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Christa Anne Bentley et al, eds., "Taylor Swift: The Star, The Songs, The Fans" (Routledge, 2025)
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Kristin Turner
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Kristin Turner
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:35]
Podcast Host
Hello, my name is Kristin Turner and this is New Books and Music, a podcast of the New Books Network. My guests today are Krista Bentley, Kate Galloway and Paula Harper, editors of Taylor Swift the Star, the Songs, the Fans published by Rutledge in 2025. Only 35 years old, Taylor Swift has already had a long career and is a pop culture icon. Her music and career are reported on by the world's press and her most devoted fans dissect her every move, looking for hidden meanings and clues about her next album. This collection, however, subjects Taylor Swift to scholarly analysis, necessarily a first look at Swift's career in songs, since she presumably has many more years to make music. The authors in this collection analyze Swift's songs and vocal choices, how she negotiates the fraught politics about her identity, and how fans and others understand her and her music. Welcome to the podcast. Thanks so much for joining me. So, Krista, why don't you. Why don't we start with each of you introducing yourselves so that our Listeners can sort of get a sense of who you are. So I'll start with Krista. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?
- [02:46]
Krista Bentley
Hi, everyone. I'm Krista Bentley. I'm assistant professor of musicology at the University of Arkansas, and I work on singer songwriters and folk and popular music. And so Taylor Swift's identity as a singer songwriter is how I got involved with this project.
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Podcast Host
Paula.
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Kristin Turner
Hi, I am Paula Harper. I study music and the Internet and I am an assistant professor at the University of Chicago in the Department of Music.
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Podcast Host
And Kate.
- [03:15]
Kate Galloway
Hi, I'm Kate Galloway, assistant professor of ethnomusicology and games at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in the department of Games and Experiential Media. And my work ranges from looking at how artists remix and recycle music sounds and text encoded with environmental information to looking at popular music and media and also music and Internet studies.
- [03:40]
Podcast Host
Well, thank you so much for being here. And I'd like. The first question really is just how did this book come about? How did you get connected and then decide to edit this collection? And Paula, I'll direct that to. To you at first.
- [03:55]
Kristin Turner
Anyway, origin story time. Yeah. Although my fellow editor should interrupt me because I think I always get this wrong. What I do know is that we. So we had a conversation on a zoom back channel while attending an online conference in the kind of high early pandemic in 2020. And that Zoom back channel conversation was about the absence of a kind of real concentrated scholarly conversation around Taylor Swift, considering that there were such conversations happening around other kind of contemporary parallel figures. So Beyonce is the kind of like standard other person in that dyad. Right. The two were being compared a lot. And while there had been a hefty amount of scholarly attention given to Beyonce for years and years, at that point there really hadn't. There had been very, very little academic work done on Taylor Swift. And so we were having this conversation, like I said, in a zoom back channel, in a zoom chat, while we had encountered each other at one of these early pandemic online conferences. And we decided to put on an online conference of our own focused around Taylor Swift. Did I get it mostly right, folks?
- [05:29]
Kate Galloway
Partially. It actually started two years prior to that, in person, before the pandemic, at one of the AMS Junior Junior Scholars workshops at Case Western Reserve. And I'm not sure how the conversation started, but somehow we were all talking about Taylor Swift, which I think Paula was like, kate, you're talking about Taylor Swift, because I'm still working on Marie Schaeffer at that point, and we just knew we wanted to do something together. I think we'd just come out of Norm Hershey's workshop on scholarly publishing, and we're a little overwhelmed by everything. And we were thinking about collaboration and then we just kind of sat on it. And I think the kind of the impulse for collaboration during the pandemic really was something we were all looking for. And it started with the conference and then what are we going to do next with the conference materials? And we knew more people were out there having these conversations. So it just kind of gradually progressed from conference to book to other kind of conference events around it, and then talks about the book after the fact to kind of keep the momentum going. But also we brought different community members into the book that weren't part of the conference as well. There were some participants who weren't able to participate in the book because of just their own publishing demands, or they didn't really have access to the materials to be able to publish them. And there were just other people who had ideas that formulated over the next couple of years, or they found out about the conference and saw that there was this wave of Swift studies that was developing in music studies and elsewhere and started taking their own work on Swift seriously and were supported in doing so. And so we had the opportunity to kind of expand out the authors in the book version of the conference in a way that we hadn't envisioned when we started planning the event, kind of high point of North American pandemic times.
- [07:24]
Kristin Turner
The conference. Well, we called it a study day. And then it had to become study days because we had so many fantastic submissions that took place in July of 2021. And then, you know, this book coming out in March of 2025 kind of speaks to the scale of academic publishing. But also, to put it in context, In July of 2021, this was. We. We were percolating these ideas in advance of. Certainly in advance of the ERAS tour, even in advance of the release of Folklore and Evermore. So we were really thinking about these questions and then thinking about spinning up this project, thinking about directing scholarly attention in a kind of large scale, collaborative focused way to Taylor Swift. And then we kind of got hit by and like picked up by a wave of the. The. The wave.
- [08:24]
Krista Bentley
A wave that is Taylor Swift.
- [08:27]
Kristin Turner
Exactly. And yeah, it is.
- [08:29]
Krista Bentley
And you said people realizing that Taylor. Their own ideas about Taylor Swift would be taken seriously. I think it's indication that a lot of people were thinking about Taylor Swift. There was a lot of immediate interest in the Conference study day and a lot more people who have been publishing and coming up with conference papers since this all started. So clearly people were thinking about her the whole time.
- [08:55]
Podcast Host
Well, that is interesting. Actually, I thought about that as well when this book came out, because how much scholarship there's been for a long time on Beyonce. And I think this is one of the first, if not the first book, book about Taylor Swift to come out, which is surprising considering how long she's been a big star and how influential her music is. I guess I'll start with Krista. Why do you think it took so long for Taylor Swift scholarship to even start?
