Music podcasts use a variety of listening modes to draw non-musically trained listeners into close readings of songwriting, production, and reception. Taylor Swift has attracted the attention of music podcasters who have devoted individual episodes and entire serial podcast to topics ranging from her celebrity feuds and well-publicized relationships, her autobiographical and deeply referential song texts, her savvy branding strategies and relationships with fans, and her public rejoinders to music industry inequities, such as her Taylor’s Version re-recordings. In the case of several Swift podcasts, these expert listeners are also avid fans, challenge the stereotype that avid pop fans are only amateur listeners. Her fans, notably those who self-identify as Swifties, are also active podcasters. This article is about listening to the sonic environments of fan-driven podcasting and the sonic spaces of fandom through music podcasting. This article engages with the sound and content of fan-driven music podcasting and the listening techniques used by hosts to listen to both the music of the artist where their fandom is centered, as well as the paramusical elements of their star persona and sonic strategies used by hosts to shape a virtual sonic environment where listeners listen with and through the hosts’ embodied listening. Through two case studies, The Swift Talk and Switched on Pop, I demonstrate how fan-driven Swift podcasting is sonically constructed and approaches listening as an inclusive social, analytic, and embodied practice of communicating fan musical knowledge to produce new insights into how listening, songwriting, star persona, and fandom are articulated in fan podcasting.
To begin, let us listen to the sonic environments of two Taylor Swift podcast vignettes where the hosts use different strategies for listening to Swift’s music and listening with fans using “Love Story” and “Love Story (Taylor’s Version)”:
Podcast Sonic Environment Vignette #1: The Swift Talk “Love Story (Taylor’s Version)”
This week we are listening to “Love Story”, and I can tell you right now if you are still listening to this, which thank you so much, uh. I can almost guarantee you that this will not be a bop from the two of you across the table from me.
Hey, you know what? Maybe love will prevail. And this is a story about love.
Maybe.
Celebrating Valentine’s Day, why would I poo poo?
Alright. So, we’re going to hit pause and you hit pause. We’re listening to the Taylor’s Version [Kait’s vocal emphasis which implies that it is the only version to listen to now that the re-recordings exist] of “Love Story” today. And we’ll be right back.
[ticking clock sound effect as Kait and Sam stream the song offline]
Well Sam, did it fill you with love and hearts and…
[quoting Shakespeare] With love’s light wings did I approach these walls. For stony limits could not hold love out and what love can do. That dares love’s attempt, for thy kinsman are not stop to me. [pause] It’s literally Romeo.
[sarcastically] Oh, I know.
Oh, you know. So, you know where I’m going with this. Oh Kait. [dramatic pause] […] Kait, I have so many questions.
Podcast Sonic Environment Vignette #2: Switched on Pop “The Oeuvre of Taylor Swift”
Let’s take a listen to “Love Story”
[“Love Story” (not Taylor’s Version) playing. Swift singing: we were both young when I first saw you… (music fades out)]
The country feel of the song is established from the very beginning. We’ve got banjo. We’ve got pedal steel guitar.
Got your electric guitar, your drums, and later on I think we might even get a little bit of fiddle. I love that it’s so strongly narrative. We can really follow along with this [Swift singing: with Juliet just crying on the stairs…] classic story of Romeo and Juliet superimposed onto an actual relationship. [Swift singing over Harding’s voice: saying please don’t go.]
Charlie and I have both noticed that Taylor likes to drop out the bass and drums.
Yeah, around the end of the songs from the last chorus coming up everything just drops out.
[Swift singing: I keep waiting for you, but you never come. Is this in my head?]
And then it’s going to build back up right here.…It’s coming. Are you ready for it!? [with excited anticipation]
[Swift singing: I don’t know what to think. He knelt to the ground and pulled out a ring. And said,
[The T Drop/Swiftian Suspension of “Love Story” drops] Swift singing: Marry me, Juliet…]
Here it is! waahhhhhhhh [cries out with thrilled satisfaction] Oh God. Okay, okay.
[In a more serious tone of voice] What I love what she is doing here…[podcast episode continues as Harding attempts to reign Sloan in and ground the conversation on the music]
I open with these two excerpts of listening to Taylor Swift and her music in podcasts to highlight the techniques used by hosts to narrate and translate their understanding and listening expertise of Swift’s music and star text through embodied listening, interpretive and accessible language, the perception of proximity and intimacy, and their individual fandom.1 What does Taylor Swift podcasting sound like and how does this form of creative media production participate in expressions of fan labor and community? These two podcast vignettes illustrate two different expressions of listening to Taylor Swift as performed by public-facing hosts who listen as fans and as skilled listeners within the sonic environment that is the podcast episode. Taylor Swift podcasts are fascinating sonic environments to observe how fans of Swift and her music use podcasts to connect with other fans, also known as Swifties, and deploy different listening strategies and musical expertise to untangle and understand Swift, her songwriting, live performances, and star text.
