Taylor Swift has many famous admirers including former Beatle Paul McCartney, whose handwritten note to her quoting lyrics from Blackbird is framed and hangs in one of the bathrooms of her $50M Tribeca compound.

The Who co-founder Pete Townshend joined the growing chorus of legendary rockers, including Billy Joel, declaring the 34-year-old pop star to be on par with The Beatles.

‘I’m a song dreamer in a sense,’ the 79-year-old Grammy winner told the What It Takes podcast on July 20.

‘So I love the great songwriters of my father’s era, Gershwin and so on. And also the great songwriters of today, past The Beatles, and all the rest of them to Taylor Swift.’

Pete continued: ‘I love what she does, too. Not that she’s necessarily absolutely always to my taste, but I just love the fact that she seems to love it [and] that she seems to be having so much fun. That’s what I identify with.’

Townshend’s comments came six months after he praised Taylor for her $1.039B-grossing, 149-date The Eras Tour, which creates a ‘place where people feel really, really, really safe.’

‘And what I think was happening in the sixties – the late sixties, early seventies – was a discovery that it was safe to blend a music event, to allow yourself to unfold, to relax into the mood of the event,’ the Chiswick-born Brit recalled to ComicBook.com.

‘It could be that it was heavy music like Led Zeppelin, or parts of what The Who were doing. But it could also be the gentleness of great R&B like Sly and the Family Stone, but also more gentle music like Joni Mitchell, like Crosby Stills and Nash. There was a cross-section of music which, brought together in festival events, had the effect of making people feel together.’

And when Swift’s underhanded ex-manager Scooter Braun – who’s since retired from the music industry – sold the rights to the first six of her master recordings, Pete publicly sympathized with her.

‘Watching Taylor Swift go through what she’s putting herself through at the moment is heartbreaking,’ Townshend told Rolling Stone in 2019.

‘She doesn’t own the f***ing music. She doesn’t own the words. I think she has a financial right to it, but she shouldn’t screw herself up about this stuff.’

The 14-time Grammy winner – who gets 92.2M monthly listeners on Spotify – has just two more archival albums (Taylor Swift and Reputation) to re-record.

Taylor is currently enjoying a much-needed break from her Eras Tour, which doesn’t resume until October 18–20 at Hard Rock Stadium in Miami Gardens, FL.