#also she isn't really the point of the post but taylor has some great expressions there

[swiftiephobe]

fawk it it's my blog and i can post it what i want so first impression ttpd thoughts below the cut (this has SPOILERS spoilers so if you don't want to know about the album content then don't read! you have been sufficiently warned 🫶) also i've listened exactly once so i make no promises of these thoughts being coherent or accurate they are just random silly musings.

first we have to establish: it's good and i like it

when midnights released and lots of people were expressing disappointment about the pop sound i said that i understood but i loved the album as a return to and synthesis of her pop sound. but for her next album i was ready for her to try something new then. this isn't that and yeah i'm a bit disappointed by it. i would've liked to see more experimentation in the production. a fair few of the songs kinda just coast past me because they don't stand out from what she's done before.

that being said, the highs are REALLY high and i think that's due to the lyrics. i think some of these songs have her most upfront lyricism... ever? like a lot of the lyrics are just very straight to the point, she lays out exactly what she wants to say even when it's a bit nasty. i kinda love that? i think the lyrics are deceptively simple and sometimes they seem a bit clunky but i definitely appreciate what she's going for and for the songs where the approach hits it REALLY hits.

like she really just does seem so done with the bullshit here like she is going to say what she has to say whether we like it or not. there's like an undercurrent of frustration in the album???

people are going to be so annoying about the functional alcoholic lyric in fortnight i can just tell lol.

people are also going to be sooo annoying about but daddy i love him lmfao. and when i say she's kinda right for saying what she said in that song what then.

actually scratch that a lot more of this album is about matty than expected and people are definitely going to be annoyed/annoying about it lol. me? i'm giggling.

honestly joe does not get that much of a dragging here lol the people who have been chomping at the bit to revel in how terrible of a person he is are going to be disappointed. like obviously their breakup hurt taylor a lot and she's sad & angry about it but i don't get the impression he actually did any of the awful things people were speculating he did. they just. were great partners for each other until they weren't.

just a few weeks ago i was wondering what made taylor take such a massive step back from that personal engagement with the fans she used to have. and well. i think i kinda have my answer with this album. not directly (except for but daddy i love him) but just reading between the lines.

it's hard to say where there will sit in my overall album ranking? i don't think it's going to make it into my top picks. it might end up being somewhere in the middle? which y'know it's unfortunate to not have found a new fave but i still like the album!

highlights: the tortured poets department, so long london, but daddy i love him, fresh out the slammer, who's afraid of little old me?, i can do it with a broken heart, the smallest man who ever lived

[walkuntilthedaylight]

The people have spoken! How can I not give them what they want?

I'm gonna put this all under a cut, since it's a bit long, and also because it's highly interpretative/speculative and not everyone likes those kinds of posts as they can be rather subjective and, I suppose, invasive. I want to give two major caveats to my thoughts below: first is that I tend not to buy the idea that Paul was the "stable/normal" Beatle, mostly b/c I view marijuana dependency and workaholism as addictions and I take them pretty seriously. Second is that I really do love this kind of tabloid/gossip/personal account shit; I think it should be taken with a handful of salt, but I don't think it should be entirely dismissed out of hand either. I read this stuff like I'm piling up sheets of stained glass: I'm intrigued by the places where the colours blend and overlap, and ignore things that fall outside the prism. Anyway, let's dig in:

Okay, so what I found fascinating about 'Body Count' is that it's one of the only sources which observes Paul McCartney's mental health during the period between the India trip and when the band breakup really got rolling. I think it's overall a fairly self-absorbed text that definitely has some lies and exaggerations peppered in there to make things spicier and more dramatic, but its broad characterization - as I mentioned in my first post - isn't exactly libelous or out of left field. Some elements that make me think it's generally if not wholly authentic are: Paul's simultaneously forceful and dorky seduction style, his terrible Liverpool diet and poor housekeeping, the bouts of thrill-seeking recklessness, avoidant adventure crafting, dark moods when drinking non-socially, the occasional hot and cold bouts with the Apple Scuffs camped out at his gate, and the way in which he underplays his drug habit, which is SO "in truthfulness we spent most of the filming of Help! slightly stoned":

These details are so bizarrely specific and have significant overlap with both sympathetic and spurned personal accounts of Paul I've read in the past, so I believe Francie is just telling "Her Version Of The Truth" here rather than crafting a piece of pure fiction. The most important and revealing anecdote in the book is this one.