Music podcasts use a variety of listening modes, such as “ride-along listening”2 and “listening to others listen”3 to draw non-musically trained listeners into close readings of songwriting, production, and reception. Taylor Swift, in particular, occupies the position of a contemporary figure in the popular music industry who has attracted the attention of music podcasters who have devoted individual episodes and entire serial podcasts to topics ranging from her celebrity feuds and well-publicized relationships, her autobiographical and deeply referential song texts, her savvy branding strategies and relationships with fans, her place in political discourse, white feminism, and LGBTQ+ allyship, and her public rejoinders to music industry inequities, such as her Taylor’s Version re-recordings project. Academic Swift studies have similarly experienced a sustained surge in production, including special journal issues (e.g., Contemporary Music Review edited by Mary Fogarty and Gina Arnold) and academic events. In 2021, Christa Bentley, Kate Galloway, and Paula Harper organized the virtual Taylor Swift Study Day: Eras, Narrative, Digital Music and Media and Taylor Swift: The Songs, The Star, The Fans, their co-edited book based on that event is forthcoming and Indiana University’s Arts & Humanities Council hosted Taylor Swift: The Conference Era in 2023.4 In the case of Swift podcasts and academic circles, these expert listeners frequently identify as fans, challenging the stereotype that avid pop fans are only “amateur” listeners whose observations lack critical, nuanced engagement with sound and music.5
This article is about listening to the sonic environments of fan-drive podcasting and the sonic spaces of fandom through music podcasting. I engage with the sound and content of fan-driven music podcasting and the listening techniques used by hosts to listen to both the music of the artist where their fandom is centered, as well as the paramusical elements of their star persona and sonic strategies used by hosts to shape a virtual sonic environment where listeners listen with and through the hosts’ embodied listening. Listening is a corporeal act that is received, sensed, and shared using more than just our ears.6 Listening is also a multisensory bodily practice experienced and expressed across virtual, hybrid, and in situ contents. There is the tendency to only consider embodied listening when attending to in-person in situ sonic experiences, like listening while studying at your favorite coffee shop to the environmental ambience and soft atmospheric jazz piped through the speaker system or feeling the haptic vibrations of the sound system in a cozy club venue. Embodied listening, however, is also practiced across virtual, mediated spaces, like when I listen to the soft pitter-patter of rain against the coffee shop window and a lo-fi jazz-hop beat while resting on my bed as I listen with headphones to “Afternoon Jazz [Lofi Hip Hop/Study Beats]” from the Lofi Girl YouTube stream, or when I viscerally feel the intimate sonic sociality of the virtual mosh pit at an in-game concert staged in Fortnite or Minecraft.7 Pauline Oliveros was an early advocate for the transmission of mediated, online, collective embodied listening, using the earliest versions of Skype to connect the Deep Listening community.8 The senses are vehicles for the transmission of embodied knowledge, and each Swiftie podcast host uses different listening strategies to comprehend and fully experience Swift, her songcraft, and star persona through her music while also employing audile techniques to translate their embodied knowledge and listening through podcasting, layering their listening alongside the listening experiences of their audience. Through two case studies, The Swift Talk and Switched on Pop, I demonstrate how fan-driven Swift podcasting is sonically constructed and approaches listening as an inclusive social, analytic, and embodied practice of communicating fan musical knowledge to produce new insights into how listening, songwriting, star persona, and fandom are articulated in fan podcasting.9
I ask podcast listeners and theorists to consider the sonic environment of the podcast episode. Sonic environments are replete with relational sonic information and affective experiences produced by living and non-living, anthropogenic and natural soundscape agents that establish place, context, and belonging. A sense of belonging through sound and feeling like you belong is important to fan communities. Sound ecology places emphasis on the way the sonic environment and its contents are perceived and understood by communities of listeners and individuals. When I work in my local coffee shop and hear the vibrational burr of the coffee grinder and the viscous sputter of frothed milk aeration, I know an artisanal drink is almost ready at the coffee bar. I then put on my headphones and listen to “Bad Body Double” (Ellipse, 2009) by Imogen Heap and the sounds of dripping and splashing of the shower stream hitting the tiled walls, the glass door of the shower, and possibly the flesh of Heap’s body as she records from within a steamy bathroom. Each of these actual and virtual sonic environments and the relationality of sounds and space bring me into a location and influence how I listen. Listening, as Jonathan Sterne argues, is a skill that is learned, practiced, and individually adapted, and people are shaped to listen in various ways.10 Swift podcasting serves as embodied broadcast tutorials that share ways of listening to Swift through her music and the paramusical elements that construct and communicate her star persona and listening with her fan community.
The Sonic Environments of Music Podcasts and Fandom
A soundscape is a sonic environment, an auditory landscape. As Emily Thompson explains, it is “simultaneously a physical environment and a way of perceiving that environment.”11 The approach I take to listening to and culturally engaging in fan-driven music podcasts is informed by acoustic ecology, or soundscape ecology and its “study of the effects of the acoustic environment, or soundscape, on the physical responses or behavioral characteristics of those living within it.”12 Sonic environments are also co-composed and shaped by the living and nonliving things that sound, listen, and inhabit them. While this definition was developed by the members of the interdisciplinary World Soundscape Project who used soundscape ecology to examine and draw attention to imbalances that may have unhealthy effects, thinking and listening ecologically about sound in other kinds of actual and virtual environments has utility beyond considerations of ecological health and furthers the understanding of the wide-ranging sonic environments encountered in contemporary everyday life.
The concept of soundscape and its application has spread widely since R. Murray Schafer’s initial development of soundscape studies, and it continues to be a generative way to understand the complexity of sonic environments, whether that soundscape is a live concert, a scene in a film, an internet meme, a podcast episode, or an actual place. One perspective on understanding the sonic environment of the recording is attending to the mediation of the voice, instrumentation, performer interaction, and aural architectures of an actual or imagined place in ways that proximity and intimacy are staged through techniques of the recording studio and felt by listeners.13 Beverley Diamond suggests that recordings can contain “sonic signatures” of place when the artists, producers and recording engineers choose to imbue the sonic signature of a track or an entire record with sonic signifiers that index specific places or shape the sound design in ways that evoke the spatial properties of these places.14
In this study I am attending to the sonic environment (or listening space) of the podcast and the sonic identity of Taylor Swift podcasts informed by fandom. I apply sonic ecology as a method of listening to the sonic environment crafted by the podcast hosts, one that is focused on listening to an artist and with that artist’s fans. Recorded spaces—like a podcast episode—are environments of sound, or soundscapes, challenging established ways of understanding relationships among music, sound, and place.15 Fans not only react to the acoustic environments of these podcasts, the sonic environments of Swift-themed podcasts are composed by fans through their listening materials, choice of sonic content, listening responses, and behavioral characteristics. The extension of sonic ecology to virtual and recorded places—a podcast episode or a video game—grants these environments the same responsiveness and affective significance that actual environments—the neighborhood you live in or an established provincial park.
Music podcasts occupy a significant space in the podcast industry, operating as space where music knowledge is created, deconstructed, interpreted, and shared by listeners who are considered professionals due to their association with the music industries (e.g., scholars, journalists, producers), and fan podcasters, including podcasters who occupy and elide these categories. The listeners across these categories are expert, skillful listeners in their own right who disseminate varying kinds of cultural knowledge and musical insight. Popular music podcasts often feature a combination of conversation and music selections that hosts listen to live, providing expert commentary or using these musical examples to highlight and support observations they made during their conversation. Each of these techniques highlights aspects of the music that the hosts want the podcast listeners to focus their attention on.
Podcasts focused on Taylor Swift, her music, and her star text exist as one-off episodes, a small collection of themed episodes, or as a serial podcast devoted to her life in music and her creative contributions to popular culture. Serial and themed-episode podcasts on Swift, her music, and her star text are primarily unscripted, a style of podcast narrative design that gives listeners the sense that they are getting to know the hosts, their point of view, their relationship to the Swift fandom community, and how they hear her music.
