When the pandemic hit in 2020, it had been five years since my sister, Emily, had died. She had lived with cystic fibrosis her whole life, yet we were a close, tactile family. We laughed, hugged and sang often. When Emily died, relatively suddenly, aged 30 (I was 27), I coped with it as well as anyone could. In fact, I prided myself on how outwardly resilient I seemed: I spoke to a therapist, started a new job. I poured myself into a packed diary and a big city.
It wasn’t until time stopped, in a way, in 2020, that I really sat with my grief. I was forced to – made redundant like so many others that summer, my days had no shape. Like many people living in city flatshares, my one little freedom was a daily walk.
Taylor Swift’s Evermore album came out that December and, like its predecessor, Folklore, was quickly on heavy rotation as I strolled about my south London neighbourhood, waiting for something to change. I walked mainly around Tooting Common, taking the same comforting route: past the athletics track, along the tennis courts, looping around the small lake. Here I would pause to sit on “my” bench, staring at the ducks rippling the water.
That’s where I was the first time that track 13 of Evermore, Marjorie, came on over my headphones. As the opening synths shimmered into my ears, tears began to fall. Before I’d even processed the lyrics, the very sound of it released something in me.
Each time I listened, the ethereal sound and simplicity of the lyrics whisked me back to winter five years earlier, the early days of grief. “If I didn’t know better / I’d think you were talking to me now,” sings Swift. I later read that she was addressing her grandmother Marjorie, who had died when she was young.
But Marjorie is not a particularly maudlin song; it builds to a pulsing, almost clubby beat that speaks of being alive. Towards the end, Swift’s grandmother’s singing voice is sampled hauntingly, just audible over the production. On my walks, I could feel what Swift was doing here – reaching out beyond this life to touch the spirit of her loved one. Just listening to it, I felt I could do the same.
I could feel Emily, almost physically, sitting on the park bench beside me, gazing at the bulrushes. As the lyrics say: “If I didn’t know better / I’d think you were still around.”
I first encountered Swift during her 1989 era, gazelle-limbed and glossy-bobbed at a time when she was stomping in six-inch heels and singing of Manhattan nights over bouncy Max Martin productions. In the subsequent years, dancing to Blank Space and belting out Style at karaoke, I never pictured turning to Swift in times of grief. But Marjorie did something I hadn’t managed in five years of therapists and packed diaries – it made me sit still with the grief I’d compressed for half a decade.
In 2024, I was lucky enough to get a ticket to the Eras Tour. Twenty-seven weeks pregnant with my son – the nephew my beautiful sister never got to meet – I stood in the stands with other Swifties as the pulsing intro to Marjorie built in the pitch-black stadium. As Swift sang the opening words, 90,000 people flicked on their phone lights into a constellation of stars, all saying: we’re here with you. I felt the baby kick and wriggle. I don’t think I was the only fan with tears running down my face.
I don’t go to church, but that experience may be as close as I’ll ever get to that kind of communal faith and euphoria. Through a pop song and a pandemic came a small ritual so meaningful to me that it healed something I didn’t know needed healing. If that’s not great songwriting, I don’t know what is.
Did a cultural moment prompt you to make a major life change? Email us at cultural.awakening@theguardian.com