i'm just a notch in your bedpost, but you're just a line in a song
on some music I heard recently
Something kind of funny happened to me this month, which is that I really loved the new Taylor Swift album. This is not unprecedented (Folklore is no-skips; Lover has several skips but is nonetheless dear to my heart), but it’s not the norm, and given the mid-ness of Midnights and the horrorshow of the Eras movie, my anticipation for the album was less keen than my curiosity about where it would take the narrative. But then The Tortured Poets Department came out and, despite the terrible, terrible title, I honestly liked it so much it kind of killed my interest in all the extratextual stuff, right at the time everyone else has decided it belongs center-stage. I agree with much of what BDM said in her great post about it, but especially with what has apparently become the niche opinion, among haters, critics, and Swifties alike, that listening to this album does not require a PhD in Taylor Lore, and that ignoring the backstory is in fact the more enjoyable way to listen to it.
So I’m going to try something very brave and radical of me, which is to try to talk about this album without any reference to the much-discussed real-world events that may have inspired it. I’m also going to avoid talking about… feelings? I mean, the feelings described in the songs by the autofictional narrator who goes by the name of Taylor Swift are fair game, of course, but I’m not going to talk about—my feelings, real human Taylor Swift’s feelings, other people’s feelings, whatever. I’m over the whole narrative of Taylor Swift, High Priestess Of Feelings (having them, providing them, capturing them, validating them); it’s somehow simultaneously overblown and condescending, exaggerating her significance while ignoring her actual work. I reject the idea that what makes her or any artist worth talking about is what she represents rather than what she does and how she does it. In fact, let’s rule of threes this—no lore, no feelings, and nothing about Taylor’s position in the culture or importance for women or any other kind of people.
This isn’t intended to be a review or argument; I’m not interested in exhaustively weighing the album’s merits and flaws, or in conducting some comprehensive exegesis of the album as a whole. This is just some observations and thoughts I had while listening to and talking about it.1 I guess more than anything it’s my attempt to say something about an album I like without assigning any symbolic weight, positive or negative, to the person who made it—to write about some Taylor Swift songs without entering into the discourse around Taylor Swift. Or, in Taylor terms: there will be no reputation; there will just be explanation.
Shortly after the album dropped, Dave added a great new piece to his Taylor series about the magpie nature of her lyrics, arguing that Taylor’s writing owes at least as much to rap as to any other antecedents you might trace, which becomes obvious once you start listening for it.2 In particular I love this (and not because he quotes me quoting Taylor):
The album reminds me of the deluge of mid-aughts Lil Wayne mixtapes; I was totally unsurprised that she immediately dropped an additional album’s worth of material two hours after midnight of the album’s release. (She’s figured out how to make money on her mixtapes: replace unauthorized samples with wallpaper.) Swift isn’t a preternatural genius of wordplay like Wayne is, but she has been pushing the limits of her rhyme schemes for a decade to incorporate hip-hop’s expansive use of assonance, accommodating endless slant rhymes. My friend Isabel points out a representative chain in “So High School”: bottles, Aristotle, full-throttle, Grand Theft Auto, scout’s honor, got her. My favorite audacious move is on “Clara Bow,” where out of the literally thousands of rhyming possibilities with “oh” she decides instead to use “remarkable.”
I’ve found that listening through this lens has really opened up the album’s pleasures for me. That willingness to lean into assonance and slant rhyme, piling up aural resonances without worrying about matching them up too strictly, gives the impression of someone genuinely having fun with the sounds of language, and while not every individual flourish works, the overall effect is an atmosphere of artistic playfulness that cuts a little through the album’s dark themes. She’s not struggling for or forcing rhymes; she’s seeing what she can get away with. In that six-phrase chain, I missed the internal vowel matches of ball and wanted, slotted in at identical points on their respective lines. In the chorus, she takes us through blink, crinkling, sinking, fingers, pink, twinkling, drink, think, brink, wrinkle, all sprinkled within an AAABAAAB scheme on the end rhymes (with a swap for smoking/jokes that comes across more like a fun twist than like she ran out of steam). There’s a goofiness to both the content and the sheer excess here, for sure—fitting for a song about a relationship that makes you feel like you’re in the same poreless teen drama TV suburb in which all Taylor Swift songs about high school take place—but there’s a “Look, Ma, no hands!” pleasure, too.3 She’s flexing a little, in a way that obviates the question of whether any individual line is “necessary.”
