All Too Well
Brandy Baenen
Her fingers tremble as she struggles to free the tape securely wrapped around the brown cardboard box. Covered with ordinary shipping labels, this package contains something extraordinary.
Brandy Baenen’s elevated heart rate brings her to the brink of tears with each pop of the package’s reveal. Swiping away the protective paper, she peeks under bubble wrap to see a personalized envelope and could no longer hold back.
“Her stars … because she can’t draw stars!” the 26-year-old semi-squeals with muffled sobs.
Those asymmetrical hand-drawn stars, “startistry” the artist calls them, belong to Taylor Swift, the superstar pop artist. The entire box, filled with the Lover vinyl, photographs and a letter, is a thank you for Brandy’s selfless loyalty.
For Brandy, it’s joy, sorrow and love — all wrapped up in one moment.
The Delivery Heard Around the World
It isn’t the first time Brandy takes possession of precious cargo.
In August 2020, the Swiftersphere buzzes about Taylor Swift sending autographed albums to independent record stores. A member of the sphere, Brandy calls the local record shop in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and gets a hypothetical “there may be a shipment coming tomorrow” nod from the owner.
The next day she and her boyfriend Garrett Lloyd show up early. They sit outside the soon-to-open store when a delivery truck pulls up. After peering through the store windows and realizing no one is inside, the driver turns to the couple and asks if they could hold onto the package until employees arrive.
“Taylor Swift would never want me to do that. She sends those [autographed CDs] to small record places so they can make money. … Some people are bad people, and then there’s Taylor Swift fans.”
Brandy asks, a little dumbfounded, “Do you even know what’s in here?” He doesn’t. When she tells him it’s probably a box of autographed Taylor Swift CDs, he gives her a condescending whoop de doo and goes on his way. Brandy, annoyed but “used to it,” secures the package.
She and Garrett stay and wait. When the owner arrives, Brandy runs in, hands him the package and waits impatiently for him to open it. She has to get to work and, c’mon, man, what she came to collect is in that box.
Brandy buys an autographed CD and leaves. I’ll write that again. She buys an autographed Taylor Swift CD. She doesn’t take off when the driver rolls away. She doesn’t covet, steal and sell the box and its lucrative contents. She buys a CD and heads to work.
Excited about her purchase, she innocently posts about her experience on Facebook — and the news travels fast. Social media explodes, and local papers start calling this honest young woman for the scoop. In this day in age, it’s shocking news when you don’t do something illegal.
“Taylor Swift would never want me to do that,” says Brandy, who is taken aback by the media attention. “She sends those to small record places so they can make money. … Some people are bad people, and then there’s Taylor Swift fans.”
Taylor Swift fans dub themselves Swifties. They are a fierce bunch spanning the world, who share their fandom with each other on social media and in person at concerts. They’re loyal and rally around Taylor’s causes as one community.
When Brandy’s story goes viral, fellow Swifties reach out to her directly. One fan even sends Brandy gifts — no-longer-available merch from the 1989, Red and Reputation albums — delivered to the restaurant where Brandy worked.
The deep-seeded love of a band or an artist like Taylor Swift is porous. It doesn’t stay within the confines of our dermis borders. It seeps out and finds others with the same devoted aura. It wants to share the joy. And when the artist herself takes in that aura and reciprocates, magic happens.
In Taylor’s case, the Swifties see in her an open book, one to be read, studied and emulated.
“Have you ever watched Miss Americana on Netflix? It’s a Taylor Swift documentary,” says Brandy. “She explains to you why she is the way she is. She says her entire life is based upon being a good person. That means I have to do the right thing.”
Brandy feels this influence from day one.
Discovering Her
A hop, skip and a few farms away from Green Bay, in rural New Franken, a town of less than 4,000 people, Brandy grows up in a ranch-style home set on 9.5 acres. The youngest in the household, she lives with her mom, dad and two brothers, along with goats, a pet goose and cats.
An active child, Brandy practices gymnastics and plays basketball as a pre-teen. She’s not a musician herself, but little does she know at this time what a large role music will play in her life.
That role begins in 2007, when she hears “Teardrops From My Guitar” by Taylor Swift on the radio, a country-pop tune about high school heartache, pulling at the teenage soul.
“I was in middle school. I remember being obsessed with those first three songs,” says Brandy, explaining how that CD came with a DVD featuring behind-the-scenes footage of Taylor herself.
“I was like, uh, this girl’s got me. I’m blond, and she had big, curly blond hair. And I have naturally curly hair. To a 13-year-old girl, Taylor was mesmerizing. She was perfect,” recalls Brandy, who would someday ink the artist’s lyrics and autograph on her body.
That life-altering CD was Taylor Swift’s self-titled debut album. Brandy loved it and wore out her karaoke machine her parents gifted her, singing the next three albums – top to bottom – in her best Taylor fashion. It was love at first listen, and it shut out all the other noise on the radio.
