Inside Taylor Swift’s fandom: ‘Joe Alwyn will go through a horrible period of time when this album comes out’

He has already seen the show twice in Chicago last year, all six of the Singapore shows in March and also managed to find tickets for two of her London dates this summer.

Hourihane, who was born in Singapore to Dublin parents, has been a Swiftie for “all of his sentient life”. That obsession has translated into a career.

He is one of the most high-profile Taylor Swift content creators in the fandom, making podcasts (Evolution of a Snake) and videos (as the Swiftologist) that attract millions of views.

Seeing her show that often, could Hourihane ever get bor–

“No. Never,” he cuts me off, “NEV-ER.”

“It’s an emotional endeavour for me to go to the Eras tour,” he adds. “When Fearless comes up and that hand heart goes up, I’m sobbing. When Enchanted comes up, I’m crying. When Look What You Made Me Do comes up, I’m screaming. I would never get bored.”

This week, Swift releases her 11th studio album — The Tortured Poets Department (TTPD.) Even for an artist as prolific as Swift, who has released four original albums and four re-recordings since 2019, the latest addition to her discography is extremely eagerly anticipated. This is partly because it is expected to be her first explicit break-up album since 2012’s cult favourite Red.

Swift has mastered the art of articulating her feelings in a way that is so confessional and so sincere, that it manages to make the life of one of the most rich and famous women in the world inherently relatable to her legions of fans.

People sometimes talk about modern fandoms having ‘parasocial’ relationships with their idols. But Swift has been talking intimately and directly to Swifties for almost 20 years. Even at the gargantuan scale that it has now reached, the Taylor Swift fandom represents a very real relationship between the singer and her devotees. If she is the most interesting story in pop-culture, the Swifties themselves must be a close second.

Today's News in 90 seconds - 18th April 2024

When Hourihane was a child, he was watching MTV when the music video for Our Song came on — the third single from Swift’s 2006 debut album. Watching in Singapore, he was immediately taken by the “buoyant, vibrant Americanism” of Swift’s country pop that was totally foreign to him.

It was when he listened to her second critically acclaimed album Fearless and read the “liner notes” — secret messages Swift left for fans revealing the inspiration and meaning behind her songs — that he realised there was something really different about her music.

“I felt like there was some wisdom to be gained from the stories and the lessons that I was hearing from her,” he says. “The songs moved me to feel something. I think the first artist to do that for you when you’re young kind of imprints upon you in some way.”

Hourihane would spend his teenage years embedded in the emergent online hub of Swift fans on Tumblr . But the dynamic shifted completely when Swift herself joined in. What had started as a fan forum turned into a venue for what would become the singular, unifying aim of every decent Swiftie: getting Taylor’s attention. “I debased myself along with everyone else. My blog just became me reblogging myself over and over and over again, tagging her and trying to get her attention,” Hourihane says.

Swift was always talking to her fans, not just through what Hourihane describes as her “confessional, diaristic songwriting” but by consciously creating opportunities to form real relationships with them.

High-profile fans would often be rewarded by being chosen for “secret sessions” — brought to Swift’s Nashville home to listen to her new albums and hear her talk about song meanings before the music was released. (Yes, Hourihane has made the cut as a “sessioner.”)

Dressing up in extravagant, super referential outfits was a trend from some of Swift’s earliest tours, because fans who managed to attract attention knew they could be chosen to come backstage and meet her afterwards. (The power to choose who gets to meet Swift, Hourihane says, lies exclusively with Taylor’s mother, Andrea Swift.) No matter how big she got, getting to have that personal connection with Taylor always felt achievable. “If you didn’t get to meet her you’d think, ‘next album, next tour, or next show, I’ll have a chance’,” Hourihane says.

But in a fandom as intense as Swift’s, getting noticed by her can sometimes be perilous. She now often talks to her fans through Taylor Nation — a kind of fan club/marketing team that Hourihane only half-jokingly refers to as the “state media” for Swifties.

