"Tim McGraw" is Taylor Swift's Best Song For At Least the Next 9 Minutes
I have not been able to write lately. I have not been reading or watching or listening to much of anything in any organized manner. I learned today at 6:45 AM that I passed the bar, which on the one hand was a tremendous relief but on the other: there goes the excuse I’ve been using the past few months to explain why I’m like this.
I have been doing well at going to bed at a regular time. That will not be the case tonight because I will be staying up for the blonde menace’s new music. A few loose thoughts on my favorite song of hers in the meanwhile:
“Tim McGraw” is perfection, a very first single that foretells her ubiquity. The metatextuality, the metonymy! It consumes itself — “when you think Tim McGraw, I hope you think of me.” Tim McGraw, standing in for his music, standing in for the relationship that ended, remembered fondly. I can’t Fermi-problem how many people have been shortened, in memory, to “that one Taylor Swift song that was playing” over the decade and a half her career’s spanned since.
For someone whose image grappled for so long with accusations of being “fake,” 1) as though savviness were a bad thing or 2) as though celebrities, or anyone working very, very hard to become a celebrity weren’t absolutely not just like us, crashing into the industry by namedropping Tim McGraw as a calculated strategy amuses me to no end. The president of her record label at the time: “We put that out deliberately, so people would ask, who’s this new artist with a song called ‘Tim McGraw’?” I love it! I unironically love it! I love “Chevy truck” and “lake” and “backroads” and “Georgia stars”! All hilarious and perfect!
“Tim McGraw” can only get better the farther away 2006 gets. It can only grow sharper: she was inevitable from the start.
When Reputation came out, a good friend of mine was letting me crash at her sublet in Friedrichshain. It felt unfair to have to wait until the morning for Eastern midnight. The album grew on me slowly. For reasons too long to go into here, when I have 17 minutes left, I spent the past year and change falling in love with someone I’d known for years and always associated very closely with Taylor Swift. I listened to a lot of Reputation last fall. Anyway, we’re both staying up, and we both have work tomorrow.
My college, where I met the friend who hosted me, is holding reunion this weekend, and I didn’t go. I listlessly flipped through the Instagram stories of distant acquaintances I now see sometimes on LinkedIn earlier this weekend and felt vaguely sad, and disappointed in myself, before remembering I neither wanted to travel nor pay for it. I miss her, but we have the groupchat, which — being composed of people who think that Taylor Swift is extremely smart and also, understandably, extremely not normal, and doesn’t think that either makes her holy or evil, just a brilliant, shrewd musician who works very hard and is as often unintentionally hilarious in her intensity and steely shamelessness (this is a woman who put her face on UPS trucks! ), as she is funny in the conventional way — has oscillated between arch and classic earnestness in anticipation of Midnights. We’ll be talking a lot tomorrow.