Podcast hosts use online spaces to cultivate audience engagement and listener interactivity even when their audience is listening asynchronously, providing listeners with the illusion of liveness. Swift discourse is shaped by social and cultural context of participation. As Kyle Wrather explains, “In a line of media convergence, podcasting offers many new opportunities for examining the interaction between media creators and fans.”16 What sets fan-driven podcasts apart from podcasts created and hosted by industry professionals, including titles such as Switched On Pop or All Songs Considered, is the fans’ dedication to taking both the music, paramusical texts, and Swift fan discourse equally seriously.17 Fans, particularly young women, are continually confronted with situations where their knowledge, expertise, insight, and cultural experience are either dismissed or diminished. The subjects and materials of their fandom are not considered as important. Podcasting is a popular mode of fan labor within the Swiftie community. Podcasting facilitates fan media content creation focusing on the subjects, issues, and figures the fan communities they belong to are invested in and presents listening knowledge undervalued by other media outlets.
Because of podcasting’s thematic, aural, and genre connections to traditional audio broadcasting, Andrew Bottomley argues that podcasting is in many ways “refashioned radio,”18 and Swift fans used this “refashioned” and reimagined broadcast space to assert their agency and expertise as fans with deep musical and cultural knowledge alongside other popular music media outlets. While Swift and the Taylor Nation use social media platforms to engage with a young and increasingly digital audience, Swifties also use video streaming platforms (e.g., YouTube) and podcasts to engage the fan community and author long-form fanworks centered on Swift, her music, and her star text. Swiftie podcasters, however, are notably older fans, fans around the same age as Swift who grew up with her and her music.19
Podcasting as a Swiftie
There are multivalent ways of listening and podcasting as a Swiftie. While this article focuses on the sonic environments and listening techniques of The Swift Talk and Switched on Pop, Swift fan podcasts are numerous, feature comparable sonic content, and explore their own audile techniques for perceiving Swift and her music. Hosts Devin and Gab frame their podcast Tay To Z: A Taylor Swift Podcast as a community space to hang out and listen to Taylor Swift’s songs in (almost) alphabetical order. Devoted Swifties, Devin and Gab present and perform their encyclopedic knowledge of Swift, her music, and her star texts, and they use the format of the podcast to circulate their fan labor that emphasizes completism (all of her songs in quasi-systematic ordering) to other members of the Swiftie community and interested non-Swiftie listeners. On 13: A Taylor Swift Fan Podcast, self-proclaimed Swifties gather to deconstruct Swift’s songs, including the musical and thematic connections between individual songs and albums, and exploring the paramusical references found in her songwriting (e.g., drawing on fan theories to speculate who she is singing about and who she is singing as). Other fan podcasts, such as Swift and Swigs and Sibs, are more niche in their content. On Swift and Swigs and Sibs, a brother and sister discuss two of their favorite things: Taylor Swift and cocktails. In each episode they pair a Swift song with a selection of cocktails, breaking down the ingredients of each song and each cocktail. There are even podcasts on other topics that incorporate Swift content, including a cat podcast with an episode devoted to Taylor’s cats.
Fan-driven podcasts hosted by self-identified Swifties explore Swift’s songs in exhaustive detail, trace developments in her songwriting, uncover Easter eggs, investigate and debunk fan conspiracy theories, and predict what might be next in Swift’s career or creative development. Fan podcasts provide a plurality of voices that convey individual and collective listening encounters and fandom expression, complicating who has the expertise and experience to narrate Swift discourse. Fan voices are accessible, relatable, and digestible to other fans and while Swift-themed fan podcasts are not story-based, they are replete with intimate and empathetic stories of fandom.
The Swiftie fandom participates in an array of common fan activities, which include displaying their encyclopedic knowledge of Swift’s life and music, obsessing over every detail in her songs, providing personal advice to friends in the form of quoted Swift lyrics, soundtracking individual life moments to specific Swift songs, and ardently defending Swift against her critics.20 Henry Jenkins describes fans as “active participants in the construction and circulation of textual meanings” and in the case of fan-created podcasts, these fan activities of making, sharing, and curating fan expertise play a significant part in shaping how media producers react as well within the texts themselves.21 Being a Swiftie is an all-consuming fandom that filters into many domains of a Swiftie’s daily life and how they self-identify in the virtual and actual worlds they move within. Swifties develop relationships through online communication, sharing their knowledge of Swift’s life, image, and music and developing a circulatory space where fan practices are closely connected and accessible.
Fan-driven Swift podcasts position themselves as cultural media production for the fans made by the fans and this mutual interest in building the Swift mediascape, taking greater care in the development of an online asynchronous space for fan engagement and participation. Fan podcast sonic environments combine banter between the hosts, listening to and analyzing music recordings, sharing their fandom, updating their listenership on the latest Taylor news, and inviting their listeners to contribute to future podcast content (e.g., filling out a survey, taking a quiz, emailing in their own stories of being a Swiftie). Several Swiftie podcasters commune with Swift and the Swiftie fandom through sing-a-longs. The soundscapes of these podcast participatory performances evoke Susan Douglas’s description of the performative act of “fusing…yourself with another, larger-than-life persona that girls [feel] as they sing along” with the recorded voices of those female musicians who speak to fans’ own experiences.22 Swift’s voice, her songs, and the themes in her lyrics encourage sing-along participation.23
Fan podcasts are a site where fan labor and care are expressed through world building. Swiftie world building is not about constructing a fictional space or recreating an actual world location with coherent qualities such as a history, geography, and ecology; rather, it is about participating in the construction of a virtual space that invites distributed fans into a space where their fandom and expertise are validated, they have voice in the discursive conversation, and they belong. Whether on YouTube, Twitter, Reddit, or a podcast, nurturing these parasocial relationships is important to the Swiftie community.
Fan music podcasts connect with their listeners through the relatability of their hosts and their connection to an artist’s music. Some Swiftie podcasters, such as Steph and Steph, two former college roommates, best friends, and self-described Swifties who host Drop Everything Now! A Taylor Swift Podcast, are more introspective and personal, using their podcast to connect with Swift and their fans, conveying a sense of intimacy among the hosts, their listeners, and Swift, by sharing how Swift’s music has been cathartic for them and by providing specific instances across their formative years where they have experienced the therapeutic effects of both Swift’s music and the distributed online relationships they have formed with other Swifties. Swiftie podcasters like Steph and Steph from Drop Everything Now! have also grown and grown up with Swift and her music. As Margaret Rossman says in her study of Swift fandom and bedroom culture, “Many Swift fans have grown up alongside her and her music, meaning that while no longer tween-aged, their long-term fandom is embedded with nostalgia of their own girlhoods. In addition, Swift constantly evokes these feelings to court adult fans eager to return to their younger years.”24
While some Swift fan-created podcasts are recorded in community studio spaces (e.g., the local radio station), others are recorded and streamed from the podcasters’ homes. The hosts use vocal narration to reference the domestic personal spaces, most frequently their bedroom where they have set up their home recording studio, using their narration of the mundane and distinctive features of place to bring listeners into their homes, simulating physical proximity between host and listener and referencing tropes best defined by Angela McRobbie and Jenny Garber’s concept of bedroom culture.25 Some podcasters take their listeners on an audio tour of their homes, describing the more mundane features, including the color of the paint on their walls, their furniture, and the weather outside, crafting the sonic environment where they listen devotedly to Swift’s music.