Olivia Horn, in a thoughtful and wonderfully written review, describes this tendency as “playfully unbridled” at best, in need of editing at worst. I don’t disagree, exactly, but there’s something about the record’s logorrheic sprawl that works for me. When she writes that Taylor “piles the metaphors on thick, throws stuff at the wall even after something has stuck, picks up the things that didn’t stick and uses them anyway,” she’s fully correct, and it’s what I like about the album. I like that she comes up with a line as ruthlessly economical as “two graves, one gun” and tosses it into a torrent of images, most of them not nearly as good, as if she’s swimming upstream against a current of her own despair, unable to pause long enough to pick a concept and hold on. I like it for the same reason I like the ten-minute All Too Well, even though the original is undeniably a “better” song, or the moment in the bridge of Hits Different where she says she doesn’t need another metaphor and then spits out two more: the way it creates this sense through the telling of AND ANOTHER THING!, the way the image comes through of a person who just can’t stop herself. This is an entire album made up of that gasping, frenetic outpour, and it’s also an album about a person careening wildly and unwantedly between extremes. If it were a better album, I don’t think I would enjoy it quite as much as I do. Or, as Katherine St. Asaph puts it, “Precision can be dull.”
Line by line, she also gets away with it more often than not.4 I agree with Dave that a lot of lines look bad on paper but sound fine in the song, as if she knows (usually) how much slack she can give while still holding a song together aurally. Take the second verse of the title track:
You smoked, then ate seven bars of chocolate
We declared Charlie Puth should be a bigger artist
Chocolate and artist look wildly mismatched as a rhyme pair, but in her natural accent, Taylor—like most Americans I know—elides the middle o in chocolate and pronounces that final -ate with a vowel sound closer to a short i than any other vowel.5 The r-controlled a in artist, meanwhile, is pronounced with short o sound in the word got—what in isolation you might spell ah—so the two words are assonant, ah-ih. It’s roughly the same vowel sequence, in fact, as in the stricter couplet in the corresponding position on the first verse of the song—apartment/department—which may or may not have been deliberate or conscious but gestures towards what I’m trying to articulate about retaining, by choice or by instinct, enough aural coherence to hold a song together.6
That’s a lot of words about a single silly slant rhyme, but my bigger point is: her occasional looseness is not the mark of a songwriter who has lost control of her pen. The bones are typically there if you listen for them, and where they aren’t, I think that’s deliberate more often than not. Not always, but let’s look at what follows the Charlie Puth line:
I scratched your head and you fell asleep
like a tattooed golden retriever
That line really doesn’t rhyme, and it is jarring, a clear break from the pattern established in the first verse. But consider a few things: first, the scene at hand, in which the narrator describes her and her loser boyfriend getting stoned out of their minds, saying inane shit like it’s profound, and settling into silent coziness; second, the giddy way her voice swells on the final two words; third, the broader context of the song, which is quite explicitly about two “modern idiots” annoyingly and toxically obsessed with each other; and fourth, what comes after:
but you awaken with dread
pounding nails in your head
but I’ve read this one
where you come undone
As soon as he wakes up, we get this set of rapid-fire AABB rhymes as the bell jar sinks back down. That golden retriever that doesn’t belong marks a moment of pure unfiltered sweet stoned delusion as the narrator floats on a cloud, untethered by rhyme or reality; once her boyfriend is no longer literally unconscious, we’re snapped back into the structure of the song.
She does the same thing in the bridge, linking together a darkly funny anecdote about how their mutual insanity makes them the perfect match with a set of long-e vowels (me/leave/seen/be/crazy) and then unspooling for this:
At dinner, you take my ring off my middle finger
and put it on the one people put wedding rings on
and that’s the closest I’ve come to my heart exploding
When it’s set to music, there’s something like a throughline if you squint (the one/on/come), but it’s not particularly strong, breaking down completely with exploding, and the prosody and melody alike are a mess. It’s absolutely a clunky nightmare of a line that takes you out of the flow of the song—and it comes at the peak of the narrator’s lovestruck derangement, as if to underscore how unreal any matrimonial daydreams with this guy might be, or to capture the extent to which she’s presently on another planet. The song “breaks” precisely at the two moments that could belong to another story entirely, the moments where the narrator’s sardonic veneer cracks and she’s high on blissful denial.