- [09:26]
Krista Bentley
I think some of those ideas are explored in the book. Certain ideas about popular music and its seriousness play out in, I would say, somewhat severe ways through Taylor Swift ideas about her fans and how serious, how seriously they take her, where as people maybe don't think that the music is quote unquote, worthy of that type of adoration and ideas about. I think in my chapter, I call it all of the sparkles and glitter that may be keep people prevent people from taking the music as something that's serious to consider. I'll also, I'll shout out to another edited collection called the Literary Taylor Swift that came out just a couple months before ours. And our collection is, I would say, the first book to talk about Taylor Swift from a musical perspective. But that is also sort of an interesting dichotomy to think about. Like what gets taken seriously first is the word. And I think that she has been lauded as a poet or a generational voice, maybe more than she had been taken seriously as a musician. And that plays out a lot of debates that have gone on in musicology, in popular music studies for a long time.
- [10:57]
Kristin Turner
Yeah, I think that there's a question of discipline and disciplinarity that Christa just spoke to. Right. The way in which maybe some of these other artists who were getting recognition were getting that recognition or that scholarly attention in disciplines outside of popular music studies. Not exclusively, but, you know, I think the immense amount of just like really, really rich Beyonce scholarship, for example, that was happening in popular music studies, but it was also happening in English departments, in Africana studies departments, in American studies departments, in celebrity studies departments. Right. And I think that there is a way in which those other figures who were receiving scholarly attention, Beyonce, Lady Gaga, even sometimes figures like maybe somebody like Katy Perry, that those figures were especially, I think, Lady Gaga and Beyonce, that their celebrity outputs their kind of performance of Persona. And their musical outputs were also, I think, kind of gesturing more explicitly towards a kind of, you know, academic critique, asking to be taken seriously by an academic or a kind of music critical audience in a way that I think Taylor Swift was perceived much more as aiming straight for the like, mass mainstream. Right. Again, this, you know, kind of echoing what Krista was saying, a mainstream of young female fans that has been historically denigrated by the music critical press has, you know, we've kind of had to like excavate them again and again as a site for, you know, their own kinds of critical analysis and perception in popular music studies. So I think there's, you know, a bit of difference between what those figures who were getting studied were. Were doing with their Personas and outputs and Swift herself. And I think that Swift's performance of this kind of like, of. Of mainstream pop princess of virtuosic relatability meant that I think it was understood less as a virtuosic performance than these other artists who were doing other kinds of like, I think more critically legible performance and output.
- [13:40]
Podcast Host
Yeah.
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Kate Galloway
And I think part of what got people's attention and kind of attracted this kind of public traction with Swift and the wave of Swift studies, but also the wave of kind of critical attention to what Swift was doing was that she started playing into some of those strategic elements of the surprise releases which also worked so well for Beyonce. When we think about the Pandemic albums of Folklore and Evermore, but also the Long Pond sessions, but also the scope and scale of the eras tour as an extended event and the many different formats in which it was part of the auto visual universe through cinemas and streaming as well as in person and breaking Ticketmaster. It had a picture particular kind of scale to grasp people's attention, even if you weren't a Swift fan and to be lauded by even those who were once critics of her, that it became cool and okay to be a fan of Swift. And also there were those elements that academics could really grab onto or that those who critiqued the academic study of such kind of pop icons could respect if the academic work was going into those spaces alongside when people were studying Beyonce, when it came to Lemonade, for example, as being like this iconic audiovisual structure and piece that just was ripe with kind of audiovisual room for audiovisual critique and investigation.
- [15:16]
Podcast Host
Yeah, I really think there's a lot also to do with who her fans were, as you were sort of gesturing to Kate, you know, that we take seriously people whose fans seem like serious people with huge scarecrows around that as opposed to adolescent girls or, you know, that sort of thing. Or young gay men. Right. And so I really resonate with the idea that when eras came around and suddenly everyone was a Taylor Swift fan, then it was okay to think about her as a subject of scholarly study in the way that it had been for. For other folks. So obviously there's a lot that goes into that kind of decision about who you're going to study and who you're not.
- [16:00]
Kristin Turner
Yeah.
- [16:00]
Kate Galloway
And Hughes gets into this in her chapter with the idea that. And her analysis of how the fans have grown up with Taylor Swift and her tours. And so her fans were now at a respectable age and had a lot of cultural power and also had their own children. And so there was a younger demographic, but also an older female dominated demographic that had. They had cultural and social power and were being taken seriously in other aspects of their life. And therefore that also kind of leveraged their fandom, whether they were still a fan of Taylor Swift or returning to the fandom of their earlier years and reliving it through the Arrows tour.
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Podcast Host
Paula, were you saying something?
- [16:42]
Krista Bentley
Or bringing their daughters to the.
- [16:43]
Podcast Host
Oh, Chris. Yeah, I know a lot of people who, who mother, daughter pairs that went to those concerts for sure. Yeah. I'd like to follow up on this idea of the fans growing up with Taylor Swift. And I'll go back to you, Kate, for this question or to start this question. I've always been struck that I feel like Taylor Swift really made the transition between being 16 and her first album and being young. Like she looked, acted, sang young to being an adult. And she didn't have that, like, extended awkward period like someone like Miley Cyrus, I feel like, had where it was hard to decide what, you know, how is she going to position herself? It seems like Taylor Swift did pretty well with that. Why do you think that was? That's something that is sort of gestured at by a lot of folks, but I'm not sure that any of your authors really took that as the. As the subject of a. Of an. Of an essay.
