Love Letter To A Record: Eves Karydas On Taylor Swift’s ‘Fearless’

September 27, 2018

Many of us can link a certain album to pivotal moments in our lives. Whether it’s the first record you bought with your own money, the chord you first learnt to play on guitar, the song that soundtracked your first kiss, the album that got you those awkward and painful pubescent years or the one that set off light bulbs in your brain and inspired you to take a big leap of faith into the unknown – music is often the catalyst for change in our lives and can even help shape who we become.

In this series, Music Feeds asks artists to reflect on their relationship with music and share with us stories about the effect music has had on their lives.

Eves Karydas — Taylor Swift Fearless

Dear Fearless,

I fell in love with you at 15. It was a time when I felt very awkward and out of place most of the time, but you made me feel sane. You helped me realise that to be a teenage girl and to feel EVERYTHING was okay. You helped me understand that I wasn’t just what the boys at school called “crazy” or “clingy”. Because I was so much more than that. I was fearless. I knew how to feel. I was a hopeless romantic, but I now knew how to protect my heart from people who didn’t care for it.

The first lyrics to reach out and clutch me around the throat and demand me to listen were on ‘White Horse’: “I was a dreamer before you went and let me down. Now it’s too late for you and your white horse to come around”.

But perhaps the true heart of Fearless is a song called ‘Fifteen’. Taylor sings about her and her best friend in high school. “Back then I swore I was gonna marry him someday but I realised some bigger dreams of mine. And Abigail gave everything she had to a boy who changed his mind”.

Those particular lyrics were instrumental to my life. They broke a spell I had been under since I was a child – that belief in oldschool fairytales and happy endings and in believing everything a boy tells you about yourself. Without being explicit, this album was one of my first introductions to the empowered feminine perspective.

I was already writing songs at this point but Taylor gave me the strongest desire to write songs that spoke to people like hers spoke to me. I called it “big sister” music. Her approach to cadence, turns of phrase, using pop hooks in a non-pop genre, it was all new to me. I can’t remember ever feeling so energized to keep writing songs.

Sometimes I think I loved you too hard, because my CD is all scratched now and skips from compulsively spinning it on repeat in any spare minute I had. But I will forever be grateful to Taylor Swift for writing Fearless, and for being there for me and millions of other girls.

Forever & Always

Eves Karydas

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Eves Karydas’s debut album ‘Summerskin’ is out tomorrow, Friday 28th September & you can catch her touring it around the country next February! Check the dates below.