Taylor swift

If I could be like anybody, I would wish to be like Peter Duchin. The pianist and bandleader — who, each year during his prime, oversaw from his perch at the piano dozens of debutante balls and scores of society events — has always seemed to me to embody style, dignity and grace.  Arguably Duchin came by some of these qualities as a consequence of his heritage — his father was the equally famous bandleader Eddy Duchin — but it has always been obvious that he must have worked hard at them, too. He had certainly had his share of reversals: his mother, the former Marjorie Oelrichs, succumbed to complications experienced during childbirth; about thirteen years later, his father was felled by leukemia. He was raised in large part by diplomat W.

The various film and TV awards ceremonies so far this year have been a predictable round; there have been few surprising winners, and the events both on-stage and off have largely been well-behaved and respectable. All hail, then, to the Grammys, which has managed to take conventional expectations of what an awards show should be and has subverted them considerably, combining everything from a transcendental comeback by one of music’s greatest stars to one of the night’s winners being dragged off by police in handcuffs. First things first though: the Grammys represented yet another victory for Taylor Swift, a woman who, at this rate, is going to become TIME’s person of the year for a second year in a row.

I have lost hope in contemporary pop music. As someone who used to keep his finger on the pulse of new releases, and who went to gigs as often as I could, the absence of innovation has been one of the great disappointments of the past couple of decades. There really isn’t anything much out there, bar, of course, the sainted Taylor Swift. But ever since David Bowie’s death eight years ago (eight years...), the music industry seems to have been in a desperate downward spiral, where flair, originality and chutzpah are sorely missed. Surely it’s time that a new act could supply such things, complete with flute solos, songs sung in Albanian and an orchestral overture? No, I am not making it up.

The Golden Globes have historically been the strangest of all the major film awards ceremonies. Previously handed out by a mysterious body known as the HFPA (Hollywood Foreign Press Association), the ceremony has all the glamor and glitz of the Oscars, but with one big difference: there is free-flowing alcohol on all the tables, meaning that, more often than not, audiences can enjoy the spectacle of at least one A-list star collecting their award blind drunk, which leads to some of the more unorthodox and entertaining speeches in recent memory. And this unrestrained ethos extends itself to the hosts, too.

Well, it had to happen. Taylor Swift has been the most talked-about person in the world for some time now. After 2023 saw her conquer both stadiums and the world’s cinemas with her Eras Tour film — which, with a current gross of $249 million, is now the highest-earning concert movie ever made — her remarkable year has been capped off both with the enormous success of her re-recorded album 1989 (Taylor’s Version) and now, the news that TIME magazine has awarded the thirty-three-year-old musician the accolade of Person of the Year. She follows in the footsteps of everyone from Josef Stalin and Adolf Hitler to Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. There are several noteworthy features of the accolade.

As I wrote a few weeks ago, there is a marvelous opportunity to bond with one’s children when you both conceive an interest, even an obsession, with the same musical act. Once upon a time, it might have been the Beatles, or Bowie or Madonna: now, it’s Taylor Swift, the all-conquering pop songstress who has not only taken over the world, but has made yet more untold millions with her concert film Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour. In practice, most of those seeing it will not have been able to get tickets to see her three-and-half-hour live show, so this slightly abbreviated version (a mere two and three quarter hours) will have to do. And my seven-year old daughter Rose is a Swiftie par excellence. We are going to have fun, I declare, and she rolls her eyes and says, “If you say so, Dad.

After a relatively quiet few weeks at the US box office, now that the Barbenheimer phenomenon has finally receded from view, it has fallen to another all-conquering icon to drag audiences back to theaters in their millions. Yes, Taylor Swift is no longer content with conquering stadia, but has now managed to establish herself as an unparalleled draw for the big screen as well, with Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour opening in American cinemas. With a first weekend gross of $97 million, it will either be the highest October launch since Joker in 2019, or even surpass it. Not bad for something made on a budget of no more than $20 million, self-produced by Swift herself and bypassing studios to be distributed directly to theaters.

Here’s the kind of guy I am: my musical taste is small-c catholic and runs about 30,000 albums. (All CD and digital, no vinyl. I’m not a hipster prone to dropping thirty-five bucks on a picture disc of Ghost in the Machine or a “junkyard swirl”-colored 2-LP edition of Out of State Plates.) If you make good music, no matter the genre, I’m probably going to like it. On any given day I might alternate listening to some Webb Pierce records with the Annie Get Your Gun original cast recording, and then follow those up with some Pantera, and then some Dandy Livingstone, and then some Bananarama, and then some Albert King, etc. etc.