Good Morning Mads!
A few weeks ago I watched the Taylor Swift documentary, Miss Americana. I finished it at about 1 A.M. and then climbed down from my bunk, got onto the notes app on my laptop and just started writing. There was so much more to the doc than I had anticipated and wanted to capture my initial reactions instead of waiting until the morning. I went into the documentary thinking that it would be a fun, concert style video like her Reputation Netflix original. Boy was I wrong, there was so much heart and truth shown through the behind the scenes of her life the past 15 years.
I grew up listening to Taylor swift, I remember coming home one day and seeing her CD on our counter one afternoon. We played that poor thing on our pink barbie CD player for so many years, reading the lyrics along with the words so that we would know the songs by heart by the time the album was through. Each new album we would declare our favorite tracks, and discuss what events might have inspired them. Until finally, one day, we were old enough to actually understand some of the lyrics. Relating to the self-imposed heartbreak, and the dreams of romance we saw in the movies, and old enough to really understand the teenage girl who wrote them to us.
“I give myself like five seconds a day to be like YES THIS IS HAPPENING! And then the rest of the day I’m trying to figure out how i’m going to make it last.” [1:10:36-1:10:29]
There was a moment when she is describing her idea for a music video to Brendan Urie and she is like I know it's crazy and its going to be a lot but it's going to be beautiful. “If you were to split open my imagination, what would come out of it… I’m sweating now, I got way too excited okay guys, too excited about everything.” [38:04-37:46] This scene brought me back to the night where I sat on the floor in my sisters closet and called Maddie on the phone saying, “hear me out I know this is crazy but I have this idea to start a blog to write our our thoughts and reactions to things that we already will see, so really doing what we already love to do.”
Another part of the documentary that surprised me was watching how normal she is and getting to understand that like the rest of us, she just wants to be loved and accepted. Because of her position in the spotlight, she feels the cruelty of society the strongest. Living her dreams means putting herself up to be completely picked apart.
In my English class my professor talked about how when an author releases a book the moment it touches the readers hands it is lost to them. The thoughts, heart and intentions they may have poured into it now come second. The emotion, pain, joys, and experiences are now reflected through the life of the reader. In many ways this is exactly what happens with Taylor’s songwriting. In each of her songs she has a story to tell, and however straightforward or layered in metaphor she chooses the true inspiring events of the song are less important than what the listener find in it.
While it feels strange that the creator never gets to be understood exactly as they intended, that is the beauty of the human experience. They are able to be connected in a more beautiful way in the sense that the same sunlight beams on us all even though we see different shadows. The truth of what is written, heard, or seen lies in the place where another can see it and say they know it. If the artist didn’t want anyone to be able to relate to it they would strictly pour out something unique to them, instead what we receive is a sent up a flare saying “THIS PAIN, THIS JOY, COME DANCE IT WITH ME, because this happened or I want it to or wish that it won’t and I want to share that with you.” I remember a few years ago my dad came home, set his laptop on the table and went directly to his iPod to play “Shake it Off” and asked us all to dance with him, to share in that feeling with him. Honestly, I never liked that song until I danced that day.
Near the end of the documentary, Taylor read some pages from her diary from when she was young. One quote really stuck out to me: “I don’t know if I can do this. I want it so bad but I get so scared of what might happen. Relax, I can handle it. I'm young, I’m talented. They’ll see it in me, I have got to hang on ” [2:48-2:34] A thirteen year old in Tennessee can only dream and keep on slowly doing the steps of dance she so desperately wants to learn. In this quote the doubt, the fear, but the underlying hope speak so clearly to me. Deep down we all want a life that is a little magic. One that we will think about wondering if it all really happened or if the colors of the dream just shone so bright we didn’t notice.
One final thought I had about this documentary is best said through the last words Taylor says: “I wanna still have a sharp pen and a thin skin and an open heart” [1:51-1:44] I think that this quote is so beautiful because even after seeing her struggles and her pain she can rise from it and remind us all to feel and to be human and to experience the world around us and continue to create something beautiful from it.
-hp
cover photo: Uploaded by Lelebird7. Taylor Swift for Time Magazine. 2019. Photograph. Accessed 2/28/2020.
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