Date: December 13, 2020
Time of post: 3:32 AM
Quarantine Day: 263
Last Song I Listened To: “evermore” by Taylor Swift
Last Person I Communicated With: Noelle Braaten on Zoom
Last Thing I Ate: butterscotch candy
Last Thing I Read: fanfic (that's all I read these days!)
Current Mood: pretty shook about 2 T. Swift albums in 2020, if I'm honest
One Thing I’ve Accomplished Today (technically yesterday): finished the box of wine I got at Thanksgiving!
One Thing I Want To Accomplish Today: finish packing
One Reason I’m Stressed Today: packing
One Reason I’m Happy Today (technically yesterday): The English Department had its holiday party over Zoom, and I got to be part of the reading! (I played Miss Prism in our abridged scenes from The Importance of Being Earnest)
 |
| The cover of Taylor Swift's 9th studio album, evermore |
Dear Apocalypsers,
She. Did. It. Again.
About 7:45AM the morning of December 10, 2020, I was rather rudely awoken by the persistent buzzing of my phone—a group chat was going off…and going off…and going off. It was too early, so I almost just silenced my phone without checking it, but then I saw two words guaranteed to make me pay attention: “Taylor Swift.” Apparently, my friends have grownup jobs that require them to be awake before 8AM on a weekday, so they got the Tay news as soon as it dropped. Meanwhile, I had been awake until 3 or 4AM and wasn’t planning on being awake for another 2-4 hours.
 |
| My friends get me |
“What ‘Tay news’?” you ask.
Taylor Alison Swift announced her ninth studio album, evermore,
and my friends were right—I did break when I found out.
 |
| Please ignore my typos; I was half-asleep and freaking out. |
This woman has put out 3 albums in 15 months: Lover
(August 23, 2019); folklore (July 24, 2020), and evermore (December
11, 2020). [Side note: if I was a hardcore Twitter Swiftie—which is its own specific
vibe—I’d say something about how releasing Lover in August when all her
previous album releases were late October or November was an Easter egg for the
song “august” on folklore.]
 |
| Peep what I changed the groupchat name to |
I will never be able to reiterate enough that Taylor
Swift is a musical legend. And I have literally cried about the fact that not
only am I alive at the same time as her, but I’m in the right age group to be
her fan. I remember watching her first music videos on CMT when I was 11. (“OurSong” is particularly special to me.) I remember wearing out the repeat button
on my purple portable CD player listening to “The Other Side of the Door” the
Christmas that the Fearless: Platinum Edition (2009) CD was released. I remember
buying Speak Now (2010) with my own money and immediately putting it
into that same purple portable CD player as soon as my family got into our
minivan. And that CD player was the first place I heard “All Too Well”—and where
I replayed it dozens of times upon first listening to Red (2012). I remember
Taylor’s transition to pop music my freshman year of college and watching the “BlankSpace” music video on my lofted dorm room bed. I remember forcing my non-Swiftie
best friend to watch the “Look What You Made Me Do” on the floor of her
apartment our senior year. I remember the K*nye drama and the ridicule and Taylor
deleting her social media. I remember letting my students watch the “ME!” music
video in class when I was a GTA and, the next semester, using “The Man” to talk
about gender in our visual analysis unit. And I remember (vividly) the delirious
elation I felt when she announced folklore this summer. (Relive it with
me here.)
This is, in many ways, a thank you letter to Taylor. Her music is what I've been turning to for almost half my life, and these 2 latest albums have been highlights during the most difficult year of my life. I think what drew me to her originally were her lyrics. Even at 15 & 16, she was writing these stories--about love and loss and pain and life--with the sweetest, most specific details that made me feel like we were part of each other's lives, like I knew her and she knew me. (I wonder if she would have done that had she known all the hell she'd get for it from critics. I like to think she would. She's a storyteller, and the haters really are just gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate.) I mean, sure, there is a lyric in "A Perfectly Good Heart" that goes "It's not unbroken anymore" which isn't exactly Shakespeare, but that album also gave us "So you come away with a great little story of a mess of a dreamer with the nerve to adore you" ("Cold As You") and "I guess it's true that love was all you wanted / 'Cause you're giving it away like it's extra change / Hoping it will end up in his pocket / But he leaves you out like a penny in the rain / Oh, 'cause it's not his price to pay" ("Tied Together With a Smile")--which I think are two of the most viscerally painful lyrics at least of her country albums.