- [17:45]
Kate Galloway
Right. I think part of that is because there's a series of different factors that all seem to kind of collide together. There's elements of the fact that some of that transition in age and kind of negotiating her transition into womanhood, or just what womanhood is, was happening over a period of time when she was doing the country to pop kind of transition. And a lot of attention was focused on that genre shift versus what was going on in her life and her adolescence. And I think that Kind of maybe glossed over some of those awkward transition moments because there was something else to pay attention to. I know, like with Travis Steinling's work, their work on the voice, those kind of youthful, not quote unquote, amateurish, but the flawed voice of a younger girl, a young woman coming into her own, ended up becoming more mature, more virtuosic, more developed just through the practice of being in the industry and having to sing repeatedly for recording, for rehearsal, for on touring. And so we can hear a maturity in her voice that wasn't there in her youthful years. But we have those comparative recordings to listen back to, and a lot of fans are doing those comparisons to. And then I think maybe I always think about the reputation era and kind of removing herself from the limelight and the growth that might have happened there, and then her re emergence afterwards with her next album and how maybe that space away from the limelight, away from the celebrity, gave her that space to kind of yet again revash herself. And of course, refashioning through multiple different eras also kind of creates this kind of performative evolution of a Persona and can gloss over some of those awkward transition moments. If there's other kind of extra musical elements of the star image for the fans, for the critics, for those who are interested in Swift as a person and as a musician to focus on. Instead of those, the kind of the awkward emergence from teen star to adult star that we see with other figures like Miley Cyrus, Justin Bieber, but also in the acting world with like Ryan Gosling and things like that.
- [20:20]
Krista Bentley
Yeah, I think that there's also a different way that Taylor Swift's start in country music. I'm gonna use the word sheltered. It could be the wrong one to use, but her from certain types of sexualization that happen when young artists start out in pop. And that Kate was mentioning a shift from country to pop that, you know, ended up with 1989 being some of the first times that we maybe have her in a more sexualized light. But it was pretty tame, I would say, compared to someone like Miley Cyrus or Katy Perry. So I think that that element of her career has been pretty different from some of her contemporaries. And, you know, she's also just now getting married. And I think there's a lot of times that people start to view artists differently once they have children and are mothers and things like that. And that has not been a part of Taylor Swift's image or story as of. As of the taping of this podcast. So there are some, I think, pretty distinct Things about her career that don't overlap with some of the other. Some of her contemporaries.
- [21:46]
Kristin Turner
Yeah. And I think, you know, Miley Cyrus has a kind of touchstone. But I think also that she started in country. Yes. You know, sort of in country. Yes. But she also started as a singer and as a singer who was always singing about romantic relationships. Right. So she has never been hypersexual, but she has always been. Been like a romantic singer songwriter. Right. Those romances were about, you know, they were. They were very chaste and innocent romances of high schoolers when she was starting out. They haven't. You know, I think Taylor Swift somewhat notoriously does not really do a lot of hypersexual depiction of her own romantic Personas ever at all. Right. Still up until this time. Right. But that. I think that starting in that place where she was kind of able to chart her own journey always as a figure who could kind of perform romantic relationships didn't start off as, say, like a television personality who was, you know, some of these folks were like, true, like child stars coming out of, you know, the Disney or Nickelodeon Mickey Mouse Club universes and so are kind of. There's this onus put on them to kind of develop into a sexual being. And Taylor Swift in some ways had the benefit of starting out as a certain kind of romantic protagonist already that then could evolve very, very slowly. I'm thinking of a. An Instagram account that I follow called Headfirst, Fearless, which is one of many that does these kind of data breakdowns of Taylor Swift songs. Taylor Swift songs as data. Taylor Swift's output as data. And one of the popular data outputs, data visualizations that this creator does is curse words in Taylor Swift's songs. Right. Tracking the kind of escalation of curse words that appear in her albums or alcoholic beverages that appear in her songs. Right. And you can kind of track this very, very gradual progression of these markers of maturity, but that they have also kind of always been there. Right. So she started from a. A kind of foundation that allowed for a certain kind of gradual, gradual growth that didn't necessitate the kinds of hard, often like, hypersexualizing pivots that other. Other of her peers wound up moving through.
- [24:46]
Podcast Host
Yeah. It'll be interesting to see what happens with this showgirl Persona that she's been doing recently, because that is much more overtly sexual than anything I'm. I mean, I'm aware of anyway with her. It seems like she's trying to. She's moving now to something more Sexual, but still kind of a tease in some ways than she's done in the past.
- [25:09]
Kristin Turner
Right. Still more fully clothed than like many, you know, kind of iconic Britney Spears performances that happened much earlier in Britney Spears's life as a performer. Right. If we're, you know, if we're tracking kind of different blonde pop star icons.
- [25:29]
Krista Bentley
And I also think that the showgirl thing, it's softened slightly by how many times we've seen Taylor Swift in a bodysuit during the Eras tour.
- [25:40]
Kristin Turner
So. Yeah, but still very like, it's not a performance of hypersexualization there.
- [25:46]
Krista Bentley
And when I look at the images, sometimes I go, oh, wow. Yeah, that is quite a lot of leg. But then you're like, well, she has been wearing this bodysuit. Has she taken a bodysuit off for three years? No, this is just for two years now. So, yeah, kind of. I would agree with you, Kristin.
- [26:03]
Kristin Turner
And then there's also kind of like.
- [26:04]
Krista Bentley
A soft launching of it.
- [26:06]
Kate Galloway
And I was saying in our text chain the other day, she released a burnt orange cardigan for the life of a showgirl on the web store. Not a sequin bodysuit, not tassels. So the choice was still to stick with the warm acrylic cardigan as the icon, but with a colorway that suits the album.
- [26:29]
Kristin Turner
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Kristin Turner
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Podcast Host
Yeah, she is fascinating in the way that she does marketing and all of that. And Paula, you mentioned an Instagram account and you are an expert in sort of the Internet of it all. So I'd like to each of you wrote an essay for this collection, so I'd like to turn to yours. Paula, you wrote about gaylore and you were not the only person that sort of took on queer readings, whether it is a queer reading by the author or in your case, queer readings by fans. Can you talk a little bit about not only sort of the Internet of it all, but also this sort of adjacent queerness of, of the way that people are thinking about Taylor Swift, the.
