You can make me a drink 🥂
New episode out now, celebrating one year of AP Taylor Swift!
Apparently, only around 32% of podcasts have published 10 or more episodes, yet somehow this week we are celebrating a whole year of AP Taylor Swift! To thank our incredible listeners, we took requests for lyrics to discuss on our anniversary episode. From revisiting “All Too Well - 10 Minute Version” to looking at lines in songs like “Coney Island” or “Delicate” that we somehow haven’t discussed yet, this episode really hits on a lot!
Scroll down for some extra credit from all of us! For us, this has been a year of friendship and Taylor, and we all wanted to celebrate along with you, dear reader.
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🎒This Week’s Extra Credit - Brought to You by All Of Us!!!
Doing this podcast together has truly been incredible. Podcasts come in so many forms, and while we will play with formats to create more content for you all, none of us could ever imagine the core of this podcast being anything other than the three of us hanging out, chatting, and enjoying ourselves.
We truly just had a whole conversation this past week about how recording the podcast and doing podcast work together is always one of the most energizing activities we have in our lives. In honor of our little team being together for a whole year (which is still insane), we are each going to give you a little bit of extra credit this week, each just riffing on whatever we want!
Jenn’s Extra Credit - “A touch that was my birthright”
For the sake of time when recording this week’s episode, I didn’t get to discuss another listener-requested lyric in this week’s episode that I was super excited about. So I’ll do it here! The requested lyric is “A touch that was my birthright became foreign” from “How Did It End.” Not to be too on-brand, but I loved this line because it has so much historical context behind it.
My first thought was the book series that first got me into history — The Royal Diaries. The idea of a “birthright” appears in other contexts, but is perhaps the most potent in royal families. Inheriting a throne and a kingdom is a pretty substantial birthright. Yet in actual history, it wasn’t uncommon for uprising and treachery to happen so the rightful heir ends up exiled or married off to a foreign land. To be fair, there are bigger questions at play in this example around inheriting kingdoms, but from the point of view of the lyrics, this is how the situation would feel.
So imagine for a moment you were raised your whole life preparing to be the leader of your people. If you want to move away from real royalty, you can also think of films like Moana or Frozen, which are both about young women who were raised to lead but then conflict happened. In this imaginary scenario, you were ready for this role, but now imagine something happened and you were sent away. Your home, your people, everything you knew now begins to feel foreign and distant.
It’s a heck of a metaphor for a break-up (of any kind). This idea of a birthright becoming foreign really captures the feeling of the rug being ripped out from underneath you and having to start over somewhere unfamiliar and isolating. We know she’s the queen of gutting metaphors, but this one is really not holding back at all.
Jodi’s Extra Credit - “The Professor said to write what you know”
Fun fact: we didn’t decide to do a Substack until the night before our very first podcast episode dropped. ‘Twas the night before Episode 1, and everything was ready to go: episode loaded, TikTok and Instagram ready, spirits high. At some point that day or evening, I don’t remember which, I had a mild panic—we needed to own our contact list!
Any good marketer or content creator knows you want as short a distance as possible between you and your audience. Podcasting feels like yelling into a void—we record in our own little world, press a few buttons, and poof! goes the episode into the magical internet land and onto your phones, laptops, and listening devices. Who are you? Who knows! We get some download numbers and demographic data, but that’s it. Even on social, tales of content creators getting their Instagram accounts hacked or their TikToks banned, leaving them with no way to reach their audience, made me nervous. So like a good marketer, I spun up a Substack, and we decided this would be how we get your email addresses.
But we couldn’t just ask you to sign up for our Substack so we could email you every week with a new episode. Substack gave us a blank space to do more—to write what we know. It was never part of the plan, but it’s become one of my favorite outlets as this Substack helps me rediscover the joy of writing. We all take a different approach to our Extra Credit sections—I’ve noticed Maansi leans academic and pulls out her rhetorical strategies; Jenn loves to touch on history; I feel like I don’t quite have a pattern, but I like to get personal and use this space as a place to let my thoughts wander. A few of my favorites I’ve written:
In honor of our “RED” deep dive in Episode 10, I dove into the ways Taylor’s music mirrors her career journey.
Episode 28 had us deep dive “Shake it Off,” my favorite Taylor Swift song, and in our extra credit, I explored the psychology of pop music and why the song is an anthem for resilience.
And for our “Death By a Thousand Cuts” deep dive in Episode 18 (I guess I write a lot of our Deep Dive extra credits?), I compared Taylor Swift to Dorothy Parker. And this was BEFORE “The Tortured Poets Department” announcement!
Substack has become a place for me to write what I feel and try to make sense of what I know, while also rediscovering the joys of creative writing. Does anyone read the extra credit? Who knows! But it’s been a meaningful outlet for me, just like this entire podcast has been, and I’m so grateful for it all.
Maansi’s Extra Credit - “You take my hand and drag me head first
Fearless”
Jodi was kind enough to call my substack style “academic,” which I take as a huge compliment, but my note today will skew more personal. One whole year of AP Taylor Swift! And for me, this year’s been a big one indeed. This podcast has been such an incredibly fun ride, and I truly just feel so lucky to be a part of it and so lucky to be able to call my co-hosts dear friends. For our one year ep, I really just wanted to share a bit of what my year was like, but more importantly, highlight how my co-hosts truly embody the Swiftie friendship bracelet spirit.
I revealed a teensy little detail about me in this episode, which was that in the last year, I also incubated and birthed my first child!! (She’s a future Swiftie for sure). There we were, a little over a year ago, Jodi had assembled the gang, we had this killer idea, our first conversation was so energizing and we were all fired up, and then…I found out I was pregnant. I was VERY excited about this because we were very ready (as ready as one can be?) to have a child, but the timing! It didn’t take me very long to realize I was in over my head. I had just committed to these two ladies to do this podcast, and suddenly, I was SO much more tired than I’ve ever been, barely able to stay awake, and drowning in what should have been a really manageable workload for this podcast. Jodi and Jenn were two of the first people I revealed my news to because I simply could not keep up, and I was so nervous, thinking I may not be able to continue this work, feeling so frustrated that I kept dropping the ball. I truly could not have predicted their response. They both made it so clear that we were doing this for fun, it wasn’t meant to be stressful, and they would be there to help and support me. But there are people who say they are supportive, who know they should be supportive and patient, and then there are those who actually just do it. My fellow co-hosts are the latter.
We tried our best to split our work evenly, but I saw Jenn and Jodi taking on my share and tackling it when I couldn’t keep up. We agreed to record everything in advance while I was feeling somewhat better so we would have a good runway to get everything edited. There were months when Jenn and Jodi would just divide and conquer our editing notes, show notes, and substacks. Both were owning our social channels. I tried to jump in wherever I could, but I had slowed down, and had awful brain fog. If I forgot to complete something, they were patient and would check in, they would send me reminders, they would make sure we were ready so nothing slipped, never guilting me, truly being so kind and understanding.
All of us have full-time jobs and I know my not being 100% put pressure on them to keep up. Even now, I have a 6-month old (!!), I just started work again, and finding my way back to myself has been hard. It’s been a whole year, and they continue to be the most incredible team. I just feel like you, dear readers, should know what rock stars they are, not only because of what they bring to each discussion, but also because from the beginning of this incredibly journey, they took my hands and dragged me head-first fearless, both into this podcast, but also into motherhood!
