A few days before Taylor Swift’s 12th studio album, The Life of a Showgirl (Showgirl), was released, I got an email from a former student. We’d been messaging back and forth, trying to find time to grab lunch and catch up on all things Taylor.
The email was short.
One line—“I am so scared for Eldest Daughter I can’t even.”
And a link to an Instagram reel:
Upon learning that Showgirl’s emotional fifth track would be titled “Eldest Daughter” (as Eldest Daughters in birth order and family dynamics ourselves), we were…unwell.
And we were not alone.
Meetings of The Eldest Daughters of the Internet convened online, theorizing and speculatingFootnote 1:
@brookekehr: As an eldest daughter who isn’t afraid of anything…Surface Pressure from Encanto had me sobbing in theaters. I fear this will be worse. Might need an extra therapy appointment after this.
@jennygawlick: Eldest daughters, how nervous are we?
@lulu_ob: [T]hose of us who are eldest daughters (like Taylor) are both super excited about this song, and also super anxious about it lol.
@soumisinha87 (on IG): So we all collectively agree that “eldest daughter” by taylor swift is either going to ruin us or heal us….Footnote 2
The “break us or save us” sentiment was particularly popular. The possibility that, as Soumi Sinha speculated on Instagram, Swift “wrote a song entirely for them,” which had the Eldest Daughters both excited and worried. After all, there are moments throughout her discography where Swift seems to be speaking directly to the challenges Eldest Daughters face.Footnote 3 But all of those songs are about much more; while they may resonate with Eldest Daughters, the songs are not written only for them. Such a pointed, specific audience is rare for Swift, whose songs aim to speak to a more universal experience.
And after the album dropped, the lyrical content of the song seemed to reflect that universal experience. Reviews of the song flooded social media and revealed a mixed reception. Some took issue with the use of contemporary slang. Some wanted more poetic lyricism, more in line with The Tortured Poets Department. Some felt that the song title was misleading, given its focus on internet behavior. After being “taken care” of by Swift for so long, many felt let down. Threads user @createwhereverbiz sums it up: “As an eldest daughter myself, this was probably my most anticipated song from the titlesFootnote 4. Didn’t really hit the mark for me in that regard.” Why did this highly anticipated song seem to miss the mark for so many?
My theory lies in the location of “Eldest Daughter” in the tracklist, following “Father Figure” and positioned specifically as Track 5. While it maintains the vulnerability traditionally associated with the fifth position, it does so in a way that redefines it: “Eldest Daughter” is Swift’s first Track 5 not to be rooted in pain or doubt, but instead offering hope and reassurance. This tonal shift may account for some of the unmet expectations, but I maintain that Swift uses this redefined vulnerability to take care of those Eldest Daughters “afflicted by a terminal uniqueness.”Footnote 5
1. The Track 5 tradition
Before we turn to “Eldest Daughter” specifically, it might be helpful to clarify a uniquely Swifitian occurrence: the Track 5 tradition. Academic conversation on Track 5s as a concept is limited; as Clipperton and Bitsikokos point out, “the research on Swift is typically smaller in scope or scale, focusing on either specific albums…or songs.”Footnote 6 Their own study, published online the day before Showgirl’s release, attempts to “examine her as an artist from the perspective of her songwriting and lyrical content across her albums.” Coining the term “Swiftian Saudade” to refer to the “distinct combination” of “joy, sadness, and nostalgia” in Swift’s music, they found that “track fives do have the highest proportion of saudade elements.”Footnote 7 Their research supports what fans had long theorized: that Swift reserves the fifth spot on her albums for the emotionally heavy songs. In an Instagram Live before the release of the 2019 Lover album, Swift herself confirmed: “instinctively I was just kind of putting a very vulnerable, personal, honest, emotional song as Track 5.”Footnote 8
It’s not enough for a Track 5 just to be sad, or emotional—there are plenty of songs in Swift’s catalog that could fit that bill.Footnote 9 For example, “Soon You’ll Get Better” on Lover is about Swift’s mother’s cancer diagnosis. “Ronan,” from Red’s vault, is inspired by a grieving mother’s blog chronicling her three-year-old son’s terminal battle with neuroblastoma. But neither is located in the Track 5 position. Vulnerability, carrying an element of personal confession, is the key component here—for two reasons.
