Drive Back Home

All my life is like a drive back home
Can’t you hear me singing?
Can’t you hear me singing?

—Bret Alexander “Drive Back Home”

Driving home from Harrisburg on Saturday night with my girls. We helped my youngest get settled in her law school apartment down there. Had a nice dinner on the banks of the Susquehanna river. I’ve become a big fan of the city. It’s got a good vibe to it. It has treated our family well.

It was twilight when we left for home. Traffic was light. The driver controls the music. Hard and fast rule. I had my way the entire trip down. A wildly eclectic playlist I created on Spotify…..everything from My Love Is Alive by Gary Wright to A Sailor’s Life by Fairport Convention, with the odd Glen Campbell song mixed in after Brick House by the Commodores and a few Stone Roses songs.. Not really my girl’s style. They wanted to hear Taylor Swift.

On the return trip I relented.

Taylor Swift has become a phenomenon. She’s the Beatles and Elvis combined. She’s a 5′ 11″ blonde 1984 era Prince/Madonna/Bruce/Michael Jackson all rolled into one. If she ran for President she’d destroy Trump and Biden. Her fans could stop wars. Or start them.

She could play an early and late stadium gig every day/night of the year and sell every ticket, assuming of course that Ticketmaster could push them out fast enough. Her new releases actually BREAK Spotify. Her fans simply overwhelm the service. Her current concert tour is on record as greatly benefitting the entire American economy. Her fans show up a day early to get in line for the merch table. Her crowds can be seen from space. At a recent sold out Philly show (that my girls attended) an additional 20,000 fans who didn’t have tickets showed up anyway to stand outside and listen, singing along to every word. That’s a spare sold-out Madison Square Garden crowd, milling around the parking lot. Taylor Swift plays for a Springsteenesque 3+ hours, often in crazy weather. She’s a total pro. She never panders to her fans and doesn’t take any of this for granted. Her fans have grown up with her music. It’s become their soundtrack. Whatever they are currently going through, there’s seemingly a Taylor Swift song that helps them get through it.

I’m a rabid music fan. I’m a musician. Music has propelled me forward since my pre-teens. Pete Townshend was my avatar. I later became a Springsteen devotee. And now I’ve got 1000 acts on my playlists. But I don’t think Townshend or Bruce or the Beatles EVER meant to me what Taylor Swift means to my kids right now. That’s how intense this is.

So yea. We listened to Taylor Swift for the entire ride home. I made a point to really listen….to dive into what I was hearing. I put my songwriting cap on. I’ve written hundreds of songs. I consider a handful of them to be pretty special. But most are shit. Why? Because writing a good song is hard. Writing a shit song is easy. Too often I’ve taken the easy way out.

She’s a wonderful lyricist. I heard couplet after couplet that slapped hard. Her melodies are simple and memorable. Her choruses extremely singable. The production is straightforward, and rarely distract from the song. Everything I heard, I liked. Some I liked better than others, but that’s just music. A great pop songwriter. A talent like hers would shine in any decade.

If you hurt her and she writes about it, it’s gonna sting. This makes bros nervous (gave Kanye a public nervous breakdown and sent John Mayer running into the arms of Deadheads), the same way that Joni Mitchell and Carol King made bros nervous in the 1970s. It’s always been a male dominated industry, and when a woman reaches the top male egos start to splatter like eggs on Mischief Night.

Now all these years later, Taylor Swift (with an assist from Beyoncé) has almost single-handedly ensured that it is no longer a male dominated industry. Whether you like it or not is irrelevant. The King of Pop is now a Queen.

I'll get older / but your lovers stay my age

—Taylor Swift (All Too Well)

Damn. This is Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde turned inside-out. I could feel this burn coming through the bluetooth. The entire 10 minute song was BRUTAL. It made me cringe for whoever that dude was. Nobody who can slice and dice like this is going away anytime soon. She’s a generational talent. She might not toil in the musical style that you or I like best, but anyone suggesting, more than a decade on, that she’s still some sort of manufactured pop diva has the brains of a kick drum.

So yea. It was a pretty cool ride home. Taylor is not about to replace Townshend on my office wall or anything like that, but you might catch me singing along sometime soon.

In a bit…

—tf