This is, of course, hardly unique to Taylor; breaking rhyme for emotional emphasis is actually a trick I reliably love, with one of my favorite examples being Lorde’s Green Light: “I know about what you did and I want to scream the truth / She thinks you love the beach, you’re such a DAMN LIAR!”7 Rhyme is also less essential to another set of genres whose influence on Taylor’s writing is under-discussed: pop-punk and emo. This is not my insight, nor are these genres with which I have deep familiarity; I credit Ivy entirely with first pointing this out to me in our Taylor talks going back at least a decade. Taylor herself has nodded in this direction; years before she featured Patrick Stump on Speak Now (Taylor’s Version), she told Rolling Stone:
I love Fall Out Boy so much. Their songwriting really influenced me, lyrically, maybe more than anything else. They take a phrase and they twist it. “Loaded God complex/Cock it and pull it”? When I heard that, I was like, “I’m dreaming.”8
You can see her incorporating this idea in lines like Mine’s flight risk with a fear of falling: it doesn’t make any sense as a metaphor (flight risk has nothing to do with actual flying), but it readily scans as that same kind of wordplay.
I’ve been thinking about this aspect of her lineage again because Nick, my partner, said it was funny that Taylor name-drops The Starting Line, because if people were to look them up and listen closely, they might realize, oh, this is what Taylor’s doing. And it’s true: their 2002 debut album opens with a track equal parts plaintive and resentful, laying bare heartbreak and getting in some digs through a simple melody with a limited range built to deliver and underscore the litany of emotions rather than to stand on its own, a song which also references the process of its own creation and thus reinforces the narrator’s identity as a songwriter—all key elements of the Swiftian playbook. “I’m sorry for writing you this song, but just what do you think you deserve?” is exactly the kind of reversal Taylor has pulled in songs like Forever and Always, alternating between sorrow and recrimination without resolving or even acknowledging the tension between them.
After that conversation, I went the other way, revisiting The Black Dog, the song where she gives them a shout, and realizing: oh, this is totally a fucking emo song. Imagine it with the tempo kicked up, heavier drums and louder guitars replacing Dessner’s cinematic score, and a guy yelping his way through the vocals (in other words: imagine it covered by The Starting Line), and that ascending, bratty tantrum of a chorus—I hope it’s shittyyyy! In the Black Doooog!—is immediately recognizable as drawing from that world. It snaps the song into place lyrically, too, both the meandering verses, where sentences tumble indifferently across melodic phrases, and the melodramatic chorus, where she drops shit like I just don’t understand how you don’t miss me in the shower and old habits die screaming—what an emo-ass line! The song, miserable and exuberant at once, perfectly encapsulates Andy Greenwald’s description of emo songs as being, “all at once, an admission of sadness and a celebration of that sadness.”9 If it’s cringe, it’s cringe because emo is cringe, not because she’s trying to be Joni Mitchell and failing.
It makes sense that Taylor would feel an affinity with emo and pop punk, because these are genres which not only accept but celebrate owning your truth as an obsessive, spiteful freak.10 I’ve always liked that side of Taylor: the girl who takes a moment to slam (hypocritically!) the fashion sense of the bride whose wedding she’s interrupting, or thinks leaving the Christmas lights up for a whole extra week is the pinnacle of wanton hedonism, or compares dating her to one of the bloodiest conflicts in human history, or seems like she might have thought Gone Girl was a rom-com—the lines that make you think something between girl, WHAT? and oh, there is something really wrong with this person. My favorite song on Midnights was You’re On Your Own, Kid, largely for the part near the end where she sketches out the familiar story of a small-town kid who chased the wrong dreams all the way to ruin, and then, at the moment where any other person would give us the humbling realization that would enable our heroine to begin the journey back to self-respect, she says, in effect: “I degraded and humiliated myself in service to my ambition. I hungered for love to the point of self-abnegation. I traded dignity for success and became unrecognizable to those who knew me for who I was before. And at the worst of it, in my darkest, lowest days, my spirit and body in ruins, my former friends unreachable, I looked around and realized: I’m Taylor Swift, and I never needed any of you stupid losers anyway.” It’s a thrilling moment of triumph from a person who sounds like the “blood-stained gown” she’s wearing might be marred with the blood of the people she has just murdered, which makes it an ideal Taylor Swift experience for me, a person who has sometimes tried to explain my interest in her by saying, You know how some people have a favorite serial killer? Well…
On this front, TTPD truly delivers like never before. Fifteen seconds in, once again using a lack of rhyme to underscore how far this journey will take us from the bounds of the ordinary and the sane, she identifies as a functional alcoholic (dark, but normal) until nobody noticed her new aesthetic (a thing only a person you would instantly back away from at a party would say). She pulls an unbelievably funny gotcha, wailing: I’m having his baby! No I’m not, but you should see your faces! She snarls, with dark grandiosity, So tell me everything is not about me… BUT WHAT IF IT IS? She drops the sick burn of “Jehovah’s Witness suit” and then crescendoes to a sputtering incredulity that leaves her searching for increasingly absurd explanations for an incomprehensible betrayal: “Were you writing a book? Were you a sleeper-cell spy???”11 She sounds, not infrequently, like a person who has totally fucking lost it, or who perhaps never really had “it” to begin with—or, as she puts it in the exquisitely titled I Look In People’s Windows, “like I’m some deranged weirdo.”
