Like Taylor Swift, I feel a strong emotional attachment to the places I've been – this is why fans flock to the destinations she namechecks

A few weeks ago, I walked into some bar called The Black Dog. I've been a Swiftie since I was 14, but unbelievably, meeting pals for drinks here was a coincidence. A friend picked the location, then followed up: “Wait, is that the Swiftie pub?!? Might still be mad busy after all that commotion.”

It was the end of May, six weeks after the release of Swift's latest album The Tortured Poets Department, which smashed records by becoming Spotify's most-streamed album in a single day as well as the fastest album to accumulate one billion streams in a single week. At 2am on release day, she pulled a classically Swiftian bait-and-switch; dropping a second half to the original album called The Anthology with 15 new songs. The first of these bonus tracks is ‘The Black Dog.’

It's mournful and bitter and scathing, as all of Swift's top-shelf break-up songs are. “I am someone who, until recent events, you shared your secrets with, and your location – you forgot to turn it off. And so I watch as you walk into some bar called The Black Dog, and pierce new holes in my heart,” she sings.

If this was any other song by any other singer, the reference would be brushed off as a metaphor. But this is the Swiftiverse, and like it or not, we're all living in it. Fans scrambled to uncover which bar, exactly, Swift was referring to – where it was, and which one of her exes walked in there one night. Swift herself has tried to deter fans from interpreting her songs too literally, especially when it comes to her love life. “Gossip blogs will scour the lyrics for the men they can attribute to each song as if the inspiration for music is as simple and basic as a paternity test,” she wrote in a letter that preceded her 2017 album Reputation. “There will be slideshows of photos backing up each incorrect theory, because it's 2017 and if you didn't see a picture of it, it couldn't have happened right?”

The Tortured Poets Department came seven years and five albums after this warning, and speculation about Swift's love life has only grown since. Now, social media is even more tangled up with our day-to-day lives – and so it goes that the bar in question seemingly outed itself on TikTok just a few days after release. “POV: You work at The Black Dog (yes the actual pub Taylor name-dropped) and are desperately trying to figure out if it was Matty [Healy] or Joe [Alwyn]” the team posted. A few days later, someone from the team confirmed that they'd spotted Swift's one-time boyfriend of six years Alwyn on CCTV footage – a shameless but fun PR move at best and an invasion of privacy at worst. The song's lyrics – particularly a not-so-subtle reference to The Starting Line – point more to 1975 frontman Healy than Alwyn, but as Swift says, the inspiration for the music is rarely so simple, and anyway, that's kind of beside the point. The Black Dog, an unassuming pub in Vauxhall, went viral and became a mecca for Swifites, both local and visiting.

It's a strange phenomenon and one that Swifties and Swift herself are no strangers to. While some might look at her fervent, adoring fanbase with confusion or judgment, to a certain extent, Swift does and always has encouraged them. Much of her early success could be credited to her keen, ahead-of-its-time use of social media – in a strange throwback MySpace, of all things, may well be at the heart of 2024's biggest star's success. Teenage Swift shared vlogs and clips of her time on the road and behind-the-scenes footage with her growing fanbase, who lapped it up. Then came the liner notes – in the lyrical booklets slotted into each physical album, she would capitalise certain letters in every song to drop clues as to who the track was about. Some are obscure (“We can’t go back,” she hints in ‘The Way I Loved You’) while others are blatantly obvious (“Tay” referring to ex Taylor Lautner in ‘Back To December’; “Adam” hinting at a brief tryst with Adam Young from Owl City in ‘Enchanted’). And others refer to places. “Portland, Oregon” is the hint for ‘Sparks Fly’; “Hyannis Port” is hidden in the lyrics of ‘Everything Has Changed’; “LA on your break” sits in ‘The Last Time’; “We start our story in New York” is folded into the words of ‘Welcome To New York’.

After her fifth studio album 1989, Swift ceased to include these little hints in each set of lyrics – put off, perhaps, by the media circus that surrounded her year-long retreat from the public eye in 2016. But the pattern was entrenched too deeply – in Swift's songwriting, music videos and social media and in the way her fans consumed her music. She continued to drop ‘easter eggs’ for her fans to uncover, encouraging them to look for deeper meaning. And she continued to name drop specific places in her songs, turning destinations into places wrapped up in Swiftie lore that became focal points for those desperate to get a piece of Swift for themselves.

‘Cornelia Street’ from Swift's 2019 album Lover might be the best example of the lot. “I rent a place on Cornelia Street, I say casually in the car,” she sings in the opening lines, essentially doxxing herself there and then (we can only assume that she'd left by the time the song was released). She paints a picture of the apartment: “creaks in the floor”, “windows swung right open” letting in “autumn air”. In the chorus, she connects her street to her new lover with an intense, melodramatic rapture that's so typical of her songwriting: “I hope I never lose you, I hope this never ends, I'd never walk Cornelia Street again.”