“Honestly, it’s just Taylor Swift for me,” she explains. “All my friends say, ‘What kind of music do you like?’ Taylor Swift. Albums one through five: that is what I listen to. Don’t get me wrong, I hear a couple different songs I like. But my phone, my playlist, my CDs or whatever it is … is always Taylor Swift. For three years, when we only had 1989 until the new album, it was the only CD I had in my Blazer’s drive. For three years. People hated riding with me.”
Brandy describes each album as if they are old friends of hers. She knows them inside and out and can recall a story tied to each one. The lyrics relate to what’s going on in her mind and what’s happening in her life – through happiness and despair.
Brandy and her dad. (Photo courtesy of Brandy Baenen)
He Leaves on a Jet Plane
One song, in particular, holds a special meaning for Brandy. It’s “Come Back … Be Here,” a bonus song off her Red album. It’s one Brandy listens to when she thinks about her dad.
Brandy’s parents begin divorce proceedings as she is finishing up her freshman year of high school. Her mom moves to another city, so Brandy switches schools. A formative time in her life, the teenager learns quickly about mental health.
“Things were pretty messy. My dad had bipolar and other issues. My mom suffered from depression,” she recalls. “I was the youngest kid. I know it wasn’t easy on any of us. I know for me it wasn’t easy.”
Looking back with more clarity, she believes that experience could be the root of her own bouts with anxiety and stress. She deals with it in poetry, a coping mechanism she shares with her father along with a love for music.
Growing up, she would sing along with him as he played songs on his guitar, their favorite being “See an Eagle Fly” which they wrote together. She introduces him to Taylor Swift.
“I remember listening to the 1989 album and Reputation album in my dad’s house,” Brandy says. “I just left my phone on my chest through the whole night, letting it go. My dad, because he can’t sleep, was so crazy. All he could hear was the same album going over and over again.”
One of those repeated songs was “Out of the Woods.” Brandy says her dad cried when he first heard it. She thinks it reminded him of her mom, his ex-wife, whom Brandy says he still loved.
June 1, 2018, was one of the most important days of Brandy’s life. She went to her first (and so far only) Taylor Swift concert, the Chicago stop on the Reputation tour. Brandy recorded the moment, and it’s everything you’d expect: a moment of pure joy and overflowing emotion.
After the show, she thinks of just one person she wants to call to share in her happiness. Her dad. But she doesn’t.
Brandy and her father weren’t speaking after getting into an argument she says was spurred by a mental health incident. She doesn’t speak to him after the concert and doesn’t again until August.
That’s when the young 57-year-old father suffers a stroke. The last 10 months of silence thrust aside, Brandy rushes to the hospital. For five days, her dad is conscious but paralyzed, and she plays him songs as he lay in bed. Then, after a surgery, he doesn’t wake up.
The day they take him off life support, she wears her Reputation concert T-shirt because that concert “was the happiest day I ever had in my life, and I wanted him to somehow be part of it.” In his final moments, she plays him his favorite song, a John Denver classic, “Leaving on a Jet Plane.”
All Brandy hears is “Come Back … Be Here.”
Peace and Lyrics
David Baenen died on Sept. 3, 2018. Two years later, less than two weeks before the anniversary of Brandy’s father’s death, a delivery man trusts Brandy to pass on a package to the record store.
One of Brandy’s most memorable moments of her life was her first Taylor Swift show in Chicago in June 2018. (Photo courtesy of Brandy Baenen)
“I believe my dad was there and is part of all that has happened,” she says, even going to see a psychic to confirm it. If it’s true, then her dad gave her the greatest gift – and all Brandy wants to do is share it.
That other package, the one addressed to Brandy, the one she opens so carefully, contains eight autographed glamour shots of the artist. In a note, Taylor tells Brandy to give those pictures to whomever she wants. Dutifully, Brandy passes them on to friends, family and strangers, including the record store owner, her brothers and a friend who was trying to get back together with his girlfriend, who is another Taylor Swift fan.
Brandy says, “The joy I have been able to give with those is the coolest thing Taylor Swift has ever done. The joy she gave me is letting me sprinkle that joy to others. That shows you how amazing she is. She is making sure I can make other people happy.”
Inspired and, perhaps, with some newfound inner peace, Brandy moves through life with guiding lyrics in her head, many of them her own. She carries with her two of her father’s guitars and is learning to play. She’s even influencing the work of her musical significant other, whose new, self-published hip-hop album, Under Consideration, contains a song with a Taylor Swift-inspired line.
Now 27, Brandy Baenen is taking her life into her own hands with one voice — one she knows all too well — on her shoulder guiding the way.
“That’s how I live my life — in what would Taylor Swift want me to do,” she explains. “That’s how I make good decisions. If I don’t know what to do, I say, ‘What would Taylor Swift tell me to do?’ She’s going to give me the nicer of the two options.”