Listening is an embodied act and generates embodied cultural knowledge that express how living beings understand and make connections in the world around them.26 For the hosts of Swift fan podcasts and the listening community who tunes those embodied ways of knowing and producing culture include the reception of Swift and expressions of fandom. The hosts of Swiftie-driven series pair the expected devices used to convey sonic intimacy (e.g., close-micing, audible breaths, conversational tone, improvisational asides) with modes of performing fandom that convey intimacy and proximity found in other forms of Swiftie fandom media production. Podcast listeners, who include those who identify as fans and those who do not, perceive the hosts’ embodied fandom through the tone, inflection, pacing, and sonic shaping, and emphasis heard in the hosts’ voices as they narrate and diffuse their listening reception.
Swiftie podcasters also narrate their fan collections. Using descriptive observational language they detail the posters, limited edition recordings, and ticket stubs and other Swift fan ephemera, giving voice and physical presence to the material culture of their fandom that surrounds them as they listen and discuss Swift with the fan community. Podcasters who successfully collected every deluxe limited-edition printing of Lover (2019), for instance, shared the pages on their podcast, sometimes in the form of a dramatic reading and in other instances in a hushed, intimate whisper, as if the hosts were sharing Swift’s most intimate thoughts in the same room as their listeners. Swifties produced a sonic environment of the material culture of fandom on their podcasts, sharing and circulating the contents of these collectibles with fans who might have been unable to secure their own copies and creating a discursive space to discuss how these materials produce Swiftian knowledge and connect listeners to Swift.
Learning to Listen Like a Swiftie with The Swift Talk
On The Swift Talk, Kait (a certified Swiftie) hosts with Sam (a non-Swiftie) as podcast listeners listen along each week as Kait tries to convert Sam into a fan. The premise of the fan podcast The Swift Talk is novel and compelling to listeners: What happens when you put a Swiftie in a room with someone with whom they have a pre-existing relationship but who doesn’t identify as a fan or know her music? Can the Swiftie transform the skeptical Swift novice into a fan if they listen together, share their respective listening experiences, and discuss Swift’s music track by track? Each episode follows a similar formula. Kait and Sam actively listen to a song from Swift’s catalogue using audile techniques, or listening techniques, engaging in conversation about the song and its paramusical life as informed by their individual situated listening perspectives.27 Listeners tune in each week to find out if this will be the week—or song—that transforms Sam into a fan. As regular listeners of The Swift Talk know, through incremental exposure to Swift’s music and Kait’s fandom, he has grown to appreciate Swift’s songwriting craft and stage presence.
While The Swift Talk’s intro music, which stylistically mimics Swift’s 1989 era remains unchanged from episode to episode, Kait and Sam modify their episode intros. Kait always welcomes their listeners with a friendly “Hello and welcome to the Swift Talk,” introducing herself as “Kait the Swiftie.” Sam responds with a variation of “and I’m not so Swift Sam” as heard on the episode for “Getaway Car” or “I’m wound up like a midnight clock not so Swift Sam” on the “Lavender Haze” episode they recorded as Kait waited in anticipation, an audible anxiety coloring her vocal tone, to see if she successfully gained access to The Eras Tour fan presale. On their next episode, Sam declared with a dry wit, “and I’m waiting in a three-hour queue to be a part of this podcast Sam Bennett.” He’d caught The Eras Tour bug. As they listened to and discussed “Untouchable (Taylor’s Version)” Sam waited in the Ticketmaster virtual waiting room. He was, of course, ultimately unsuccessful, as were many fans.28
Before Kait and Sam turn to listening to their song of the week, they discuss the latest news in the Swift universe and advertise special events organized by the podcast, such as Taylor Swift-themed dance parties with signature drinks named for songs and podcast content puns. They also take care to construct a sense of interpersonal intimacy between themselves and their listeners by disclosing personal details about their lives, sharing stories, and giving shout-outs to their friends. Like many fan-driven Swift podcasts, the hosts (particularly Kait) choose to refer to Swift and other celebrities associated with her by their first name to connote a sense of relational proximity between the hosts, fans, and Swift.29
The Swift Talk uses several narrative and structural strategies to afford listeners the experience that they are occupying the same live listening and discursive sonic environment as Kait and Sam in the moment the hosts’ listening and critical analysis unfolds. The listening techniques they use on their podcast externalize the acoustic space for their interiorized and personalized listening. Following each episode’s intro and a section of playful banter between Sam and her, Kait introduces the song that she is inviting Sam to listen to with her. The idea is that Sam has never heard the track before and it is here on this podcast in this moment where Kait and the podcast listeners will experience someone listening to a version of Swift for the very first time, raw, unedited, and embodied. On rare occasion, Sam disrupts this structure, surprising Kait by humming a fragment of the song’s chorus or reciting a few lyrics, revealing that he has in fact heard the track somewhere before (as he does on the episode where they listen to “Getaway Car”). Instead of listening to the entire track live in full (or even in fragments as other podcasts like Switched on Pop do), Kait pauses the podcast while they listen. Even though Kait and Sam listen to the song in full off-podcast, Kait still initiates participatory listening with the podcast audience by inviting listeners to pause the podcast as well and listen to the song with them in their own acoustic space. This directive communicates to listeners that although their respective sonic environments are asynchronous, by performing this listening technique with the hosts they are connected in this moment of mediated community listening.30
Following a few seconds of a ticking clock sound effect, listeners rejoin the hosts immediately after Sam’s first listen. In the episode where Kait introduces Sam to “the 1” off folklore (2020), the ticking clock stops and Kait awaits Sam’s immediate reaction to the track, asking inquisitively: “Well Sam?” After several intentionally audible emphatic sighs and tense exhales, Sam gets serious as he compares “the 1” to previous songs from Swift’s catalog they listened to in previous episodes. He finds it much more philosophical, layered, and complex when compared to any of the relationship songs that Kait has played for him. Sam is surprised to find out from Kait that “the 1” is not unequivocally a fan favorite. On The Swift Talk Sam’s ear has been trained on Swift’s sonic signatures identified and curated by a Swiftie. As a result of this conditioning of his listening he can hear how the album folklore and “the 1” are a stylistic departure for Swift and her songwriting.31
Kait wants Sam, and more broadly, the podcast’s community of listeners, to hear Swift the way she hears Swift. You can hear in her voice that she is excited to share her fandom with Sam and with others who are willing to listen with her. Kait’s vocal inflection and what she says convey paralexical sonic evidence of how she is moved by Swift and her music (or not so much in the case of “Not So Swift Sam”). Their podcast listeners also hear Swift and the hosts’ discursive treatment of each song from these two contrasting perspectives, the fan and the non-fan, which informs their own listening experience of Swift’s music. From week to week Kait and Sam’s song-by-song analyses of Swift’s catalog use lyrical evidence over other compositional features of the music, components of her live and mediatized performances, and online and social media fan discourse to present Sam with a strong case to cross over into the Swiftie fandom community, or at least, develop a deeper understanding and appreciation of Swift’s songwriting and star persona.