Possibly my favorite moment on the album comes in Clara Bow, the first half’s closing track, a song about the revolving door of female icons chewed and spat out by fame. In the verses, nameless admirers praise a young ingenue as the next someone else (Clara Bow, Stevie Nicks, Taylor Swift in a darkly self-deprecating closer) as that girl prays that her dreams will come true. The chorus shows us the lines they’re feeding her:
This town is fake but you’re the real thing
Breath of fresh air through smoke rings
Take the glory, give everything
Promise to be dazzling
But in the second chorus, without so much as a beat in between, she repeats the melody, with—and this is crucial—the exact same affect and intonation, only this time, the words say:
The crown is stained but you’re the real queen
Flesh and blood amongst war machines
You’re the new god we’re worshipping
Promise to be dazzling
This made me laugh out loud the first time I heard it, largely because of the way Taylor maintains her wistful sing-song style without blinking or in any other way betraying awareness that the imagery has changed. One moment we’re in a smoke-filled room with the smarmy suits of L. A.; the next, she is the blood-soaked general on the field of battle ready to claim the throne before the thousands cowering beneath her gaze while the soil is still littered with the remains of her enemies, moldering under the sun. And the music suggests that in Taylor’s mind, these are exactly the same thing. It makes her sound totally unhinged. It’s amazing.12
The high point of morbid humor on the album is probably I Can Do it With A Broken Heart, a frantic number, equal parts desperate and boastful, about crushing it at work while you want to fucking die.13 Her penchant for stringing together a melody from a handful of notes has never been put to better use; the way she drones her way from touting her bonafides (“I’m a real tough kid / I can handle my shit”) to the demands of the job (“lights, camera, bitch, smile / even when you wanna die”) to the intrusive flashback (“he said he’d love me all his life”) to the recap of her public agony (“all the pieces of me shattered as the crowd was chanting more!”), all along a melody that mostly hammers one single note over and over in the middle of Antonoff’s bubbly synths, all in the same sugary chirp that lands somewhere between determined and dead inside—it’s both dramatically effective, illustrating the relentlessness of both the show and the heartbreak, and darkly hilarious. I love the understatement of “he said he’d love me for all time / but that time was quite short”: it underscores the idea that she doesn’t even have time to grieve, but it also gives the song a quality that almost reminds me of the Lonely Island Bash Brothers movie, where the ’roided-up all-stars trying to sound badass keep accidentally swerving head-on into the darkest corners of their psyche and keep rapping as if nothing has changed: Put your back in it and lift it higher, bitch / stab that needle in my ass ’till I am rich!14
Dave talked about Taylor Swift’s minimalist melodies in an earlier post in his series that I just adore as an example of technically knowledgeable, context-informed, curiosity-driven criticism. I particularly appreciate his description of “Love Story”:
But Taylor Swift hugs the root tone a lot in her songs. To make up for this, she writes rhythmically, in a pattering style that in late 2008 didn’t sound like anything else on the radio except maybe Jack Johnson’s acoustic schlub-core. In the chorus of “Love Story,” she’s singing the root, second, and third over and over again — it’s “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” just like in modal rap, but in a major key instead of a minor key. If you played it in C, the chorus of “Love Story” would work out to a pattern of C-D-E-D again and again and again, giving the song a kind of perpetual motion machine rush—you almost can’t believe she’s getting away with it, that she’s going to make us feel like we’re soaring hitting those notes over and over again. She makes us fly while hardly budging herself.