- [28:43]
Kristin Turner
Internet of it all. So a perhaps controversial, perhaps misguided, who knows opinion that I have is that of all of the things that Taylor Swift is lauded for, celebrated for, given massive amounts of credit for, I think something that is under discussed is how she has always been since the very beginnings of her career, a really, really savvy, I can't think of a more generous word than manipulator of social media, like just a navigator of the social media landscape for the execution of her own brand, for the cultivation of particular kinds and modes of fandom that she has really been able to ride the wave of a changing digital landscape from all the way back from the MySpace era, through the wilds and weirdnesses of Tumblr, through Instagram and TikTok, and the way that she has been able to navigate kind of a space for herself and a way of engaging with her fans across a changing social media landscape I think is really, really impressive. And for her to have been able to do that, kind of be an early adopter of curation strategies of social media fandom that really, really worked and pay immense dividends now in the kind of age of Easter eggs for which she is a kind of figurehead. So I think Taylor Swift, incredible social media mastermind is what I would say as the kind of large scale introduction to my work on her. I've also been interested in my work on music and the Internet, how fans and fan practices shape social media and are shaped by social media, especially on platforms that we wouldn't necessarily consider to be music platforms. So you know, to what extent how does Tumblr work as a music platform, say? And I think I was drawn to researching Swifties, but researching gaylors in particular because I found it to be such an interesting site of negotiation between a number of different currents. So Gaylors are Swifties, a subsection of Taylor Swift's fans who theorize on a kind of spectrum of seriousness. Some are really invested in it as kind of literal truth. Some are more playfully invested in it or more personally invested. They theorize that Taylor Swift has had relationships with women, that in some versions of this, that her all of her relationships with men have been fake for pr, and that her true romantic attachments lie with women she's often connected to to various other celebrities. Anyway, all of this is to say that I find it really fascinating to track the ways in which that kind of theorizing makes a home in bigger discussions about sexuality that have unfolded on the Internet in online spaces across the 2010s and 2020s. I find it really fascinating to track the kind of critical and methodological and like, theoretical, analytical apparatuses that fans are bringing to the table when they are doing work like presenting a queer reading of Taylor Swift as a text. I'm interested in how those things are adjacent to what I do as an academic and what I see my fellow pop music scholars doing and the ways in which they. They don't match, they don't align. And so really, I think, you know, I think the gaylors are a fascinating subsection of Swifties, but I think too, they work really well as a case study for looking at fan theorizing, fan analysis, and it's what it does and does not share with work that I do as an academic.
- [33:15]
Podcast Host
Yeah, I hear that there's a little. There's some darkness coming out of Gaylor recently because she has now she is engaged to a man.
- [33:24]
Kristin Turner
She is engaged to a man.
- [33:26]
Podcast Host
Yeah. It sounds like there's a few fans who are. Who have taken to real conspiracy theories.
- [33:33]
Kristin Turner
Oh, yeah, well, that's the other side of this. Right. There's a kind of. The Venn diagram has lots of potential circles, and there's certainly a methodological diagram in which gaylors are one circle, academic analysts and pop music scholars are one circle, and Internet conspiracy theorists are another circle. And there is certainly, it's not just an overlap between any two of those circles, but there's, there's, you know, there's a frothy middle ground in which there are methodologies shared by all. You know, I think you. Anyone who's been in the midst of a particularly thorny archival project has probably had a bit of a red string board somewhere in their physical or digital office. Space. And yeah, I think that as Taylor Swift's career has progressed, as it has been more and more allowable economically viable for a major celebrity to exist and produce work while queer, the. The population of gaylords has, I would say, shifted more and more towards folks who are resemble more and more a kind of conspiracy theory mindset in that they are holding on to something that seems less and less likely for a variety of reasons, only one of which is her current engagement to a man.
- [35:15]
Podcast Host
Krista, you talked in your work and there are several other essays about this as well, about this sort of tension between her as a very intimate performer and intimacy in her music and also these huge spectacles that she has put on throughout her career. Of course, Era Era, the ERAS tour being the hugest, but it's certainly not the only example. Can you talk a little bit about that?
- [35:42]
Kate Galloway
Yeah.
- [35:43]
Krista Bentley
So my essay is about Taylor Swift's acoustic sets and ways that she's distributed those acoustic sets on the Internet, starting with her Red album. So I am interested in, of course, singer songwriters in my research. And Taylor Swift is a singer songwriter and that she writes and performs her own music frequently from an autobiographical perspective. But she performs very differently from many of the singer songwriters who came before her, who are known for kind of sitting on a stool with their acoustic guitar and singing their songs straight to you without really much else. And that type of musical Persona came out of small listening rooms, small clubs, sort of intimate acoustic environments that fostered the connection of this sort of autobiographical confessional songwriting with intimacy connoting singer songwriters as sort of conduits of intimacy. So when Taylor Swift gets up and performs and it's. Everything is larger than life, many times acted out with fairytale costumes and glitter and confetti at the end of, you know, a finale in the tour that's worlds and worlds and worlds away from how St. Joni Mitchell performed when she was coming up. So I've been interested in this idea of what a singer songwriter performance is and how Taylor Swift does leverage singer songwriter performance throughout her career through her acoustic sets, which she started, she's always done on her tours. And she'll leave the big stage and go to a sort of separate small stage where she is there with her stool and her acoustic guitar. It frequently involves a costume change into something that's seen as more normal clothes than maybe what she's wearing on the main stage. Maybe just during the Red tour, it was a striped T shirt and jeans that was kind of a conic of her look at the time and she performs songs that she is accompanying herself with no other band and just singing straight into the microphone with no other dancing or staging, although it is a staging is what I'm trying to say. It's a very specific conjuring of this singer songwriter Persona. And so I've been tracing her acoustic sets in my chapter. I look at some performances that she's done in small environments and then posted online, including a performance at the GRAMMY MUSEUM After 1989, a performance at the Bluebird Cafe in Nashville, and then her Tiny Desk concert on npr. And that's a way for people to sort of see her singer, songwriter, Persona and understand her in a different way than maybe how she's portraying herself on her album. And what I found is that it brings up really interesting comments from the fans and has helped her gain an audience and recognition with among fans who might not take her seriously with the glitter and confetti and background dancers. She frequently talks about this in her acoustic sets. And it's a way for her to put herself forward as a songwriter and that that kind of forms the core of her identity. And it's a consistent one that she can trace throughout her career, despite all the other changes that she's made. And it's really helped her navigate some tensions in her. How people perceive her and negotiate and authenticate herself as an artist.
