Taylor Swift Praises This Pal For Being The 'Same Genre' Of Weird As Her

Taylor Swift's squad era of the 2010s is gone. She's in her wifey era now. Besides, there has been no shortage of friend drama throughout the years, meaning that many stars have left Swift's squad. But some friendships have stood the test of time — and the test of fame. That's the case for Abigail Anderson, Taylor's best friend since childhood. "It's like, you know, when you find that person who just completely sees you for the strange, little genre that is you at your purest," she said in a November 2026 "Toy Story 5" Q&A.

Swift, who was a songwriter for the movie, compared her relationship with Anderson to Bonnie and Blaze's friendship featured in the latest installment. The pop star met Anderson in high school, after she moved to Nashville to pursue her passion at 14. She quickly became her person. The characters' journey evoked her own path, from trying to understand which group of girls she would fit in best to the joy of finally "finding someone who's the same genre as weird and silly as you are."

More than 20 years may have passed, but Swift and Anderson still activate the young girl silliness in each other. Now married women in their 30s, the friends still talk in "Napoleon Dynamite" voices when they are together. "It's something our husbands have to put up with," Swift laughed. Travis Kelce, aka Swift's husband, probably doesn't mind it too much. Swift's inner circle, including Anderson, approves of Kelce, after all. A lot has happened in the two-plus decades they have known each other, but they're still grateful for sitting next to each other in English class.

Taylor Swift and Abigail Anderson may go around talking like "Napoleon Dynamite," but the original guy who brought the two together was Shakespeare. The British playwright may not be as silly as Jon Heder's character, but he evoked a shared emotion in the young teenagers that made them fast friends. "We were the ones in the back of the class saying negative things about 'Romeo and Juliet' because we were so bitter toward that emotion at the time," Anderson said on "The Ellen DeGeneres Show" in 2008 (via Us Weekly).

Little did they know that their eye-rolling at the intensity of Romeo and Juliet's forbidden love would lead to a lifetime. "We just really connected ... and ever since then, we have been inseparable," she said. You know the redhead in Swift's 2008 song, "Fifteen?" That's Anderson. After stardom, she found it hard to relate to people who didn't understand her reality, so she naturally gravitated toward other famous women.

But she has never taken for granted the connection that Anderson represents to her life before fame. "She wanted to be a swimmer and go off on a college scholarship for swimming and I wanted to be a singer. Now she's off at Kansas on a swimming scholarship and I'm singing," she said on "The Oprah Winfrey Show" in 2009. A lot has changed between then and now. Anderson isn't swimming for a living, working as a corporate development executive instead, while Swift has reached Prince William's playlist levels of stardom. But their friendship has proved to be made of sturdy stuff.