Listening to Taylor Swift in Prison - The New Yorker

The following is an excerpt from an article that appeared in The New Yorker, written by Joe Garcia, a journalist with the Prison Journalism Project.

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The first time I heard about Taylor Swift, I was in a Los Angeles County jail, waiting to be sent to prison for murder. Sheriffs would hand out precious copies of the Los Angeles Times, and they would be passed from one reader to the next. Back then, I swore that Prince was the best songwriter of my lifetime, and I thought Swift’s rise to teen-age stardom was an injustice. I’d look up from her wide-eyed face in the Calendar section to see gang fights and race riots. The jail was full of young men of color who wrote and performed their own raps, often about chasing money and fame, while Swift was out there, actually getting rich and famous. How fearless could any little blond fluff like that really be?

In 2009, I was sentenced to life in prison. Early one morning, I boarded a bus in shackles and a disposable jumpsuit, and rode to Calipatria State Prison, a cement fortress on the southern fringes of California. Triple-digit temperatures, cracked orange soil, and pungent whiffs of the nearby Salton Sea made me feel as though I’d been exiled to Mars. After six years in the chaos of the county jail, however, I could finally own small luxuries, like a television. The thick walls of Calipat, as we called the place, stifled our radio reception, but an institutional antenna delivered shows like “Access Hollywood,” “Entertainment Tonight,” and “TMZ.” I was irritated by the celebrity gossip, but it was a connection to the outside world, and it introduced me to snippets of Swift’s performances for the first time. Here and there, I’d catch her on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” or “Fallon,” and was surprised by how intently she discussed her songwriting. I didn’t tell anyone that I thought she was talented.

Around the time Swift dropped “1989,” I acquired an old-school boom box. Technically, exchanging property and altering devices is against C.D.C.R. rules, but every prison has guys who fill their cells with radios, TVs, and speakers to repair and resell. I looked out for one guy, G.L., when he first hit the yard, and he became one of the best electronic fix-it guys I’ve ever met. He loved reconfiguring different speakers to get the best sound. He rewired the boom box for auxiliary cables and gave it to me. At C.M.C., I had a cell to myself, so I’d turn up the music enough to drown out obnoxious sounds outside my cell. Of course, some people always think that Swift is the obnoxious sound. “What’s up with the damn Taylor Swift?” a neighbor yells out. Another voice chimes in with requests: “Play ‘Style.’ That song’s tight right there.” By the time the song ends, someone new will admit, “That girl’s got jams.”

Alone in a prison cell, it’s virtually impossible to avoid oneself. As my body and mind began to recover, I started to question everything. What really matters? Who am I? What if I die tomorrow? I hadn’t been in touch with my sweetheart in more than two years, because she had told me that she was trying a relationship with someone who cared about her. Now, though, I wrote her a letter to see if she was O.K.

A week after I mailed my letter, I received one from her. Prison mail is slow enough that I knew it wasn’t a response—we had decided to write to each other at the same time. “The lockdown has afforded me plenty of time to reflect on all sorts of things,” her letter said. “I’ve been carrying you with me everywhere.” Reading it brought to mind Swift’s lyrics in “Daylight”: “I don’t wanna think of anything else now that I thought of you.” She was single again, and we started talking every week. In lockdown, between paltry dinner trays, I did pushups, lunges, squats, and planks in the twenty-two-inch-wide floor space in my cell. The twentieth year of my incarceration was approaching.

In 2020, the California legislature passed a law that made anyone who served twenty continuous years, and who was at least fifty years of age, eligible for parole. I’m fifty-three, and I’ll get my first chance at release in 2024. I couldn’t help but think of “Daylight” again. “I’ve been sleeping so long in a twenty-year dark night,” Swift sings. “And now I see daylight.”

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Joe Garcia is a journalist and Prison Journalism Project correspondent incarcerated in California. Garcia was previously a staff writer and the chair of the Journalism Guild for San Quentin News. In addition to prison publications, his work has appeared in the Washington Post and the Sacramento Bee. You can read his full essay "Listening to Taylor Swift in Prison" at The New Yorker website.