Read on Twitter
Okay, here we go. Here's my thread with first, unfinished, messy thoughts on EVERMORE. https://twitter.com/LennartSpion/status/1286580569741185026
The album starts very different. FOLKLORE starts with the soft piano notes and chill vibes of the 1, EVERMORE starts with the energetic acoustic guitar of willow.
Rather than laid back, we hear a more hurt/threatening TS, reminding me of some of the songs on reputation intonation wise, albeit acoustic here.
She mentions wine in her first verse, which made me think about the amount of wine in her star text recently -- she often posts herself drinking wine on social media, she incorporated it lyrically, she drank it throughout the Disney+ lake concert.
I'm not a food scholar, but wine often signifies maturity and class. In movies, it often accompanies friendship and romance. It is a symbol of fragmentation: grapes get fermented and turn into wine.
Wine implies the nearness of a loss of control from getting drunk, but when the drinker does not get drunk it symbolizes the opposite: full control over the self and all of its urges. The biblical connotation of wine is purity and holiness, because of its connection to Jesus.
The chorus is classic conservative het-Taylor: following her man around wherever he goes (mirroring the lyrics of LOVER), asking him to wreck her plans (mirroring the lyrics of AUGUST).
I will never forgive her for the line 'I come back stronger than a '90s trend'. No.
Some people have pointed out cardigans were big in the 90s. She named a FOLKLORE song after it and sells cardigans in her merch and wears it in the music video for WILLOW:
A lot of fans think she has married Joe Alwyn in secret, see: https://www.news.com.au/entertainment/celebrity-life/taylor-swift-fans-convinced-shes-married-joe-alwyn/news-story/831dac1b43931427c073915325d40520
She wears the dress from that picture in the music video as well. The video starts where the music video for CARDIGAN ended, but then shows her following a golden rope in a magical forest. She is barefooted, just like in her early music videos.
In TIM MCGRAW, her first music video ever, she also wears white dresses and walks around barefeet:
In WILLOW, she goes looking for her lover but as she jumps into the water she transforms into a small girl (that looks nothing like TS) only to then reappear in a glass case that according to Swift represents how she feels about fame.
The set design of the indoor spaces reminds me of her 2010 VMA performance of INNOCENT, very Gone-with-the-wind-y:
I know I keep bringing this article up, but you should really read Cullen's THE INNOCENT AND THE RUNAWAY: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/jpms.12160
Anywho-- she dances in a circle of witches that reminds me of MADWOMAN (interesting read on TS and the witch motif: https://medium.com/@shmylaaa/taylor-swift-and-the-witch-motif-4ec5a511db87) and is ultimately united with her lover at the end of her video (the actor is a dancer from her RED tour).
Also -- I am not a fan of this white fairytale stuff (read more about that here https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/19392397.2020.1704431) and find her investment in these visuals and her glorification of nature kind of tiring
CHAMPAGNE PROBLEMS is about a failed marriage proposal. It's almost LOVER's evil twin. Although the title is meant in a cynical manner, it thoroughly classes Swift, just as THE LAST GREAT AMERICAN DYNASTY did on FOLKLORE.
I did not find this song particularly interesting, but if you do I would encourage you to go and spend some time on Swiftie reddit (there are threads for all the songs): https://www.reddit.com/r/TaylorSwift/comments/kavz9o/champagne_problems_discussion_megathread/
GOLD RUSH is Swift being convinced that everyone wants to steal her boyfriend and struggling with her strong feelings for him. I like how she acknowledges how her views of him are altered by her love, for example when she sings "my mind turns your life into folklore"
(Not to get too dark here but I like the implication of love as an act as dehumanization that it carries with it -- turning someone into a story rather than person)
This song also shows Swift taking some responsibility for dating white men when she sings "At dinner parties I won't call you out on your contrarian shit," which is honestly the least white women dating white men can do. White men's contrarian shit has to be called out.
By calling him out Swift is trying to civilize him, which is very different from this year's other dinner table song: UNDER THE TABLE by Fiona Apple. Apple is not trying to civilize anyone but rather is the contrarian and obstructive person herself.
This gives it a completely different political feel. Whereas Swift's boyfriend was probably being annoying playing the devil's advocate, one of the white man's greatest hobbies, Apple was probably ranting about misogyny. Both songs feel extremely white though, lyrically.
someone on the reddit thread said they were listening 'TIS THE DAMN SEASON while reading Sally Rooney's Normal People and I can't get over how perfect that combination is.