For me, Taylor understands what makes us human, and she articulates it better than people with 2 or 3 English degrees. You don't even have to be going through a breakup to understand, "And you call me up again just to break me like a promise, so casually cruel in the name of being honest" ("All Too Well"). The imagery, especially in her country days, is delightfully specific--and somehow universal in that specificity. To use "All Too Well" again (partially because it's considered by a lot of people to be her best song), the second verse opens like this:
"Photo album on the counter
Your cheeks were turning red
You used to be a little kid with glasses in a twin sized bed
And your mother's telling stories about you on the tee ball team
You taught me about your past thinking your future was me"
And the second chorus goes:
"'Cause there we are again in the middle of the night
We're dancing 'round the kitchen in the refrigerator light
Down the stairs, I was there
I remember it all too well"
You might not have those specific moments with an ex-love, but you know that feeling of learning about each other's lives and meeting their families and trying to fit yourself into their world. You have those moments of intimacy where it was just the two of you and it felt like the whole world. Hell, I don't even have an ex-love, and I can relate to that feeling! I've lost friendships I thought would last forever. I've watched friends get hurt by their own Jake Gyllenhaals.
Taylor has gotten a lot of flack for writing about her love life, and I could go on and on about how sexist that is, but what you learn from all those heartbreak songs is that she wants what we all want--to be loved. That's the topic of some of the greatest poems and plays and novels and films in history. And Taylor's love songs--including break up songs--are just her trying to find that love, even "when it's hard or it's wrong or [she's] making mistakes" to quote "New Year's Day."
There are plenty of Taylor Swift songs from her first 7 albums that aren't about romantic love, but I won't list them...yes I will: "Tied Together With a Smile," "A Place in This World," "The Outside," "Fifteen," "The Best Day," "Change," "Innocent," "Mean," "Never Grow Up," "The Lucky One," "22," "Welcome to New York," "Shake It Off," "Bad Blood," "I Did Something Bad," "Look What You Made Me Do," "This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things," "The Man," "Soon You'll Get Better," "You Need To Calm Down" (and these are just the ones that are explicitly not about a romantic relationship; I'd also argue that "Afterglow," "ME!," "Clean," and "I'm Only Me When I'm With You" don't have to be read as romantic, either).
 |
| From my folklore inspired photoshoot in November: "I'm still on that tightrope /I'm still trying everything to get you laughing at me" ("mirrorball") |
And I've grown up right beside her.
And this doesn't even get into folklore, where her storytelling returned with a vengeance and instead of giving us accounts of her private life, she gave us worlds with characters and settings that we could very well could find in our own hometowns. From James skating down the sidewalk in front of their ex's house ("betty") to a small town with a single movie theater screen ("this is me trying") to Centennial Park and the invisible string that ties two people together ("invisible string"), folklore just confirms that Taylor Swift probably has some kind of spellcasting magic in her blood with the way she manipulates language. She's certainly had me under her spell for a while.
 |
| "Please picture me in the weeds" ("seven") |
 |
| "Please picture me in the trees" ("seven") |
I’ve grown up with Taylor Swift, and I’ve loved her through every era—even when she “wasn’t cool” when I was in high school, even when she was “basic” in undergrad, and even when half the world thought she was a snake.
But now it’s 2020, and I think you’re the
uncool one if you can’t admit to liking Taylor Swift, or, at the very least,
appreciating what she’s done for the music industry. She’s fought for better
artist compensation on streaming services and for artists to be able to own the
rights to their own music (as opposed to their record labels owning them)—and good
news! She outright owns all of Lover, folklore, and evermore
after leaving Big Machine Records and signing with Republic. (There is so much
drama around the masters recordings of her first 6 albums, but she is re-recording
them so that she’ll own them, too!)
But, okay. Now we have folklore and evermore
both released in 2020, and Taylor has called them sisters.
In a letter to the fans, she wrote:
“I’ve never done this before. In the past I’ve always treated albums as one-off eras and moved onto planning the next one after an album was released. There was something different with folklore. In making it, I felt less like I was departing and more like I was returning. I loved the escapism I found in these imaginary/not imaginary tales. I loved the ways you welcomed the dreamscapes and tragedies and epic tales of love lost and found into your lives. So I just kept writing them.”
As I write this, it’s just after 1AM on Taylor’s 31st
birthday. She’s been releasing music since she was 16, and I get the feeling
that she’ll be doing it for—well—evermore. And, if I may paraphrase a song from her debut album, “When I’ll be 83, she’ll be 89 / I’ll still look at her like
the stars that shine.”
Forever & Always, Long Live, evermore,
Katie
No comments:
Post a Comment