MINTZ: Taylor Swift is Important and This is Why

I am going to come right out and say it: I love Taylor Swift. I am also going to come out and say that this is not going to be an album review of her new release “1989,” obviously. Even though it’s amazing and I would love to write about it, I have a theme to stick with. This is, instead, my manifesto in defense of Taylor Swift.

I have loved Taylor Swift ever since her first album came out, back when I was too young to experience half the things she wrote about. I listened to “Tim McGraw” on repeat before I even had a summer romance. I subjected my mother to countless plays of “Should’ve Said No” in the car before I was ever scorned by any boy. And when I finally got my license, I made a playlist of all of Taylor Swift’s songs thus far and almost exclusively listened to that for my first few weeks on the road. Some of my favorite memories involve taking pointless drives solely so that my sister and I could listen to Taylor’s albums in full, or skip around and find our favorite songs or scream the words to a sad song when my sister was feeling heartbroken.

Somehow, even if the lyrics do not totally match up with your situation, Taylor has a way of making you feel like all of her songs are about you.

As I grew up, Taylor grew up with me: the release of her 2010 album “Speak Now” (arguably my favorite album of all time, as lofty as that statement may be) coincided with a time in my life wherein I was miserable in the greatest sense of the word, completely hopeless, lacking any optimism — and this is coming from, today, a fairly optimistic person.

I remember one day at 16 years old, cleaning my room after not having gotten out of bed for days. I was listening to the album in full (skipping over all the happy songs, as emotional 16 year old’s do), and her song “Innocent” came on. The song is allegedly about the infamous Kanye West scenario at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards, but the lyrics just so happened to coincide perfectly with how I was feeling lately. Call me dramatic, but there is a part of me that fully believes I owe my life and my place in this world to hearing that song at the perfect time.

When Taylor Swift released “Red” in 2012, her most beautifully written, chaotic, heartbreaking album, I sang loudly along with her. When Taylor Swift suffered her greatest heartbreak, I was going through my first (and only, so far). Although my situation was far less extreme than hers seemed to be, Taylor Swift helped me get through it. I played “If This Was A Movie,” a song about two people who were once so intensely wrapped up in each other but then faded away, religiously. I cried on my birthday to a song about how the boy Taylor Swift loved didn’t come to her birthday party, much like the boy I loved couldn’t — not necessarily his fault, though, since he lived 5,000 miles away.

When the heartache was finally over, I played “Holy Ground,” a song rumored to be her last song about Joe Jonas, as if my healing depended on it. And maybe my healing did, in fact, depend on it. The song is happy, reminiscing on everything that went right in a relationship that she’s now over and past. Still, to this day, when I listen to that song, a movie-esque montage of moments from summer 2013 plays in my head — all good things, of course.

Now, I swear I had a point before I went off on a tangent about how much Taylor Swift’s music means to me.

Taylor Swift writes the kind of music that anyone — yes, anyone — could relate to. And before you roll your eyes, I guarantee it, there is a Taylor Swift song for you, too. But over the years, Taylor has seemed to garner a bad reputation as the paradigm “Dramatic Girl,” the scorned woman who only writes overly dramatic songs about boys she only ever went out on one date with, even when this is not the case.

Almost the entirety of her album “Red” was (allegedly, of course) about her relationship with Jake Gyllenhaal, and people were so quick to remind her and everyone else that she and Jake only dated for six months, or however long it was. But judging and patronizing her for what one may consider a large amount of drama over a relatively short relationship is undermining what Taylor does best: the beauty of her lyricism is her ability to take one tiny moment and magnify it so that it matches how she felt it and how you would have probably felt too.

She manages at once to make her writing universal and deeply personal, something I’ve never experienced with any other songwriter. But she is vilified for it, this writing talent of a magnitude of which I can only dream. Do not even try to tell me that you have never obsessed over a brief little encounter and wanted to tell the entire world about it. The amazing thing about Taylor Swift is that she gets to tell the entire world about it.

And quite frankly, Taylor doesn’t have time to spend more than a few months with the same person. She’s too busy running an empire.