I have a big fat confession to make. After a lifetime of eschewing the mainstream, I’ve become an unlikely Swiftie, and I have my 11-year-old daughter to thank for it.
If you’d told me 10 years ago that I would get swept up in Taylor Swift mania at the very peak of the pop star’s global dominance, I would have shaken my head disdainfully. I was a contrarian; a forever surly teen who only relatively recently grew up enough to openly enjoy firework displays without cringing at all the oohing and ahhing. I was a shy outsider with a preference for scrotty, small music venues. But when my daughter, now almost 12, started playing the Swift classic “Shake It Off” around the house a year or two ago, I found myself appreciating what this woman was singing. (Haters gonna hate, slutshame and all the rest, but I’m just gonna shake it off, and do what the hell I want and need, essentially.)
