Toronto seems to be utterly enchanted by Taylor Swift with fans starting to make their way to one of her six sold-out shows this month.
The city is swiftly showing its love for the Grammy-award winning singer – changing street signs in her honour, limiting construction, and increasing transit service to pave the way for the droves of “Swifties” who will be making their way to the Rogers Centre over the next two weeks.
A slew of events will also be popping up throughout the city that pay homage to the “Blank Space” singer (including a pre-show “Taylgate”).
Toronto has not given nearly the same treatment to any other musician before, so why does this Pennsylvania-born singer command so much attention?
Stephanie Burt, an English professor at Harvard University who taught an entire course on Taylor Swift and her world, would not call the singer’s appeal universal – as she says practically nothing about the human experience is. But she posits many care for Swift due to her ability to connect with her audience through her music.
“She’s extremely good at the technical aspects of song-writing. She just has the ability to create a lot of melodies, and a lot of song structures, and a lot of phrases that people really enjoy hearing over and over, and remembering and repeating and singing along with,” Burt told CTV News Toronto.
“She has retained that ability over 11 albums, which is quite unusual without repeating herself.”
It’s a testament Swift honours through “The Eras Tour,” fittingly named as she traipses through every project throughout her career – from her sophomore album “Fearless” to her recently-released “The Tortured Poets Department” – during her three-and-a-half hour show.
All throughout Swift’s eras, the singer has managed to maintain, or even propel, her popularity, with Billboard crediting her with a dozen number one songs on its Hot 100 list and 59 top 10 hits. Her albums have also topped the charts, with “1989” and “Fearless” each spending 11 weeks at the top of the Billboard 200 list, and her latest feature album “The Tortured Poets Department” reigning supreme for 15 weeks.
Burt credits Swift’s wide range of literary and musical references in her songs through the use of uncomplicated vocabulary, as another key to her success. The Harvard professor says she’s able to pull inspiration from the likes of Joni Mitchell and Brandy to books like “Rebecca” and “The Great Gatsby.”
“(Swift) has this tremendously wide range of reference that she can draw on, not just from album to album, but within her albums. She does it in ways that don’t seem … overtly high-brow, so that’s awesome, and that’s something she’s learned how to do by listening, and reading, and practicing,” Burt said.
While Swift is skillful with her pen – even literally, as she categorizes her songs by the pen she uses to write each song from either a fountain, quill or glitter gel pen – Burt pointed to her ability to collaborate with other musicians as another component to staying fresh and creating consistently catchy music.
“She’s so good at collaborating. She can write a whole album of extremely catchy and well-construct songs by herself, and she did that once to make a point (with the album “Speak Now”) but she prefers to switch it up, and change and grow,” Burt said.
“She’s very good at working with people and that’s one reason why she’s been able to stay fresh and do something different each album.”
Swift has had an eclectic mix of musicians that have leant their talents throughout the years from hip-hop magnate Kendrick Lamar on “Bad Blood” to country star Keith Urban on “That’s When” and pop-punk princess Hayley Williams on “Castles Crumbling (Taylor’s Version)”, to name a few.
But, outside of vocal features she has also worked with artists during the song-writing process, most notably with Grammy-award winning producer, Jack Antonoff, who first collaborated with Swift in 2013 with “Sweeter Than Fiction”.
‘Both aspirational and relatable’
And while Burt says her ability to collaborate well with other artists reflects her desire to grow and produce albums that are different from the last, she notes that Swift’s capability to present herself as both aspirational and relatable is another key component to why she is so beloved by fans.
“The Taylor who comes out of most of her hits and most of her songs, and all of her albums, is someone who many of us both want to be like, look up to as an awesome person, to aspire to or imagine ourselves being, and someone we feel understands us, knows us, already resembles us, gets us, connects to the problems and challenges that we already have in our lives and the role we already play,” she said.
“That’s hard to do as a writer in any kind of writing, especially hard to do in songwriting where you have so many constraints that don’t apply to page-based written poetry or novel writing, or, screenwriting, and she’s been able to do that over and over to be both aspirational and relatable.”
Though brimming with talent in more ways than one, Burt says part of Swift’s success that’s “hard to talk about” are the privileges she has as a white, blonde and conventionally attractive woman.
“She didn’t choose to be blonde or white or 5“11 or have the build that she has, but it is important when you’re thinking about the success of a pop star to think about how many pop stars at that level – most popstars, especially women, and this is very gendered, don’t get listened to, they get looked at,” Burt said.
The Harvard professor also pointed to Swift’s sixth studio album “reputation”, which hinged on her persona and how the public viewed her at the time (when she was embroiled in various celebrity feuds and public break-ups, and was reluctant to talk about politics then).
“It’s an album about white privilege, which she wasn’t ready to talk about in 2017, she wasn’t ready to talk to the media at all after what she’d been through, but she was low-key writing about it,” Burt said.
“White privilege and pretty privilege is part of her success, and she knows it, and seeing that doesn’t, I hope, take away from the tremendous talent that she has shown and the way she’s known how to use it, but it is a disservice to the study of culture and to her listeners and to the truth if you don’t acknowledge that.”
Swift performs the first of her sold-out shows in Toronto this Thursday at the Rogers Centre. The near 21-month-long “The Eras Tour” is set to cap off next month in Vancouver.