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Last night I attended a concert-slash-book-release party celebrating Taylor Swift By the Book, a literary analysis of Taylor Swift’s entire discography. The co-authors, who also happen to be sisters-in-law, come from two distinct yet complementary backgrounds. Rachel Feder is a romanticist literary professor the University of Denver and accomplished writer whose way with words brought down the house as the officiant at her co-authors wedding.
Meanwhile her co-author, Tiffany Tatreau, is a true multi-hyphenate in her own right–an actor and vocalist with an incredibly dynamic musical range, who briefly went viral in the midst of the pandemic with her work on Ride the Cyclone, an album recorded entirely remotely. One flew in from Colorado just for the weekend; the other came up from DC for the day, where she performed 9 shows last week in A Beautiful Noise, the Neil Diamond musical.
The concert-slash-literary experience blended academic insights and playful quizzes (Q: Which famous author of a horror story was also a big Broadway fan? A: Dracula) with live performances by Broadway singers. The setlist featured inventive mashups and covers of Taylor Swift songs, each tied to the literary themes and motifs discussed—think the gothic intensity of Wuthering Heights, the whimsy of Peter Pan, and the romanticism of The Great Gatsby.
Works like this discover their defensibility through extreme niche.
Sure, anyone could host a live Taylor Swift cover concert. But fewer could assemble a lineup featuring star-studded Broadway talent (not to mention perform a few bangers themselves).
Fewer still would also have the range to dissect Taylor’s discography through a purely literary lens. (An even smaller fraction would have the know-how and the network to successfully convert that into a published book.)
And only the rarest could also orchestrate a cover band talented enough to create mashups so inventive they didn’t even surface across Taylor’s sprawling 149-concert Eras Tour.
Tiffany and Rachel packed the room with friends and family, but also with moms and dads on the Upper West Side, who knew the percussionist as "the guitar guy" from their kid’s preschool. (Where the preschool director had kindly offered to promote the event to every parent in the school network.)
And this, and that, and this other thing
Slash, ampersand, plus-sign
Whatever you want to call it
In an era of abundance, maybe the things that make you weird are the only things that make you stand out.
Big tech can chase the trends but they can’t touch your beautifully weird extreme niche.
One clear and unifying factor stood out from the entire evening: Everyone in the room was operating at the upper echelon of their field or domain of expertise.
This wasn’t a room of half-hearted wannabes, it was jam-packed with upper crust talent, bleeding all the way through to the 8-year-old girl who attended, and brought the room to their feet at the end of the night when she spontaneously took the mic in “You Belong with Me.” She didn’t miss a single word.
As more people fractionalize their work or splinter parts of their portfolio into sub-components, I’m noticing a rise in surprising, unscalable hyper-collisions at an ultra-local level.
In an age where ideas are abundant and first drafts are more accessible than ever, the real challenge lies in the creative combinations we give ourselves permission to dream up. We’re living in an era of “and,” not “or”—a time where we no longer need to stick to a single specialization, a straight-line career path, or a singular focus. The more we lean into the freedom to explore these invisible playgrounds of possibility, the more unusual (and inventive) these niches can become.
I have a feeling 2025 will be the year of the extreme niche.
Follow the talent.
As Taylor would say, it really is All Too Well.
