Taylor

 

Taylor Swift grew up on a Christmas tree farm. This was one of the quiz facts on the Taylor questionnaire Bridie and I glanced through in her 2015 program while Vance Joy did the warm-up. We were perched in a bay of the Melbourne Cricket Ground, together with thousands of other female (mainly) fans. I think of Taylor Swift each January into February, as I step around Christmas trees left out flat on the footpath, their needles turning brown in the sun. I hum ‘Delicate’ in my mind. Christmas trees are big business. Everyone wants a Christmas tree. Knowing your product and your market are ground rules of the Swift family. Someone is bound to benefit from farming them, a Swift turnaround in the end-of-year rush. Nature provides the raw material that we decorate in a thousand different ways. Then the lights are taken down again, the baubles unhooked, the big star returned to storage, and the tree fast-tracked to the side of the street. By that stage it could be just one more compact disc or overpriced vinyl that has gone out of style, replaced at the back of the rack. Another question was, did we know she is named after James Taylor, a fact that stays in the mind years later like a catchy riff until I wonder if I’m being brainwashed. Taylor’s music was note perfect but the MCG stage show was just you know Hollywood, take it or leave it. Bridie, like her friends, let go of Tay once she was making too much money; I listen to Taylor more than she does, nowadays. I enjoy her witty wonderful arrangements and changes, ditto her exceptional storytelling techniques in a lyric, where a single phrase can alter the meaning and feel of a whole song. The rest of it is glitz. I note that her new album is called ‘The Tortured Poets Department’. Could it be about crucifixion? Has she written a Passion Play? More likely it is a storyline in keeping with her verse about “Boys only want love if it’s torture/ Don’t say I didn’t, say I didn’t warn ya…”, and the titles of the just released tracklist suggest that relationships remain the main game. She made the announcement at the 2024 Grammys, so promotion is high on her mind yet, take advantage of the Season. I guess it will be more of Taylor’s joke-on-herself that is at the same time a joke on someone else. Is this the ultimate takedown of emo verse? Or does anything we ever say have emo somewhere in the mix, up high, or way down low? Perhaps I should offer a U3A course on the subject, everyone else is. An unavoidable topic on my curriculum though would have to be Taylor’s carbon footprint, as she wings from stadium to stadium in 2024 in her private jet. The discussion could pick up on Christmas trees, how they are not good for the Australian soil, in a certain light are just one more consumable. Pets are for life, not just for Christmas; that sort of thing.