#tswift motif: home

[plainsimpletaylor]

Taylor Swift’s single era on Midnights, a lyric analysis

Here’s the thing: I think Taylor Swift has been in her single era for the past few months and she’s already told us about it on Midnights. Here’s an exploration of this theme on the album. (This is a long post but worth it.)

Dear Reader

Let’s start with Dear Reader because the outro is screaming that she’s single. The way Taylor Swift uses her own motifs that she’s been building across her entire career to really hammer this message home that she is alone just destroys me.

To Taylor, going home is going home to a lover. It’s the physical act of making a house a home. It is this gentle, comforting, cozy kind of love. Her specifying that she’s going a house instead of a home underlines that she’s alone. She is physically in a house, but she is not emotionally at home. And no one would take her word for it because her being alone is counter to the public narrative of her six-year relationship.

And just in case she wasn’t clear enough already, she emphasizes that she’s alone yet again by bringing in another of her motifs: that love is a game.

She is no longer playing a two-player game. She’s playing solitaire, which says in the name of the game itself how solitary it is. And then, to underscore this even further, absolutely no one is watching and seeing her play this game. (I have so many more thoughts on this lyric alone, but to avoid tangents here, I’ll write a different post to discuss that further at some point.)

So, with these two lyrics, she has established and emphasized several different ways that she’s alone. She’s single.

Now, let’s look at the lyric in between the two above. This is describing her feeling trapped in her own house. Here’s where Eras Tour visuals come in to align with this song.

‼️ Spoiler warning for eras tour visuals

Going “home” to Taylor has a specific meaning but so does a “house” because of the Lover House that represents her entire body of work so far. The Lover House is the house that Taylor built (or bought with the songs she wrote as she says in the Miss Americana documentary). It’s very significant that she is literally burning down the Lover House every single night at tour, and this lyric in Dear Reader gives more context to this visual.

In Dear Reader, the house is trapping her. Across all her work, Taylor has written over and over about cages and fences and boxes to evoke the feeling of being trapped. I find the use of the word “pen” here to be a very specific choice. "Pen” both means a physical pen locking something away as well as a writing instrument. She feels trapped inside this house that she built with her own writing.

I don’t think she resents her past work — but the narrative the public has created for her from it. Her early work is characterized by fairytale romances and idealizing the idea of marriage as a happy ending. And now, so many people keep expecting her to get married and have kids and retire so she can live out that narrative in real life. But as seen in other songs on Midnights like Lavender Haze, she’s decided that life isn’t for her.

So, she is burning down the Lover House, which represents the pen she feels trapped in, in order to be freed of the expectations the public has for her and have more control of her own public image and narrative.

Lavender Haze

The idea of feeling boxed in or trapped by societal roles and the public’s expectations is exemplified in Lavender Haze.

Her history is the Lover House and her career and the muses people assign to all of those songs. This is also her history of having written about an idealized version of marriage as a picture perfect happy ending. That is the standard to which a lot of the public is holding her to well over a decade later.

And now, she’s telling the public that she no longer wants that idea of marriage or that kind of happy ending. The lyric above is a critique of the entire societal standard that still categorizes women into two distinct boxes: either you’re the femme fatale temptress or the doting housewife. And she’d rather talk about anything else than whether or not she’ll get married.

She’s damned, or trapped, if she cares about the public’s expectations. She’ll be shoved into one of those two boxes: the temptress that can’t ever hold down a man or a doting housewife that’s expected to retire from her highly successful career in order to have children and that perfect happy ending.

And she especially does not want to be the housewife type figure. She directly says that doesn’t want that 1950s shit. It’s clear to me from this song that she wants to be successful in her career and just be herself without having all these expectations and gender roles forced upon her.

Lavender Haze is all about rejecting the traditional idea of marriage and charting her own path in life that’s outside of the public’s expectations. And the music video’s visuals support this, especially when the last shot is of her alone and seemingly happy without a lover.

This theme of rejecting the narrative that the public wants for her exists throughout Midnights because the album is about nights across her life, and her entire life has been shaped by her relationship with fame.

Midnight Rain

Obviously, the song that most directly echoes Lavender Haze in terms of rejecting the idea of marriage is Midnight Rain.

I don’t think Midnight Rain is about a recent time in her life, but she still chose to include a song about this on the album to further contribute to this theme of taking her narrative into her own hands. Midnight Rain positions Taylor as a complete opposite to the lover in the song — and by extension her career as opposite to that idealized fairytale happy ending type of romance.

Bejeweled

The entirety of Bejeweled sounds like it’s reflecting on a break up and getting back out there afterward. But for being in her single era, this one lyric stands out. And if you change the punctuation in “I don’t remember,” it can have two different meanings.

“I don’t remember” = whether or not she has a man is so unimportant she doesn’t remember for sure if she does or not

“I don’t, remember?” = I don’t have a man, why don’t you remember that?

The Bejeweled music video is also directly countering the fairytale happy ending romance. It’s a retelling of Cinderella where she ends up happy and alone. She literally turns down a proposal from the prince so that she can have her castle she won with her talent all to herself with her dragons/cats. That’s very single era to me.