- [39:35]
Podcast Host
Kate, it was interesting to me that you talk about. All three of you talked about this book as coming out of sort of a pandemic project, right? A pandemic conversation, a pandemic conference. And Kate, you wrote about Taylor Swift's pandemic project. Can you talk a little bit about your essay?
- [39:54]
Krista Bentley
Sure.
- [39:55]
Kate Galloway
So, as I said in my introduction, I tend to always be interested in different representations of environments of nature. I've been particularly interested in kind of expanding how we think about acoustic ecologies and soundscapes into different types of media environments. So whether that's music videos or sound art, Internet spaces. And then in this chapter, looking at these mediated natures that Swift was crafting in the sound design of her albums Folklore and Evermore, but also how that imagery in the lyrics, but also in their sonic environments was playing out para musically through imagery world building in her sets, in her official lyric videos, but also the stagecraft of her live performances to create a particular kind of eco sonic media aesthetics in these pandemic albums that were partially tied to a lot of the discourse around rewilded nature during pandemic times that was coming out in different news reports and also in different sound Art projects I was encountering in other parts of my teaching and studies. But it was also bound up in the kind of experiences of nature in the uk, like the Lakes district that she was writing about. She was also thinking nostalgically back to the types of nature she grew up in, in around her homestead and so very intimate ideas of nature as well as these kind of wild yet domesticated ideas of nature. And I didn't want to approach this as kind of. Is Swift an environmentalist? I was very much interested in thinking how can we think about human nature relationships as they're kind of bound up in her recordings and her live shows on television and the ERAS tour for these two albums. And then also how that got remediated into the composition of the Long Pond Sessions documentary thinking about stagecraft and world building and world building on the sound design of recordings to kind of investigate these novel approaches to listening for and interpreting sonic environments in these mediated SO spaces. And because a lot of my work in kind of looking at the environment in music, a lot of that work is often telling us that we have to always look for the environmentalist narrative, but there's other ways that we experience the natural world and even built environments through popular music studies and related media that I think are really fascinating. But that said, right now I'm working on kind of an offshoot of this Looking one piece is looking at issues of whiteness and race and this particular kind of domesticated nature that is very much tied to these albums as well. But specifically there are sections of her fandom that were very much dealing with the tensions between the large scale spectacle of the ERAS tour, the confetti, the discarded friendship bracelets, just the carbon footprint of the tour, the rise in concert tourism that led to. And many of these Swifties were also trying to adopt sustainable practices and be environmentally conscious in their own lives. And some self describe on message boards and some Reddit spaces as Eco Swifties. And it's a very much smaller than probably the gaylor subset subsection of the fandom. Some call themselves Eco Swifties that were actually making choices about using recycled materials for their friendship bracelets, doing a lot of IPS upcycling of their costumes and their outfits for the ERAS tour, choosing to go to a streamed version of the ERAs tour over flying 100 miles, 100 miles, thousands of miles to the ERAs tour and thinking about how they can reconcile their environmental practices with their Swifty fandom in a fandom that is kind of notorious for the the amount of consumption with the number of different vinyl variants. And Swift herself has come under a lot of critique for her carbon footprint in a way that other stars like Beyonce, like big touring bands, haven't received the same critique. And I think partially because of these albums, Folklore and Evermore and that particular Back to Nature aesthetic that she had during that particular era, it was so close to the Eras tour that it's like, well, how are you back to nature yet? You're engaging in this kind of high profile, unsustainable environmental footprint activity. But then there was a lot of economic and social impact that the tour had globally and cities were very much wanting her to come to their location because of the kind of economic injection into tourism and city life that the tour brought. And so there is this interesting kind of environmental tension that I couldn't explore for that chapter and really want to narrow in on the kind of paramusical and mediated natures that she was crafting through those related media texts and albums. But very much is part of her ongoing relationship with critique around the environment that is bubbling up much more since those pandemic albums because of the visual aesthetics of the album covers, the music videos, her televised Grammys performance, and those particular eras separately and when they were enfolded together in the revision of the Eras tour and how they were kind of the sister albums focused around rural Hudson Valley, Lake District, domesticated, colonized nature.
- [46:16]
Podcast Host
When did making plans get this complicated? It's time to streamline with WhatsApp, the secure messaging app that brings the whole group together. Use polls to settle dinner plans, send.
- [46:27]
Krista Bentley
Event interview invites and pin messages so.
- [46:29]
Podcast Host
No one forgets mom 60th and never.
- [46:32]
Kate Galloway
Miss a meme or milestone.
- [46:34]
Podcast Host
All protected with end to end encryption. It's time for WhatsApp message privately with everyone.
