It’s a love story – or is it? Conflict and sudden chaos in Taylor Swift’s songs about commitment | Taylor Swift

WWhen she was 19 and already had her second album under her belt, Taylor Swift made sure to tell a would-be lover he was mistaken for her: “I’m not your princess, this ain’t our fairy tale… It’s too late for you and your white horse to catch me now,” she sang in her 2008 song “White Horse.” Then, as now, Swift loved a happy ending: she had no objection to rewriting Romeo and Juliet to end with the marriage in a story Love, or the fantasy of stealing a boy from his bad girlfriend in You Belong With Me, both from the same White Horse album. She just didn’t want a man to come along and rescue her from the chaos of life, like the prince in an early Disney movie whose appearance signified marriage, a happily ever after, and the end of a young girl’s life.

It was always easy to dismiss this story; Even Disney was parodying it as early as Sleeping Beauty. Like many women of her generation, Swift had a complicated relationship with everything that marriage entailed, at least in how she wrote about it. When she met Travis Kelce, the man she is now set to marry, she had just come off her 2022 album Midnights, on which she repeatedly made clear that she could and would dump any man, even a perfectly nice one, who stood between her and her ambition. “He wanted a bride/I was making my own name,” she sang on “Midnight Rain.” In Bejeweled, the tone toward the neglected “baby” is even harsher: “I miss you…but I miss the sparkle.” No one will be able to end Taylor Swift’s story, because there are only two forces that can end it. One is God. The other is Taylor Swift.

Swift’s narrators and heroines, faced with domesticity at the end of the story, inevitably flee, even if they don’t really know why. “Sometimes, you don’t know the answer until someone gets down on their knees and asks you,” muses the narrator in her 2020 song “Champagne Issues.” She imagines her jilted lover’s family and friends telling him “What a shame she had sex in her head,” and she doesn’t really seem to disagree with that assessment. She just knows she can’t say yes. At the same time, the lasting bond of marriage is something that runs through her songs as a real goal: from early songs like “Mary” (2006), to the lover you can trust “like a brother” on “Call It What You Want” (2017), to the multiple proposals and hints at marriage on her 2019 album Lover. This would represent a kind of domesticity in which the story never ends, she has simply entered a new chapter.

But there’s another kind of fairy tale that girls absorb from popular culture, and it’s this: You meet a guy. You like him. He seems to like you. Then he will inevitably hurt you. However, you are not an angel yourself, and love is work, so you work at it. The more you work on it, the more you reaffirm how important this love is. The more you fight, the more you tighten your unbreakable bond. A man may do something bad, but he comes back and wants to make it better. Isn’t that what matters?

The feminine fantasy these stories capture is not that you will emerge from life’s general struggle into marital bliss, but rather that the person who hurt you will care enough to try to change. This other type of imaginary love is more tempting because it seems more real. You’re not asking for anything perfect. You are asking for something in return. You realize that there are a lot of things — social, political, and personality quirks — that could make it difficult for a man to connect with you. This is good! You He wants The prince who really tries (he really does) (it’s not like I’m making it easy).

This more nuanced story is the fantasy that Swift chased and perfected throughout much of her songwriting. She had always been as interested in life after the wedding as in courtship or a first meeting, but she imagined that life as one of struggle. Even “Mine,” a song from the 2010 film “Speak Now” that depicts a happy relationship, depicts a late-night fight that ends with its heroine running out into the street. If her songs were Instagram posts, many of them, especially on Lover, would be like a friend posting on her wedding anniversary how she and her boyfriend constantly fight and want to kill each other three times a day, but they won’t change things in the world.

In Love Story, Swift sang: “This love is hard / But it’s real.” This true and difficult love remained her ideal throughout most of her 12 albums. Love You Chase, Love You Leave; The love that heals you and breaks you; Love the false god, love the king of your heart; Love is like freedom, love is like prison; But never, never, easy love. I’ve always loved this side of Swift, this screwball heroine who dons a thousand disguises to pursue a man so she can reveal that she’s, as one great screwball movie says, “positively the same lady.” But the twist in songs, unlike movies, is that the guy always knew. He made Swift’s stories truly emotionally satisfying – where the hard work was a true labor of love because it was also completely unnecessary. This is the case with Americans, of which Taylor Swift is a great example: we don’t really trust anything that doesn’t require hard work. She wants us to know that she has guitar string scars on her hand.