She pulls a similar trick on my favorite of the Anthology tracks, The Prophecy, hitting the same three notes over and over in a chorus that this time doesn’t soar so much as it drives, propelling itself insistently only to finally un-resolve on the last syllable, holding tension as her voice fades. Some of the rush here comes from Dessner’s gorgeous orchestration, so haunting and anxious that it makes the song sound like it’s a candle flickering unreliably in a dark room, Taylor’s harmonies shadows following her movements along the floor. But it’s also held together by the sound of the words. Here it is with some patterns marked—bold for those long e sounds as the end rhymes (consistently on the higher note, even if the written version moves things around), italics for the series of sounds on the half-step dip linked by slant rhyme, either with similar but not identical vowels followed by similar consonants (don’t/money) or with identical vowel sounds and different consonants (just/one):
Please
I’ve been on my knees
Change the prophecy
Don’t want money, just someone who wants my company
Let it once be me
Who do I have to speak to about if they can re-do
The prophecy
This leaves some things out: the internal rhyme on the second syllable of money, the who/do/to/to/do run near the end, the alliteration through want/one/want/once. To borrow a word from Dessner’s Instagram post about the release, there’s an intricacy to the way the lines are assembled; you can imagine a different chorus that matches these metrically and even hits the end rhymes but doesn’t flow the same way through that three-note loop without the connective tissue she’s put in there. But when she sings it, it comes out unstilted, even conversational. She does another riff in the bridge, stacking long a sounds one after the other—unstable, table, greater, faith, made, wait, afraid, fate, soulmates, paperweight, shades, greige—then running through too many syllables to capture her own unspooling before the last one: “spending my last coin so someone will tell me it’ll be okay.”
All these echoes and repetitions add to the song’s air of foreclosure, the sense of being locked into a path from which you cannot deviate: wherever you go, there you are, hearing the same old sounds, staring down the same unwanted fate. The Prophecy is a song about being alone, but it’s also a song about feeling trapped, doomed to a fate you wish desperately you could change. The simplest reading of the titular phrase is the inevitable collapse of all attempts at love; when she says don’t want money, just someone who wants my company, she’s pleading her case: I’m not asking for much.
But this is a song on an album that wrestles repeatedly with the weight and isolation of fame, an album, to quote St. Asaph again, that “delves into every nuance of this fame-induced alienation and every way that it disconnects her from her own feelings.” She resents the “empathetic hunger” that turns heartbreak into spectacle; she rages against the attacks of the who’s-who of who’s-that, but she never articulates the comeuppance she threatens to deliver. An atmosphere of suffocation pervades the album, on which she imagines herself into scenes of captivity as a depressed housewife, a doll on the shelf, a circus animal defanged, a criminal (more than once, with questionable judgment), Jesus in the tomb and on the cross. In that context, you can hear The Prophecy as the story of someone who already made her bargain with the supernatural, long ago, and now wonders if perhaps she chose wrong; when she offers up money in exchange for comfort, she’s asking if it’s too late to change the terms.
