This article is taken from the December/January 2023 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

I like Taylor Swift a lot. To review: I’ve seen her in concert twice, listened to her albums obsessively (OK, I’m a bit patchier on the first three Nashville-y ones), can measure out the last ten years of my life in her songs, and have advanced theories of Taylorology around her lyrics. I once bought a T-shirt from the official Taylor Swift merchandise store bearing a picture of her cats. I’ve actually worn it.

I even use one of her lines as my Twitter bio. It’s a good line too, from “I Did Something Bad” off the Reputation album: “They’re burning all the witches even if you aren’t one/So light me up.” I embraced it as a statement of defiance from a woman who’d dealt with the rougher side of having a public profile, but character limitations means I can only use the “light me up” bit, and I worry sometimes that it just makes me sound like a stoner. Still, loyalty to Taylor means I’m unlikely to change it.

Swift inspires something more than love among her admirers: a fervent attachment that lives just below the surface

In short, if this isn’t fandom, then I don’t know what is. But in the realm of Taylor Swift fandom, this is hardly anything. In the realm of Taylor Swift fandom, I’m a half-assing dilettante. Swift inspires something more than love among her admirers: a fervent attachment that lives just below the surface of normal-seeming young women, who will with the least prompting enter into detailed dissections of the art of Swift that make Torah study look like Wordle in comparison.

On the day Swift’s latest album, Midnights, came out, I got a text from one of my Swiftie friends at half past seven in the morning asking what I thought. What I thought, at that point, was nothing: I was still in bed, listening to Today, marvelling at the prodigal self-destruction of Liz Truss, looking forward to some quality Swift listening at lunchtime. (Though Liz Truss, who is also a Swiftie, was probably consoling herself with the new record. And maybe a bottle of cold breakfast Chardonnay per her rider.)

My friend, though, had been awake since 5am, when the album landed on Spotify UK time. She’d arranged a sleepover with a fellow Swift fan (whose boyfriend arranged to be out of the flat for this: the secret life of men who love women who love Taylor is a social phenomenon in its own right), so they could listen to it together the moment it was released.

The surprise second album drop is a perfect example of how Swift tends her relationship with her fans

“And then three hours later I had to go to work, and the 3am Edition appeared!” exclaimed my friend when she told me about this — a second version of the album with seven extra tracks.

The surprise second album drop is a perfect example of how Swift tends her relationship with her fans. For those like my friend who made the effort to be there when the album appeared, Swift made the effort in turn to reward them with something special. Midnights is a delicate, introspective record (Swift called it “a collage of intensity, highs and lows and ebbs and flows”), but the 3am Edition is even more intimate: one track (“Bigger Than the Whole Sky”) has been interpreted as a ballad of mourning for a miscarriage.

It ends with a song called “Dear Reader” that speaks directly to the listener. “Never take advice from someone who’s falling apart,” she sings — a confession of her own vulnerability and an acknowledgement that listeners do look to her for wisdom.

“You should find another guiding light/ But I burn so bright.” And, if I’m quite honest, I envied my friend this moment shared with Taylor. A moment shared with Taylor, and millions of other Swifties: Midnights accumulated a billion streams globally in its first week of release, and racked up multiple sales records.

Swift’s troubles replicate, on a grand canvas, a basic irritant of life today

It was a collective moment that somehow felt private. Part of Swift’s genius, both as an artist and as a celebrity (two separate roles, but two roles that are closely entwined in Swift), is that she brings a feeling of interpersonal conspiracy to a relationship that is, objectively, impersonal and transactional. Taylor Swift doesn’t know you, her fan. But the acute intelligence of her lyrics means that it can feel uncannily as though she does.

Take my Twitter bio. What, truly, do I have in common with Swift when it comes to dealing with public life? It’s not much fun trending on Twitter because you’ve said something intemperate about penises (again), but it’s also hardly on a par with the Swift experience that inspired that song: she got called a liar by Kim Kardashian and Kanye West, thousands of people left snake emojis on her posts and sundry bloggers decided she was the poster girl for white privilege.

And yet: Swift’s troubles replicate, on a grand canvas, a basic irritant of life today. All of us — at least, all of us who exist on social media to any extent — are a tiny bit famous. A popstar who can articulate the particularity of life under scrutiny would once have been singing of something remote to the average listener. Now, that’s the most relatable subject possible.

Midnights is an album about love and loss, not just celebrity, but Swift’s craft with the well-chosen detail tells with any subject. She is a star, because she feels like one of us — a talent for ordinariness that makes her the most exceptional artist at work today.