First of all, I really like that it is a holiday song without sappy holiday themes/sounds. No chime-bells!!!!!
It's the first time a TS song has a curse word in the title. There's a lot of fucks on FOLKLORE and EVERMORE in general. That's pretty new for TS. She's done being a good girl, she seems to want to say (even though she is still trying to be real good at the same time)
The song is connected to DOROTHEA and focuses around a small story of a girl leaving a small town to get famous in Hollywood. In this song, the protagonist comes home for the holiday weekend and hooks up with an old flame.
The chorus has a nice reference to Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken": https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44272/the-road-not-taken
In the bridge she mentions 'so-called friends' -- real and fake friendships have been a theme throughout Taylor's work, from the 'girl squad' that she assembled for sleepovers, parties and music videos to the presence of her all-time bestie Abigail in most of the things she does.
Fake friends have reappeared a lot too -- betrayal and abandonment keep returning in many of her post-1989 songs.
Track 5, as Swifties know, is an important one. Swift always puts an emotional song as the fifth track. Previous songs that held that position are ALL TOO WELL (RED), DELICATE (REPUTATION) and THE ARCHER (LOVER). She added TOLERATE IT to the Track 5 canon.
Last year, Swift explained in an IG live video that she was not aware she had this habit of putting vulnerable songs as Track 5, "But because you noticed this, I kind of started to put the songs that were really honest, emotional, vulnerable, and personal as track 5."
A wonderful example of Swift's fandom interactions adding to her star text.
I do not like this song at all. Swift infantilizes herself in it and that annoys me immensely. She does this way too often: she juxtaposes her lover's worldliness with her own childlike innocence. Women of the world: stop that.
Here she refers to her lover as older and wiser, while describing herself as waiting by the door "like I'm just a kid".
She falls into a classic gender representation thing, describing herself as trapped in the domestic, polishing plates and setting the table, while her lover is "building other worlds".
In a way, it almost feels like an exploration of these conservative gender and sexuality constructions that ultimately do not work out very well for the protagonist: she is not loved. With that it reminds me of Adrienne Rich's 1954 poem "Living In Sin": https://www.naic.edu/~gibson/poems/rich1.html
Hear me out. NO BODY, NO CRIME is Taylor Swift and Haim's ode to The Chicks' GOODBYE EARL (2003):
Both Swift and Haim thank The Chicks for all they did in music to create space for progressive women in countryfolk with this ode and I am here for it. It plays into the classic country trope of the woman done wrong, with her all-women friend group taking revenge upon the bad man
PLEASE let there be a music video for NO BODY, NO CRIME. PLEASE. I NEED IT.
NO BODY, NO CRIME starts with police sirens and Haim singing 'he did it'. Swift sings how Este (the real name of one of the Haim sisters) confides in her that her husband is cheating on her. Este disappears shortly after and his mistress moved in.
In the third verse, Swift sings about getting her boat and covering up a scene, with Este's sister giving her an alibi. Swift killed her HE HE HE.
If you haven't listened to Haim's WOMEN IN MUSIC PT. III (2020) by now you're missing out. Do it immediately. https://open.spotify.com/album/6NtEjhPWfZcvJQuvjGX4bk?si=8jXqQeivRcKEWiOLISK0Zg
The Chicks' GASLIGHTER (2020) is also worth giving a go icymi: https://open.spotify.com/album/1YV5Rh6n8dLOycCqWcUSq4?si=-jWySOf-QVW3F4i3FP8qTA
I like HAPPINESS because of its complexity. I actually think this should have been Track 5 and I think it's one of the best songs she's ever written. Excellent stuff.
A relationship ends: "I was dancing when the music stopped / And in the disbelief, I can't face reinvention / I haven't met the new me yet." I like how it combines Swift's returning theme of reinvention, blurring the lines between a personal, interpersonal and celebrity level.
"There'll be happiness after you / But there was happiness because of you / Both of these things can be true" is a balanced breakup Swift, mirroring THE 1 but with way more space for strong emotions.
When she's frustrated, she sings: "Tell me, when did your winning smile/ Begin to look like a smirk?/ When did all our lessons start to look like weapons/ Pointed at my deepest hurt/ I hope she'll be your beautiful fool/ Who takes my spot next to you."
