How Taylor Swift saved Bronte Alva
“When you are young, they assume you know nothing” – Taylor Swift.
When I was young, people assumed I knew nothing, and they were right.
When I was young, I hated Taylor Swift. Not because she has ever had bad music, or because I ever particularly disliked her. In the end, I found it mainly boiled down to deeply engrained internalised misogyny. Back then it just wasn’t cool. I wanted to be cool so badly. In school, with my friends, with boys I liked. It didn’t stop when I grew older. But that’s normal as a teenager! Who am I? What do I like, who will I be? Normal pressures we have to overcome to find our true identities. As young girls, we enable one another to fold ourselves to these perfect little packages holding boys favourite desires, which is confusing enough for the self-esteem. Then, put a power imbalance in there, and a 10-year age difference at the age of 17, we’ll have a petri dish of self-hatred and a tasteful sprinkling of identity crisis.
He was my gym instructor. I was infatuated with him. I thought it was love. It wasn’t. It was a blowjob in a parking lot. It was booty calls, and it was grooming.
A week before my 18th birthday, he ghosted me. I blamed myself for a long time. What did I expect? I was a silly young girl, and he was… everything. He had a life. Mine hadn’t even left highschool. It wasn’t until later with a lot of reflection that I realised it wasn’t my fault. Before the epiphanies came the reeling. The blasting sad songs, sobbing into pillows… One song that connected to me was ‘All Too Well’ by Taylor Swift. It follows her reminiscing on her experiences dating an older man and all that comes with it: the insecurities, the yearning, the ignorance to the problems and the lapses in judgement. How when we’re young, we’re malleable. I had spent so long trying to be the cool girl who was mature for her age, who liked old music and never needed anyone. But, in the end, when everything unraveled, the person I connected most with was the biggest pop star in the world and her sugary sweet music. Taylor Swift is girly, honest, and everything I was trying not to be. It was only then, that I realised that I was never going to be the “cool girl” I thought he wanted me to be because that girl didn’t exist.
I felt this was failure at first. I couldn’t figure out what was wrong with me and why I couldn’t be that person. But I didn’t have to know why. I wouldn’t ever have the answers. I was seventeen. He was the failure. The only thing he succeeded at was teaching a young girl one hell of a life lesson.
Listening to Taylor Swift’s vulnerable songwriting allowed me to move past failure and accept the things that I’ve experienced. That I can be the most true and contradictory, complex version of myself, not fitting into the box that this man put me in, and still hold all my worth. Having a sense of solidarity from one of the world’s biggest artists helped me to eliminate my shame.
Another artist who did this was Missy Higgins. Growing up as a young queer person, listening to a queer woman write songs about being in relationships with women and men at a young age, normalised it for me. It gave me a sense of entitlement to a voice when historically, it was something that we shouldn’t/couldn’t talk about, let alone put in a song. Ultimately, her influence led me to releasing my first single ‘Eve’s Lips (Make Me Want To Cry)’, a song about my first kiss with a girl. I had to move through a lot of shame in that time. The song was a way of coming out to my family. When I felt shameful and embarrassed, I thought about Missy Higgins and how I don’t have to feel that way.
Same with the help of Taylor Swift’s vulnerability with her own experiences, I can now write about that man on the other side, knowing the pain he put me through, the questioning of my worth, my memories, of my truth, and he is just some stupid boy I used to know.
Without these women I wouldn’t be the artist that I am today as they taught me the value in being vulnerable and accepting your true self in all of its complexities.
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Check out Taylor Swift, the latest single from the Dharawal/Wollongong-based indie rock artist.
BRONTE ALVA – TOUR DATES
FRI 11 AUG | BOTANY VIEW HOTEL, GADIGAL/SYDNEY NSW
FRI 18 AUG | THE BASEMENT, NGUNNAWAL/CANBERRA ACT
SAT 19 AUG | THE ALLEY BAND ROOM, GADIGAL/SYDNEY NSW
FRI 20 AUG | ICEBREAKER FESTIVAL, GADIGAL/SYDNEY NSW
SAT 26 AUG | STAG AND HUNTER, MULUBINBA/NEWCASTLE NSW
SAT 14-15 OCT | YOURS & OWLS FESTIVAL, DHARAWAL/WOLLONGONG NSW
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