- [46:39]
Commercial Announcer
Learn more@WhatsApp.com this episode is brought to you by Jack Daniels. Jack Daniels and music are made for each other. They share a rhythm in the craft of making something timeless while being a part of legendary Knights. From back to backyard jams to sold out arenas, there's a song in every toast. Please drink responsibly. Responsibility.org, jack Daniels and Old no. 7 are registered trademarks. Tennessee Whiskey 40% alcohol by volume. Jack Daniel Distillery Lynchburg, Tennessee the new.
- [47:07]
Kristin Turner
Popeyes and Hot Ones menu is the.
- [47:09]
Krista Bentley
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Kristin Turner
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Krista Bentley
Time to take it up a notch with the smoking Rojo chicken sandwich. Mmm, that's so hot.
- [47:20]
Kristin Turner
But it's so good. Now onto the daring Dab Ghost wings.
- [47:24]
Kate Galloway
Yup, there it is.
- [47:26]
Kristin Turner
I love the spice level attempt the Popeyes and Hot Ones menu in stores. Our hottest collaboration yet. Love that chicken from Popeyes. Limited time in participating US Restaurants.
- [47:38]
Podcast Host
One thing that runs through many, many of these essays is how the fact that she is a woman affects her career. A lot of it. How does misogyny, how does patriarchy, how does you know the world that we live in? If you are a woman and a woman whose fan base has often been mostly women, mostly gay men, often very young girls, like how all that affects her. And that's such a big thing that I'm sure all of you will want to weigh in. But I'll ask Paula first. Can you talk a little bit about your, you know, what your authors and you see as the effect of misogyny and the fact that she is a woman on her career?
- [48:19]
Kristin Turner
Well, I mean, I think, you know, I think we had a big, I think a lot of our conversation at the beginning, right? The kind of origin story of this volume and of Swift studies. I think if we were to go back and give a one word answer as to like, why it took until 2021 and beyond for there to be a real critical focus on it. The one word answer would be misogyny and its impacts. I think. What do I want to say here?
- [48:51]
Podcast Host
I think some.
- [48:52]
Kristin Turner
A way that I think about it is that one, Taylor Swift is often lauded as an incredibly savvy, virtuosic businesswoman as well as, you know, all of her credits for songwriting, performing, et cetera, et cetera. And I think that one of her superpowers is the way in which she kind of navigates the misogynistic landscape, the kind of the world of patriarchy as it is. She navigates it savvily and kind of turns what might be stumbling blocks into opportunities. Like, she really is good at kind of leveraging, right? Leveraging this kind of denigrated figure of the teen girl as the ultimate consumer and then flips that into like, well, if, if my fandom is filled with teen girls and those are the ultimate, you know, that's the, the ultimate form of the consumer under contemporary capitalism. Well, like here are 19 different versions of my album, right? Or if there is a mand women in particular to kind of remake themselves as a kind of, I don't know, like a bulwark against or like a response to proof against the most horrifying thing a woman can do, which is age. Like, Taylor Swift will take that mandate and she will Turn it into, you know, a tour that lasts for years and an impossibility of just saying the word era without kind of of tm branding it back to herself, her celebrity. So I think that she is an incredibly savvy interpreter of the ways in which the patriarchal landscape that she inhabits could constrain her. And I think is a creatively takes those potential constraints and refigures them to further kind of enhance her brand and operates within them as like part of her celebrity structure.
- [51:06]
Podcast Host
Krystra or Kate, would you like to add anything to that?
- [51:09]
Kate Galloway
I think that tied to her celebrity structure, I was thinking about one of the ways that she's so virtuosic in the kind of transformation, but the maintenance of her particular star Persona is her ability to kind of perform relatability when she's highly unrelatable to her fan base for so many reasons, like the number of houses she owns, like the scale, like dating a football star. Like, there's so many elements of her life that are unrelatable, but she crafts her Persona in a way that is like she's just like us. And that both really strategically works with her and her fandom and the kind of perceived intimacy with her fandom that has sustained her career. But also ways in which going back to how she and scholarship on her hasn't been taken seriously, that a particular kind of male critic would look at her and listen to her and be like, oh, that's. Well, she's just like them. That's unremarkable. And so the kind of crafting of a star Persona that is relatable, that kind of shies away from emphasizing these kind of virtuosic, savvy businesswoman elements that are very much there. It's when you kind of really put her under the lens. And that's one of the ways in which I've seen her kind of disregarded as not being air quotes yet again, worthy of this type of sustained investigation and academic scholarship. And also what many popular music topics get charged with the kind of the critique about. Well, whether is this going to be historically memorable? Is this a pinnacle moment in pop music histories that we should spend a lot of time on and focus in on? Is how many pages is this going to take in the next edition of a pop music history textbook? Or are we going to have to revise it down to a paragraph in the next edition? Like so many different and mostly female led initiatives in popular music have been subjected to. And I'm thinking specifically about like two editions of a pop Music textbook that I had to use in undergrad where the first edition had, like, almost a whole chapter on the Spice Girls, and then by the next edition, it was down to, like, three and a half pages.
- [53:35]
Kristin Turner
That's horrible.
- [53:36]
Podcast Host
Yeah.
- [53:38]
Kristin Turner
Justice for the Spice Girls.
- [53:39]
Kate Galloway
Absolutely.
- [53:40]
Krista Bentley
Yeah. I'm gonna pop in with a couple of chapters from the book, if it's okay to just point to a couple of authors who are really grappling with these questions. I'm thinking of Phoebe Hughes chapter that talks about how Swift negotiates her identity as an aging pop star. As strange as that is to say for someone who is in her 20s, it nonetheless shows how gender and her gender and her race play into how she performs her star Persona on the 1989 tour. There's also a great chapter from Annelotte Prinz that talks about white femininity and how Swift's Persona vacillates between ultimate control and helplessness. And she can kind of deploy these modes as a way to assert herself. And then also Jocelyn Neal's chapter that talks about the re recordings and some strategies that Swift used in that process.