There's no reason not to believe this is a fairly accurate representation of something that actually happened, imo, since we know that anxious purse strings were an ongoing issue in the unusual turnover rate within the band Wings, and there are plenty of confirmed and rumoured cases alike of extended family members feeling entitled to a "piece of the pie"; this is just like, the kind of thing that happens to working class people who get catapulted into fame and fortune. And Paul in particular already had deep-seated financial anxiety for whatever reasons he'll never fully admit (as is his right, but I think his offhand claim that he "once heard some adults arguing about money and that's why" might actually be alluding to having heard some adults - y'know, like his parents - arguing over money fairly frequently). What esp interests me about the anecdote is the way Paul seems to connect the conflict b/t his dual "identities" with these financial expectations. Perhaps the CAPSLOCK emotional hysteria related in the book is puffed up for drama, but it does bring to mind one of the most revealing comments Linda ever made about their relationship, which is that Paul needed to be told he would still be loved when the cameras weren't rolling. And that's the thing: Francie caught Paul at the exact moment that the pillars of his Smile-For-The-Camera "Beatle" identity were collapsing; the dissolution of his relationships with John and Jane.

Whatever all this could possibly mean re: the breakup of the Lennon-McCartney partnership is a post for another time. What I wanna do instead is apply the level of speculation we usually reserve for that relationship to the endpoint of Paul and Jane's courtship.

So like, Paul and Jane: I know people are resistant to this specific POV, but I honestly just don't... think it was that deep? "Not deep", mind you, doesn't mean "not significant". Paul was obviously Jane's first love (u never forget), but the feeling I get from Paul's side (as a subconscious process I mean) is that Jane's importance was primarily as a lynchpin in his London Socialite persona. He loved her family, he loved the friend group, the artistic scene dating her gave him access to, as well as the leg up he got in the class system, etc. He liked to be the kind of guy who was dating Jane Asher. But I don't know that he was the guy who was dating Jane Asher, you get me? When people describe their "great love" they accidentally tell on them (Cynthia innocently describing Paul as being pleased to have her on his arm like a trophy; John: "it was an ordinary love scene"; Alistair Taylor noting that Paul was humiliated by the breakup). Paul's a serial monogamist who U-Hauls like a lesbian, of course, so he definitely took the relationship VERY seriously, but it's telling that all of his love songs to her were either about hitting a brick wall in arguments (certainly not dreamy, fond, yearning of "sunday morning fights about saturday night"; and occasionally expressing hints of class tension too), or completely non-descript Guy With A Guitar Trying To Get Laid shit. I could extrapolate a lot about Linda just from listening to McCartney I/RAM and the Wings discography, but 'And I Love Her' doesn't tell me a single thing about Jane besides that she's pretty. It could be about literally anyone the same way 'My Love' or 'Maybe I'm Amazed' could only be about his dynamic with Linda. Some of this is obviously the natural result of getting older and gaining emotional maturity; what I'm saying is that Paul's behaviour and self-expression in this relationship does not suggest to me that it was one in which his emotional maturity was able to develop or flourish.

I want to stress again that I don't think this belittles the significance of the relationship or makes it "bad" or "fake". Like, sometimes hot people just date for a while in their teens and twenties and love each other without necessarily unlocking their inner emotional cores, usually because they don't know how to. It's, like, fine. You need to experience relationships like that as stepping stones. I simply believe that this sort of front-facing social importance being prime in the romance is a major factor in why it ultimately didn't work (and probably in Linda's reported lingering jealousy of Jane, who wasn't just an ex, but also a symbol of the life Paul ditched to build a new identity w/ her, and sometimes still pined for). With Jane, Paul was dating the "right" kind of girl (didn't put out on the first date, erudite and middle class, as serious about her career as he was, a good "celebrity" match), but the relationship often wasn't doing what he wanted it to do. Francie's observation is that by 1968 it also wasn't doing what he needed it to do either. This is the overwhelming "mood" in her affair with Paul McCartney: that he needed something very badly from a romantic partner that he just was NOT getting, and Francie couldn't figure out what it was either:

(note that she means "queer" as in "mad", not "gay")

This was an EXTREMELY roundabout way of asking: well, what WAS it that Paul needed a relationship to do for him? And I think this is Francie's big, accidental insight. The most scandalous claim in 'Body Count' is that Paul told Francie that he hit Jane and it "turned her on".

I personally think this is p. absurd absent any real proof to back it up, but like, what is Francie actually saying HE'S saying here? If she's exaggerating or lying, she's trying to make it believable within the psychological parameters laid out, right? It's not an expression of some secret desire to dominate women she's accusing him of, but emotional disturbance and confusion at the idea that the woman he was with might like that sort of forceful, masculine violence more than his softer, feminine side, which he was - yeah, we all know it - deeply insecure about.

