The Age of Taylor Swift: Did She Hit Her Peak At Seven?

What’s the last thing you would expect from a pop star as she glitters upon international stages on the highest-grossing tour of all time? Relatability. And yet, Taylor Swift’s work taps into this endless font of stories about being an American girl, feeling her feelings and figuring it out.

How is she relatable? you may ask. On her new album, The Tortured Poets Department, Swift lyrically pontificates on an idea that is swirling in the cultural zeitgeist: age. Some popular memes that pull girlhood into the adult conversation, have been “girl dinner” and “being a teenage girl in her twenties.” If these memes did not grace your social media feed last year, here’s a brief overview. Girl dinner romanticizes cobbled-together meals that require no cooking, often resembling a childlike version of a charcuterie board on a paper plate. Being a teenage girl in her twenties is about embracing the fact that you still love what you loved when you were younger. It is also about how many young women feel like they haven’t caught up to their real age just yet, which some conjecture is related to growing up during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Age on this album is simultaneously like a jumbled timeline she is trying to detangle, and a nebulous thing that she is embracing. Upon listening, it becomes clear that Swift feels much younger than she is and not in a good way. She makes fun of and criticizes herself for her “teenage petulance” on the song “Down Bad,” or posits that “growin’ up precocious sometimes means not growing up at all,” on another song. Childlike imagery abounds in the song “My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys,” which explores how an ex’s immaturity negatively affected her. On “Peter,” she finally leaves someone who couldn’t quite grow up, no longer living in the shadow of a Peter Pan-like figure. By the end of the song, she calls herself a “woman”, not a “child” or “kid” as she does on so many others.

Swift also embraces and romanticizes being younger. On “So High School,” (you can see where this is going) she gushes about how being in a new relationship makes her feel like a teenager, “the brink of a wrinkle in time” bringing her from one age to another. Lastly, on “Robin,” she writes an ode to a little kid as they currently are, in all of their unbridled, unselfconscious glory. These themes have appeared in her work before, on her album “folklore,” where she sings, “I hit my peak at seven.”

Grappling with what age she feels like internally, and whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing is a sweeping investigation throughout The Tortured Poets Department. Many will relate to her as they continue growing from their immaturity and embracing their inner child as they listen to this album, perhaps while eating their girl dinner.