It is a cloudy Saturday evening in Edinburgh in early June and I am in a rugby stadium surrounded by young women who are wearing glitter and homemade friendship bracelets. Pink stetsons and shiny bodysuits abound, middle-aged men in TK Maxx less so. This is not my tribe – I am here with my 12-year-old daughter, Laila, to see Taylor Swift in concert. She has been looking forward to this night for months, having seen the Eras tour countless times online. Every night since the tour began, Laila would watch live streams, but nothing could have prepared her for the moment Swift appears on stage and the stadium screams along to Cruel Summer. Laila sings the lyrics with passion and delight. I can tell by her expression that today is the greatest day of her life.
Trying to recall a time when Laila was not a Swiftie is like trying to remember a time before I had children. It must have existed, but it is hard to believe. It feels like Taylor has been an unofficial part of our family for years. She pops up in almost every conversation with my daughter, particularly in recent weeks, albeit in sombre tones, following the tragic events in Southport, with the death of three children, all Swift fans, and the riots that followed – such a far cry from the inclusiveness and joy Taylor Swift embodies.
For years now, Taylor Swift has been a constant presence on any car journey and she is the permanent soundtrack in our home. She was not immediately welcomed into our family, though. It was around two years ago, while reading Guinness World Records, that Laila spotted a reference to Taylor Swift. “She had done the biggest stadium tour of 2018,” she told me. I’d heard of Taylor Swift, but I didn’t actually listen to her. I remember looking her up and watching the lyric video for Enchanted and I loved it instantly. From that moment she was all in. The intensity of Laila’s Swift obsession reminds me of my youth when I, too, encountered an American singer-songwriter whose work seemed to encapsulate all my hopes, fears and dreams.
I was 16 when I was first introduced to the music of Bruce Springsteen. It changed my life – a journey I have written about in my memoir Greetings from Bury Park, which was adapted into the movie Blinded by the Light. In the early days of my Springsteen obsession, I would listen to bootleg cassettes featuring rare outtakes just as Laila will search online for unreleased Swift deep cuts. I read books about Bruce, she listens to podcasts. We both love merch.
I first went to see Bruce Springsteen in June 1988 when I was 17 and my reaction was similar to Laila’s reaction to seeing Taylor Swift. “You don’t think of her as a real person,” Laila told me after the Swift concert. “You have her all over your wall, on your blanket, on your T-shirts and so the thought of her being like an actual person and seeing her there is quite a transcendent thing.”
Seeing Springsteen for the first time was equally transcendent for me, but there is another parallel between our musical obsessions – they inspired both of us to write. I went from keeping a diary to writing poems to finally ending up in journalism and screenwriting. Laila used to write poems, but after listening to Swift she moved on to songwriting. “I started writing my own songs because of Taylor,” Laila tells me. “She’s really helped my song-writing style.”
I bought Laila a cheap secondhand acoustic guitar a few years ago, but for her birthday earlier this month – she’s just turned 13 – she asked for a Taylor Swift Baby Guitar. Young girls don’t usually choose to share much of their interior lives with their parents, but through discussing Taylor Swift and her songs and listening to Laila’s own songs I am able to gain an insight into Laila’s inner world. Her songs are akin to an emotional diary, but one she is willing to share with her parents. Taylor Swift helps me connect with my daughter, which is why I ended up listening to Swift, too. I had assumed one of the privileges of parenthood was that I could share my tastes with my children. They grew up with me singing Springsteen songs as bedtime lullabies. I have a memory of Laila as a two-year-old at my brother’s house in Luton. She was jumping on a trampoline in the garden when she suddenly started singing, “You can’t start a fire without a spark, this gun’s for hire even if we’re just bouncing in the dark.” I remember feeling an intense jolt of love and pride.
That was then, but these days I find I agree with my daughter that Taylor Swift is also an incredible writer and performer whose work can range from the shiny pop of Style to the indie folk of Exile to the bruised electronica of Fortnight. She is an artist who can mine her personal life in songs like All Too Well and So Long, London that take apparently real-life incidents to create work that is both richly specific and also universally relatable. Simply put, if you don’t believe Taylor Swift is a generational talent, then you just aren’t listening closely enough.
On a recent trip to New York the very first thing I did after checking in to my hotel was go to Cornelia Street to visit the apartment block where Taylor used to live and which she mentions in the song of the same name. I visited the Hotel Chelsea, namechecked in the title track of The Tortured Poets Department. I did all this for Laila, and it was lovely to FaceTime her from Cornelia Street while she was home in London. My wife later told me she was genuinely moved that I made the effort to go to these places, because I knew they meant something to her. It was that feeling of having made a connection that made me jump at the chance to see Taylor Swift in Edinburgh a few months later.
This past week, following the cancelled concerts in Vienna in early August, Taylor returned to Britain for the final gigs of her historic eight-night residency at Wembley. I was lucky enough to attend last Saturday night with Laila. It was an incredible experience to be in the stadium with 92,000 other fans on that warm night, but it was not the first time I visited Wembley this summer.
Flashback to a rainy Thursday evening in London in late July. I was there to see Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. I had been here many times since 1988, but this evening was special because I had Laila at my side. I had warned her that the concert would be long and I was dreading hearing the ominous words, “Daddy, I am tired.”
The wait in the queue takes me back to the queue for Taylor Swift in Murrayfield back in June, albeit with more denim and fewer sequins. The Springsteen concert started and soon both Laila and I were singing along to Hungry Heart, Because the Night and Dancing in the Dark. My mind kept returning to the nights spent listening to these songs as a teenager clinging on to Springsteen in an attempt to better understand myself. I remembered the arguments I would have with my late father. He claimed that by listening to an American singer I was somehow betraying my Pakistani Muslim heritage. “You have your music, your own culture,” he would say to me and he wanted me to tell him what was so great about this Bruce guy. The worst part was that I never could explain it to him. I didn’t even try because he would never have understood.
I tried to imagine my own father standing at my side at a Springsteen concert and I couldn’t do it, but here was my daughter at my side at a Springsteen gig just as I had been at her side at a Taylor concert. Sometime around nine o’clock – with almost two hours of the concert still to go – I heard the words I had been dreading: “Daddy, I’m tired.” My heart sank. “But don’t worry,” Laila said, “I’m going to stay till the end.” She must have wondered why I had tears in my eyes.
My parents were baffled and often hostile to my Springsteen obsession, but Laila is sharing my passion for Bruce and I am enjoying her love for Taylor. If Springsteen was a wall between my parents and me, Swift is the bridge between myself and my daughter and it is for that reason I am a proud if unlikely citizen of the Taylor nation. Her music has provided so much joy for my young daughter and shaken me out of my middle-aged addiction to revisiting the past; it has reminded me of the ways I am like my daughter and my daughter is like me. Springsteen and Swift: they are the ties that bind and that is the story of us – Laila’s version.