WASHINGTON – At a Congressional hearing on Wednesday, senators grilled Attorney General Merrick Garland on the Justice Department’s investigation into Ticketmaster, which botched ticket sales for Taylor Swift’s coming tour and is dominant in the concert industry.
“Channeling Taylor Swift, I know that ‘All Too Well,’” Mr. Garland said, name-dropping the title of one of her songs. “I’m pretty familiar with Taylor Swift.”
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WASHINGTON – At a Congressional hearing on Wednesday, senators grilled Attorney General Merrick Garland on the Justice Department’s investigation into Ticketmaster, which botched ticket sales for Taylor Swift’s coming tour and is dominant in the concert industry.
“Channeling Taylor Swift, I know that ‘All Too Well,’” Mr. Garland said, name-dropping the title of one of her songs. “I’m pretty familiar with Taylor Swift.”
Everyone in the Capital has been talking about Taylor Swift and Ticketmaster, from senators in Congressional hearings to White House officials in public reports and fans holding protest signs on the streets.
Mr. Garland has been talking about her for years. In his home, in his car, and in his wood-paneled office suite on Pennsylvania Avenue, where he has prominently displayed nearly all of her CDs in a curio cabinet. He’s a die-hard Swiftie, as her fans are known, and he drops lyrics into legal arguments and discussions all the time.
“My favorite song is ‘Shake It Off,’” he said in an interview.
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He tracks Swiftie minutiae and has discovered some Taylor Swift fans on his own staff.
“Since we established our mutual regard for Taylor, references to her work have come up in a few conversations, sometimes hiding in plain sight,” said Marissa Brogger, his chief speechwriter. “Recently, I dropped something off for the attorney general to review and he said he would do so swiftly. It took me a second to realize it, but given the attorney general’s tendency to be precise in his word choice, I don’t think it was an accident.”
Mr. Garland learned of Ms. Swift from his two daughters, who insisted on blasting the singer’s self-titled debut and 2008 follow-up album “Fearless” while Mr. Garland, then a federal appeals court judge, drove the girls to school when they were young.
“We invented carpool karaoke before it was a thing,” Mr. Garland said in his office, where the Swift CDs, given to him by his daughters, occupy a special place shared only by Bruce Springsteen’s autobiography “Born to Run” and a collection of Beatles albums. Now, whenever Ms. Swift releases a new album, the Garland family gathers on the phone to swap notes.
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“My daughter sent me Midnights right away as a CD, which I appreciate is a little prehistoric at this point,” Mr. Garland said. “And then she told me the playlist order in which I should listen to the songs.”
(Ms. Swift still—years into the streaming era—sells lots of physical albums. She has offered incentives to encourage her loyal fan base to buy them.)
Mr. Garland declined to discuss the Ticketmaster investigation, which predates the Taylor Swift ticket fiasco, during which fans waited in online queues for hours before having tickets disappear from their carts during checkout or the site crashed.
A spokeswoman for Live Nation Entertainment, Inc., which owns Ticketmaster, didn’t respond to a request for comment. The company’s President Joe Berchtold
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has apologized for the bungled ticket-sale process, and has previously said bots were to blame for the problems.
Did Mr. Garland or anyone in his office get tickets to Ms. Swift’s tour during November’s debacle?
“That is a delicate question,” Mr. Garland said, in an apparent reference to Ms. Swift’s hit song, “Delicate.”
Mr. Garland is one of several musically inclined attorneys general.
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William Barr loved the bagpipes and
played them himself in the Great Hallof the Justice Department.
“I always have been a big fan of big Broadway musicals,” Jeff Sessions said in an interview.
Mr. Sessions confirmed that at least once during a private meeting on policing issues he quoted from Gilbert and Sullivan’s 1879 opera “The Pirates of Penzance”—“When constabulary duty’s to be done, to be done, a policeman’s lot is not a happy one.”
“The Sound of Music” provided another source of wisdom.
“One line I used to quote more in the Senate was, as the great economist Julie Andrews sang, ‘Nothing comes from nothing. Nothing ever could,’” he recalled.
And Congress and pop culture have intersected in interesting ways before. Frank Zappa, John Denver and Dee Snider of Twisted Sister testified at a 1985 Senate hearing on explicit rock lyrics. People packed the hearing room to get a look. “I’ve been a fan for a long time, Mr. Denver,” then-Sen. Al Gore told the singer.
Things got chillier when Mr. Snider, who had long hair and wore a sleeveless T-shirt, asked if Mr. Gore planned to praise his music too. Mr. Gore conceded he enjoyed Mr. Zappa and Mr. Denver. “I am not, however, a fan of Twisted Sister.”
In legislative fights, House Republicans have deployed pulp-culture GIFs of celebrities, such as singer Britney Spears, the cartoon character Ariel of “The Little Mermaid” and Will Ferrell’s “More cowbell!” skit from “Saturday Night Live.”
Well before becoming a parent, Mr. Garland was at the vanguard of popular music. He recalled seeing the little known Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band open for Bonnie Raitt at the Harvard Square Theater in Cambridge in 1974, when he was in college there. “Nobody I knew had ever heard of Springsteen before,” he said. “And it was great.”
Obama White House aide Brian Deese let it slip in a videotaped interview years ago that Mr. Garland was “reasonably into Taylor Swift.” That prompted Mr. Garland’s clerks to present him with a (mock) tweet from TayTay that said: “I’m reasonably a big fan of yours too!”
Once, as a judge hearing oral arguments, Mr. Garland tapped Ms. Swift’s words to describe how two parties needed to give clear notice before they could get out of signing a contract.
He turned to the clarity of the singer’s famous breakup song.
“I said, ‘so you’re agreeing you have to say you’re never ever, ever going to get back together,’” he recalled, “like ever.”
“It fit very well into the issue of the case,” he said.
In 2017, when the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington presented a mock trial based on the play “Twelfth Night,” Mr. Garland served as a judge in the matter, which was rife with dating drama and confusion. A lawyer representing the character Olivia likened her situation to a Britney Spears hit “Oops!…I Did It Again.”
“Your argument seems to be, ‘look what you made me do,’” Mr. Garland countered, using Ms. Swift’s lyrics to correct her.
Different Swift hits have resonated at various points in Mr. Garland’s career, such as when Senate Republicans blocked his path to confirmation to the Supreme Court in 2016. Why is his favorite song, “Shake It Off?”
“That should be self-explanatory,” he said.
Write to Sadie Gurman at sadie.gurman@wsj.com