Exploring the Taylorverse

To call someone Taylor Swift’s biggest fan is bold, but of her admirers in academia, Andrew Ledbetter, professor of communication studies, might hold that title. He blogs regularly to share thoughts on the artist’s communication style and to detail his favorite Taylor Swift songs — “All Too Well” and its 10-minute version are tied for first place.

“It’s her magnum opus,” he said. “Every note and lyric just feels so carefully chosen to cultivate the emotional impact.”

Andrew Ledbetter wears his fandom proudly, with Swift’s signature friendship bracelets and a display of memorabilia in his office. Photo by Desiree Rios

Ledbetter’s fandom merged with academic inquiry in a 2024 Communication Quarterly study that linked Swift’s lyrics with fans’ reception of her music.

Forbes has labeled Swift the world’s second-youngest female self-made billionaire, and The New York Times estimated that her 21-month Eras Tour was the highest-grossing concert tour in history at more than $2 billion just in ticket sales. Ledbetter said she is also a successful communicator, “and any celebrity’s success is jointly co-created with the audience.”

Dedicated Swift fans — called Swifties — believe her music’s popularity comes from its interconnected storylines, Ledbetter said. They have likened her discography to the interwoven films of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, affectionately calling it the “Taylor Swift Cinematic Universe” or “Taylorverse.”

If the fans’ theory is correct, Ledbetter hypothesized, her most popular songs would share common themes, with deeply interconnected songs being the most popular.

Ledbetter used TCU’s Schieffer Media Insights Lab to analyze Swift’s lyrics; the facility allows faculty and students to analyze and visualize social media conversations with data analytics tools. After the computer created a map of the links between songs based on words they shared, he applied fantasy theme analysis, the process of locating concepts that connect common words, to the results.

“All Too Well” turned out to be statistically significant, with so many shared words it placed fourth among Swift’s most centralized songs.

His conclusion? The Swifties are right. “It is the connections between the songs,” he wrote on his blog, “as well as the artist and her fans, that animates her art and fuels its success.”

The Tortured Poet

Through the lab, Ledbetter measured the popularity of Swift’s songs by quantifying social media engagement. He also collected streaming data from Spotify and factored in evaluations from professional music critics to gauge the success of individual songs.

He examined Swift’s lyrics using fantasy theme analysis, an element of symbolic convergence theory, which asserts that social groups create a collective identity based on shared narratives. Through the lens of the theory, he writes, “one reason for her success may be her ability to craft compelling fantasy themes that unite her audience into a rhetorical community.”

Ledbetter said fantasy in this context is not about fiction but rather how someone uses symbolism in storytelling, which Swift is known for. A famous example mentioned in the paper is the red scarf referenced in “All Too Well.” The scarf’s symbolism is hotly debated by hardcore fans, but Ledbetter interprets it as indicative of a romance’s “initial passion and eventual collapse.”

Using data analytics tools and fantasy theme analysis, Andrew Ledbetter confirmed what Swifties know all too well: Her most popular songs share the most interconnected storylines. CC by 2.0 Paolo Villanueva

He identified four types of stories — called fantasy types — that constitute the Taylorverse: Villains and Heroes, Longing and Regret, Finding the Extraordinary in the Ordinary and Empowered Voice.

The Villains and Heroes fantasy type is most prominent in Swift’s earliest work and contrasts good and evil, wrongdoer versus victim. The central verbs he identified in this category are fighting, running, keeping, holding and waiting. He notes she also occasionally employs military metaphors, especially in her songs “Ivy” and “The Great War.”

Songs in Longing and Regret explore heartbreak, exemplified by the somber verbs leaving, falling, changing, wishing and missing.

Finding the Extraordinary in the Ordinary songs focus on domestic imagery and assign emotional significance to the seemingly ordinary. The words home, car, door and room are common in this narrative arc. “All Too Well” and its heavily symbolic reference to an everyday object — the red scarf — appear in this section.

“This is Taylor the poet,” he writes of this category, “using her command of language to cast the world in a beautiful and epic light, leveraging specific details to voice insight and meaning to her experiences.”

Finally, in Empowered Voice, Ledbetter says, Swift’s lyrics grow bold to the point of sarcasm. Songs in this group push back against her critics, with the terms yeah, wanna and gonna juxtaposed with levity in the words play and fun. This last group, he says, is where she most asserts her agency, displaying a power almost nonexistent in her earliest music.

Throughout her career, he says, Swift’s settings have shifted from small towns to big cities, and characters — including her depiction of herself — have become more complex. Her subject matter has expanded to include career challenges and gender politics.

The latter speaks to what Ledbetter calls Swift’s “feminist rhetorical vision,” in which she validates women and girls’ lived experiences, no longer relying on male authority figures’ approval. Such vision may be particularly valuable for academics, who often use symbolic convergence theory to study powerful figures like politicians but rarely pop culture personalities. He said this preference could leave young women’s voices underrepresented in such research by favoring older male perspectives.

The biggest shift in Swift’s music is in her “sanctioning agents,” meaning characters or entities that either legitimize or delegitimize the speaker’s narrative, Ledbetter writes. This is where her feminist message is arguably most pronounced. In her early song “Love Story,” Swift depicts herself as Juliet and her love interest as Romeo, falling in love despite her father’s objections. The song deviates from Shakespeare’s tale and ends with Romeo proposing after finally earning her father’s blessing. This song revolves around a stark power imbalance with a patriarch gatekeeping Swift’s happiness.

“One reason for her success may be her ability to craft compelling fantasy themes that unite her audience into a rhetorical community.”
Andrew Ledbetter

Ledbetter says Swift began gradually inserting her feminist rhetoric in her 2010 album Speak Now. Her song “Mean,” he writes, shows Swift pushing back against a male music blogger’s criticism, while “Long Live” portrays Swift and her fans “fighting dragons” together.

In her 2014 album 1989, Ledbetter says, Swift guides her fans to embrace their own empowerment and self-validation.

“The release of 1989 was not only a shift from country to pop,” he writes, “but also Swift shaking off these sanctioning agents and becoming her own, via connection with her listeners. In other words, it became the (feminine) symbolic convergence achieved by her fans, positioned against the lack of understanding from other (masculine) audiences, that legitimated the rhetorical vision.”

Taylor Swift’s appeal is historically vast. A 2023 Forbes survey found that 53 percent of U.S. adults identify as fans of Swift, with 16 percent counting themselves as “avid” fans. CC by SA 3.0 Beth Garrabrant

And Soon Enough You’re Best Friends

Ledbetter’s TCU colleague Naomi Ekas, professor of psychology, teaches a course called Psychology (Taylor’s Version). The class uses Swift’s work to analyze topics such as loss, infidelity and love through a developmental psychology perspective.

Ekas and Ledbetter bonded over their shared fandom, and he later sent her early drafts of his paper. She said his work engages students and helps them learn by applying academic theory in real-world contexts. “I think ultimately, as academics,” she said, “that’s at the heart of what we’re trying to do.”

Students get excited when they learn Ledbetter is a fellow Swiftie. They often talk to him outside of class about her music, discussing the latest albums and debating which tracks are her best.

Gianna Arganbright, a master’s student in communication studies, said Ledbetter’s research is academically valuable. “Especially with the way that our culture is going with social media … it’s just so relevant.”

Ledbetter said that he probably isn’t the singer’s target demographic but that anybody can be a Swiftie — even, as he called himself on his blog, a “40-something bald professor.”

“I know it’s a different expectation in terms of age and gender and some of those things,” he said, “but I think we’ve seen her music has a huge appeal across a whole bunch of audiences.”