Regardless of whether specific details are true or false (and I think there's both in this story, all hyper-magnified to make it, y'know, a ~STORY~), I think what might be true is the emotional undertow of the retelling, that this all taken together is actually representative of the side of Paul McCartney she was exposed to, at a time when his public and private facades had both become unbearable to the point of cracking and the drug-fueled optimism of the Summer of Love was getting scrubbed off of everyone and everything. It's the Paul McCartney who eviscerated frogs because he was worried he was too "soft" for compulsory military service. The Paul who modelled his masculine teen behaviour off John Lennon's fake "Marlon Brando" swagger, but was actually more fond of the velvet "Oscar Wilde" interior.

What's SO FASCINATING about all this to me, is I deeply believe that one of the key factors in what makes The Beatles music so unique and compelling is that both the songwriters experienced psychological strain from the tension b/t their parochial socially-defensive "masculine" pride, and their sensitive "feminine" core, the latter of which they were able to express in the unburdened emotionality of their music. The reason I care about doing these totally unhinged psych analyses is because I do think it reveals something about the underpinnings of the music, as well as the reasons why the band was such a hysteria-inducing phenomenon (the rise of psychology, imo, is almost as important as the rise of industrialization as a defining factor of the modern and postmodern eras; mass psychology can be understood and wielded in precise ways, and The Beatles were one of the first empires built on that). The subconscious drives caused by this tension have been ENDLESSLY picked apart re: John's psyche, but Paul's "mirrored" issues are very under-discussed (mostly b/c he's still alive so people are a little more leery about putting him on the "couch" as a historical figure). 'Body Count', intentionally or not, painted a portrait to me of someone who was drowning in their own ill-fitting celebrity "suit", collapsing under the weight of "Being" "Paul McCartney". A guy who desperately needed some sort of space to be vulnerable without feeling emasculated for doing it. By 1968, there was no one in his life anymore - and maybe there hadn't been for a while, or ever - who was giving him this space.

In other words: the thing he needed to avoid going "stark raving queer and killing himself" was simply someone who would love him 'after the ball'.

EDIT: read the comments for further clarification and discussion! ;)

[acelor-acetaylorswift]

In honor of International Ace Day, a list of famous asexual people whose work Taylor has referenced!

I've been meaning to do this post for a long time, but it's taken some research and help from friends...and when I saw today is International Asexuality Day, I figured it was the perfect time to finally pull this together!

Salvador Dali

"And losing on card game bets with Dalí" -the last great american dynasty

Emily Bronte

There are a lot of parallels between "my tears ricochet" and the relationship between Catherine and Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights.

"May she wake in torment...Why, she's a liar to the end...Be with me always...do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you..."

"Cursing my name, wishing I stayed"

"You say I killed you -- then haunt me!"

"You had to kill me but it killed you just the same"

"I didn't want to have to haunt you"

Heathcliff secretly comes to Catherine's wake

"And if I'm dead to you, why are you at the wake?"

J. M. Barrie - author of Peter Pan

"tried to change the ending / Peter losing Wendy"

writing about her friends' three kids (PP was written about Barrie's friend's kids)

general Tinkerbell vibes in Taylor's styling (lol)

George Bernard Shaw - playwright

So in his play Pygmalion (adapted into the movie My Fair Lady with Audrey Hepburn...just put on netflix!) Henry and Eliza have a very tempestuous relationship, eventually leading to a huge fight at the end of the play. A lot of stuff in their argument reminds me of "my tears ricochet". And it's super interesting b/c Henry seems to basically just want him, Eliza, and their other friend to just live together in some platonic arrangement. Even before that, at the beginning, he expresses that he has no interest in marriage.

(the quote or example from the play is indented, the cursive is the taylor line that corresponds!)

"This ring isn't the jeweler's, it's the one you brought me in Brighton." *Henry throws it in the fireplace*

"We gather stones...Some to throw, some to make a diamond ring"

After Eliza is transformed into a lady, she is distraught because her transformation is supposed to let her go anywhere and be anything she wants, but when she tries to go home, she realizes she can't be there anymore.

"And I can go anywhere I want / Anywhere I want, just not home"

"You have wounded me to the heart."

"And you can aim for my heart, go for blood / But you would still miss me in your bones"

"Well, you have my voice on your gramophone. When you feel lonely without me, you can turn it on!"