The song comes to a hard stop immediately after when Swift cuts her narrative off by saying "No, I didn't mean that", emphasizing herself as an unreliable narrator. She adds: "Sorry, I can't see facts through all of my fury, you haven't met the new me yet."
It is a beautiful display of the not just interpersonal but often individual introspective struggles between emotional and rational ideas (often way more entangled than we care to admit) about ourselves and romantic love when love ends. I like it a lot.
Another thing to pay attention to is how Swift calls the breakup "our great divide", pointing to The Great Divide ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_Divide_of_the_Americas) --> Swift often uses metaphors that rely on America when talking about love.
Now we arrive at one of the two songs that I immediately liked when I heard them -- instantly added them to my favorite songs. In DOROTHEA we meet the protagonist from TIS THE DAMN SEASON again, but from the perspective of her hometown hookup.
It's funny that she sings 'making a lark' bc it is British slang for having fun -- an ode to her love for her British boyfriend?
CONEY ISLAND is the other song I immediately added to my favorite songs. I liked the reference to DELICATE, another TS song I like a lot, in the line "Did I close my fist around something delicate? Did I shatter you?"
I deeply hate the line "'Cause we were like the mall before the internet, It was the one place to be." Bad. Anyhow, it relates to Coney Island as place of decay -- the mall as a placeholder in the US cultural imaginary that has now been taken over by the internet is interesting
Coney Island (and later 'the mall', and afterwards, according to Swift, the Internet) originally symbolized the working class dreams in America: it was a dream of a raceless, classless space of entertainment and consumerism. I'm talking about the 1861 idea of it here.
It was an amusement park without an entrance fee: accessible to all New Yorkers willing to take the subway down to it. Bc the subway ride would cost 5 cents it became known as 'The Nickel Empire'.
Its openness and accessibility made it into a symbol of the American democratic dream: anyone could visit the amusement park, its boardwalk and beach.
It also used to host a lot of problematic circus and carnival acts, putting people with disabilities on display next to wild animals, pointing to America's willingness to exploit in service of entertainment.
It offered thrills, like The Wonder Wheel and The Human Roulette Wheel, that one could not find elsewhere pre-second world war.
The movie THE LITTLE FUGITIVE (1953) shows what Coney Island's heyday looked like, in case you're interested: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0046004/
After that, Coney Island decayed. It could not compete with rival entertainment sources. Other, more modern and innovative amusements parks arrived.
TVs entered living rooms. Car sales went up, allowing NY-ers to avoid the busy subway and crowded Coney Island beach and drive to Jones Beach or Rye Beach instead.
When I visited it years ago it felt desolate. Gritty. The affective landscape was one marked by unhappiness, embodying the American nightmare rather than dream.
It had been hit hard by Hurricane Sandy in 2012, although the famous Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Contest sign still stood there. I took a picture of it. In 2018, NY announced expansion plans, but when COVID hit these plans were paused. The park has mostly remained closed this year.
The song CONEY ISLAND plays into all of this -- promises and dreams falling apart.
The bridge is interesting, because Matt Berninger becomes an amalgamation of Swift's exes, combining them into one big bad boyfriend. Jake Gyllenhaal, who missed TS's 21st birthday party -- sth she sings about on "THE MOMENT I KNEW" (RED);
Harry Styles, whose song "MEET ME IN THE HALLWAY" is pointed at in the line "were you standing in the hallway";
John Mayer, about who Swift sang "You paint me a blue sky / then go back and turn it to rain" (DEAR JOHN, 2010), w Berninger here singing "Did I paint your bluest skies the darkest grey?"
Harry Styles again, referencing OUT OF THE WOODS (2014) and the car accident in the song with the lines "and when I got into the accident"; Adam Wiles/Calvin Harris with "But when I walked up to the podium I think that I forgot to say your name,"
referring to 2016 when Swift thanks Wiles in her speech when she received an iHeartRadio Award while he, later that year, forgot to mention her when he won a GQ Men of the Year Award.
The song seems to relate to MISS AMERICANA & THE HEARTBREAK PRINCE too, discussing the decaying American dream: "wondering where did my baby go/ the fast times, the bright lights, the merry go" and "the gift-wrapped suburban dreams/ sorry for not winning you an arcade ring".
IVY tells the story about a married woman who has an affair, relating the song to ILLICIT AFFAIRS (FOLKLORE). Both are track 10 on their respective albums.
