Lately I've been thinking a lot about the so-called "Inner Circle".... (Patreon)

For those of you who don't know, the Inner Circle is what a group of very big losers referred to themselves as. They famously had a bunch of unreleased Taylor songs and created a website where they would boast about having them, essentially, listing them off by title and describing them. The history of them is actually quite interesting and I do consider myself a historian of Swiftie Fandom Nonsense, so I have a bit of an abridged biography of their existence. 

The first time I encountered the Inner Circle was in 2009, around the time that Fearless Platinum Edition came out. I had just started my tumblr blog (fuckyeahtaylorswift back then, oh how the times have changed...) and was only beginning my journey of online Swiftiehood. I made some friends and one of them asked me if I had heard of the Inner Circle, and I said ummm no? And she linked me to their old website which was darkbluetennessee.com, named after one of the most famous unreleased Taylor songs. When I clicked the link and entered the website, to say that I was absolutely fucking gagged would be an understatement. Imagine being fifteen year old me, only having two Taylor records at the time, and gazing upon this CORNUCOPIA of Taylor songs that I had never heard of before. I sat there that day and read every single description of every single song so many times that some of them are still memorized even all these years later, like how they described Firefly being a sweet and beautiful song, or how they called Dark Blue Tennessee an incredible and sought after song, and 'Till Brad Pitt Comes Along one of their most "heavily protected" songs. The way that they described the songs made them all seem worthy of salivation, especially to a loser fifteen year old like myself. I wanted all of those songs so bad I'd have killed to get them. Truly. 

The first unreleased Taylor song I ever got my paws on was Songs About You, and incidentally I think this is one of the first ones that ever leaked. A truly nothing song. LMFAO...but fifteen year old me was clapping like I just heard a brand new national anthem. Over time I got songs like Need You Now, Tell Me, My Cure, This Is Really Happening, Diary of Me, and, the one, the only, DARK BLUE TENNESSEE. Some songs were actually fairly good. Some were just pure trash. But song sharing among my peers was really fun and I made lots of friends online that way, and talking about the songs like they were deep dark secrets to be kept made me feel important and like I had something special. 

To say that the inner circle didn't like song sharing would be putting it lightly. Apparently I became, like, an FBI most wanted criminal to those people because I shared the songs with A LOT OF PEOPLE, like, a lot of fucking people djagoiarjgio because I didn't really think there was any reason to keep them from other fans? Especially the ones that were CLEARLY never going to be fucking released. I don't remember who gave them my name or why, but boy do I remember when I received an email from the king of the Inner Circle, who was a fucking 45 year old MAN!!! named Steve. And he got up on his email account and tip-tapped out a message threatening MEEE, a sixteen year old girl, that he was going to like, contact the authorities or some shit because I was sharing songs (????) Now I was gagged trust that I was gagged...but I also was like completely in awe of the fact that a grown man was essentially harassing me because I gave some other teenage girls This Is Really Happening. So I came after him guns blazing and said hmmm I wonder if anyone would be interested to hear about an adult MAN!!! on the internet threatening and haranguing young girls over TAYLOR SWIFT SONGS.....that changed his fucking tune reeeallllll quick and he started going off about how "we need to protect these songs, we need to protect Taylor," on and on, and I was like, don't you have a fucking WIFE to worry about buddy boy? Anyway, that's the story of how I became the nemesis of a grown ass loser man with a mail order bride in 2010. 

The Inner Circle operated a lot like a cult back in the day, because they used legitimate intimidation tactics to keep people quiet about the songs. They peddled one lie in particular that many of the songs were owned by Sony music group (true) and that if you were caught having them and especially sharing them, you would be SUED by Sony (false), most famous of these Sony songs being Till Brad Pitt Comes Along. Now I believed this so entirely and so completely that when I actually did get Till Brad Pitt Comes Alone on my ipod, I literally was afraid to press play on it, like someone was going to come busting through my door to take me to Music Jail. Nobody ever got sued, for the record. I got so tired of all the lies and bullshit the inner circle perpetuated, and ESPECIALLY of their smug ass fucking attitude just because they had a collection of mid to subpar Taylor Swift demos, that I took matters into my own hands Vigilante Shit style and up and leaked Dark Blue Tennessee on tumblr dot com. Just fucking leaked it. LMFAO. And actually, the leaking of Dark Blue Tennessee by ME, lead to the leak of dozens of other unreleased Taylor songs. Tons of songs that the IC guarded and protected so tightly were making their way onto youtube and boy I was fucking living for the downfall. 

Sometime around 1989, darkbluetennessee.com disappeared. We cheered. We clapped. We forgot that they existed. 

Then, before Lover, they came back.............................even more annoying than they were before........I would've thought that whatever well they were using to get these songs would've dried up as Taylor got more famous and her unreleased stuff more heavily guarded, but they DID know about a handful of demos from Lover, like Need and All of The Girls You Loved Before. To say I was shocked that they still existed and was still lead by that 45 (now FIFTY...) year old man with a mail order bride would be the understatement of the fucking century...like I was shonked. Who are these losers? How are they still getting songs? Surely they're close to someone in the ACTUAL INNER CIRCLE of Taylor, but how has Taylor not found out about their bullshit by now? How do they have these songs? Why? Who are they??? What do they want?????????? They still had songs that people had been chasing for years. They had even more songs than that. 

But the re-released records that Taylor started putting out completely and totally fucked up their entire operation. Fearless TV in particular had, like, all of the main songs they were so heavily guarding back then on it. I cackled and I fucking cheered. Red TV had I Bet You Think About Me on it, one of their most HIGHLY PROTECTED SONGS. I GIGGLED...I REALLY GIGGLED....after Red TV, they were gone, and I think gone for fucking good. The only reason they even created the website in the first place wasn't to share their knowledge with the swiftie community, it was to lord their bullshit over other fans and to feel all self-important, more important than other fans. With all the vault songs coming out, and Taylor picking only the best of the best and not loser ass songs like FIREFLY or HONEY BABY, they had literally no reason to exist. The evil has been utterly defeated. 

Swear, Steve is still one of my greatest nemeses. Just a pathetic prole of a man. GET A JOB...STAY AWAY FROM HER......like surely after twenty years of being a lameass he has stopped his conniving ways. I was not the only girlie he attacked via email - he actually intimidated a close friend of mine back in the day OUT OF THE FANDOM ALOTGETHER. SHE HAD TO START STANNING SARA BAREILLES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! That's how bad he rattled her cage. Not eye though...not...eye....we truly defeated them, though even as I type this, I feel fairly certain that they are a zombie that will not be killed, kinda like Jason Voorhees from the Friday the 13th movies. That man went to Hell, he went to MARS even, and he just keeps coming back. Same thing with Steve from DBT.com...an evil entity that can never truly perish....