First, vulnerability in song can open up a connective potential. According to Holly Crocker, “Swift’s pandemic music shows how stories that value women’s vulnerability can foster new creative formations of community.”Footnote 10 Focusing solely on Swift’s Reference Swift2020a albums folklore and evermore, which she sees as Swift’s most vulnerable, Crocker illustrates Clipperton and Bitsikokos’s observation that Swiftian scholarship tends to focus on specific albums, rather than across her discographyFootnote 11. But we can expand Crocker’s scope and apply her ideas of vulnerability and community to the Track 5s as a whole and to “Eldest Daughter” specifically.
Second, the vulnerability of Swift’s Track 5s allows her listeners to experience others’ (specifically Swift’s) stories of pain, which in turn provides them with a language to verbalize their own pain—a necessary step for healing, growth, and connection. As Phil Klay says, “It’s a powerful moment, when you discover a vocabulary exists for something you’d thought incommunicably unique.”Footnote 12 This ability to deftly detail her emotions is what opens up Crocker’s connective potential of Swift’s music. However, there are some who view this vulnerability as disconnecting them from it. NPR’s Leah Donnella, for instance, insists that “[t]here comes a moment in a lot of Taylor Swift songs where…you realize that this song isn’t about you. This song is about Taylor Swift.”Footnote 13 Which is true, yes, but only to a degree. As Switched on Pop’s Nate Sloan and Charlie Harding point out, on her albums, Swift “loves embracing characters and playing different roles. This is not a biography.”Footnote 14 The main character of her songs may be a version of Taylor Swift, but it is not the Taylor Swift—it is a version of herself, refashioned to most effectively convey the emotional truth of the song. So what matters in the Track 5s is not who the song is about, but the pain, the hurt, and the feelings that come from that moment in time.
And most, if not all, of the Track 5s before Showgirl are characterized by raw pain and doubt. There’s Debut’s “Cold As You,” where a younger Swift laments that “you come away/with a great little story/of a mess of a dreamer with the nerve to adore you.”Footnote 15
There’s Reputation’s “Delicate,” characterized by Swift’s constant questioning (a total of 44 in the song), as her insecurities drive her to continually check in with her partner: “Is it cool that I said all that?/Is it too soon to do this yet?/Cause I know that it’s delicate.”Footnote 16
Then there’s evermore’s “tolerate it,” where an older narrator grieves, “I made you my temple, my mural, my sky/Now I’m begging for footnotes in the story of your life/Drawing hearts in the byline/Always taking up too much space or time.”Footnote 17
From the self-beration in “White Horse,” “Stupid girl, I should have known…that I’m not a princess/this ain’t a fairytale” to the final whispered “you’re on your own kid, you always have been,” Swift’s Track 5s are uniformly marked by betrayal, pain, and loss.Footnote 18
2. Changing the prophecy: a new type of Track 5
“Eldest Daughter” represents a significant tonal shift in Swift’s Track 5s. Gone are the betrayal, pain, and loss that marked the earlier songs. As Clipperton and Bitsikokos found, “Track five songs, on average, are on the negative emotion side” and “usually tell a story of some kind, dealing with heartbreak and deep feelings.”Footnote 19 Here, we have, perhaps for the first time, a positive Track 5, dealing not with heartbreak but with hope.
It’s worth noting that “Eldest Daughter” follows “Father Figure” in the tracklist, which some believe is more “Eldest Daughter” coded than the track of the same name, with the protagonist exhibiting textbook Eldest Daughter behavior.
But…what if that’s intentional? What if Swift deliberately placed “Father Figure” there as an example of the “bad bitch” persona she’s forced to adopt—the persona she will disavow in the next song?
