For a period during the first half of this decade – ecstatic and life-affirming and over all too soon – I found myself living with a pair of Taylor Swift obsessives. One was my daughter, the other my father. Divided by 70 years and much else, they were united by Taylor, though it was less a case of shared taste than of parallel obsessions with occasional moments of convergence.
My daughter got going first. I remember being in the car on a fourth-birthday outing to a circus, not long before the pandemic. Shake It Off was playing on the Bluetooth speaker. As we reached the spoken-word bridge, I heard my daughter sing, with emphasis to match Taylor’s, the lead-in line about ‘getting down to this – sick – beat.’
After that, Taylor-worship accelerated. On a 2021 playlist, ‘Fruity Fresh’, so named because we were driving to Park Royal to buy some widely mythologised mangoes, six of the 12 songs were hers. The enthusiasm wasn’t driven by new releases. In October 2022, in a five-star review of Swift’s new album Midnights, the music critic Alexis Petridis, noted that she had ‘steadfastly’ declined to serve up ‘neon-hued bangers.’ This was another way of saying that Taylor was no longer catering to my daughter’s appetites. But there was a complicating factor. After Swift’s record label Big Machine sold her master recordings, she embarked on a project of re-recording her early albums. As far as we were concerned, You Belong With Me was new music from the biggest pop star in the world, no matter that it had been written by a teenage country singer almost a decade before my daughter was born.
My father was an unlikely beneficiary of the Big Machine dispute. In late 2021, Swift put out the ‘Taylor’s Version’ of Red (2012), her transitional album, part country, part pop. My father alighted on the final – 30th – track. All Too Well had one key subtitle (10 Minute Version), distinguishing it from the original five-minute track, and another (Taylor’s Version) that was slightly misleading. The only previous recording of the longer All Too Well had been made when Swift ad-libbed the song in early 2011, shortly after the end of her relationship with the actor Jake Gyllenhaal. Swift then worked with the Nashville stalwart Liz Rose to create the five-minute song that appeared on Red towards the end of the following year.
In the intervening period, Swift enlisted the Swedish hit-machine duo Max Martin and Shellback to produce the songs that my daughter loved, like We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together (which is the song that had got me into Swift’s music before I had children). But the five-minute All Too Well was by no means drowned out by the poppy synths and drum pads. There’s a daft talk-show moment in 2017 when Maggie Gyllenhaal is asked about the scarf Swift refers to leaving ‘at your sister’s house’ in the song’s third line. Gyllenhaal replied that she ‘never understood why everybody asked me about this scarf.’ After the ten-minute All Too Well emerged, she explained that she had found her old notebook and ‘restructured the song to the way that it pretty much was’. Pretty much: many questioned whether a ‘Fuck the Patriarchy’ keychain could have appeared in the original.
By the summer of 2023, when I received a text from someone staying at the house saying that my dad was listening to All Too Well, it didn’t even merit a reply. Ten days later, my dad sent me a link to a 46-minute conversation between Swift and the Irish playwright and filmmaker Martin McDonagh, in which she reflected on writing and directing the short film that accompanied All Too Well. He also kept me up to date on claims testifying to her greatness as a lyricist.
My father’s interest in the extended version of All Too Well was no more a niche taste than my daughter’s love of Shake It Off. It became the longest song ever to top the Billboard Hot 100, and was the subject of a ten-week course at Stanford. In 2025, Rolling Stone called it the neatest encapsulation of her ‘genius.’ My daughter would have disagreed. She had many favourites, and All Too Well wasn’t among them. The legend of that song rested on its maturity and vulnerability. She responded to Swift’s catchy melodies, mischievous humour, and tone of defiance. The break-up songs she enjoyed were closer to diss-track territory, and for the most part, she preferred a quicker tempo.
At the risk of sounding parochial, I would claim to really appreciate her achievement you had to be in our house on a weekday evening in 2023 – a seven-year-old in the living room wearing bracelets with Taylor song titles and a t-shirt that asked ‘What would Taylor do?’ while dancing and singing along to Blank Space, a 78-year old in his cubby hole taking a well-earned break from recordings and performances of All Too Well to blast out Taylor’s New York University commencement address, in which she urged the graduating students to learn to live alongside cringe.
