Season 4, Episode 4

Everybody’s studying Taylor Swift these days, from Swifties decoding her vault to YouTubers decoding her harmonies to right-wing conspiracists decoding her plot against America. But what does it mean to study Taylor Swift as a musicologist? Christa Bentley, Kate Galloway, and Paula Harper know: they’re co-editing Taylor Swift: The Star, the Songs, the Fans, a book of essays out next year. This week: a conversation about what it means to study the cultural phenomenon that is Taylor Swift, and what Taylor can tell us about musicology today.

If you’re interested in learning more about Professor Bentley, Galloway, and Harper’s work, check out:

• Taylor Swift: The Star, the Songs, the Fans, forthcoming with Routledge in 2025
• Sound Expertise’s interview with Paula Harper, from Season 2
• Bentley’s chapter “Forging the Singer-Songwriter at the Los Angeles Troubadour,” from The Cambridge Companion to the Singer-Songwriter
• Galloway’s article “Podcasting Taylor: Listening Strategies, Fandom, and the Sonic Environments of Taylor Swift Podcasting” in the Journal of Popular Music Studies
• Galloway’s article “Musicking Fan Culture and Circulating the Materiality of Taylor Swift Musical Greeting Cards on YouTube” in American Music
• Harper’s article “Autoplaying, Unmuting, Attending: (Re)formatting the Twenty-First-Century Digital Sensorium,” in the journal Twentieth-Century Music

Sound Expertise is hosted by Will Robin (@seatedovation), and produced by D. Edward Davis (@warmsilence). Please subscribe via Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, and/or Spotify. Questions or comments? Email soundexpertise00 @ gmail

A written transcript of this episode is available here; thanks to Andrew Dell’Antonio for volunteering to prepare transcripts for the show!