The relatable billionaire: Why Taylor Swift's lyrics resonate with so many (2025)

Dipra Gulati has been in a fever dream for weeks.

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The 21-year-old “Swiftie” has been busy bejewelling her boots and making friendship bracelets. She’s up to 20, but wants to have 20 more to trade when she sees Taylor Swift at B.C. Place on Friday, in the first of three sold-out shows in Vancouver.

The third-year psychology student, and proud member of the UBC Swifties Club, lucked into tickets when she was suffering over an assignment at the library last summer. An acquaintance sitting nearby announced she had just received the golden ticket: a pre-order code.

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In a gesture that expresses the spirit of Taylor Swift — generosity, empowerment and good karma — she offered to get a ticket for Gulati.

And just like the lyric from Swift’s song Fifteen, “Soon enough you’re best friends.”

Gulati knows every word of every song by heart.

“I’ve been listening to her since second grade,” said Gulati, who grew up in northern India where she quickly learned that girls were “treated differently.”

Swift’s lyrics became a guiding light.

“I was very aware that women lack control in the world. She saved me while growing up, especially in high school when her album Reputation came out. I used to be scared to express myself, and now I can express myself without fear of judgment.”

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Swift’s music and lyrics are studied not only by fans like Gulati but also in the academic world. Courses are popping up at universities, including Harvard and the Berklee College of Music in Boston, hoping to crack the code: What makes Taylor Swift so relatable?

“Even though she is this beautiful white billionaire, she is still singing about heartbreak, love, pain, joy. So her relatability crosses different cultures and generations,” said Eloise Faichney, a lecturer in communications at the University of Melbourne.

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Faichney was one of the creators of an academic conference in Melbourne called Swiftposium in February that attracted 130 participants from around the globe.

The idea for a modest conference examining Swift’s power and influence came up when Swift’s Eras tour dates Down Under were announced in 2023.

They anticipated a handful of academics, said Faichney, but the call for papers was picked up by news outlets including the BBC and Rolling Stone.

“It went viral overnight,” said Faichney

Swift scholars poured in from across Southeast Asia and the Americas in disciplines as varied as medicine, law and literature.

Faichney said she came away from the conference with a great deal of respect for Swift.

“I don’t think we can ignore her as a very significant artist.”

Swift has been denigrated by some in the media — “haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate” — but Faichney sees a turnaround.

“Feminine pop culture is painted as low brow and girls screaming as some kind of collective hysteria, while we frame sports, with a group of men screaming, differently. There is a level of misogyny there.”

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She compares Swift to Shakespeare, who was considered low-brow in his time.

“Shakespeare was also part of popular culture. He wrote plays for the common people,” said Faichney.

“She is plugged into the zeitgeist, referencing things in pop culture and literature. She’s funny, she’s self-deprecating, calling out her haters but also calling out herself — and that makes her relatable. As relatable as a billionaire can be.”

For Stephanie Burt, an English professor who teaches a wildly popular course on Taylor Swift at Harvard (she expected 20 students, she got 300), Swift’s relatability comes down to more than just her songwriting.

“She changes!” said Burt.

Swift has “signature” songwriting moves, but never repeats herself entirely, said Burt.

She is able to get a lot of people to identify with her because she’s so good at singing about the contradictions and pressures of femininity, but also the workaholism, the desire to please, the obsessional behaviour, and “the good girl’s wish for everyone to like her, and no one to disapprove of her ever,” said Burt.

But it is also her writing.

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“Songwriting means lyrics and music that work together,” said Burt.

Scarlet Keys, professor of songwriting at Berklee, developed a songwriting course based on the music of Taylor Swift after seeing her impact on family members, from her pre-teen daughter to her 50-something sister-in-law.

Kids could relate and adults could re-process the events of their early lives.

“She was scoring their lives,” said Keys.

Once Keys “dug in” to Swift’s songwriting techniques, she was hooked.

“One of the things she does so well is lead with her vulnerability, and that is really powerful,” said Keys. “She isn’t just a perfect, beautiful Barbie under the lights. She’s human.”

Lyrically, “there is not a literary device she doesn’t use,” said Keys.

Some of the literary devices she uses to create memorable hooks include something that Keys said “Yoda and Taylor Swift have in common.” That is the use of anastrophe, the inversion of the usual order of words.

“If Yoda had spoken in sentences that used every noun, adjective and verb in the correct order, he would not have sounded as wise,” said Keys. “In her song Invisible, Swift writes ‘gold was the colour of the leaves … teal was the colour of your shirt.’ It creates a little rhythm, and creates surprise.”

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She also relies on heightened language, metaphor and simile to wake up not just the language, but the experience she is writing about, said Keys. “She is helping you figure out your own brokenness in a new way.”

Swift isn’t shy with her use of epizeuxis, a rhetorical device where words are repeated for emphasis.

“Think location, location, location,” said Keys.

It’s a technique she uses in Mirrorball — “I’ve never been a natural / All I do is try, try, try” — and in We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together — “We are never, ever, ever, ever getting back together.”

In her choruses, Swift often uses melisma, which is stretching one syllable over several notes over several measures.

Musically, Swift uses very simple rhythms that serve as a bed for the lyrics, said Keys.

“A four-year-old and a drunk guy in a bar can remember a Taylor Swift song. It’s not too complicated.”

Simple rhythms helps keep the focus on the lyrics.

“Swift almost always does something new in the bridge that hasn’t happened in the song yet, harmonically, melodically, and musically,” said Keys.

While most songwriters don’t treat the bridge “like the queen of the song,” Swift often changes the entire meaning of the song in the bridge that leads to the final chorus, reframing the whole story.

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In Keys’s class, students’ final project is a song featuring at least five of the songwriting devices Swift uses.

“None of them sound like Taylor Swift songs. They just become better songwriters,” said Keys.

And maybe they become better people, too.

Swift is also an important role model, said Keys. “When you look at her, you see graceful moment after graceful moment,” from how well she takes care of her team, what she gives back to charity, and how she has weathered vilification, criticism and hatred online and come back with darker, more complex and powerful work.

For Gulati, every song represents an era in her own life that, like a friendship bracelet, she can keep or give away and move on from.

“Swift began her career as the quintessential single, American blond-haired girl. A good girl. You see her change throughout her eras. It helps to know that if you have to be a woman, you don’t have to be a certain way. When I look back on my life now, I give myself that same grace.”

dryan@postmedia.com

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