The point of this newsletter is, ostensibly, to discover new music, but before I get to trawling through others’ wackily-named playlists and asking them questions about it, I’m going to talk a bit about Taylor Swift.
I have, after all, dedicated perhaps the mostly interestingly-named playlist in own my Spotify to her, so she gets first dibs.
I’ve gone in cycles with Taylor over the last 15 years. I remember sitting in a school computer room in 2006 (do they have those anymore? Do you need a room full of PCs these days or do kids all just bring their own laptops?) listening to Picture to burn. All of Fearless, of course, I loved two years later.
Then I stopped listening. I missed Speak Now and Red almost entirely, only discovering All too well at the hands of a friend while on exchange in France in 2014. Then I was back in. Shake it off dropped and, because I would be in Italy visiting my grandfather the week that 1989 was coming out, my friend and I promised not to listen to the album until I got back and we could go buy the CD together (again, it was 2014; I dutifully ripped it to my mp3 player soon after).
Reader, we loved it. We stood in a hallway waiting for our Shakespeare class one morning rhapsodising about the beauty of the Out of the woods bridge and the Blank Space video. It was fun to love something so much and have someone to share the fun with.
By late 2015, though, the love had waned a little bit thanks to a year watching Taylor parade her squad around the world on tour (though I’m still annoyed that we didn’t get a special guest at the Sydney show). I thought, this is uncool (as if I know cool?). When she removed her music from streaming platforms I thought, excellent, now I can listen to something else; I stopped listening again.
Of course, she came back and, as the very creation of this playlist and its name show, I knew would too.
As it turns out, the pandemic helped. folklore and evermore are one thing, but falling into SwiftieTok after downloading TikTok in the early days of March 2020 helped me discover songs I’d either never given much thought to, or thought were kind of naff: Don’t blame me, King of my heart, Death by a thousand cuts, I think he knows, even London boy. I listened to so much Taylor through 2020 that my Spotify wrapped told me I was in the top 5 percent of listeners.
So, when I put this playlist on now, I just know I’m up for a good time. I accept I’m kind of a cheesy bitch who loves pop music and that Taylor always does The Most, but it’s fun and - as if this is at all controversial to say (it’s not!) - the music is so good.
I like that there’s 15 years behind this playlist and listening to certain songs takes me back to different places, back to that computer room in 2006, to a French university hallway, to working through a pandemic. It’s nice to have liked something, or someone, for so long.
First addition to the playlist: 13 June 2017 - Welcome to New York
Latest addition to the playlist: 10 April 2021 - Forever and always (Taylor’s Version)
Favourite song on the playlist: Exile (long pond studio sessions)
Most-played song on the playlist: Exile
That’s it for issue 1! Thanks for reading. The format going forward will be more of a Q&A, so don’t worry, you don’t need to sit through a bad essay/ramble every time.
If you’ve got a playlist you want to share and talk about, hit me up. In the meantime, tell your friends!