"I'd meet you where the spirit meets the bone" is a line from Miller Williams "Compassion" (1997) and signifies the deep connection the protagonist feels http://www.yourdailypoem.com/listpoem.jsp?poem_id=1916
It's a song that again has 'goddamn' in the lyrics -- HAPPINESS has it too. Again: this is significant, because Swift used to write... differently.
There are a lot of queer readings of this song. On reddit, some have called it "sapphic cottagecore for the ages". Others have argued it's about Emily Dickinson and Susan Gilbert: https://www.brainpickings.org/2018/12/10/emily-dickinson-love-letters-susan-gilbert/
This ties in with the theory that the title of the album, EVERMORE, points towards Dickinson. Released on ED's birthday, it's title could refer to ED's "One Sister Have I In Our House" -- a poem Dickinson wrote for Gilbert: https://poets.org/poem/one-sister-have-i-our-house-14
COWBOY LIKE ME is one of the most country sounding songs. It's kind of problematic, bc like in many of these songs, Swift adopts a white working class position, dreaming of financial wealth while being one of the richest pop stars on earth.
Specifically gross during the covid crisis, in which many celebrities have been called out on their class privileges. It is strange Swift escapes all this, especially because she *has* been called on it during specifically her RED/1989 era.
Anyhow, I do not really need her to sing about "hustling for a good life" and am just not a fan of that southern country chic white working class thing she keeps claiming while growing up on a christmas tree farm w two parents who work in finance,
who have always owned multiple (summer) houses and were able to relocate to Nashville for her career when she was 15 and singing about her riches and champagne problems elsewhere.
LONG STORY SHORT is, long story short, again the story about how Swift was demonized, something that she already discussed in REPUTATION, LOVER and FOLKLORE. She sings about losing herself and then finding her boyfriend at her lowest moment and being finally happy.
Noticeable lyric: "I wanna tell you not to get lost in these petty things / Your nemeses / Will defeat themselves before you get the chance to swing -- obviously a jab at Kanye's public downfall.
MARJORIE pays homage to Swift's grandmother Marjorie Finlay. It is track 13, tying it to track 13 of FOLKLORE that was about her grandfather, Dean. Swift's grandmother died in 2003 and was an opera singer. Marjorie is credited with background vocals in the album notes.
It's nice to have a song about the death of grandparents. We don't have that many of them and it's such an interesting relation and specific grief. I've been thinking about this a lot recently. Am currently writing some stuff about it for my Instagram icyi.
As @bvdpim rightfully remarked -- having a song after a song called CLOSURE should be illegal, yet here we are.
Anyhow, CLOSURE is different, sonically. I've seen it described as "industrial-folk", with the drums likened to the sound of Nine Inch Nails. It's about an ex who wants closure and a narrator who refuses to offer it and doesn't need it.
It is produced by Dessner, but also by James McAlister (mostly known for his work with Sufjan Stevens, which immediately made the drums make sense to me) and BJ Burton (best known for his work with Bon Iver). This all makes so much sense music wise.
It kind of paves the way for EVERMORE, the title track. EVERMORE is another collaboration with Bon Iver. Both EXILE and EVERMORE have been co-written by Joe Alwyn. I dont like it, although I can understand it is probably the most interesting song on here with its shifting music.
I usually quite like that -- when songs have multiple songs in them -- but idk. I guess I'm just slightly tired of Bon Iver atm. It again discusses Swift's downfall and how she found her boyfriend in her moment of need. Yeah yeah, we know. Enough already! Get a room!
It is filled w references to the other Bon Iver collab, FOLKLORE'S EXILE. There the lyrics go 'You're not my homeland anymore/ So what am I defending now'. Here they go 'Guess I'm feeling unmoored/ Can't remember what I used to fight for'.
There they sing: "You never gave a warning sign (I gave so many signs)", here they sing "Sending signals". She sings about being barefoot, an image and idea that returns throughout her work, placing her in close relation to nature, symbolizing purity and authenticity.
The link w nature is also emphasized in the beginning of the track with bird sounds. In the bridge Vernon and Swift again sing over each other, just like in EXILE, repeating the verses. I do like the slowing down and the silence that follows the bridge, a moment of reflection.
The deluxe version of the album will have two more tracks: RIGHT WHERE YOU LEFT ME and IT'S TIME TO GO. I'll try to add sth about these songs here when they come out (although I might forget that I said this)