- [54:53]
Kate Galloway
That.
- [54:56]
Krista Bentley
Shape Swift as a mentor to her young female audiences, and that she's giving advice to future, future tailors. Right. About how to negotiate their contracts and do better in business. And that's sort of aimed towards another generation of girls. And those are some of the things that have come out of the book about misogyny, but also gender and femininity and white feminism that are very specific to Taylor Swift. And I think also forms. We talked about Beyonce. Right. I think people were eager to dive into Beyonce because of how her work intersected with ideas of black feminism. And I think people were maybe slightly uncomfortable with how to understand white feminism in Swift's work. And these are some of the starting points, certainly not the end of the conversation, but maybe some of the starting points for understanding not just misogyny, but femininity and white feminism.
- [56:08]
Podcast Host
Well, Krista, I think that is a great lead in to what I think will have to be our last question, unfortunately. And. And it is about this. Her as a political figure and as a figure of feminism. There's a great essay that talks about how for a certain amount of time when she was not saying, doing anything political because she was a white woman, she became sort of an alt right favorite. That because she was a blank slate because she was white, because she was young and all those things. And in country music, the alt right really took her on as a figure, and she was reported on in the alt right Press and that kind of thing. But then, no, she really wasn't right. It sort of reminded me of the Dixie Chicks a little bit. And there's this moment in one of the documentaries about her where she's really grappling with do I come out as a political person? And I think not just as a political person but, but her particular political beliefs and as a feminist. Like she really talks about herself as a feminist. I think in my mind anyway, more after that announcement. So, Krista, maybe I'll start with you. Since you brought sort of tangentially brought it up. Can we talk a little bit about what happens when a big star like Taylor Swift comes out, so to speak, not as gay, not as anything else, but as a person who has actual deeply held beliefs that might not correlate with what at least some of her fans thought they that she would have.
- [57:43]
Krista Bentley
I think for Swift, it's been put forward sort of as I have a platform and I should use it to speak on things that became maybe no longer able to stay silent on. Like it really was quite a long time before she decided to comment on a political situation with state legislators in Tennessee. And so it really, it almost seemed like maybe she, she could no longer just not say what she would say was right. I think is what she says in Miss Americana. So from my perspective, her PR team would see it as like using her voice or using her platform. I think since then we've seen her endorse Democratic presidential candidates and that's been seen as, you know, a big statement. It hasn't gone too much farther than like an Instagram post with an endorsement. So I don't know if what happens is that it's like unleashed a larger political voice that she is, is using in her songwriting or you know, like a benefit concert or anything like that. But it really has been like a, I have a platform. People see my Instagrams and so I will make a nice endorsement when it becomes so dire that I cannot say nothing. I don't know if that's an ungenerous.
- [59:31]
Podcast Host
Take, but let me know, you know, because this always comes out around social media. I'm not sure that she really talks about this from the stage and I don't know if she's ever done much in the way of like campaigning or anything like that. So being since you are the Instagram expert, can you talk a little bit about this kind of way to is how is she able to mediate both being a high profile Democrat at this point but still maintain, I mean she has managed to keep out of the worst, I think, my perspective, any of the worst of the worst of. Of partisan vitriol, mostly. I mean, there was this thing about her in football that got very weird, but. Yeah, yeah.
- [60:17]
Kristin Turner
So here's what I will say is going back to. You opened this question by talking about Annelotte's chapter, which talks about the way in which Taylor was kind of interpreted and taken up by and celebrated by the alt right. And I'm gonna try to put this through relatively quickly, but we've sometimes thought about Annelot's chapter and my chapter and chapter by Lauren Alex Hooper as kind of this triptych of interpretation chapters of different segments of Swifties. Swift fans were just folks who are taking the same body of texts and interpreting them and coming out with different conclusions about kind of what Taylor Swift, what messages Taylor Swift is trying to reveal. Right? And so I think, I think one answer to this question of kind of Taylor Swift political figure is that because Taylor Swift has so successfully established this brand in which she has kind of set up an expectation with her fans that if you subject my output to close, close scrutiny, you will be rewarded with these kind of secret messages that will get you closer to me, that will get you in, in this kind of more intimate relationship with me, the celebrity whose songs you love and are singing all the time. Right. That, that is, on the one hand, I think, incredibly beneficial to her. It helps cultivate this intense, intense phantom. It's incredibly lucrative. But the flip side is things like, you know, you wind up with gaylords, you wind up with a group of people who come together and do this interpretive work and, and their conclusion is, look, all of these individual data points point in a straight flashing lesbian flag colored arrow towards her relationship with Karlie Kloss.
- [62:24]
Kate Galloway
Or you get the folks in the.
- [62:26]
Kristin Turner
Alt right who are saying, well, if you take these data points, you get an enormous. This bright white arrow pointing towards white nationalism. Right. And so the, the kind of danger is that if you encourage fans to subject your work to this kind of scrutiny with the promise that they will reveal something true, that they will gain access to truth about you, then this kind of meaning making might have groups of fans reaching conclusions that without, you know, the input of more concrete might not be conclusions that you want them to reach. They might not be true. They might not be beneficial to the, you know, the, the prolongment of your career or your album sales. Right? And so I think that, you know, I think that Taylor Swift has been forced. There's also the aspect of just the kind of collision of celebrity and entertainment culture with partisan politics. You know, the, the president used to be a reality television star. Right. That it goes in both directions. Right. That that entertainment figures are. Are also have to be political ones and political figures also have to be celebrity entertainers. For better or for worse. I think many would say for worse. Right. And I think, you know what my interpretation is that Taylor Swift would say for worse. I don't think that Taylor Swift seems like a person who is particularly interested in being a public political figure. If she were, there are plenty of things that she could be doing more prolifically and that when she has made political statements, they have been, you know, I think as Krista said. Right. A kind of. She has felt like she has had to. What exactly those pressures are, you know, whether they're coming from her own deeply held convictions, whether they're coming from, you know, market data, whether they're coming from a combination of both. I think that that's not something that we necessarily have access to. But it does certainly seem like she has like made these statements because she felt like she did not have another choice. Choice.
