Taylor-Made
Oh darlin’, don’t you ever grow up
Don’t you ever grow up
Just stay this little
— Never Grow Up
Before I get all emotional talking about what it was like to take Katie to see Taylor Swift perform in Kansas City on Friday night, I should probably get the Great Dad stuff out of the way. Everywhere I went at Arrowhead Stadium, it seemed, people would come up to me — well, specifically, women would come up to me, young girls, teenagers, Moms, etc. — to tell me what a Great Dad I am. One wanted to hug me. Another asked me my favorite Taylor album (Red) so she could give me a specific friendship bracelet. Several wanted to specifically compliment my shirt.
The shirt was a particularly big hit. You might not know this (though you probably do) — people dress up for Taylor Swift concerts. Katie began planning her outfit roughly six months ago, and it was clear from looking around that others had been planning a lot longer. They dressed up as Taylor, obviously, at various points in her life, but they also dressed up as people from her songs, so we had hundreds of Miss Americanas (and many, though fewer, Heartbreak Princes), and we had hundreds rocking Taylor’s black body suit, and there were many referencing lyrics from “Karma Is My Boyfriend” (including one young woman wearing a jacket with “Karma Bounty Hunter” on the back) and everyone was wearing so much glitter that as the sun set over the stadium, the entire place seemed to be shimmering like an enormous disco ball.
Other Dads* were a lot more creative about their clothing. Some wore shirts with straightforward messages such as “Real Men Love Taylor Swift” or “Swifty Dad.”
*They were around, though it’s fair to say that one of the few places one could find a little solitude in this mass of Taylor fanhood was the men’s room.
But my shirt was a lot more subtle than that … so subtle, in fact, that a Taylor Swift concert was probably the only place on earth where anyone would have even noticed it. I wore a simple polo shirt; I had not bought it specifically for Taylor’s night and it had no Taylor messages on it at all.
But, see, the shirt was the exact right shade of purple — a sort of light lavender.
And that is the precise color to match up to Taylor’s “Speak Now” album.
And Friday night was a celebration of “Speak Now,” because at midnight she released “Speak Now, Taylor’s Version,” a part of a massive project — Taylor Swift has been remaking her old albums so that she can own her music. This is a precious thing in the Taylor Swift world, and so wearing that shirt I was (more than I even knew) standing with Taylor, supporting her, validating her … AND I brought my daughter to her concert and watched with her.
Oh yeah, in this world, I was one Great Dad.
I’m not sure why I didn’t see the emotional stuff coming. Everything is emotional these days. Katie is 18 and about six weeks away from going off to college. Elizabeth is already off at college. Also our dog, Westley, has started to be afraid of going down the stairs by himself; he will stop halfway down and wait there until someone, usually me, climbs up and escorts him down the stairs like he’s getting married.
The passage of time is constantly all around me.
So there was never really a chance that this Taylor Swift concert would not be emotional; Taylor has been the soundtrack of Katie’s life. Katie was born in 2005. Taylor’s first album, the self-titled one, was released in 2006. Taylor was just 16 years old when it came out.
And so Taylor Swift’s musical journey — from the more innocent and country love stories to the harder-edged rock and hip-hop stuff to the more empowering songs in recent years — has been Katie’s journey, too. She has no memory of a time or world before Taylor Swift. Just about everything in her life, in some way, has been tinged by Taylor.
So the concert — and it was a more than three and a half hour concert — was like a journey through Katie’s life. I don’t need to tell you that she, like pretty much every person at the concert, knew every single word to every one of the FORTY-SIX songs performed. But what was funny was how whenever Taylor Swift would start a song, Katie would look over at me with this shocked look as if to say, “WHAT? SHE’S PLAYING THIS ONE TOO? WHAT IN THE WORLD? HOW IS THIS EVEN POSSIBLE?”
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I’m told this was the most epic Taylor Swift concert ever — I guess “Kansas City wins” was trending for a while. Not only did Taylor do three “surprise” songs, including her very first live version of “Never Grow Up,” and not only did she cry listening to cheers after performing “Marjorie,” which she wrote for her grandmother, she also showed the world debut of the “I Can See You” video, and then brought out the stars on stage; this included Joey King and, even more significantly, Taylor Lautner, who, well, that’s a whole thing. The shrieks for Taylor Lautner, particularly after he did a gymnastics tumble for the crowd, were pretty much the loudest of the night.
In all, Katie cried three times (minimum), squealed and squalled 5,000 times (“I sound like I’ve smoked a pack,” she said in a gravelly voice the next morning) and was more or less in a daze the rest of the time.
Almost 15 years ago, Taylor Swift was holding her godson Leo, who was just a baby, and she started to think up the lyrics for “Never Grow Up.”
To you, everything’s funny
You got nothing to regret
I’d give all I have, honey
If you could stay like that
It was more than a song about a baby, though. See, Taylor herself was just 19 then. She was newly famous. She had only just released the hit album “Fearless,” That was the year that Kanye West interrupted her acceptance speech at the MTV Music Awards. She was going through a lot that most people cannot understand.
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But she was also going through something everybody can understand. She was 19. She moved out of her parents’ house. “Sometimes I felt like a grownup,” she said, “but a lot of the time I just wanted to time-travel back to my childhood bed, where my mom would read stories to me until I fell asleep.”
That’s the drift of the song, the essence of it; “Never Grow Up” is a simple song about the dueling emotions of growing up and not growing up at the same time. That’s Katie right now. That’s what we parents are feeling too. We want her to go to college and then go on to live a powerful and meaningful life with love… and also for her to go back to being that little girl I would sing “You Belong With Me” with while driving to school.
In the end, of course they grow up because that’s just the direction time goes. When the concert ended, and we were shuffling very slowly to the exits because of the throng of glitter and tears in front of us, I felt this part a bit profoundly. Sure, there’s some sadness. But Katie’s grown up. Taylor, too. In the end, who would want it to be any other way?
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I couldn’t even NAME a Taylor Swift song let alone sing one. But Joe almost makes me want to be a fan.