Expert as Fan Podcast Listening with Switched on Pop Swiftian Series
I remember the first time I was asked during a conference panel Q&A whether I picked my research topic because I was a fan, or if I became a fan during the process of research. I replied with some version of: Does it really matter? Why are knowledge creation and fandom considered by some as mutually exclusive? Scholars of popular music, as Line Grenier reminds us in her work on Céline Dion, regularly have the validity of their research questioned when they disclose that they are also a fan of the artist.32 The music podcast is a productive sonic environment where fan knowledge is valued, not discredited. It is also a place where podcasters who identify as scholar-experts and fans can express themselves as both music industry insiders and fan insiders.
On Swiftie fan discussion forums, such as Reddit’s r/TaylorSwift, fans recommend and evaluate the available and archived Swift podcasts and Swift-themed episodes. Like fan collectors, they value completism, favoring podcasts that treat each album as a curated musical experience—a contained recorded sonic environment—and discuss the entirety of Swift’s ever-expanding discography (e.g., the series Every Single Album on the Ringer podcast). Swifties also trust hosts who identify as Swifties but do not shy away from critique and honestly evaluate her career and music (e.g., the podcast Holy Swift). Fans listen for a delicate balance of joyful, entertaining listener engagement and thoughtful knowledge dissemination, gravitating to hosts who engage with Swift deeply, contextualizing both her musical and cultural impact.
The democratization of listening to a variety of bodies, experiences, training, and positionalities critically reevaluates the false expert-amateur dichotomy to offer a pluralistic understanding of listening knowledge and expertise.33 While Swift fans appreciate the range of podcast styles and formats offered by Swifties who have embraced the podcast as a participatory fan space, they also keenly seek out podcasts hosted by expert listeners from the pop music industry who accessibly share their expertise.
Select industry podcasters also share something else with their listeners, their fandom. When listening to and examining Swift’s music, these hosts in not-so-subtle ways disclose their Swift fandom and fannish behavior either by sharing an experience or personal story or outright declaring their adoration.34 When one Swiftie on r/TaylorSwift came across another fan recommending Switched on Pop’s Swift episodes, they asked the forum how they would characterize Charlie Harding and Nate Sloan’s “general attitude toward Taylor?” Could they be trusted with Swift and her music? A forum member quickly responded: “They stan pretty hard.”35 Scholarly, industry, and celebrity music and popular culture podcasters carefully negotiate the nebulous space between their role as “expert” and their identity as a fan.
Swift fans not only value Harding and Sloan’s mixture of musical rigor and fannish adoration, but they also appreciate the duo’s sustained engagement with Swift’s songwriting career. Swift is not just the subject of a single, one-off themed episode on the surprise quarantine recording and release of folklore (although they do have their own folklore episode). Instead, Swift, her music and at times her star persona are the focus of nine (and counting) full-length episodes to date, with the most recent Swift episodes tackling Midnights (2023) and the Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) (2023) re-recording.
Switched on Pop is an acute example of this skilled balance of expertise and fannish engagement that is praised by the fans who frequent Swift fan forums and social media platforms. The podcast advertises itself as being about “the making and meaning of popular music.”36 In the introduction to their book Switched on Pop: How Popular Music Works, and Why It Matters based on their podcast, the creators and hosts musicologist Nate Sloan and songwriter Charlie Harding retell the origin story of their podcast. The podcast’s title is a playful reference to Wendy Carlos’s Switched on Bach (1968), an album that asked listeners to take electronic music seriously and illustrated the expansive and expressive possibilities of the synthesizer. Harding and Sloan wanted to do the same thing for the pop music that fascinated them. Harding and Sloan were “geeking out” on music in the backseat of the car on a road trip down the California coast as they shared their admiration for Canadian composer Owen Pallett’s piece for Slate, a nuanced deconstruction of Katy Perry’s “Teenage Dream” that focused on the craft of songwriting and production.37 Also, they each recently experienced a revelatory listening moment that shifted how they listened to pop music and acquired a “new respect for the musical integrity that animates even the bubbliest of bubblegum pop.”38
For Harding and Sloan, it is about Swift’s music, not Swift the person, unless the songwriting and the person intersect in meaningful ways. Switched on Pop’s prioritization of the music is important for many Swifties because they have other podcasts and digital fan spaces where they can contribute to Swiftian speculative mythologies. As one fan posted in a Reddit thread, Harding and Sloan are “very objective in my opinion and usually appreciate the technical side of Taylor’s songwriting. They purposefully don’t really get into the ‘celebrity’ side of things which I appreciate.”39 Switched on Pop is a space where the music that the fans love is taken seriously and verified, equating listening expertise with academic training and credentials. Switched on Pop is a podcast about popular music and how to listen to it using the tools and techniques from academic music studies and bringing those tools into the discursive space of the podcast. While some fans choose to advocate for the cultural and musical value of Swift’s music in fan forums and social media discussion threads, other fans find validation for their music tastes and fannish behavior in the knowledge that Harding and Sloan have devoted numerous episodes to the analysis of Swift’s songwriting, illustrating her compositional skill using the audile techniques of industry professionals and music scholars in the public-facing sonic space of the podcast.
