Taylor Swift tends to have a deep impact on her fans. You could see if in the sea of Eras-inspired outfits during the singer’s epic Eras Tour this summer, not to mention the river of joyful tears that would often accompany each night’s secret song segment.
But in an essay for The New Yorker, writer Joe Garcia muses on the surprisingly deep connection he developed to Swift’s music while serving a life sentence for murder in some of California’s most unforgiving prisons.
Writing about anxiously awaiting the release of 2012’s Red album, Garcia said that he was immediately obsessed with “All Too Well” — dubbing her recent 10-minute Taylor’s Version “even better” — putting the song on repeat when he played his CD copy. “As Swift sang about love’s magical moments, how they are found and lost again, I thought about a time before my incarceration, when I briefly broke up with the woman I loved,” he recalled in a story straight out of a Swiftian saga. “She came to my house to return one of my T-shirts. When she hung it on the doorknob and walked away, I was on the other side. I sensed that someone was there, but, by the time I opened the door, she was gone.”
Garcia, an avowed Prince fan, wrote that the first time he became aware of Swift’s music was when he was in the Los Angeles County jail awaiting a transfer to prison on a murder charge. He recalled copies of the Los Angeles Times getting passed around from prisoner-to-prisoner in lock-up and gazing at the singer’s “wide-eyed face” in the Calendar section as he took in the gang fights and race riots around him, thinking her rocket ride to teenage stardom was an “injustice.”
Surrounded by young men of color who were writing and performing their own hip-hop songs about chasing paper and fame, Garcia focused in on Swift, “actually getting rich and famous. How fearless could any little blonde fluff like that really be?” he wondered. Once he was transferred to the unforgiving Calipatria State Prison in 2009 to serve a life sentence after six years in county jail, he was afforded the “small luxury” of a TV, where he would catch glimpses of Swift’s performances on The Tonight Show and Ellen. He said he was surprised by “how intently she discussed her songwriting,” never daring to tell any of his fellow inmates that he was impressed by Tay’s talent.
Garcia charts his fandom throughout his various transfers to other prisons, recalling how he got a security level bump-down for good behavior in 2013, which led to a move to Solano state prison, where he was forced to rely on a borrowed pocket radio to catch Taylor’s songs after his CD player and TV were lost in transit. “At night, we’d crank up the volume and lay the earbuds on the desk in our cell. Those tiny speakers radiated crickety renditions of Top Forty hits,” he wrote.
He would hear Swift songs almost every hour, at which point he realized he was kind of digging them, including “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together,” which reminded him of the woman he’d lived with for seven years before prison and how they never used the word “never” when they dreamed about getting back together.
“When I heard ‘Everything Has Changed,’ I had to fight back tears of exaltation and grief,” he wrote about thinking back on their first date while listening to the lyrics: “All I knew this morning when I woke/ Is I know something now/ Know something now I didn’t before.”
Alas, he had to leave his copy of Red behind after yet another transfer, which forced him to listen to a country radio station that played a wide variety of Swift’s music, from the twangy “Tim McGraw” to the full pop explosion of “I Knew You Were Trouble.”
“There was, in her voice, something intuitively pleasant and genuine and good, something that implies happiness or at least the possibility of happiness,” he wrote of Swift. “When I listened to her music, I felt that I was still part of the world I had left behind.”
The essay takes Garcia through several other transfers, chronicling the ups-and-downs of coming out as a Swiftie in the prison yard and learning that he wasn’t the only one bumping her tunes behind bars. By the time he was sent to San Quentin prison — around when Swift dropped Lover in 2019 — Garcia says he had accumulated nearly every Taylor song there was.
Whether on radios, boomboxes, TVs, MP3s or CDs, Garcia’s time in prison has been marked by the quest to acquire the latest Swift album. That includes during a harrowing COVID-19 lockdown in June 2020 when he was sent to an isolation cell where, between shivering and sweating through a brain fog for two weeks, he passed the time by making a playlist of the singer’s most uplifting songs. “Listening for the happiness in her voice,” he wrote.
In 2020, the then-53-year-old Garcia learned that he would be eligible for parole in 2024 due to a new California law, an unimaginable ray of light that once again made him think of the lyrics to “Daylight” from Lover: “I’ve been sleeping so long in a twenty-year dark night,” Swift sings. “And now I see daylight.”
He was, of course, psyched to hear about the Midnights album in Oct. 2022, and overjoyed when a volunteer slipped him a copy of it for his birthday a short time later, a kind gesture that nearly brought him to tears. Swift is now 33, the same age Garcia was when he was arrested and he wrote that he wonders if her music would have resonated with him at that age.
“I wonder whether I would have reacted to the words ‘I’m the problem, it’s me,’” from “Anti-Hero,” he wrote of the Midnights single. “Hers must be champagne problems compared with mine, but I still see myself in them. ‘I’ll stare directly at the sun, but never in the mirror,’” she sings on the single. “I think of the three-by-five-inch plastic mirrors that are available inside. For years out there, I viewed myself as the antihero in my own warped self-narrative. Do I want to see myself clearly?”
In a few months, the California Parole Board will ask him questions about his time behind bars, which made Garcia think of the “Karma” lyrics: “Ask me what I learned from all those years/ Ask me what I earned from all those tears.” So, with Taylor’s help, he thinks about what he’s learned and as those questions dog him at night when he’s not sleeping, he said he’ll keep listening to Midnights on repeat.