TTPD’s most striking formal choices are found on The Manuscript, the full album’s track-31 closer, which describes an experience with an older man that the narrator is haunted by and subsequently turns into art. I’m going to quote this one in full, because it’s short and because you need to see the whole thing to understand the effect that caught my attention. Here’s the first verse:
Now and then she re-reads the manuscript
Of the entire torrid affair
They compared their licenses
He said, “I’m not a donor but
I’d give you my heart if you needed it”
She rolled her eyes and said, “You’re a professional”
He said, “No, just a good samaritan”
He said that if the sex was half as good as the conversation was
Soon they’d be pushing strollers
But soon it was over
The first two lines set up a structure you expect to hear filled in; the rest of the verse refuses that structure. The lyrics are—or seem—artless; the piano plunks tentatively around them in a way that reminds me of the intro to Ani Difranco’s You Had Time, which she played haltingly on the piano, an instrument she rarely used.15 Dessner obviously knows how to play the piano, but he uses his skill to create a similar effect. The melody, to borrow again from Dave’s post about modal songwriting, reminds me of what a cantor might sing at religious services: it’s almost the barest amount of musicality that you could even call singing, the lines having a certain simple shape and stretching or contracting as needed to fit the words. She sings it slowly, uncertainly, as if she’s making it up on the spot. Only with the last two lines do we start to see what we might expect in a song: that repeated soon, taking on a different emotional cast the second time; the slant rhyme of strollers/over, taking us away from this memory and into the rest of the song. Then comes the second verse:
In the age of him she wished she was thirty
And made coffee every morning in a French press
Afterward she only ate kids’ cereal
And couldn’t sleep unless it was in her mother’s bed
Then she dated boys who were her own age
With dartboards on the backs of their doors
She thought about how he said
Since she was so wise beyond her years
Everything had been above board
She wasn’t sure
The contrast between the French press and kids’ cereal might be the most devastating image of her career. It’s spare and simple and it tells the whole story in a few quick strokes. So small, so undignified. So much communicated through negative space: we don’t know how old she is, but we know it’s young enough to playact thirty like a kid playing with their parent’s briefcase. The form remains loose, but it’s growing more bounded. The lines are still shaggy but less unruly than before, except when memories of what he said to her intrude. That first contrast of during and after is lightly contained by the matching short e’s in press and bed; doors loops together with board and with that final, heartrending sure. Here we come to the bridge:
And the years passed like scenes of a show
The professor said to write what you know
Looking backwards might be the only way to move forward
Then the actors were hitting their marks
And the slow dance was alight with the sparks
And the tears fell in synchronicity with the score
And at last
She knew what the agony had been for
Now this sounds like a song: show/know/forward; marks/sparks; score/for. The melody arranges itself into something you could hum, still slow, still simple, but with an gentle swell. And finally, our coda:
The only thing that’s left is the manuscript
One last souvenir from my trip to your shores
Now and then I re-read the manuscript
But the story isn’t mine anymore
Four neat, more or less pentametric lines, an easy ABAB rhyme scheme: that’s a song. A song being sung in the first person, by a singer who knows how to make them. And in closing so gracefully, the artlessness of the introduction becomes legible. This is a song about turning pain into art; we can hear the story becoming a song from verse to verse, structure finding its way into the words over time. We can hear her refining her voice from beginning to end; we can hear that as she starts writing, the world begins to cohere. Near the end, we hear the first line of the song again—now and then she rereads the manuscript, identical but for the pronoun—but now, after the story has been given a shape, it no longer marks the beginning of something she she couldn’t control; instead, it slots easily into place.
There’s an interesting ambiguity to the final line of The Manuscript: the story isn’t mine anymore. The story isn’t hers—because she’s shared it with the world, and it belongs to all of us now? Because by writing her way out of her pain, she became someone other than the girl in the story? Because, as BDM suggests in her post, by making her pain public she lost the ability to keep it to herself? Yes to all, I think. This is what she does; this is who she is; this is what she’s left with and what she can count on, a truth so fundamental it goes beyond questions of good or bad. It is what it is. What that means depends on how you listen; I hear it a little differently each time.