On Switched on Pop, Harding and Sloan employ what Amy Skjerseth refers to as “ride-along listening,” a listening technique where hosts play musical examples that isolate and compare musical features while the hosts comment instantaneously, examining the song’s production and reception and defining terminology in accessible ways for their listeners.40 Harding and Sloan use the podcast to soundscape a sonic environment where they alternate listening and commentary, providing instantaneous explanations of musical terms, detailed analysis of compositional techniques and performance practices, and the sociocultural context of the music excerpt the hosts just listened to with their listeners or what they will be listening to next. This layer of commentary examining a song’s craft, context, and production uses accessible language and explains terminology to make musical analysis accessible for listeners from a range of music backgrounds who listen to the podcast as a part of their everyday listening practice. While Harding and Sloan emphasize to their listeners that their listening model foregrounds the materials of music and Swift’s songwriting strategies, they also advocate for the strengths of listening critically while also identifying as fans.41
Switched on Pop’s first Swift episode “The Oeuvre of Taylor Swift” begins with a reflective listening moment, as Sloan and Harding remember a live Swift appearance that they both attended, but from different spatial and sonic perspectives. Harding recalls a local event where Taylor shut down the main boulevard in Hollywood for a performance on late-night television promoting her latest album. Sloan described it as a “profoundly moving experience” watching it at home on television, and Harding admits he “had to” get exclusive VIP tickets to the event to “see what the spectacle was all about.”42 As Harding stood in the middle of a sea of young fans straining to catch a glimpse of Swift, Sloan watched his television screen searching for Harding in this crowd. While Sloan watched from the privacy of his home, he still viscerally felt the elements of liveness mediated by his television. Swift only played four songs, but they were expertly choreographed for live television, offering the televisual audience the same sense of liveness as those in person in the streets. The sonic space of the podcast is saturated with the distinct traces of their individual, embodied, and situated listening as Harding and Sloan relate how they are hearing, or not hearing, what is all around them.
The animated register and variable timbre of Harding and Sloan’s voices and the controlled energy that propels their description of the event affirms that although they heard the performance from different locations and experienced different dimensions of her liveness, they shared the experience of hearing Swift live. Through technology of individual sound, including headphones, private speakers, radios, or here, the podcast, Harding and Sloan shape a sonic environment that translates and transmits their embodied listening experience of the event and its mediated liveness to their podcast listeners.43 Harding and Sloan also express moments of fannish behavior as they recount their different forms of participation in a live Swift event that Swifties identify with, but they recognize they are not the average Swift fan. In these opening moments of this first Swift-themed episode, Harding and Sloan position themselves as both fans and people employed by the music industry who listen for a living.
The episode “The Oeuvre of Taylor Swift” is where Harding and Sloan attune their ears to the sound of Swift and her songwriting, decoding a selection of Swift’s most common songwriting techniques and illustrating how they are used and transformed across her catalog. Drawing examples of songs from her early country period through her transition into the distinctive pop sound of 1989 (2014), Harding and Sloan identify Swiftian sonic signatures. Beverley Diamond suggests that artists and their recordings can contain “sonic signatures” where sound is portrayed and used to reference actual or imagined locations or kinds of environments, establish genre, and index the body and identity of the artists on the recording.44 Diamond’s sonic signatures in recorded sound are not unlike Schafer’s soundmarks of a soundscape, the unique sound of a place, community, thing, or individual. Sonic signatures that listeners can hear and recall across Swift’s songwriting are important because, as Harding and Sloan argue, Swift is a “musical chameleon who changes her style from album to album,” and these sonic signatures ground the listener in Swift’s sonic identity, reminding fans that it is still the same Taylor they are listening to.45
What Harding calls the “T Drop” and Sloan identifies as the “Swiftian Suspension” is one such Swiftian sonic signatures—or soundmark—one of many indelible audible markers of Swift’s sonic identity that Sloan and Harding use to establish Swift’s compositional credentials against those who question Swift’s creative agency and voice.46 A soundmark like the “T Drop” provides continuity to Swift’s songcraft amid musical reinvention and genre-shifting, as listeners encounter Swift “rewriting her musical playbook” as she experiments with musical identities across the successive eras of her career.47
Outro: Podcasting Taylor and Broadcasting Fan Listening and Knowledge
On July 24, 2020, Harding and Sloan, like many Swifties, “dropped everything” to listen to folklore upon its surprise release and recorded a last-minute episode to unpack the album’s music, sound design, and paramusical references. Swift, like many artists (not to mention her fans), redirected her energies in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, turning to technologies of connection, circulation, and expression to continue making and processing their unexpected circumstances. The abundance of podcast episodes produced following folklore’s unanticipated release affirmed that skilled listeners across the spectrum of fandom—from dedicated Swifties to professional music critics—were invested in closely listening to where Swift had taken her music next.
In this article, I highlight that listening to the sonic environments of Taylor Swift podcasting reveals a range of techniques of the listener and audile forms of sensory perception in and of recorded sound. I demonstrate that the content and construction of The Swift Talk and Switched on Pop’s Swift episodes highlight the many ways podcasters who identify with Swift, her music, and her fan community offer their creative labor and listening strategies to create Taylor Swift sonic media about Taylor Swift sonic media. Although I focus on the ways in which the hosts of The Swift Talk and Switched on Pop approach Taylor Swift podcasting and the strategies they use in the translation and transmission of their listening knowledge to their audience—which includes fellow fans when I listen for the sonic environments of Taylor Swift fan podcasting—these are not the only ways of listening to Swift, making a Taylor Swift podcast, or being a fan of Swift’s music.
Swiftian podcasting highlights both Swift’s development of a vocabulary of sonic signatures and songwriting practices that forge new songwriting paths as a form of agency, as well as the hosts’ development of diverse listening strategies that they deploy to decode lyrics and translate Swift’s songwriting content, listen closely to fan forums, and canvass other fans’ listening experiences in their efforts to understand Swift’s life, feelings, and creative decision-making and maintain the Swift/fan connection. Swiftie podcasters’ listening commentary offers evidence and explanation of their fandom and Swift’s cultural and musical significance and the plurality of Swiftie fan voices and listening perspectives, contributing to the ongoing understanding of physical, virtual, and social environments of popular music sociality and reception.
Notes
On podcast intimacy, see Alyn Euritt, Podcasting as an Intimate Medium (New York: Routledge, 2023).
Amy Skjerseth, “Ride-along Listening: Inclusive Modes of Musical analysis in Switched on Pop,” Radio Journal: International Studies in Broadcast & Audio Media, vol. 20, no. 1 (2022): 33–48.
Byrd McDaniel, “All Songs Considered: The Persuasive Listening of Music Podcasts,” Twentieth-Century Music, vol. 19, no. 3 (2022): 411–26.
Academic Swift studies has experienced a sustained surge in production. In 2021, Christa Bentley, Kate Galloway, and Paula Harper organized the virtual Taylor Swift Study Day: Eras, Narrative, Digital Music and Media; their co-edited book Taylor Swift: The Songs, The Star, The Fans is forthcoming. See also Melissa K. Avdeeff, “TikTok, Twitter, and Platform-Specific Technocultural Discourse in Response to Taylor Swift’s LGBTQ+ Allyship in ‘You Need to Calm Down’,” Contemporary Music Review, vol. 40, no. 1 (2021): 78–98; James Barker, Richard Elliott, and Gareth Longstaff, “‘Standing in Your Cardigan’: Evocative Objects, Ordinary Intensities, and Queer Sociality in the Swiftian Pop Song,” in Disrupted Knowledge, ed. Tina Sikka, Gareth Longstaff, and Steve Walls (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill Academic Publishers, 2023), 259–79; Mary Fogarty and Gina Arnold, “Are you ready for it? Re-evaluating Taylor Swift,” Contemporary Music Review, vol. 40, no. 1 (2021): 1–10; Nate Sloan, “Taylor Swift and the Work of Songwriting,” Contemporary Music Review, vol. 40, no. 1 (2021): 11–26; John McGrath, “The Return to Craft”; Paul Théberge, “Love and Business: Taylor Swift as Celebrity, Businesswoman, and Advocate,” Contemporary Music Review, vol. 40, no. 1 (2021): 41–59.
