Why Taylor Swift is so important in my life — and why I won’t miss her show in Kansas City
Back on April 1, 2010, Intrust Bank Arena was just a few months old, and as part of my job with The Wichita Eagle, I was still reviewing every concert.
Of course, it went without saying that the paper would cover a concert by a popular 20-year-old artist named Taylor Swift, whose first-ever headlining tour in support her second album, “Fearless,” was arriving at the arena that night. The sold-out crowd of mostly young girls and their moms was beyond giddy to see Swift, who’d recently become the youngest solo artist to win a Grammy for Album of the Year.
It was my job to attend the show and review it for the next day’s paper, and I was less than thrilled. At the time, Swift was really more of a country act, which has never been my favorite genre. Plus, I considered her a teeny-bop performer, and I’d covered enough Hilary Duff and NSYNC concerts at that point in my career that my ears were already anticipating the indescribable pitch created when 13,000 young women scream at the top of their lungs simultaneously.
The piercing screaming did happen, as expected. But something else happened that was unexpected. Over the course of the evening, I accidentally became a Swiftie.
If you are among the roughly 110,000 people who were able to snag tickets for one of Swift’s two concerts at Arrowhead Stadium this weekend, you likely already understand what happened to me on that April night 13 years ago. Despite the fact that I was 37 years old at the time, I was completely blown away by the show Swift put on. A Taylor Swift concert is not just a concert, you see. It’s a full-scale production, and every song gets its own costumes, set pieces and story lines. Many performers have one trick — they fly over the crowd on floating stages or they appear suddenly from underneath the stage. But Swift’s shows are nonstop tricks with a whole troupe of backup dancers and a dizzying amount of choreography and video projections.
In the years since I saw that first show, Swift has become an unknowing participant in my relationship with my daughter. I’ve also had time to develop my own theories about how Swift has achieved such a magical hold on legions of fans and about what makes her so appealing to so many people.
I’ll be at the Friday-night concert at Arrowhead, and it will be my fourth Swift concert, my 18-year-old daughter’s third. Since we scored our tickets in November — a stressful weekday-morning undertaking that involved seven people on seven laptops in two cities frantically navigating the Ticketmaster debacle — I’ve been excitedly chattering with others who I know are going about how amazing it’s all going to be. But I’ve also been having some prickly exchanges with haters who spout their parroted lines about Swift — “She’s overrated” or “She only sings about her breakups” — making it clear that they’ve never been to a show and therefore just don’t get it.
After that 2010 show, I could not wait to introduce Swift to my then 6-year-old daughter, Alexis, who was much closer in age to a typical Swift fan than I was. I gifted her a yellow Taylor T-Shirt I’d snagged at the show, and I played her some of the many sweet and bouncy songs from the “Fearless” album — “Love Story,” “Hey Stephen,” “You Belong With Me” and the like. She loved it, and it turned out so did her two best friends — Sasha and Caroline — who are sisters. After that, the girls, ages 6 to 8, would frequently put on spirited Taylor Swift dance parties in my living room.
The girls dreamed of seeing Swift in concert, and they didn’t have to wait long. In September 2011, Swift’s brought her “Speak Now” tour to Arrowhead Stadium, and the sisters’ mom, Kim, and I got the three girls tickets. We stayed at the Great Wolf Lodge and let them get feathers braided into their hair at a local hair salon, and they basically were in little girl heaven. Our tickets were pretty far back in the stadium, and a busy refreshment stand was directly behind our seats, meaning too much light was shining in our area during the often dark show. So at ages 6 to 8, the girls — surrounded by 50,000 people for the first time in their young lives — had a hard time focusing. But it was nonetheless a memory-making adventure that we still talk about today.
Two years later, the three girls got another chance to see Swift, and this concert required no travel. In a surprising move, Swift — who in three short years had catapulted from first-time headliner to the top-earning musician of the year — added a Wichita stop to her “Red” tour, and on Aug. 7, 2013, the five of us were among the 11,000 people who crammed into Intrust Bank Arena for a show that included Swift floating above the crowd on a flying stage as she sang her hit “Sparks Fly.” The girls were positive Swift waved at them — just them — as she flew past our seats.
The girls continued to grow and quickly became teenagers. It became my tradition to belt an off-key rendition of Swift’s 2008 hit “Fifteen” — which so perfectly describes the fear of leaving the safety of middle school for the big scary halls of high school — each time one of them had a 15th birthday. We followed along with more Swift album releases, and we also followed along with her personal life, carefully dissecting new songs for clues about who had inspired them. Harry Styles? Joe Jonas? Taylor Lautner? Or those epic jerks John Mayer and Jake Gyllenhaal?
Swift’s songs were the background of the girls’ childhood and teen lives, and their moms loved her songs as much as they did. Not only can Swift produce exceptionally catchy melodies and hooks, but she’s also a poet with an uncanny ability to describe the emotions that go along with young womanhood. Sure, she sings about her breakups, but she also perfectly describes the unique experience of first love, that painful longing for someone who left you, and — yes — the satisfaction of making him sorry. I still remember being young and feeling all the feels Swift so flawlessly describes with the release of each new album.
This tour, called Eras, is a retrospective of Swift’s long career, which started when she was 14 and is bigger than ever as she prepares to turn 34. The set list includes 44 songs curated from Swift’s 10 albums, and the tour, which started in March and will travel overseas next year, is set to earn a record-breaking $1 billion in sales, it was reported earlier this week.
I’ve never been one to count on celebrities to positively influence my kid, but if I were, I’d definitely choose Swift. Her career has been relatively scandal-free, and she’s always demonstrated to young women how to advocate for themselves — like when, in 2017, she successfully stood up in court to a man who groped her, or when she rose above Kanye West publicly humiliating her at the 2009 MTV video music awards, or when she decided to re-record her albums to wrest back control of her music from a greedy record company executive. She’s also a goofy cat lady who trusts her own talent and instincts, and I’d rather my daughter admire a dozen Taylor Swifts than one single Kardashian.
On Friday, the five of us will load up for our latest — and hopefully not last — Taylor trek. This time, though, Kim and I will be escorting a college freshman, a college sophomore and a college junior. We’ve watched the clips of previous concerts online and can’t wait to see Swift literally dive into the stage, see the tour-provided wristbands worn by 50,000 fans light up in patterns, and hear the crowd shout along to every word. We can’t wait find out if our endless speculation about what Friday night’s “surprise” song will be is correct. We’re looking forward to every costume change and will savor every minute of the three-hour show.
Three of the most important girls in my life have grown up with Taylor Swift, as have many Millennials and members of Gen Z, and I anticipate the crowd’s average age will be much higher than when I first saw Swift back in 2010. I know my girl is much older: I’ll drop her off at college in August, and this is one of the last fun things we’ll get to do together before she goes.
But Taylor Swift is the kind of star who will likely have Cher- and Paul McCartney-length careers, and I hope the five of us keep seeing Taylor Swift shows together for many Eras to come.
This story was originally published July 5, 2023 at 11:13 AM.
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