After all, the character in “Father Figure” adopts a protective stance, echoing the swaggering bravado of a mob boss in the lines, “You want a fight, you found it/I got the place surrounded/you’ll be sleeping with the fishes before you know you’re drowning.”Footnote 20 The repetition of “leave it with me” and “I protect the family” portrays the narrator as fiercely protective and paternalistic.Footnote 21 The final warning of do not “mistake my kindness for weakness” may hint that while the narrator will do what she must to protect those around her, the tough exterior may be a defensive armor, rather than her true nature.
“Eldest Daughter,” then, can be seen as a continuation of that story. Only, in the Track 5 position, the narrator is now more vulnerable, lowering her guard and revealing that the tough exterior—of moments like those in “Father Figure”—is just a mask. As Swift herself explains in the theatrical event that accompanied the album’s release, she’s paired the unique stresses of being an Eldest Daughter with the similar pressure to seem “cool” and “unbothered” in online spaces, intending to create a “song that kind of unmasks all the facades we’ve put in front of ourselves and just says like, ‘I’m not all those things that we aspire to be culturally, and that we’re told we have to be.’”Footnote 22
And in the end…they are just masks. So when the narrator confesses, “But I’m not a bad bitch/and this isn’t savage,” Swift is not just casually throwing in swear words or appropriating contemporary slang in a way that some found so cringey and jarring.Footnote 23
She is deliberately calling back to the “savage” persona of “Father Figure,” drawing attention to its artificial, constructed nature.
She is directly alluding to Fearless’ “White Horse,” a Track 5 written by her younger self. The callback to “I’m not a princess/this ain’t a fairytale” juxtaposes the language of childhood fantasy with Gen-Z slang, exposing them both as facades Swift believed she needed to survive.Footnote 24 In that song as well, the heroine of “White Horse” tries to convince herself that she’s “gonna find someone someday/who might actually treat me well”—an event that seems to be realized in “Eldest Daughter.”Footnote 25 Here, the protagonist reveals that she has what she wanted, even if she was too hardened to admit it: “We lie back/A beautiful, beautiful time lapse/Ferris wheels, kisses and lilacs/And things I said were dumb.”Footnote 26 However, this older protagonist has realized that surviving is not just about being taken care of, but also about actively caring in return—which Swift makes clear in the final line of the final verse, “but now you’re home.”
Finally, unlike the characters of past Track 5s, whose masks were back in place by the end of the song, this version of Taylor has cast it away. Swift is confidently confessing that all the posturing, all the bravado, all the efforts to fit in—they are just for show. As she points out, “everybody is so punk on the Internet” and “apathy is hot.” Consumed by “cautious discretion” and the fear that she’d “never find that beautiful, beautiful life that/shimmers the innocent life back,” she insisted that she was fine on her own, kid.Footnote 27 Since then, she’s learned to allow herself “to admit that you do actually need somebody.”Footnote 28 In this song, there is no pleading, no confessing, no wondering—not even the insecure questioning that characterized “Delicate” and “The Archer.” Instead, there’s a series of hopeful promises: “I’m never gonna let you down/I’m never gonna leave you out” and “I’m never gonna break that vow/I’m never gonna leave you now.”Footnote 29
Perhaps the most concrete evidence that this hope is realized? Not once in this song—or the entire album—does Swift express doubt or wonder if she’s enough.Footnote 30
3. Conclusion
If the Track 5s can be read as letters Taylor wrote to the version of herself she was at the time, the medium of song allows them to be letters to us, the listeners, too. In that sense, this new hopeful vulnerability provides Swift’s listeners with a vocabulary they “thought incommunicably unique” (Klay). The Eldest Daughters of the Internet—at least some of them—convened and realized they were not alone. As Threads user @zhnTa3nshl_ concluded, “Taylor really put those hidden feelings into words, and it left me crying because it felt like finally…someone one gets it.”
After all, to affirm an Eldest Daughter is to see beyond her mask for who she is—and to tell her that she is enough.
So who takes care of the Eldest Daughters?
It’s still Taylor Swift.
Author contribution
Writing - original draft: L.D.A.
Open access