As I said at the start, I don’t consider Taylor to be a lore-dependent artist. I do find that there is sometimes an additional dimension of appreciation that comes from hearing her songs in the context of her body of work. This isn’t unique to Taylor, and it’s usually not particularly deep. I like artists, in pop music and elsewhere, whose work creates a window into a specific subjectivity that is recognizable from text to text, or whose work carries an unmistakable stamp of personality. This has nothing to do with liking someone’s personality or with connecting emotionally to the person who emerges across their work, nor do I mean personality in the sense of some essential core of their personhood. It’s an aesthetic appreciation for the successful performance of personality, where “personality” refers to a property of a text that can perhaps be defined according to Fitzgerald’s famous formulation as “an unbroken series of successful gestures.” I like it when someone makes me think, again and again: Oh, that’s so them.16
With Taylor, sometimes this quality shows up in little details, as in the moment in loml, the most classically Swiftian tear-jerker on the album, where she interrupts her lyrical mourning to add a petulant little aside: “You said I’m the love of your life… about a million times.” Other times it emerges in recurring tendencies, as in The Albatross. Working in the fairy-tale mode she first experimented with on Evermore, Taylor weaves a tale about a man warned off a dangerous woman who refuses to stay away. For most of the song, she plays the idiomatically famous literary allusion of the title fairly straight, if not quite in a manner that proves she has ever read Coleridge:
Cross your thoughtless heart
Only liquor anoints you
She’s the albatross
She is here to destroy you
But then at the end, we get the kind of script-flipping final chorus she’s been doing since her country days:
So I crossed my thoughtless heart
Spread my wings like a parachute
I’m the albatross
I swept in at the rescue
This is peak Taylor, to me, more so than any number of sad songs about boys: taking a longstanding symbol of a burden so heavy it feels like doom and saying, But don’t you know that birds can fly? This brand of willful optimism is objectively kind of dumb, and I used to find it really annoying. But at some point I warmed up to it, largely because the picture it paints of Taylor’s worldview is so, so funny; it’s like the 30 Rock scene where we see the world through Kenneth’s eyes and it’s all muppets singing about how special he is. See also the line in thanK you aIMee17 about how she pushed each boulder up that hill on the way to her grand success: only Taylor would write a song where Sisyphus finally gets to say, “We did it, team!” Taylor the romantic is pretty much dead on this album, where even the few love songs never approach, say, the transcendence of State of Grace or the depth of New Year’s Day. But you can still catch glimpses of the girl who read Romeo and Juliet and thought, Good start! But I have some notes.
Occasionally, though, these resonances across time add a layer of meaning. If you’re familiar with her work, Would’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve, another song about looking back at a damaging encounter with an older man, is impossible to listen to without thinking about Dear John because of their shared insisted-upon repetition of nineteen. Noticing that connection doesn’t require any knowledge about or investment in who those songs might be about, or even the conviction that they were inspired by the same real-life events or draw from reality at all. Nor is it a knock against Would’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve to suggest it lands just a little differently if you know Dear John, any more than it would be a knock against Dylan’s Sara to suggest that the fourth verse hits a little harder if you’ve ever listened to Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands. And I don’t think it takes away from either song to read the story that emerges when you place them side by side: at nineteen, the girl in the dress thought she had played with fire and walked out unscathed; years later, the woman she became knows better.
Listening again to The Manuscript, I found myself thinking about a Taylor song I don’t particularly care for: her very first single, Tim McGraw. In that song, Taylor sings wistfully of a romance soon gone, but the real story comes at the end, when the song they used to listen to becomes the song she’s written, their love lost but her work long-lasting. In Tim McGraw, the tone is unambiguously triumphant, her art the thing that matters more than any boy ever could, the sorcerer’s stone that transfigures her heartbreak into power. In The Manuscript—well. It’s more complicated now. Most things are, when you grow up.
Clara Bow, the album’s first closer, is a song about show business; The Manuscript, its second, is an intimate story about a private hurt—until it, too, becomes a song about show business. The other thing the two of them have in common is that they’re both songs about the fact that you don’t know what you’re asking for until you get it. Specifically, they’re both songs about girls who thought they were getting what they wanted, and now have to live with the aftermath.
When you’re young, someone who wants something from you might tell you a story about all the wonders with which they can fill your world, and you won’t know the real price until it’s too late to take it back. You wish you were thirty like schoolchildren wish for summer and then one day you wake up and you are thirty, and all it means is that you’re old enough to realize just how young you were when you made the choices that built the life around you. Whether or not you regret it, whether or not it seems worth it now, the fact remains that you did not—you could not—understand what you were choosing. Maybe that means someone should have stopped you from making the choice, should have, as Taylor writes, curtailed your curiosity a little while longer; maybe it’s a choice you shouldn’t have been offered. Maybe the fact that you couldn’t possibly understand where your choice would lead you means that it wasn’t really your choice at all. And yet here you are, living inescapably in its aftermath.
The album shifts in light of its ending. All the present-day struggles and heartbreaks it chronicles, all the thrashing bitterness, that unrelenting fatalism about the dark immovable line of the future—closing the story on the wound that preceded them suggests the true origin of these might lie in the distant past. What happens to you when you’re young isn’t confined to the moment of impact; it encompasses the person you become. If it hadn’t happened, would you have become someone else? Would you have grown up to want different things, better things? Would you have learned how to walk away from that which no longer suited you instead of always drifting back to the ache that felt like home?