It's exactly the kind of diaristic song that Swift made her name – and her billions – on. Turning her experiences into the kind of early relationship drama that her fanbase can relate to, she shares a piece of her life with her listeners, and they reward her with an almost God-like reverence. Whether she knew what this push-pull relationship would turn into when she started is up for debate – she's a self-proclaimed mastermind, after all – but she's not shying away from it now. On any given day, Cornelia Street in Manhattan's Greenwich Village sees a thrum of Swifties walking it, playing the song, taking photographs. Many publications have articles with pictures of the flat where Swift lived at the time. When news broke that Swift and Alwyn (the muse for the song) had ended their relationship, fans set up a shrine outside the door, and there have been reports of some people even breaking into the abandoned building. Somewhere between the song's release prompting innocent fans to flock to the locale and these break-ins, a line was crossed – but where exactly? The sinister shift hasn't escaped Swift's attention, either – in ‘Whose Afraid Of Little Old Me?’ on The Tortured Poets Department, she rages: “So all you kids can sneak into my house with all the cobwebs”. But that hasn't stopped her from name-checking more destinations for people to hone in on. See again: The Black Dog.

Of course, music fans have long visited the destinations they connect with their favourite artists. I live near Abbey Road in North London and will take a 20-minute detour to avoid the studios and Beatles fans taking their own crosswalk photos. They've also been known to visit Eleanor Rigby's grave, which, for my money, is far creepier than taking a selfie on Cornelia Street. That these fan experiences are accepted as par-for-the-course can't be separated from the fact that Swift and her fans have always come under fire largely thanks to the fact that this is music made by a young woman, predominantly for young women, and therefore written off as silly or overwrought.

After all, it's not exactly unique – this connection to places we've visited or lived, places where we've experienced shifts in our personal lives. The place where you got engaged or married, where you had the last conversation with a family member, where you had an epic night out with friends, they all carry special spots in our hearts. I still can't walk past a particular bench in the park near where my parents live without remembering my first love asking me to be his girlfriend while we sat there one chilly April afternoon. I was 17, but when I jogged past on one of my runs when I visited for Christmas 13 years later, I was right back to being that teenager, all knots in my stomach and shaking hands. In a quite Swiftian move, I myself arranged for our break-up chat a couple of years later to take place on that very bench. I was 19 by then, and I liked the sad poeticness of it all. Perhaps, Swift's sweeping, tortured discography had seeped into my psyché and made me masochistically eager to be the main character in my own Track 5.

The invisible strings that tie us to the locations that meant something to us once are universal. Perhaps Swift does it because she can't help it – because when she sits down to write, she is so pulled to these destinations as backdrops to her story and metaphors for how things once were. They are littered throughout her discography after all: The Lake District in England, which she name-drops twice, once in ‘Invisible String’ (“Bold was the waitress on our three year trip getting lunch down by the lakes”) and again in ‘The Lakes’ (“Those Windermere peaks look like a perfect place to cry”); Wicklow, Ireland, where Joe Alwyn filmed Conversation with Friends, in ‘Sweet Nothing’ (“I spy with my little tired eye, tiny as a firefly, a pebble that we picked up last July… Does it ever miss Wicklow sometimes?”); Hampstead Heath in London where she's rumoured to have lived with Alwyn before their break-up in ‘London Boy’ and ‘So Long London’ (“Stick with me, I'm your queen, like a Tennessee Stella McCartney on the Heath,” she coos in the former, before lamenting “I left all I knew, you left me at the house by the Heath,” once the relationship was over in the latter).

But things are so rarely an accident with Swift, and while she might be questioning her parasocial relationship with fans by the release of The Tortured Poets Department, she's not burning it down. These little references to destinations peppered throughout her songs act as her anchoring, a reminder that for all her money and success and breathless media coverage, Swift really is just like us. If she can hang out in a Vauxhall pub, then our connection to her songs is real and just. She's no longer the biggest pop star in the world – nothing special, just another wide-eyed girl whose desperately in love with, well, all of this. The fame and the easter eggs and the tours and the success and the speculation. Much has been written of a return to girlhood that's associated with her Eras Tour – there's no shame in unironic fandom, and these pilgrimages to Swiftiverse destinations are allowed to be meaningful and frivolous, and give us a feeling of connecting to her and other fans who we've had a shared experience with, whatever our real lives look like.

So, back to walking into some bar named The Black Dog in May. As I arrived, I saw that the benches outside were packed despite the fact that it was raining. I ducked inside to buy a pint and waited a good 20 minutes, standing in line behind a group of overseas Swifites who were counting out notes and coins they didn't recognise. Behind the bar, I noticed that the team were selling merch, which made me laugh – if anyone can respect the hustle to get fans to part with their money, it's Taylor ‘I released four special vinyls and a line of Christmas tree baubles’ Swift. The girl next to me asked the bartender how much the commemorative pint glass was, and when told “£17”, turned to her friend and said earnestly, “Not bad!”. She bought three. As I carried my pint (no special pint glass for me; I'm on a journalist's salary, after all) and two packets of crisps to the cramped corner table where my friends sat in mild annoyance, I realised I had been to The Black Dog before. Many times, in fact – I'd just never made the link. Maybe I was there on the same day that Joe Alwyn or Matty Healy or some other unnamed lover walked in and inspired the song in the first place. Maybe the tale never happened at all. Either way, I was happy to have visited, to have felt that connection – however fleeting, however fake – to a sequin-spangled universe that's been the soundtrack to half of my life.