- [64:52]
Krista Bentley
I. I think there was also something in Annalette's chapter she didn't want to be seen as a bad person. So that goes back to pressures on women. Right. To not as good or right. Granted, politics means that other people have a different idea what's good or right. But I think it was a pressure to. To not be seen as a bad person, which it was right in line with everything else that was happening during the reputation era. Right. To not be perceived as a bad person.
- [65:29]
Kate Galloway
The expectation that high profile stars that have kind of cultural capital are going to leverage those in political ways.
- [65:39]
Kristin Turner
In.
- [65:40]
Kate Galloway
Other aspects of social justice. Like coming off the ERAS tour, there have been plenty of kind of journalistic critiques on if that essentially we could solve climate change if Taylor Swift were really to throw her star power into that. And even I'm thinking about when yet again she was forced and there was to kind of post Instagram and her various platforms in the last election. It was very much in the force of. Of the kind of falsely made AI of her endorsing Trump and the confluence of that with the charges against Harris about being a childish cat lady, that it was a very on brand moment when she posted her support for Harrison Waltz on Instagram and signed it off. Taylor Swift childless cat lady. Because it kind of fed into a particular kind of of on brand cat moment that she's already known for that is part of her branding. And it was strategic. But at a certain point there was a lot of critique against various kind of high profile stars that hadn't essentially come out with their political stance and who they were endorsing. And it was getting later and later in the, in the campaigns that they were really under scrutiny, Swift and others to say something, anything. So yet again, that kind of pressure, and some stars like Swift have been also placed under pressure to leverage their star power in other ways that will have social, environmental, cultural, kind of good doing and advantages to kind of locally, but also maybe the world at large.
- [67:27]
Krista Bentley
And during the last election cycle, I think there was also a lot of reporting that Trump was afraid of Taylor Swift.
- [67:35]
Kristin Turner
Right.
- [67:35]
Krista Bentley
That he was. He didn't like her and didn't, didn't want, I don't, didn't want her to make some kind of statement. But of course, in the end, it didn't leverage floods and floods and floods of votes in the right districts to change the outcome of the election.
- [67:53]
Kristin Turner
Yeah, I mean, I think this is not a politics podcast and we are not. I'm not a political theorist, but, you know, I do think that there's, there's a way in which a kind of feeling of, a feeling of the kind of like power and strength of fandom, of the energy that folks pour into their relationships with celebrities of the stature of Swift, but also the, the feelings of, you know, participating in something like the Eras tour. Right. That there's this, this understanding of connection and of kind of collectivity that seems like it must be a. That seems like maybe one of the only sources of power that I think maybe some of Taylor Swift's young fans might have. Right. And so this kind of turning in desperation towards figures like powerful pop stars with the assumption that, that they also have political power. Right. That surely this sense of collectivity could have, you know, kind of desired political results. And then the way that, that transforms into this kind of impetus or demand for certain kinds of political responsibilities of these folks who are singers, who are singer songwriters, who are musicians, who are, you know, who are not, who are not politicians, is, you know, it's something for which Taylor Swift kind of served as an avatar recently. But it is not something that is like exclusive or unique to Taylor Swift. But I think says something about the kind of larger ecosystem of media, of attention, of the collapse of politics and entertainment.
- [69:47]
Podcast Host
Well, maybe we can end this with. I'll mention one of your other essays that I think plays into what you're saying, Paula, and what you've all said is that is Melissa Avedeef's one about how the reception of you need to calm down on Twitter was really misstated by the press as being sharply divergent between people who supported or opposed this. This anthem of straight allyship is how I would call it. But actually a large, you know, really the majority of the posts were just they liked it or didn't like it.
- [70:27]
Kristin Turner
Right.
- [70:27]
Podcast Host
It wasn't a big deal either way. And that is not what was reported. And you can really understand how someone sort of maximally online like President Trump is the way that and maximally really oriented towards popular culture, which he is as well, would assume that there is a direct relationship between the power of fandom and electoral power, which did not seem to be the case in this election. I'm not sure it's ever the case, but it's easy to overstate when all of your inputs are, as Abedef said, was not even reflecting reality, even in the sort of unreal space of the Internet. And in this case, Twitter is what she was looking at specifically. So there's a lot to unpack there.
- [71:19]
Krista Bentley
I think that chapter is a great one to bring up at the end and a good example of what we hope the book will do, which is, you know, teach us something about our the world that we're living in through Taylor Swift. And that chapter on kind of polarizing data in the media is a great one where you might not think that that's what you're going to get in a book about Taylor Swift, but that's what we hope you do get out of it.
- [71:49]
Podcast Host
Well, I'd like to thank all of you for being here. My name is Kristin Turner and I've been talking to Krista Bentley, Kate Galloway and Paula Harper, who are the editors of Taylor Swift, the Star, the Songs, the F published by Rutledge in 2025. And this is new books and music. Thank you so much.
- [72:20]
Commercial Announcer
ABC Wednesday, Shifting Gears is back. He has arisen. Tim Allen and Kat Dennings return in television's number one one new comedy.
- [72:29]
Podcast Host
What what?
- [72:30]
Commercial Announcer
With a star studded premiere, including Jenna Elfman, Nancy Travis and. Hey buddy. A big home improvement reunion.
- [72:40]
Kate Galloway
Welcome.
- [72:40]
Krista Bentley
Oh boy, that guy's a tool.
- [72:43]
Commercial Announcer
Shifting Gears season premiere Wednesday, 8, 7 Central on ABC and stream on Hulu.