Tea Stains on Parchment

 Like so many Taylor Swift fans, I have a particular soft spot for the 2012 album Red. I remember when it came out. I was 13, and I was working on my eighth grade science fair project and had just heard "I Knew You Were Trouble" for the first time on Pandora during class. This is hardly the kind of context that would make a person fall in love with Red, an album that has become a sort of seminal heartbreak anthem. But nonetheless, I loved it. It was one of the only physical CD's I owned growing up, and I felt so cool for having a Taylor Swift album. As time went on, this became less cool. Liking Taylor Swift became something you were supposed to hide or preface with something like "I used to..." or "She's just ok." Her work was "juvenile" or nothing but catchy pop.  I'm very happy to say that we, as a cultural group, have moved passed this vein of thinking. In fact, it was never true. How could someone who is only writing for money or...

 If you know me, you probably, or rather, definitely know that I'm a big fan of Harry Styles. Now, this is an outcome I had never anticipated. I didn't hate Harry Styles, but I was not a One Direction person, and I had very wrongfully assumed that to love one was to love the other, that they were the same. And before the fans come for me, no, I also don't dislike One Direction. They were just never really my thing. But Harry Styles is very much my thing.  So how did I go from being completely ambivalent to being in the top 1% of spotify listeners? Well, I guess it started when I went to London and heard about the Fine Line release concert. I wasn't there--I was already leaving London, but the hype piqued my interest, so I decided to listen to what singles had been released and then finally the whole album once the pandemic hit. What I found wasn't frivolous pop but something that felt really genuine and oddly pertinent to my life. Fine Line is the perfect mixture of...