David Remnick: Now, we recently published an essay, a fascinating one in the New Yorker, by a man named Joe Garcia.

Joe Garcia: Hello, this is Joe Garcia. I'm a prisoner in the California Department of Corrections.

David Remnick: Garcia is 53 years old. He's from California, and he's serving a long sentence in High Desert State Prison.

Joe Garcia: In a prison cell. I have a window, it's like a small window that looks out into the yard, and I'm just in a completely concrete cell. It's about five feet wide.

David Remnick: The piece he wrote is called Listening to Taylor Swift In Prison. Garcia read from the essay for the New Yorker Radio Hour over the phone from his cell.

Joe Garcia: The first time I heard about Taylor Swift, I was in a Los Angeles County jail waiting to be sent to prison for murder. Sheriffs would hand out precious copies of the LA Times, and they would be passed from one reader to the next. I'd look up from a picture of Swift's wide-eyed face to see gang fights and race riots. She had an album called Fearless, but how fearless could any little blonde fluff like that really be?

In 2009, I was sentenced to life in prison. Early one morning, I rode a bus to Calipatria State Prison. Triple digit temperatures and cracked orange soil made me feel as though I'd been exiled to Mars. After six years in the chaos of the county jail, however, I could finally own small luxuries like a television. Here and there, I'd catch Swift on Ellen or Fallon and was surprised by how intently she discussed her songwriting. I didn't tell anyone that I thought she was talented.

Ellen DeGeneres: The brilliantly talented Taylor Swift and one thing about Taylor is most of her songs, you write all your songs, right?

Taylor Swift: Yes.

Ellen DeGeneres: Your songs are written mostly like under 30 minutes, is that what I heard, you just write a song?

Taylor Swift: Yes. Usually, it happens fast.

Joe Garcia: In 2013, I got transferred, and my property was lost. For months, my only source of music was a borrowed pocket radio. At night, my cellmate and I would crank up the volume and lay a pair of earbuds on the desk in our cell. Their tiny speakers radiated crickety renditions of top 40 hits. We heard tracks from Red, Swift's fourth studio album, virtually every hour.

[Music by Taylor Swift: Red]

Joe Garcia: I was starting to enjoy them. In her voice, there was something intuitively pleasant and genuine and good. Something that implies happiness or at least the possibility of happiness. When I listened to her music, I felt that I was still part of the world I'd left behind. Whenever I heard, We Are Never, Ever Getting Back Together. I would think about the woman I had lived with for seven years before prison.

[Music by Taylor Swift: We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together]

Joe Garcia: I remember bittersweet times when she had visited me in county jail. It didn't seem fair to expect her to wait for me, but we didn't ever use the word never. My next prison was the California Men's Colony. I started to hang out in a cement workout area with some of my Asian homies. When they asked me what kind of music I liked, I confessed that I was anxiously waiting for a Taylor Swift album. Everyone laughed, "Oh my God, we've got a Swifty on the yard." Lam, a muscular guy, told me, "You in touch with your sensitive side? Are you gay?" He especially loved to heckle me in front of his buddy, Hong, who spoke little and laughed almost silently.

When Red arrived, I found out why Lam had been clowning me in front of Hong. Red was the only Swift CD that Hong didn't own because he considered it a misguided pop departure from the country greatness of Fearless and Speak Now.

[Music by Taylor Swift: Love Story]

Joe Garcia: Eventually, Lam outed himself as a Swifty, too. For six months, the three of us would workout and debate which album was best. Then Hong transferred out of the prison, taking his CDs with him. When I landed at San Quentin, I started working at San Quentin News, the in-house newspaper, for a quarter an hour. Around that time, the California Prison system started allowing a vendor to sell us MP3 players for $100 and charging $1.75 per song. I asked my family to order one and would call my cousin Roxanne with requests. "What's up with all the damn Taylor Swift?" she'd say during phone calls.

By the time Swift released her album Lover in 2019, I had almost every song she'd ever released. Seven months after Lover came out, the California Prison System shut down all programming because of the COVID pandemic. By the end of June 2020, hundreds of us were testing positive and getting sick, including me. I lugged all my property to an isolation cell in the quarantine unit, where I shivered and sweated through a brain fog for two weeks. I followed San Quentin's death tallies on the local news. Would I die alone in this cell suddenly and violently breathless? I made a playlist of Swift's most uplifting songs, listening for the happiness in her voice.

Alone in a prison cell, it's virtually impossible to avoid oneself. As my body and mind began to recover, I started to question everything. "What really matters? Who am I? What if I die tomorrow?" I hadn't been in touch with my sweetheart in more than two years. Now, though, I wrote her a letter to see if she was okay. A week after I mailed my letter, I received one from her. Prison mail is slow enough that I knew it wasn't a response. We had decided to write each other at the same time. "The lockdown has afforded me plenty of time to reflect on all sorts of things," her letter said, "I've been carrying you with me everywhere." She was single again, and we started talking every week.

In lockdown, between paltry dinner trays, I did pushups, lunges, squats, and planks in the 22-inch wide floor space of my cell. The 20th year of my incarceration was approaching. In 2020, the California legislature passed a law that made anyone who served 20 years and was at least 50 years of age eligible for parole. I'm 53 and'll get my first chance at release in 2024. "I've been sleeping so long in a 20-year dark night," Swift sings, "And now I see daylight."

These days, I call my sweetheart as often as I can. She tells me that it's complicated and confusing for her, speaking to the ghost who disappeared 20 years ago. Just recently, she told me, "Talking like this over the phone so much, I think we've gotten to know each other way better than before." One morning in October, 2022, I turned on Good Morning America and heard a familiar voice singing an unfamiliar chorus. "It's me. Hi, I'm the problem. It's me." The anchors were giddy to announce Swift's new album. Midnights. A couple of weeks later, I read the liner notes. "What keeps you up at night?" Swift writes.

For the past two decades, sleep has not come easily to me. I can still see the grieving family members of the man I killed staring at me in the courtroom at my trial. I'm guilty of more than murder. I abandoned my parents and my sweetheart, too. There's no way to fix this stuff. Taylor Swift is currently the same age, 33, that I was at the start of my incarceration. I wonder whether her music would've resonated with me when I was her age. I wonder whether I would've reacted to the words "I'm the problem. It's me." "In karma," Swift sings, "Ask me what I learned from all those years. Ask me what I earned from all those tears."

A few months from now, California's Board of Parole hearings will ask you questions like that. What have I learned? What do I have to show for my 20 years of incarceration? In the months ahead, when these questions keep me up at night, I will listen to Midnights. The woman I love says she's ready to meet me on the other side of the prison wall on the day that I walk out into the daylight. Recently, she asked me, "If you could go anywhere, do anything that first day out, what would you want us to go do?" That question keeps me up at night, too.

David Remnick: That was Joe Garcia reading Listening To Taylor Swift in Prison. A longer version is at newyorker.com from our series weekend essay.

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