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By Greta Noble
In 2008, just days before Fearless soared to the top of the US country music chart, I was entering the doors of my elementary school for the very first time. With my sparkly Skechers and pink and orange polka dot lunch box, I was embarking on a new chapter, or rather era, of my life. Within weeks of the school year starting, You Belong With Me and Love story were top of the queue on my iPod shuffle. While I was yet to understand the meaning behind a single lyric, the moment that Taylor Swift rocked the Crowley Corner Fundraiser with her rendition of Crazier, I was hooked.
On January 31st, 2010 my father and I sat down in the living room to watch the 52nd annual Grammy Awards. Taylor Swift had released her Speak Now album just weeks before and rocked the world with a rendition of Mean that fully encompassed her passion for country music and took her career to the next level of maturity. In the months following that performance, my house was filled with home concerts and songwriting as I had made the decision to be a country singer when I grew up.
By 2012, I no longer dreamt of becoming a country singer when I grew up but, neither did Taylor Swift. As I was taking the step into the life of a middle school girl, a time filled with dramatic fights with my brother and irrelevant boy drama that seemed in the moment like the end of the world, Taylor swifts world of country music was coming to an end as she took a step into the genre of pop music.
While Taylor Swift may have been born in 1989, her career as a pop music star was born in 2014 with the release of her 1989 album. Thus began nights of Shake it off and Blank Space dance parties with the people that I still to this day call my best friends. Choreographing dramatic dance and gymnastics routines to the songs of 1989 solidified the friends that would define my formative years.
In 2017 I coined the phrase “only child” to describe my brother leaving for college. While I may have put on a face of excitement, it meant I no longer shared a wall with my best friend and that entering high school would be filled with unfamiliar faces rather than my biggest support system by my side. While he may have left me an extra room when he moved out, he also left a Jasper-sized hole in our house. A personality that filled every room with conversation and laughter is hard to live up to. I was feeling as though I had a pretty big reputation to fulfill in his absence just as Taylor Swift released her sixth hit album Reputation. As she was entering an era of change that began with a clean slate, and a dedication to the music she felt passionate about, I was entering high school, a change filled with nerves and new beginnings.
The summer of 2019 was the definition of a Cruel Summer. Plagued with overly dramatic heartbreak and the constant pressure of the impending high school graduation nothing seemed to be on the right track. While it may seem silly, I felt as though Taylor Swift's album Lover was the light shining through the darkness. In contrast to Reputation, Lover was filled with butterflies and pastel pinks and felt like an opportunity for change when a rut had taken over.
While 2019 may have felt as though it was plagued, 2020 truly was. As the Lover tour was cut short due to the COVID-19 Pandemic, so was my high school experience. We went from ambitious high school students taking the ACT and searching for the perfect college to online art projects and meeting up with our friends across parking lots with rolled-down windows. 2020 felt like nothing more than a waste of time and a lost opportunity for what should have been some of the greatest years. Taylor Swift did not feel the same way. In the year 2020, she released not one but two hit albums one of which, Folklore, won album of the year, and the other, Evermore, produced her hit single Champagne Problems. Taylor swift took one of the most trying times in recent history and turned it into a musical masterpiece.
On November 15th, 2021 I sat down with girls I had only known a few months in a room I had lived in for less than a year and listened to Taylor Swift’s All To Well Ten Minute Version for the very first time. We spent that night and the days following reveling in the symbolism behind the red scarf and the advice to be taken in how we each should be treated. That song became the soundtrack to many late nights in the library and dinner dates at the Prov and somewhere along the way the city I had spent less than a year in became a home filled with people that mean the world to me.
Just when we thought we had seen it all from Taylor swift, 8 original albums, 2 rerecorded albums, a short film, and multiple movie appearances, she stunned the world with the release of the album Midnights followed by the announcement of the Eras Tour only one week later. The album Midnights broke nearly every Spotify and iTunes record within a day of being released and the announcement of the tour caused one of the biggest Ticketmaster crashes in history. As could be assumed, I was one of those 14 million fans that hit the site on the day of ticket release. I walked through the pouring rain, laptop open, actively not studying for a test, as I waited in a queue for 6 hours with the possibility of still not being able to get a ticket.
On June 30th, 2023 I will be watching Taylor Swift perform live at Paycor Stadium in Cincinnati, Ohio. It may seem that idolizing a celebrity in the way that I have just described seems childish and frankly, it is. While Taylor Swift is an incredibly talented singer and artist, she is not above the average human. She is nothing more than a small-town country singer that served as a constant through the life of a small-town girl from Northern Kentucky. But despite the childish ideas or naive idolization, this small-town girl from Northern Kentucky will be counting the days until I can reminisce on the eras of my life right alongside Taylor Swift.
Greta Noble is a McConnell Scholar in the class of 2025. She is studying biology, environmental science, Spanish, and political science at the University of Louisville.