Not all Taylor Swift fans self-identify as Swifties, and a Swift scholar does not necessarily have to be an avid fan. But many scholars engaged in Swift scholarship procured tickets to The Eras Tour simultaneously for entertainment and research, often attending with non-academic friends who are Swift fans and engaging in pre-concert preparation rituals (e.g., bedazzling their outfit for the evening or making homemade beaded jewelry featuring the titles or lyrics of their favorite songs to wear at the concert and posting photos of their fanworks on social media).
For further scholarship on multisensory listening, musicality, and perception, see Jessica A. Holmes, “Expert Listening Beyond the Limits of Hearing: Music and Deafness,” Journal of the American Musicological Society, vol. 70, no. 1 (2017): 171–220; Anabel Maler, “Musical Expression Among Deaf and Hearing Song Signers,” in The Oxford Handbook of Music and Disability Studies, ed. Blake Howe, Stephanie Jensen-Moulton, Neil Lerner, Joseph Strauss (Oxford: Oxford University Press: 2015), 73–91; Byrd McDaniel, “Out of Thin Air: Configurability, Choreography, and the Air Guitar World Championships,” Ethnomusicology, vol. 61, no. 2 (2017): 419–45. Additionally, Tomie Hahn’s Arousing Sense: Recipes for Workshopping Sensory Experience contains both in situ and virtual networked sensory exercises that entrain. Hahn, Arousing Sense: Recipes for Workshopping Sensory Experience (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2021).
For further scholarship on listening to the everyday, the body, and ubiquitous listening that considers the function of mediation, see Mack Hagood, Hush: Media and Sonic Self-Control (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019); Anahid Kassabian, Ubiquitous Listening: Affect, Attention, and Distributed Subjectivity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013). On embodied listening in virtual concert game spaces, see Karina Moritzen, “Opening Up Virtual Mosh Pits: Music Scenes and In-Game Concerts in Fortnite and Minecraft,” Journal of Sound and Music in Games, vol. 3, no. 2-3 (2022): 115–40.
Pauline Oliveros, “Networked Music: Low and High Tech,” Contemporary Music Review, vol. 28, no. 4–5 (2009): 433–35; Oliveros, “My American Music’: Soundscape, Politics, Technology, Community,” American Music (Winter 2007): 389–404.
The podcasts selected for this study are made and hosted by creators who actively promote their podcasts across social media and fan community spaces. They also make their podcasts accessible to listeners across multiple popular podcast listening apps and platforms. The listener comments I weave into my study are similarly posted by listeners who are actively recommending, creating, curating, and evaluating Swift-themed media for the Swiftie community and indicate their desire for their valuation of these podcasts and fan knowledge to be widely disseminated. I focused on two spaces of online discourse: Swiftie Reddit threads where the fan community actively makes podcast recommendations and discusses individual episodes in detail, and the posts and comments on each podcast’s official social media accounts (Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter) made by listeners in response to specific episodes.
Listeners can tune in to The Swift Talk on Apple Podcasts or on Spotify (The Swift Talk https://open.spotify.com/show/6dIvX9NqblFGT5WdLF6iec). The podcast also maintains an Instagram presence. Switched on Pop is also available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, but also, from their website and linked from their Instagram account. The Swift Talk, Instagram, https://www.instagram.com/theswifttalk/. Switched on Pop, https://switchedonpop.com and Switched on Pop, Instagram, https://www.instagram.com/switchedonpop/. While every episode of The Swift Talk is dedicated to Taylor Swift, Switched on Pop has a collection of Swift-themed episodes. These Swift-themed episodes include, Episode #2 “The Oeuvre of Taylor Swift,” Episode #10 “Taylor Swift’s Beethovian Blank Space,” Episode #72 “Taylor Constructs A Darker Reputation,” Episode #114 “Taylor Swift Causes a PANIC!,” Episode #179 “folklore: taylor swift’s quarantine dream,” Episode #199 “‘Evermore’ of a good thing,” Episode #247 “Taylor, Adle & Silk Sonic’s broken hearts club,” Episode #288 “Up late with Taylor Swift’s Midnights,” and Episode #322 Speak Now (about Taylor’s versions).
Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003).
Emily Thompson, The Soundscapes of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900-1933 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), 2.
Barry Truax, ed., Handbook for Acoustic Ecology, 2nd ed. (Vancouver: Cambridge Street Publishing, 1999).
Allan F. Moore, Patricia Schmidt, and Ruth Dockwray, “A Hermeneutics of Spatialization for Recorded Song,” Twentieth-Century Music 6, no. 1 (2009): 83–114; Dockwray, “Proxemic Interaction in Popular Music Recordings,” Mixing Music, ed. R. Hepworth-Sawyer and J. Hodgson (New York, NY: Routledge, 2017), 53–61.
Beverley Diamond, On Record: Audio Recording, Mediation, and Citizenship in Newfoundland and Labrador (Montreal and Kingston, Canada: McGill-Queen’s Press-MQUP, 2021), 180–204.
George Revill, “Landscape, Music, and Sonic Environments,” in The Routledge Companion to Landscape Studies, ed. Peter Howard, Ian Thompson, Emma Waterton, and Mick Atha (New York, NY: Routledge, 2018), 264–73.
Kyle Wrather, “Making ‘Maximum Fun’ for Fans: Examining Podcast Listener Participation Online,” The Radio Journal–International Studies in Broadcast & Audio Media, vol. 14, no. 1 (2016): 43.
When I refer to the podcast hosts of Switched on Pop and The Swift Talk by name I use their full names, if available, on first mention and then abbreviate their name from that point on using the abbreviated name used to refer to the host in their promotional materials, interviews, fan forums, and professional settings. On the one hand, many fan-driven Swift podcast hosts exclusively use their first names to encourage parasocial relationships between themselves and their listeners. Similarly, they refer to Swift as Taylor rather than by her last name. On the other hand, Charlie Harding and Nate Sloan of Switched on Pop have careers beyond their podcast where they are known by and referred to by their last name.
