The Magic Hour

On anticipation, hope, candy salad (?!?) and watching my daughter wait for The Tortured Poets Department to drop

One year I stood on the grid before the start of the Daytona 500 with a friend from the NASCAR industry. He has attended dozens of 500s and hundreds of races. “There are 250,000 people here who would kill to be standing where I am right now,” he told me, “and I’m bored out of my mind.”

I laughed … but I thought he was nuts.

Bored?

How?

Bon Jovi was singing about Tommy and Gina right behind us. We were surrounded by racecars that collectively generated 36,550 horsepower according to the rules and who knows how much more by cheating. Every single car was spit-shined and immaculate. When the drivers started their engines, one would be deafening; all of them roaring together could burst our ear drums.

The best stock car drivers in the world, their crew chiefs and their car owners were milling around, every single one of them giddy to the point of vibrating.

Of all the events I’ve covered in 30 years as a journalist, my favorite is the Daytona 500, and that’s because of the last hour before it starts. Hope is everywhere—in every strutting driver’s gait, in every smiling sponsor’s face, in every beaming owner’s body language.

I published a version of the above a few years ago under the headline, The Magic Hour, and that’s a perfect description of what my 14-year-old has been experiencing since Taylor Swift announced in February that her new album would come out April 18. That’s a lifetime ago announcement ago 14-year-old Swiftie time.

My daughter is … what did I just say about drivers, crew chiefs and owners? … giddy to the point of vibrating.

This is the biggest music release of her young life, and she has talked about it nonstop since she learned of its existence.

I hope she loves it. My favorite band has always been Rush. I bought six of their albums on the day they came out. One of them was a full six years after the one before it when it looked for many of those years. That was 22 years ago, and I can still remember exactly where I was when I heard the new song’s world premiere on the radio.

I hope my daughter remembers Thursday like I remember that.

3:32 p.m., Thursday, April 18, 2024

I pick my daughter up from school. I’m dying to tell her about the Internet-consuming rumors about the leak of Swift’s album. But I don’t. She turns on her phone. “I have 209 text messages,” she says.

“I bet I know what they’re about,” I say.

“What?” she says.

“Just check. You’ll know.”

The messages apparently contain nothing substantive.

“It leaked,” I say.

“WHAT?!!!?”

Within seconds she calls her friend Ella. They try to get to the bottom of it. Did it really leak? Or was it AI-generated fake music? Either way, they vow not to listen to it. I’m proud of her for that. To listen to leaked music is to steal it no matter how long you’ve waited or how eager you are to hear it.

I express doubt that anyone would fall for an AI song. She swears she has heard AI-generated Taylor Swift songs that sound like the real thing, and the only reason she knows they’re not is she knows every Taylor Swift song.

“It’s like The Terminator,” she says. “They’re going to come back singing Taylor Swift.”

7:22 p.m., April 18 2024

At Target, my daughter sees another girl wearing the same Taylor Swift shirt as she is. They talk. The other girl says she is buying ingredients for candy salad (all of which are candy) that she’ll eat while she listens to TTPD.

Candy salad?

Is that a thing?

10 p.m., April 18, 2024

The Daytona 500 is often called the Super Bowl of stock car racing but only by people too lazy to think of a real comparison. The Super Bowl is the end, at which hope has died for every team but two. The Daytona 500 is the beginning, in which every team still has a chance.

The Daytona 500 is more like all 32 major league baseball teams holding opening day in the same place at the same time while simultaneously getting hijacked by a carnival run by celebrities.

For the home opener in St. Louis one year, I took the train to Busch Stadium. It was so crowded that I got smished by other fans, and I’m fairly certain there were portions of that short train ride in which my feet weren’t on the floor. But nobody cared. The whole train radiated excitement. 

The entire, massive Daytona International Speedway is like that.

Imagine that level of excitement and interest, multiply it by however many teen-age girls there are on earth, and that’s what it’s like in my house right now.

All of which leads me to this: I don’t have the heart to tell my daughter I’m worried the Internet might break with 87 quintillion people trying to download/listen/buy the same album at the same time.

Our Internet, in particular, gets finicky if you try to do anything complicated, such as, for example, use it. I’d put it at 50-50 that she can actually listen when it drops at 11 p.m., and I’d put it at 147 percent that she’ll be apoplectic if she can’t.

10:41 p.m., Thursday, April 18, 2024

If I don’t tell her, and she can’t download it, and she finds out I could have warned her … screw it. Life ain’t fair

10:47 p.m., Thursday, April 18, 2024

Eventually NASCAR officials started hollering at everybody to get off the grid because it was almost race time. Like everybody else, I ignored them because the longer we all stayed, the longer the party went. It was as if we couldn’t wait for the race to start and at the same time didn’t want it to start yet.

Which is exactly what my daughter is think—HA! NO! OF COURSE NOT! She is SO OVER WAITING to hear these songs.

Finally the crowd thinned out, and I rode the wave to pit road. I walked toward turn 1. There’s a massive TV screen near there, and it baffled me every year that people watched on TV what was happening literally right behind them.

I leaned up against the fence, as close to the track as I could get. The cars roared by, and the noise ruffled my shirt and shook my ribs. For the first several laps, the cars ran nose to tail, two or three wide, and it will never, ever get old watching those lunatics do that at 200 miles per hour.

11:01 p.m., Thursday, April 18, 2024

The Internet works. Thank heavens.

I wonder how many times in a row she’ll listen to it.