If fans get noticed by Taylor Nation, but are perceived by others to be undeserving of that attention, there will be a backlash. In one incident earlier this year, Taylor Nation quietly deleted a post promoting an Australian fan’s Eras tour costume after Swifties collated and shared a dossier of the fan’s most problematic social media posts, organised into folders. (“Homophobia,” “Just Evil Shit.”)

“If I got the 22 hat,” Hourihane says, referencing a point in the Eras tour when Swift gifts a black hat from the Red era to a selected fan, “I would fear for my life.” Perhaps to avoid this, most of the tour dates seen the hats go to little girls. “Little girls are always excused from the nonsense,” Hourihane explains.

Fans are very protective of Swift, and sometimes this can tip into extremes. Hourihane gets a lot of hate online for critically rather than effusively analysing Swift’s work — for example, he has put out videos criticising her use of a private jet and the ethics of her status as a billionaire. “There is definitely a lack of tolerance for any non-effusive praise,” he says, “I’m read as a traitor.”

The Eras tour is the first of Swift’s to not have hours-long backstage meet and greets — it is a three-hour show, and even Swift isn’t immune to Covid-19.

Her social media presence is less personal than it used to be. But even as her fanbase has increased exponentially, she has still managed to maintain a direct dialogue with her supporters. Swifties don’t just love her, they really know her — and you’d know someone too, if you’d been effectively reading their diary for almost 20 years.

The bond between Swift and her fans is so deep that she no longer really needs to bother with legacy media. Last year was the biggest of her career, yet she only did one profile interview. And that was because she won Time Person of the Year.

Swifties take intense pride in understanding and faithfully interpreting Swift, who still uses coded messages and deep-cut references in her work. These “Easter eggs” encourage what Hourihane describes as a “self-generating content hub of fans,” who post TikToks and threads of their many theories and interpretations of Swift’s work. And all the while, Swift genuinely seems to be reading and watching along.

The Tortured Poets Department is predicted to be about the breakdown of Swift’s six-year relationship with the actor Joe Alwyn. While there is a small cohort of fans who mourned the end of the relationship (“Joe widows”), Alwyn was generally not popular with Swifties. Many of the lyrics of her last four albums, even in songs that were ostensibly about being in love, were flagged by fans as evidence of Alwyn’s failings as a partner. ​

Swifties’ interest in the relationship breakdown shouldn’t be mistaken for gossip. Generally, nobody really cares about the man. What they care about is how he made Swift feel. And the fan lore is that Alwyn broke Swift’s heart.

This was all but confirmed when Swift saw a popular fan theory online that suggested the theme of her new album was the five stages of grief. It isn’t, but she liked the theory so much that she adopted it — and organised some of her old songs on five different playlists under the theme. Earnest love songs were recategorised as being written in states of denial, or delusion. The fans were totally exalted with vindication. And again, it felt really intimate — like the catharsis that follows a best friend’s break-up, when you start to confess seeing the red flags you had both seen but ignored.

One would almost feel for Alwyn, now that he’ll find himself in the cross-hairs of millions of outraged fans when an album articulating her deepest, rawest feelings comes out. But the Swifties’ sympathy for Alwyn is pretty limited.

“At the end of the day, Joe Alwyn will go through a horrible period of time, but it will not last forever,” Hourihane says, before immediately correcting himself. “Well actually,” he says, rather ominously for Alwyn, “I don’t know about that. But it won’t last in this intensity forever.”

While there may be a moral issue with one person presenting their side of a relationship breakdown to millions of zealous fans while the other person is forced to remain silent, Hourihane argues that it’s Swift’s prerogative to write about her feelings in an authentic way.​

“If you’re dating Taylor Swift after the year 2014, you know what’s up. You’ve seen it happen to other people. You understand what you’re signing up for. To think any different to me is kind of like a form of hubris. It’s like denying the facts of life,” Hourihane says.

