Taylor Swift might be, well, Taylor Swift, but at the end of the day, she’s just as much of a fangirl as the rest of us.
After AJ McLean posted an Instagram video of himself listening to a remix of her song “Elizabeth Taylor” mashed up with the Backstreet Boys’ “Everybody (Backstreet’s Back),” the pop superstar couldn’t contain her excitement in the comments. “OH HI AJ OH MY GOD,” she wrote Monday (Oct. 20).
“Come on now you know one of us had to! @taylorswift !” McLean had captioned the clip.
“Elizabeth Taylor” appears on Swift’s new album, The Life of a Showgirl, which dropped Oct. 3. The LP did historic numbers in its first week, debuting at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 with a record 4.002 million equivalent album units sold.
“I have 4 million thank you’s I want to send to the fans, and 4 million reasons to feel even more proud of this album than I already was,” she reacted to the feat in a statement at the time. “Thank you for going out to celebrate this project in the movie theaters, investing in vinyl, streaming, watching the video, buying CDs, reading the poems I wrote inside the packaging, and immersing yourselves in The Life of a Showgirl. I’ll cherish this feeling forever.”
A true millennial at heart, Swift has long been open about her love for ’90s boy bands. In 2023, she freaked out when the members of *NSYNC reunited on stage, shortly after which the group presented her with best pop video for eight-week Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 single “Anti-Hero.”
“I’m not doing well pivoting from this to this,” she said in her acceptance speech, gesturing to Justin Timberlake, Chris Kirkpatrick, Joey Fatone, JC Chasez and Lance Bass lined up behind her. “Like, I had your dolls … are you doing something? What’s going to happen now?”
McLean has also previously shared his love for Swift. “She is, by far, in my opinion, one of the most grounded, humble performers ever,” he said of the 14-time Grammy winner on the Getting Grilled With Curtis Stone podcast in 2024. “She’s met my oldest [daughter] three times. The last time she met her, she remembered her name … as a dad alone, [that] catapulted her into the stratosphere for me.”
