Taylor Swift college classes are a thing now

On a Thursday morning last month, a dozen students were crammed into desks in a small classroom at Berklee College of Music, reading the sheet music to a song by Taylor Swift. Together, they chanted the rhythm to the first verse of Swift’s 2012 hit “I Knew You Were Trouble.” Stripped of its playful descending melody, the song was uncomplicated, almost monotonous.

The class’s instructor, Scarlet Keys, was trying to make a point: that the relative simplicity of Swift’s music helped explain the singer’s widespread appeal.

“I think in the beginning of Taylor Swift's career, part of what made her a global artist is her simple rhythmic architecture," Keys said. "We’re thinking about stressed out people and distracted people and drunk people. We’re talking about old people and we’re talking about four-year-olds. We’re talking about everyone. How quickly can someone learn: duh-DA-da-da-da-da, duh-DA-da-da-da-da?”

In terms of commercial success and cultural impact, 2023 was Taylor Swift's biggest year yet, culminating in a string of chart-topping albums, Grammy awards and the highest-grossing concert tour of all time. So perhaps it’s a sign of the times that Swift’s music has made its way into the rarefied circles of academia. Last year saw the emergence of two headline-making academic conferences focused on the pop star's music and cultural impact. A Taylor Swift course at Harvard University garnered buzz when it launched last fall. Keys’ class debuted that semester, too, and was popular enough that she offered two sections in the spring — and will offer three next semester.

The idea for a Taylor Swift songwriting class came to Keys when she noticed the impact Swift’s music was having on her middle school-age daughter, who was going through a rough patch with a friend. “I started to hear my daughter sing ‘Mean’ by Taylor Swift every morning. That was the song that was getting her through,” Keys said. “And then I noticed [Swift’s] global appeal, and I thought, ‘There really is something there.’”

Keys’ course meets weekly, moving chronologically through Swift’s catalog one album at a time. Her students are mostly women, and — perhaps this goes without saying — big Swifties. When Keys played a recording of “I Knew You Were Trouble,” the class immediately started singing along. At the end, Keys broke the students into groups and told them to write a chorus based on the song’s trademark melodic motifs, using simple rhythms and a big melodic leap.

A good portion of the class was devoted to Swift’s lyrics. This, Keys said, is where the songwriter really shines.

“She’s such a great storyteller. Lyrically, she is a poet,” Keys said. She pointed to “Getaway Car,” from Swift’s 2017 album “Reputation.” In it, Swift uses the story of Bonnie and Clyde as a metaphor for wanting to escape a relationship, lending a mythic quality to a slightly unsavory scenario. “She's really doing the thing of, I'm going to take this average feeling that we all have, and I'm going to ... put your life in a way you've never heard it and help you resolve it in a really unique way,” Keys said.

The class is designed to give her students tools to write appealing, well-constructed pop songs. One of Keys’ students, Berklee senior Isabelle Blake, said she tries write three songs based on each lesson.

“In one of the earlier classes that we had, [Keys] said that in some verses it sounds like [Swift is] about to stand up with the melody, but then she sits right back down,” Blake said. “So I went home and I wrote a song just based on that one idea.”

It’s not just songwriters who have noticed the music of Taylor Swift is a good teaching tool. Across the river at Harvard University, English professor Stephanie Burt teaches a popular undergraduate lecture class called “Taylor Swift and her World.”

“Maybe 10 or 12 years ago, I noticed that among the songs that you just hear in public places, in CVS, in airports … there was one that was just a much stronger piece of songwriting than everything else,” Burt recalled.

That song — “You Belong With Me” — led Burt to the 2020 Taylor Swift documentary “Miss Americana.”

“It really set me thinking about the space of celebrity in which she moves, and the way that her decisions when she's not recording and not on stage, and her life as a human, interact with her life as a public figure, her life as a songwriter, her life as a performer,” Burt said. “And I found it tremendously sympathetic and admirable.”

Burt’s class treats Swift’s music as worthy of study and analysis, like any piece of literature. The curriculum pairs different Taylor Swift albums with literary works like Willa Cather's novel "Song of the Lark" and the poem "Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot" by Alexander Pope, which Burt calls Pope's version of "Shake It Off."

A poet by training, Burt applies a close reading to pop bangers like “Antihero.”

“The unusual images. Dreaming that she's coming back from the dead, dreaming that she's a giant stomping all over little people, and taking advantage of what is, for her, an unusually wide vocal range, show the way that she is disconcerted by trying to be who she wants to be, and how hard that is,” Burt said. “And it just sounds great.”

Burt hopes her students will come away from the class with a deeper appreciation of Swift’s craft as well as a newfound appreciation for works of literature on the syllabus they may not have yet been familiar with. And she hopes they are able to apply the analytical skills they learn in class in other contexts.

“I would like them to get a toolkit that they can then take away and use on the rest of life. Things they like, things they don't like, popular things, unpopular things,” Burt said. “Which is also a toolkit for critique.”

Burt noted that there is plenty of precedent for her Taylor Swift course.

“Those of us who were in academia, or who were undergraduates in the late '80s, may remember Madonna studies,” Burt said. Those have mostly fallen by the wayside.

“It’s possible that in 20 years there won't be Taylor classes,” Burt said. But she thinks there’s a chance the study of Taylor Swift will prevail. She compares Swift's songwriting to the work of other great songwriters, like Steven Sondheim and Bob Dylan.

“[Her] songwriting isn't the same as Dylan and isn't the same as Sondheim,” Burt said. “But it's really, really good and durable and rewards repeated attention.”

At the very least, Taylor Swift studies seem to be filling a need right now. Scarlet Keys, the Berklee instructor, said her class offers a reprieve for chronically stressed-out college students.

“When they're in this class, singing all the songs for two hours, they leave feeling so good and so happy,” Keys said. “And they have very deceptively learned so much about songwriting.”