"And I still talk to you (when I'm screaming at the sky) / And when you can't sleep at night (you hear my stolen lullabies)"

The beginning of the ME! music video also gives me My Fair Lady vibes with the costumes and the green wallpaper...looks like Henry's library.

Isaac Newton - scientist and mathematician

my tears ricochet: a ricochet (a rebound off a surface) = Newton's Third Law (for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction)

this is me trying: "the curve became a sphere" = Isaac Newton invented calculus

John Ruskin - art critic

Ruskin was an art critic who famously had his marriage annulled because it was never consummated. He fell in love with the Lake District at a young age and was inspired by it throughout his life, eventually buying a home there in the 1870s.

Alexa, play "the lakes" by Taylor Swift!

Florence Nightingale - nurse

Nightingale was an English nurse who revolutionized nursing on the warfront. I can't help but see a parallel in the heart-wrenching

"epiphany"

H.P. Lovecraft - writer

So there's this short story called "Colour out of Space". They made a movie of it recently with Nicholas Cage lol. Basically there's this meteor with an alien virus in it that makes plants really big, then turns them to brittle ash and leaves the fields barren...."My barren land / I am ash from your fire".

This guy finds the stone and keeps it, not knowing its destructive nature.... "We gather stones never knowing what they mean"

Edward Gorey - artist

Gorey did this cartoon which really speaks for itself.

"I'm still on that tightrope" -mirrorball

Nikola Tesla - engineer

Okay, this is one I want to do more research on because there is just so much to read about this guy and his brilliance/quick mind makes me think of Taylor. But a kind of similarity I found was that he drew a diagram of a solar eclipse and ironically, three years ago, Tesla car batteries had this weird thing happen when there was a solar eclipse...

my eclipsed sun

Also, at one point, people in the press began turning against a project of Tesla's, saying it was a hoax.

your faithless love's the only hoax I believe in

Kinda goofy ones, but I thought I'd put them out there as long as I was writing something up. And I'll leave you with the most amazing thing I found about Tesla, which kind of reminds me of Taylor's love for her CATS:

I have been feeding pigeons, thousands of them for years. But there was one, a beautiful bird, pure white with light grey tips on its wings; that one was different. It was a female. I had only to wish and call her and she would come flying to me. I loved that pigeon as a man loves a woman, and she loved me. As long as I had her, there was a purpose to my life.

Anyways, happy ace day! Hope you enjoyed this! I apologize that it's messy...formatting on tumblr is not my expertise lol. it was cool to see some prolific people who were possibly ace because there's not much visibility out there.

Feel free to share any other references/people to look into!

[goood-girl-faith]

When reputation was released i was sooo happy because i have been waiting to see Taylor kick some asses. And ofc she did. Idk but whatever happened 4 years ago, I took it personally esp the comments i heard from people i knew. I was hurt for tay but i know she went through worse than we imagine. That's why for all those months I waited and told myself to calm down because Taylor will definitely give them what they deserve. I wanted so bad to show them how great tay is and that they are all sooo wrong with what they chose to believe. I can still remember how i lost my mind when that first snake tail was posted. Classes and quizzes the next day were forgotten. I was just so excited bc i know she's back tho i wasn't really sure what we were gonna get. I'm sure everyone in the fandom rejoiced after hearing lwymmd. Taylor Swift is a genius and I believe she is her enemies' karma. This is getting too long but my point is for the most part i loved reputation bc it was her comeback, it was badass and it shook the world. I mean I love everything that Taylor has put out and will put out. (And no, this isn't blind obsession or being a dumb fanatic, bc 1. no fan of taylor is and 2. i just know whatever it is she's gonna give us, it's quality and she worked hard for it, gooosh i can't express how much i trust this woman) I'm no storyteller so apologies if this looks like a draft :( BUT ANYWAY i loved reputation when i first heard it but i can definitely say 3 years after i love and appreciate it more. At first I only saw the side of the album that was meant to address all the issues and drama and shade thrown at her reputation but now i see the raw and vulnerable side of it too. Maybe this is bc we were now finally done dealing with the critique and Taylor has now moved forward with her life. It's past midnight now and I just wanted to appreciate reputation. It's an art perfected by all the pain and new beginnings. My heart will forever be excited upon hearing LWYMMD, IDSB, DBM, END GAME, RFI, TIWWCHNT, SO IT GOES, GETAWAY CAR, AND DRESS but it will also always feel "kilig" and go "aww" for CIWYW, DELICATE, DWOHT, KOMH, GORGEOUS, and NYD. @taylorswift