Rock legends have been falling over themselves to praise Taylor Swift over the past few years, and the latest to reveal himself as a fan is The Who’s Pete Townshend.
Speaking on a recent episode of the What It Takes podcast, the songwriter and guitarist namechecked Swift when the conversation turned to songcraft.
“I'm a song dreamer in a sense,” he said. “So I love the great songwriters of my father's era, Gershwin and so on. And also the great songwriters of today, past The Beatles and all the rest of them to Taylor Swift. I love what she does, too.”
Townshend might seem like a fairly unlikely Swiftie, but he says that it’s the joy she brings to her work that he admires.
“Not that she's necessarily absolutely always to my taste, but I just love the fact that she seems to love it, that she seems to be having so much fun,” he says. “That's what I identify with.”
Townshend isn’t the first rock titan to put Swift in the same sentence as the Fab Four; back in 2021, Billy Joel actually compared them directly.
‘She’s productive and keeps coming up with great concepts and songs and she’s huge,” he told USA Today. “You have to give her high marks. She knows music and she knows how to write. She’s like that generation’s Beatles.”
Both Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr have praised Swift in the past, and in an interview with Time in 2023, Swift revealed that she has a handwritten note from McCartney hanging in her bathroom.
“Take these broken wings and learn to fly,” it reads, this being a famous lyric from The Beatles’ Blackbird.