There’s no way to know. You can never meet the version of yourself your life never happened to. So what do you do with the wondering? Where do you put the weight of the life you may have lived if someone had protected you from what you thought you wanted? The Manuscript says—you do what you’ve always done; you put it in a song. You give shape to the story you carry; you gain closure by offering others catharsis. Is that enough? Does it make what happened worth it? Is it healthy, is it healing? Is it good? Asking that makes me think of how the creature eating his heart answers that question in the Stephen Crane poem, “In the Desert”:
“It is bitter—bitter,” he answered;
“But I like it
“Because it is bitter,
“And because it is my heart.”
I told you I don’t have some grand thesis about this album, but, you know—if you wanted one, I think you could do worse than that.
Ann Powers also nods to the influence of rap in Taylor’s cadence and writing—not the same thing as Taylor rapping, at which she is demonstrably very bad—in her review, which contains some interesting thoughts although it also kind of does that Taylor Matters For Girl Feelings Reasons thing I find so annoying.
The other joke of the song, of course, is that its production is a pitch-perfect homage to the kind of soupy alt-rock all over the charts during the years Taylor Swift was or would have been in high school.
When she doesn’t, it’s usually not about rhyme but about pushing stress patterns too far. She pulls that off reasonably often, too—nearly all songwriters, including among the all-time greats, massage their verbal rhythms through performance—but, for example, “who would have bullied you in school” in Chloe or Sam or Sophia or Marcus grates in a way that doesn’t feel deliberate or justified.
Google’s pronunciation tool marks it as two syllables and spells the last one kluht, but their demo sounds to my ears much as I’ve described: chock-lit.
She’s used the trick of rhyming across verses to deepen the structure of a song at least once before that I can think of: the first two choruses of All Too Well, little town street/middle of the night. The final chorus breaks the pattern in terms of rhyme, meter, and meaning, cutting that extra syllable to shift from scenic recall to plaintive emotional declaration—loved you so—and it’s part of how that last verse sticks the landing.
It’s also not new for her. Peace, on Folklore, contains a few unrhymed lines, including “All these people think love’s for show but I would die for you in secret.”
To my knowledge, although I have not fact-checked this, that’s the only specific example she’s given of songwriting that influenced her; in a different interview, she also named Blank Space as a song that owes its craft to Fall Out Boy. It’s worth noting that the song she quoted, Sugar, We’re Goin Down, also (1) plays extremely loose with rhyme in the verses and (2) contains the incredibly Swiftian line that I couldn’t resist using for a title.
From Greenwald’s 2003 book, Nothing Feels Good: Punk Rock, Teenagers, and Emo, in which The Starting Line makes a number of appearances.
Thanks to Nick for offering up these songs I had never listened to when I asked him to fact-check this sentence, which illustrate the point better than I could have dreamed.
I said nothing about avoiding reference to possible fictional inspirations, so I will toss out that given that Taylor is a known Game of Thrones fan and has cited the show as inspiration before, I think there’s a non-zero possibility she wrote this thinking about Daenerys right before she gets stabbed.
Seeing people act like “not relatable” is a meaningful criticism of art mostly makes me think quiet, honey, the grown-ups are talking, but I’ll indulge this once: this is, to me, easily in the top five most relatable songs Taylor has ever put out. While I’m here, I’ll also say: you know what? All my friends DO smell like weed or little babies!
I mean this as a huge compliment, obviously, and will say while we’re here that the joke in Pop Star: Never Stop Never Stopping about a spot at the VMAs opening up because Taylor Swift got arrested for murder remains the funniest Taylor Swift joke anyone’s ever made.
I could swear I remember reading she had said she deliberately used an instrument she didn’t know well to capture a sense of struggle, but the closest thing I can find to substantiation for that two decades later is the Nick Hornby quote excerpted on the Genius page, so possibly I picked up false info in a game of mental telephone, or possibly she did say that but it has been lost to the Internet winds.
With Taylor, to be frank, this quality is not aways a positive. Starlight and This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things are both aggressively Taylor-ish Taylor songs, to their detriment.
She’s baiting us but we don’t have to fall for it!
I’m just a woman with perimenopause insomnia who wants to read brilliant, detailed dissections of Taylor swift and Tortured Poets in the middle of the night and damn you scratched that itch with acrylic nails
Love this <3