What If I Told You She Was a Mastermind: How Taylor Swift Colonized Dad-Rock

I’m a dad. And like any other dad, nothing beats sharing something, anything, with my daughter—a 17-year old high school junior. She’s a music fan who grew up in a household attuned to current music (I helped start this very website). Like many girls her age, she loves Taylor Swift because of course she does. For most of Swift’s career, even as she sold hundreds of millions of albums, won 12 Grammys and built an army of Swifties whose fierce loyalty is rivaled only by the Beyhive, I assumed her music wasn’t for me, but was glad for the young girls who enjoyed it.

Swift’s music was not a major point of connection with my daughter except when she released 1989. “Shake It Off” and “Blank Space” caused music-heads like me to sit up and take notice. Then Ryan Adams dropped his cover of the entire album, earning regular rotation for the Dads of many Swifties. Turns out we loved her songs rendered in our idiom. I’m sure Taylor noticed.

Before I get to my theory, a note about Taylor Swift: She’s not just an uber-talented songwriter and cultivator of passionate fans, she’s by all accounts extremely hard-working and, importantly, wicked smart. It wasn’t a surprise to learn that the one celebrity who saw through Sam Bankman-Fried and the FTX scam and turned down their huge sponsorship dollars was the same artist who flipped the industry on its head by re-recording her back catalog to take away streaming and licensing revenue from the company that had taken ownership of it.

After her massive Loverfest tour plan was wiped out by COVID-19, like the rest of us, she had some time on her hands. In the throes of lockdown, Swift famously reached out to Aaron Dessner—songwriter, producer, guitarist and co-founder of Dad-rock heroes The National—to collaborate on some music. This wasn’t random—she’d openly admired them, name-checking the band as far back as a 2015 GQ interview as one she listened to while making 1989 and was pictured on Instagram in 2019 wearing a National t-shirt.

This fruitful collaboration led to Dessner co-producing and co-writing most of 2020’s Folklore (which won Swift’s third Grammy for Album of the Year) and doing the same later in the year on a second full album, evermore. Folklore included further collaboration with Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon and evermore featured each of The National’s members but, most memorably, lead singer Matt Berninger on “Coney Island” and even a duet appearance by Marcus Mumford for good measure on “cowboy like me.”

This wasn’t all. Big Red Machine, the supergroup featuring Dessner and Vernon, dropped two Swift collaborations, “Birch” and “Renegade,” on their 2021 album How Long Do You Think It’s Gonna Last? Swift’s 2022 album Midnights featured three more Dessner collaborations on the extended “3am” edition and a special Target CD version included a full Taylor Swift-The National-Bon Iver track, “Hits Different.” Finally, The National’s new album First Two Pages of Frankenstein features yet another Taylor Swift duet, “The Alcott.”

So here’s my theory: The creative-yet-ambitious, grateful-yet-striving, artsy-yet-clever human Venn Diagram overlap of Jay-Z’s business savvy, Beyonce’s fan connection and Joni Mitchell (pick your preferred elite songwriter if that offends you)-level songwriting asked herself during early COVID: “I’ve got all these teenaged girl fans—how do I win their Dads?”

Maybe make an album with Wilco? Absent that, how about The National? And Bon Iver? Over the course of three years and what has amounted to nearly three dozen songs scattered over three Taylor Swift albums plus albums from Big Red Machine and The National, Swift has cashed in on the connection with older male music fans that sprouted with “Blank Space”, was watered by Ryan Adams’ full-album tribute and came to full flower during COVID in what is sometimes called her “Cottagecore” era.

Was it all a big plot to win us Dads and grow the fanbase so that now she is underplaying markets while still filling football stadiums on three successive nights per city? Whether it was or not, it worked—according to MRC Data, Folklore was the most popular album of 2020 for men aged 36-50. Another report shows her share of male Spotify listeners increasing. Her success selling vinyl and other physical product (both Folkore and evermore reached the top of the Billboard Top Albums Sales Chart which measures pure album sales without streaming or song equivalents) indicate strength among older music fans. Anecdotally, I’ve listened to more Swift music than any other artist over the past three years, and I know I’m not alone among fellas like me. Check the hashtags #DadLovesTaylor and #DadSwiftie for more.

I’m writing here about a massively rich, famous and powerful person and imagining what she might be thinking. Yet, there’s been a sense in how Swift presents herself that she’s fan-focused, empathetic and a thoughtful person. Did she set out to create a new, fun and powerful connection between fathers and daughters? Who knows if she planned it, but I’m delighted that it happened. I text and talk with my daughter regularly about Swift’s music, arguing over which songs we love. This month we bonded over our experience at The Eras Tour and all the hoopla that surrounds it. Just yesterday, we thrilled to the Tiktok video of her live debut of “Would’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve” with Aaron Dessner himself at the already-legendary rainy third night of her Nashville stand.

At this point I know Taylor Swift didn’t just throw us Dads a couple bones—the Eras Tour setlist includes a dozen or more songs from the cottagecore albums, more than could reasonably be expected for a stadium tour and the bombast that it requires. Nora Princiotti and Nathan Hubbard, the knowledgeable and passionate Swifties who host the excellent Every Single Album podcast, predicted far less Folklore/evermore songs to make the tour setlist. She’s a different artist now, and her “return to pop” on Midnights I find to be her best album yet. It’s the first one my daughter and I got to look forward to together, and we’ve listened to it and debated it ever since release day.

So yep, I’ll give Taylor Swift credit for a grand plan to unite me with my daughter while growing her fanbase (and her bank account). After all, she showed her work on the closing song on Midnights: “I laid the groundwork, and then just like clockwork / The dominoes cascaded in a line / What if told you I’m a mastermind? / And now you’re mine / It was all by design.”

Good job, Taylor, and thanks.

Nick Purdy is a co-founder and former publisher of Paste Magazine. He currently runs Wild Heaven Brewery in Atlanta and Avondale, Ga.