Jojo Johnson

If you're asking about what's the best Taylor Swift song ever, I think it has to be All Too Well 10-Minute Version. There's just so much there – not just lore, but lyricism, and "you kept me like a secret, but I kept you like an oath" is such a hard-hitting lyric, underappreciated.

I think You're On Your Own, Kid is maybe the one that I appreciate the most, at least right now. Midnights is my favorite album anyway. I felt like that was the one that spoke to my soul in a way that no other Taylor Swift albums have. And You're On Your Own, Kid, just being this song of like, “hey, no one's gonna have your back except for you, but you're gonna be okay. You're gonna be able to do it, and everyone else is on their own, too.” It just became this mantra for me, like, I can do this. I can do whatever I set my mind to, and it also made me feel connected to not just Taylor but the fan base as a whole. Knowing that we all feel like this, we all feel alone, even though there are so many of us.

And then Opalite is my favorite song from Taylor’s newest album, The Life of a Showgirl. It's just happy. Opal is Travis Kelce's birthstone. And Taylor had said in an interview that she thought the idea of a man-made opal to represent Travis Kelce, like they sort of forged this path forward for themselves. They made a commitment to each other and made it work. And now their future is this really bright, beautiful future filled with all kinds of color and ideas and love and happiness.

I think part of it is that Taylor has never pretended to be anything that she's not. She's never pretended to be the best singer out there or the best dancer out there. But she has always said she has a passion for lyricism, and that's truly where she excels and where she finds most of her pride. And I think that's why she has so many fans.

Her radio hits are not going to be where you find that with Taylor. You really have to kind of dig into her works and learn some of her story. And then some of those songs hit you in a way that you never knew would also apply to your life too, that Taylor Swift is feeling the same feelings and emotions that you and I are.

The other piece to it is, I think Taylor has really spent a lot of time cultivating community with her fandom. In the early years, she was online a lot and she was interacting with people, constantly commenting and posting and liking things, and mailing people gifts. Her cultivating that community created this really strong fandom of people who will consume any art that she creates just because we love her. We love the person that she's shown us, and we will support her because we believe her to be such a good person who takes care of her fans. And it's also created this sort of like back and forth with us. She keeps putting things out that she knows we'll like because we'll love them, and then they perform really well. So she puts out even more stuff, and we boost each other up in that way. But that's how we even got any of the Taylor's Versions, or All Too Well 10-Minute Version, was just because we wanted it so bad. She fed that to us, and we sent it up on the charts and talked about it online and made it our whole personality sometimes.

I feel like it was exactly as she described it. It is a pop album – perfectly pop. It was the exact kind of upbeat that I was hoping for coming off of an album like The Tortured Poets Department, which was so dense. I loved that album so much, but it was dense. It took a long time to understand and chew through, and sit with. And Life of a Showgirl is almost the complete opposite of that. I was instantly dancing on my couch (and I'm not a dancer) and immediately singing the chorus along on the second time. And it was easy for me to immediately latch on to and love it.

I think the song that's probably going to go down as one of the iconic tracks from this album is either The Fate of Ophelia or Opalite. I think they both represent the album as a whole really, really well. I think my favorites right now, though, are Father Figure and The Life of a Showgirl.

With The Life of a Showgirl as a track, Taylor did a couple of things for us. We've been asking for a strong feature with a female artist for a very long time. There's Nothing New with Phoebe Bridgers, but other than that, a lot of her female features have not had super in front vocals. She even re-recorded "Snow on the Beach" with more Lana Del Rey, as fans were asking for more. I think off the top, the fact that The Life of a Showgirl features so much of Sabrina Carpenter is what fans were asking for. It also gives us another example of really vivid storytelling, bringing the fans in with that Vancouver audio, which also brings us back to that moment at the Eras Tour when the confetti fell and Taylor was waving goodbye with her dancers and her backup singers. She captured that moment of euphoria at the end of the show and then put it into a song.