That’s why it was so surprising when, when Swift was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in January, she quoted Steven Spielberg’s wife, Kate Capshaw, as saying that “good, real things are easy.” This is a new topic for Swift.

eEven in Swift’s sweetest love songs, there’s an unmistakable trace of doom. She was always looking over her shoulder. Perhaps there was an external threat, as in a love story. Perhaps there was a lot of baggage from the past, as in the 2012 song “Start Over,” where the song’s narrator says: “I think it’s weird that you think I’m funny because / He never did.” Even in Lover, the ostensibly most likely candidate for the first dance, we’re told: “I highly doubt everyone who sees you wants you.” With 12 albums of songs, she probably has a dozen love songs that I would call safe and unhaunted.

One of them is So High School, from 2024’s Tortured Poets section, a giddy sixpenny-richer creation about the joys of letting a giant man be really nice to you. Swift uses internal rhyme (in the pre-chorus alone: ​​”shimmer”, “crinklin”, “sinkin”, “pink”, “twinklin”, “drink”, “think”, “brink”, “wrinkle”) to build a sonic space where everything sounds magical and connected. She says she’s drunk and feels these feelings and it looks like she is. And if you’re thinking this song sounds a little stupid, she knows it, maintaining constant eye contact as she sings “Grand Theft Auto,” “You Know How to Play Ball” and “Full Throttle” with Aristotle. What are you going to do about it? Make a small job online?

Tormented Poets, though divisive upon its release, was the album I always wanted Swift to make: bold, angry, and heartbroken, Swift wages war on her public self through songs in which she inhabits different personas, such as the woman who may have killed her husband while fleeing to Florida. It even revisited the love story with the updated version of the bittersweet But I Love Him Daddy, where love still brings marriage but also the definite middle finger to expectations. In that song, she includes what could be the album’s thesis statement, which is that “growing up early sometimes means / not growing up at all.”

In Tormented Poets, Swift returns to her early dreams and deconstructs them. The lover who left but promised to return? It’s Peter Pan. Those guys who told you how great and mature you are for your age? It was just a line, a line they fed to all the girls. The man who swore it would be different this time? “A con man sells a fool a plan to get love fast.” The song shows Robin Swift watching a child play: She realizes that her early maturity has cost her this kind of unconsciousness. The final and most imprisoning illusion to overcome, on this album, is the belief that you are a rational person without illusions. True adult life, true adult love, true adult happiness, can only be gained by destroying the false maturity that made it easy to praise a wise-beyond-the-age teenager.

If good, real things are supposed to be easy, Swift didn’t do a very convincing job in last year’s The Life of a Showgirl. On an album supposedly about finding love with her current fiancé, Swift struggled to portray happiness, often resorting to artificial conflicts — pitting herself against mean girls in the bathroom, crass materialism, and online hate campaigns — on songs that were meant to highlight her newfound emotional comfort. Some of those songs were good: the upbeat “Opalite” is about finding happiness after mismatched relationships — but much like Begin Again, it relies on bad relationships to describe good ones. Swift is not blind to this trope: the eldest daughter clearly faces the problem of how to write about joy after spending so much of her life on the defensive. It’s about Swift not being so cool and acting tough, but now she’s found true love and can let go of that behavior. It has a beautiful bridge that paints a picture of love that is “Ferris wheels, kisses, and purple flowers.” However, to get to that bridge, you have to sit through Swift as she sadly sings: “I’m not a bad bitch.” It sounds like an air horn every time, though it’s an interesting wrinkle in a sense of bewilderment, if not fully realized. If true love sounds easy, maintaining that sense of uncomplicated joy in music is not.

There’s a certain type of fan who’s convinced that marriage is the end of Swift’s story; Her next album, her lucky number 13, will be her last. i doubt it. What is more likely is that for some of these fans marriage is the end of their interests: once Taylor Swift is definitely married to a specific man, she will stop reflecting their own life back to them. But for Swift, marriage was always the beginning of another story. She will not give up telling her new love story after her failed attempt. She can, hopefully, write an album that presents happiness in all its complexity. Sometimes the prince actually appears on a white horse. But there’s no telling where this horse will travel. Giddy up and off he went.