls and Reels–babies bouncing to 'Invisible String' and toddlers twirling to 'Lover'—on me is yet another sign of my forever girlhood.
The anxieties around transitioning from girl to woman is something Swift addresses in several of her songs. In one track she feels like a 'monster on the hill'. In another, she touches on how 'growing up precocious sometimes means not growing up at all'. 'They say that celebrities are frozen at the age they became famous,' she said in her hit documentary film Miss Americana. 'And I think that’s what happened to me.' On stage, I've seen her skip around in a reproduction of a dress she wore at 19. It's an image I regularly think about. Perhaps it's a giant 'f*ck you' to societal norms and the singer's defence of girlhood. Maybe it's as simple as her liking a dress she once wore as a teenager. Is that such a crime?
On the morning of her Eras concert, I woke up early in my hotel room and headed downstairs to make friendship bracelets in the lobby. While I worked I chatted with a five-year-old. I asked her if she was going to the show (she wasn’t) and if she wanted one of my bracelets (she did), all of which—I realised too late—were at best too niche and at worst inappropriate for a child: the letters of Swift's pseudonym 'Nils Sjoberg' threaded between black beads; 'Woodvale' among neutrals; 'B*TCH PACK' in key lime green. I helped her select a red, white, and blue one that said 'TAYMERICA' and then drowned myself in existential despair.
Five minutes into Swift's show, however, my cheeks ached from smiling. At times I couldn’t catch my breath. There was a lightness in my chest I recognised as something from my youth. I soon realised that the Eras tour doesn’t care whether you are young or not, a girl or not, a mum or not. It cares that you feel joy.
'The Archer' is one of my favourite songs, and, in my opinion, Swift's most self-aware track. She's since cut it from her setlist on her global tour, but she played it at my show. 'I never grew up, it's getting so old,' she crooned. Crying so hard I couldn’t sing along to the lyrics. Instead, I listened to a chorus of 65,000 like-minded fans rising behind her. For the first time in years, I didn’t feel old at all. I felt like I was exactly where I was supposed to be.
Emily Layden's new book, Once More From The Top, is out from August 1.
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