Swift is a romantic. Throughout her career, she has suffered from shallow media commentary that wrongly perceives her songs to be a dialogue between her and her exes. It’s not, though; it’s about the relationship between her and her fans — with whom she wants to share her feelings.

She is coming to the end of a groundbreaking effort that involves her re-recording all of her first six albums, after losing the original masters to the record executive Scooter Braun. The “Taylor’s Version” project is vindicating for original fans, and has recruited new, latent ones.

Anyone who has paid sincere attention to Swift’s work can plainly see she has a songwriting skill that verges on literary. Yet for much of her career she was dismissed as frivolous and girlish for writing about her feelings and her heartbreak. A caricature was created of her in the media as either a boy-crazy lovefool or a maneater who would harvest the remains of her romantic conquests for lyrical content. Through the album rereleases, the world got to hear the words that Swift wrote when she was 19 sung with an adult voice. When a track like Dear John was re-released last year, any fair analysis was forced to admit without prejudice that Swift has always been brilliant.

She can change the GDP of a nation just by touring there. And the lore around her means that she attracts an attention economy of almost unprecedented scale. It’s modern Beatlemania.

But inviting fans to interpret everything she does has sometimes become treacherous for Swift. Some of the more extreme fringes of the fandom have become conditioned to believe that she is always sending them secret messages, that there is always another meaning that can be found if you love her or understand her enough. This has led to her own personhood being totally erased by those who have an imaginary, preferred version of the singer that they insist on projecting on to her.

The most egregious example is a faction of the fandom known as the ‘Gaylors’. These are a cohort of fans who have convinced themselves that the 34-year-old is a closeted gay woman, who leaves breadcrumbs about her true sexual identity through her songs. This led to one critic penning an essay in the New York Times in December espousing the same outlandish theory, which was so offensive that Swift’s camp was moved to publicly denounce it.

“No matter how many times she comes out and whacks the Gaylors across the head, they will insist that she’s subliminally messaging something to them. I think she becomes this avatar that people project whatever they want on to. And her actual voice becomes less powerful, in a weird way,” Hourihane says.

Swift herself has referenced a concern that her life has become so “unmanageably sized,” that she struggles with “the idea of not feeling like a person”. She is undoubtedly the most famous person on the planet. That is a blessing and a burden.

But even when she’s writing about that level of fame, the unique experiences that surely nobody else could understand, Swift still finds a way to make those songs human and real. Like 2017’s Reputation album, which is ostensibly about what she described as being “cancelled” from what was then the high point of her fame. That should have been a theme that isolated fans. But Swift, true to form, still managed to make the album a love story. When the opening bars of Ready For It launch the Reputation era during the live show, it usually gets the biggest roar.

Thousands of words have been written by those trying to understand Swift’s cultural impact. For fans like Hourihane, it’s not that complicated.

“It’s definitely more straightforward than it seems. It’s this intimacy, it’s the confessional songwriting. It’s songwriting that is specific enough to be emotionally resonant, but vague enough to be generally applicable to many different people’s lives,” he says.

“It’s why people fall in love with poets and writers. It comes down to her way with words. She’s a wordsmith.”

“Like you want to get her merch because you want to wear those lyrics that mean everything to you. You want to dissect songs here and there because you have a perspective on what this means and how it should be interpreted.”

As a fandom, Swifties are often mocked for being so earnest and so excited about Taylor Swift. A fairly common insult is to compare them to a cult. But in the same way that pets sometimes take on the appearances of their owners, fandoms take on the qualities of their icons. Taylor Swift’s entire core ethos is about embracing earnestness, even when it’s kind of cringe.

Swifties are a huge, global, disparate, group of people.

“But you all unite at Mecca, which is the Eras tour. You all come together under the same roof and you worship the same God. There’s something religious about it, there’s something reverential about it.”