Andrew Bottomley, “Podcasting, Welcome to Night Vale, and the Revival of Radio Drama,” Journal of Radio & Audio Media, vol. 22, no. 2 (2015): 179–89.
Jeremy Wade Morris, “Artists as Entrepreneurs, Fans as Workers,” Popular Music and Society, vol. 37, no. 3 (2014): 273–90.
For further scholarship on Swift fandom, see Gaston Franssen, “Policing the Celebrity of Taylor Swift: Introduction,” Celebrity Studies, vol. 13, no. 1 (2022): 90–92; Margaret Rossman, “Taylor Swift, Remediating the Self, and Nostalgic Girlhood in Tween Music Fandom,” Transformative Works and Cultures, vol. 38 (2022).
Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (New York, NY: Routledge, 1992), 24.
Susan Douglas, Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female with Mass Media (New York, NY: Three Rivers Press, 1995), 87.
On fan online performances of the material culture of Taylor Swift fandom, see Kate Galloway, “Musicking Fan Culture and Circulating the Materiality of Taylor Swift Musical Greeting Cards on YouTube,” American Music, vol. 38, no. 2 (2020): 240–61.
Rossman, “Taylor Swift, Remediating the Self.”
Angela McRobbie, and Jenny Garber, “Girls and Subcultures,” in Feminism and Youth Culture: From “Jackie” to “Just Seventeen”, ed. Angela McRobbie (London: Macmillan, 1991), 1–15; Mary Celeste Kearney, “Productive Spaces: Girls’ Bedrooms as Sites of Cultural Production,” Journal of Children and Media, vol. 1, no. 2 (2007), 126–41. On the practice of bedroom recording and production, see Emília Barna, “Bedroom Production,” The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music, Space and Place, ed. Geoff Stahl and J. Mark Percival (New York, NY: Routledge, 2022), 191–204.
Tomie Hahn, Sensational Knowledge: Embodying Culture through Japanese Dance (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2007).
Jonathan Sterne, “Headset Culture, Audile Technique, and Sound Space as Private Space,” Tijdschrift voor Mediageschiedenis, vol. 6, no. 2 (2014). See also Paula Harper, “Autoplaying, Unmuting, Attending: (Re)formatting the Twenty-First-Century Digital Sensorium,” Twentieth-Century Music, vol. 19, no. 3 (2022): 427–43.
Spencer Kornhaber, “How Taylor Swift Broke Ticketmaster,” The Atlantic November 18, 2022. https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2022/11/taylor-swift-ticketmaster-presale-concert-tickets/672181/
On podcast intimacy, see Euritt, Podcasting as an Intimate Medium.
For further scholarship on asynchronous communal listening broadcast practices, see Kate Galloway, “The Sonic Strategies and Technologies of Listening Alone Together in The World According to Sound’s Outside In: A Communal Listening Series,” Radio Journal: International Studies in Broadcast & Audio Media, vol. 20, no. 1 (2022): 85–103; Nate Sloan, “Listening Together: Podcasting as Public Music Theory,” in The Oxford Handbook of Public Music Theory, ed. J. Daniel Jenkins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021).
John McGrath, “The Return to Craft: Taylor Swift, Nostalgia, and Covid-19,” Popular Music and Society (2022): 1–15.
I thank Line Grenier for this productive and supportive conversation at the 15th Biennial of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music in Liverpool, UK, in 2009 following this combative Q&A session. At the time I was working on Rufus Wainwright, but I’ve faced a similar critique of my work on Swift. Line Grenier, “Global Pop on the Move: The Fame of Superstar Celine Dion Within, Outside, and Across Quebec,” Australian Canadian Studies, vol. 19, no. 2 (2002): 31–48.
Jessica Holmes in her work on deafness and music attends to multisensory listening and the extension of listening beyond the ear to listening that engages the whole body. Denise Von Glahn explores the relationships among listening, composition, and situated experience in the natural world, using the term “skillful listener” to refer to the unique listening insights afforded by women composers inspired by the world around them and the ability to translate these situated experiences through their music. Holmes, “Expert Listening Beyond the Limits of Hearing,” 171–220; Denise Von Glahn, Music and the Skillful Listener: American Women Compose the Natural World (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2013).
Mark Duffett, “I Scream, Therefore I Fan: Music Audiences and Affective Citizenship,” in Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World, ed. Jonathan Gray, Cornel Sandvoss, and C. Lee Harrington (New York, NY: New York University Press, 2017), 143–56.
reddit, r/TaylorSwift, “Links to All ‘Switched on Pop’ Podcast Episodes on Taylor’s Music to Celebrate ‘Lover’ Week!” https://www.reddit.com/r/TaylorSwift/comments/csjcjb/links_to_all_switched_on_pop_podcast_episodes_on/
Switched on Pop, https://switchedonpop.com/
Owen Pallett, “Skin Tight Jeans and Syncopation: Explaining the Genius of Katy Perry’s ‘Teenage Dream’,” Slate, March 25, 2014. https://slate.com/culture/2014/03/katy-perrys-teenage-dream-explaining-the-hit-using-music-theory.html
Nate Sloan and Charlie Harding, Switched on Pop: How Popular Music Works, and Why It Matters (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2019), 3. In addition to this book based on their eponymous podcast, Sloan has written about the practice of the scholarly podcast, knowledge creation, and the embodied experience of listening together. Nate Sloan, “Listening Together: Podcasting as Public Music Theory,” in The Oxford Handbook of Public Music Theory, ed. J. Daniel Jenkins (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2021). https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780197551554.013.4
reddit, r/TaylorSwift, “Links to All ‘Switched on Pop’ Podcast Episodes on Taylor’s Music to Celebrate ‘Lover’ Week!” https://www.reddit.com/r/TaylorSwift/comments/csjcjb/links_to_all_switched_on_pop_podcast_episodes_on/
For more on Harding and Sloan’s application of “ride-along” listening and hearing aural embodiment in music podcasting media, specifically on Episode #80 of Switched on Pop where they deconstruct Janelle Monáe’s “Make Me Feel” with guest co-host Lizzo, see Skjerseth, 33–48.
Being a Taylor Swift fan is markedly different than identifying as a Swiftie.
“The Oeuvre of Taylor Swift,” Switched on Pop, Episode 2. https://switchedonpop.com/episodes/002-the-ouvre-of-taylor-swift
Paul Sanden, “Rethinking Liveness in the Digital Age,” in The Cambridge Companion to Music in Digital Culture, ed. Nicholas Cook, Monique M. Ingalls, and David Trippett (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 178–92.
Diamond, On Record, 180–204.
Sloan and Harding, Switched on Pop, 21.
Ibid., 21.
Ibid., 21.