In Olivia Rodrigo's new album You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love, Taylor Swift's influence still lingers.Xavi Torrent/Getty Images
What constitutes a Taydaughter?
As in all the most vexing of slang – “rizz,” “looksmaxxing,” “cap” – the term has roots in TikTok, where a Taylor Swift fan could ostensibly scroll for millennia without running out of like-minded videos to consume, about anything from the singer’s cats to her music to, most recently, her gargantuan wedding at Madison Square Garden.
Enter the Taydaughters, among the most crucial of players in the Taylor Swift Cinematic Universe. According to TikTok, the term applies to young artists – female, usually – whose music and marketing have somehow been influenced by Swift. Some Taydaughters have collaborated with Swift directly, opening for her on the record-shattering Eras Tour; some have seemingly rejected the title altogether, stoking rumours of a feud or some other snub.
This summer, three so-called Taydaughters – Maisie Peters, Olivia Rodrigo and Gracie Abrams – released studio albums that suggest an impasse for the musicians, who came of age in the glow of Swift’s career. At one extreme, there’s Rodrigo, who now avoids speaking about Swift in interviews despite once claiming to be the auteur’s biggest buff; at the other, there’s Abrams, seldom written about without mention of the most famous woman in the world. (Guilty as charged, I suppose.)
What’s better? To accept existing in Swift’s shadow, waiting for crumbs of the attention lavished on her and her work? Or to live in exile of her fandom, her influence? It’s an impossible choice, and one in which only Sabrina Carpenter, the Eras Tour opener with a sound and style all her own, seems to have found a manageable middle ground.
On Florescence, Peters explores the fallout of opening for the Eras Tour, and the subsequent bullying from Swifties which all but drove her into hiding in 2024.Joel C Ryan/The Associated Press
On Florescence, Peters’s third studio album, the British singer-songwriter vividly explores the fallout of opening for the Eras Tour, and the subsequent bullying from Swifties which all but drove her into hiding in 2024. Of this summer’s three Taydaughter releases, Florescence is by far the most explicit in its ambivalence toward the Eras queen’s sycophantic queendom: “Sometimes when I sing I get the big note wrong, the teenagers held onto that all summer long,” she murmurs on Mary Janes, referring to a minor vocal hiccup that occurred during Lost the Breakup at Wembley Stadium. “My skin isn’t thick,” she confesses, adding that the incident made her cry before opening for Noah Kahan in Birmingham.
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The album that follows marks a pivot for Peters, who since her 2021 debut album has chased the radio-friendly fizz of four-chord pop songs, complete with the sort of infectious, stream-of-consciousness bridges that once made Swift stand out in the musical landscape.
On Florescence, Peters employs a few Swiftisms – the extended metaphors seen in Houses, the piercing accusations heard in Old Fashioned – but on the whole, the album seems to reject Swift’s fame-conscious brand of writing, experimenting with a more acoustic style of folk storytelling. “I hate the afterparties, I want forests, I want fires,” she confesses on Audrey Hepburn.
Rodrigo’s place in the Taydaughter debate, meanwhile, is looser, rooted more in fan speculation – in the Swift-verse, as deadly a weapon as an atom bomb – than in overt lyricism. When Rodrigo released her first album, Sour, in 2021, the relationship between Swift and her protégé seemed rosy and vaguely maternal, with the former even quoting her own mother when praising Rodrigo for her early success.
But something soon shifted: Swift was granted a songwriting credit on Deja Vu after Rodrigo admitted to being inspired by Swift’s anthem Cruel Summer. The singers stopped posting about each other, fuelling gossip of an intergenerational rift between Gen Z’s newly anointed pop princess and the megastar who laid the first bricks of her castle. When Rodrigo released her second album, Guts, a song titled The Grudge lent credence to TikTok sleuths: “You have everything and you still want more,” Rodrigo sings to no one – or, maybe, a very blonde someone – on the album’s 10th track.
But even as she’s turned her back on Swift, the latter’s influence still lingers. On Rodrigo’s latest album, You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love, the Swiftian cliché of sad things being “blue” makes multiple appearances; My Way, about a possible interloper in a romantic relationship, sounds awfully similar, premise-wise, to Swift’s 2010 track Better Than Revenge.
Like Swift, Rodrigo has also deployed frequent rebrands, segmenting her career into “eras” rather than mere albums: 2021’s Rodrigo seemed afraid to admit to drinking an occasional glass of wine. This year’s Rodrigo, 23, wears teeny baby doll dresses and sings freely about the friends who “smoke blunts in the bathroom” at jam-packed clubs. From her earliest records, Swift set a precedent for measuring age not by birthdays, but by collections of songs – it seems Rodrigo, loath as she may be to admit to it, has found value in doing the same.
And then there’s Gracie Abrams.
The daughter of film director J.J. Abrams, the 26-year-old is no stranger to nepo baby discourse: With each new release, she’s fought to be heard on her own merit, on her own name. Only recently has she begun to speak freely about the advantages she had early on in her journey, the doors that opened a little more easily for her than they might have for her peers.
On Gracie Abram's latest release, Daughter from Hell, the former eras tours opener somewhat reverts to the bedroom-pop angst of her earlier, pre-Swiftian work.Mario Anzuoni/Reuters
It’s thorny, then, that Abrams’s career has become so intertwined with Swift’s. Unlike Peters, Abrams didn’t “get the big note wrong” as an Eras Tour opener: Her stint touring with Swift exploded her stage presence. She even recorded a duet with Swift on her last album – in the fifth slot, of course, borrowing the titan’s tactic of putting a record’s most emotional ballad in the coveted number-five spot.
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On her latest release, Daughter from Hell, Abrams somewhat reverts to the bedroom-pop angst of her earlier, pre-Swiftian work. Her voice, which so easily filled the Rogers Centre during the Eras Tour’s Toronto dates, once more sounds small, whisper-quiet in its exploration of what it means to be a daughter (or even, perhaps, a Taydaughter?).
“Your words to kill are evergreen,” she claims on Death Wish – a poetic description of song lyrics, maybe? A cutting description of “walls built on teenage dreams” seems similarly damning. But, just like Swift, it’s doubtful she’ll ever confirm what that track, or another suspect, Men Like You, is about – even if, to fans, it feels obvious.
Indeed, it seems the pop industry has a choice to make, at least for as long as Swift continues to make music: Should young artists spend their time and creativity attempting to curry favour from pop culture’s reigning monarch? Evidently, they risk becoming the subject of endless comparison if so. Is that better than gambling with obscurity? Would creating a new album – one critics have called “toothless” and “bloodless” in equal measure – have been easier for Abrams if Swift hadn’t doused the rising star in her own limelight?
At a certain point, it’s inevitable that these artists will stand on their own two feet – they’ll have to, if they aspire to emulate Swift’s singular staying power. But for now, they are daughters from hell, wrestling with an inheritance that will either immortalize their creative work or kill it.