Philly-area mom goes viral for printing out lyrics to Taylor Swift songs

It was like the best karaoke night ever for Maureen Gregory.

Gregory, alongside her two daughters, cousins, and nieces, went to the Taylor Swift concert at Lincoln Financial Field on Friday night, the first of three shows packed with fans dying to see the Grammy-winning pop star’s first live show in Philly in five years.

But while Gregory, 62, was there, she unknowingly became somewhat of a sensation herself.

The Downingtown mother loves live music and singing along to it. As she prepared for Friday’s concert, she thought back to the Miranda Lambert show she went to in 2021, where a mother and daughter duo behind her knew every word to every song, as she struggled to remember the lyrics.

“I was jealous, I wanted to know all the words,” she said in an interview.

A longtime Swift fan thanks to her daughters, Gregory couldn’t risk being outsung again. So on Friday, she brought the lyrics with her — all 80 pages worth.

She copied and pasted the words to every song on the set list into a Microsoft Word document and printed the packet at Staples, where the employees were quite entertained, she said.

It was 80 pages, double-sided and secured with a cheetah-print binder clip. And to make sure she could read it inside the dark venue, she brought along a mini reading light.

She was slightly worried someone would make fun of her inside the concert, but at one point, the girls standing next to her leaned in for the words of a song they weren’t familiar with.

And then some young girls a few rows back noticed, snapped a video of her in action, and posted it on TikTok. Within hours, it amassed hundreds of thousands of responses. By Sunday afternoon, it had 4 million views and nearly 750,000 likes.

“She brought out the hymnal 🙏✨,” one commenter wrote.

“The church of Taylor Swift 😌,” wrote another.

Gregory said she was partially inspired by her church — even after 60 years, she said, she still brings along a missalette so she never misses a word.

Her daughter asked her why she didn’t just read the lyrics off her phone.

“It’s too small,” Gregory said, adding that she didn’t want to be distracted by her phone. “I made the font big enough so I could see it.”

But she hasn’t ruled out bringing her mini iPad to the next show, she said.

Going viral, she said, has made an exciting, beautiful weekend even more special. Friday was the fifth time Gregory has seen Swift in concert, she said, and each time her performance has improved.

And there’s nothing like the aura the comes over Philadelphia when the singer is in town, she said — seeing teen girls decked in glitter inside the Wawa, everyone singing in unison to songs that often hold such personal meaning, including for Gregory.

The last time she saw Swift live was in 2018, alongside her middle daughter, Claire.

“I don’t really love taylor swift, but I really love my mom. So we’re gong to see Taylor Swift tonight,” Claire wrote in an Instagram post at the time.

But in 2020, Claire died after a yearslong battle with addiction. Gregory holds the memory of that concert close, and feels a deep connection to a handful of Swift’s songs.

Like “22″ — a song that came out when Claire, 22 years old at the time, was in Florida in a rehabilitation center.

Swift played the song Friday night. And Gregory never had to look down at her lyrics to sing along to it.