You’re On Your Own, Kid

YOYOK is basically a pep talk she’s giving to her self about how she’s always been alone and how she can still be okay being alone. (cw: ed mention)

This specific lyric gets me because it’s once again a rejection of that idealized fairytale happy ending. Romance isn’t going to suddenly heal her like in the stories because real life isn’t a fairytale. Perfect magical kisses don’t exist.

At the end of the song, she realizes she’s always been alone and that’s a source of comfort. She’s always had the tools to handle whatever life throws at her all on her own.

Taylor Swift is in her single era, and that’s okay!

I realize after writing all this out that it sounds like she’s sad in being single, but I don’t think she is. Every single one of these songs, aside from Dear Reader, has an upbeat note to it in the production and melody as well as some of the lyrics. Dear Reader can come back around to being upbeat with the Eras Tour visuals of her burning down the Lover House and being freed from everyone’s expectations.

Each and every piece of this is an example of her reclaiming her narrative for herself — and working to define her career not by any of her relationships or the public’s expectations, but by what she wants and her talent and her artistry. She wants to stand alone and proud on her own. That is definitely a happy thing.

[disregardcanon]

oh while i still have some time to just sit and be today, i wanted to write some Thoughts TM that i had while listening to tswift’s folklore in the car yesterday 

1. folklore is really great as a concept album. there’s a couple of songs that don’t hit me perfect, but as a whole it does FEEL like the mystic, timeless folktale thing that she was going for. i’m impressed with the cohesion there 

2. i’m not entirely sure what “the 1″ is doing there. it feels a lot more reputation/lover than the rest of them, especially since it’s more straight up romance and doesn’t do anything very interesting with the style in the way that some of the other songs do. i don’t HATE it or anything, but it doesn’t feel like it belongs on this album 

3. i like how there’s clearly more than one story being traced through the songs

last great american dynasty going into mad woman is great. last great american dynasty is more about the character but also about taylor herself, and then it shifts into that theme of just wanting to go apeshit because there’s so many strings attached to civility. 

also, mad woman HITS a lot better than some of her rant stuff for me recently. i’m not a big fan of the man from lover because it feels more like “why can’t patriarchy work for me”, but mad woman feels more like shouting in a soundproof room, the way that it so often does trying to rage against the status quo. 

cardigan to betty is great, and i feel like august is probably also in that story because the earnest summer romance aspect seems like it happens BEFORE cardigan which happens before betty. so order of the story is 2 1 3

seven and mirrorball and this is me trying all feel like they’re the same story. there’s less backing for this one, but the way that seven is about returning to the fierceness, wildness, and sureness of self of childhood melding into mirrorball “this is where i am right now, melting myself into different shapes to fit for different people” to “i have done the melting for so many different people that now i’m far behind and don’t know who i am. i’m trying but it’s just not going well” feels like a narrative thread together. 

hoax and the lakes for sure go together. i’m not sure if it’s the narrator, but the way that the two play off of each other is perfect. the shift from screaming on the cliffside asking for a reason to jump going to lie in your sadness by the lake just to be there is so.... visceral 

it’s such a violent mourning shifting into more of a melancholy. 

4. many of them are about themes that just don’t really get explored much. 

seven as really the Purity of youth as much as the lack of knowledge and slightly feral quality. like, there’s the innocence, but not innocence as an entirely good thing. the narrator clearly doesn’t really understand the abuse the nature of the situation that “her” companion has been through and there’s this just run off to the woods and be pirates narrative that’s sweet, but clearly borne from a place of not really getting the situation. it focuses more on the narrator wanting to escape the confines of her adult life and civility than letting the companion with the bad home life escape. 

then it’s got that playground chant style that’s mixed with kind of a foreboding “haunted” feel that just gives it the perfect amount of creepy and wistful. it’s a good song. 

i also LOVE the lakes. i hadn’t heard it somehow until yesterday, but it’s just a feeling that i’ve never really felt expressed to music before. it’s that deep melancholy that you WANT to wallow in because there’s something about being a teenager that makes you drawn to lying in angst to lie in it, the “alone together” in a place of sublime in the literary sense, just to kind of soak up the way that the world feels vast and beautiful and terrifying and ugly and lonely- together with someone else who gets it too, while the assumption that no one else could ever GET that thing that’s kind of a universal experience is running through too. 

it feels so much like being a teenager to me in a really good way i’ve never seen before. the hamlet part of being a teenager. 

the style feels right for it, but i can’t tell you why as much as something like seven. i might be able to grasp it better with a few more listens. 

5. other highlights- cardigan DEFINITELY feels like it’s music video where you’re transported to another, magical world. it’s a mystical and scary one, though, which is perfect for a first love that leaves you heartbroken and adrift on the sea

exile feels so right for the content of the song- that loneliness that can only be achieved through miscommunications that could probably be solved if you talked a little better 

mirrorball’s style is hollow and feels like it’s spinning like a music box, which feels perfect for the image of someone who feels hollow trying to fit themselves into a million different boxes. this is me trying feels similar and works for about the same reasons. 

also lyrically, this is me trying has some of my favorite stuff from her. i have about six close readings i did in the car but here’s my favorite section 

They told me all of my cages were mental-- the narrator asked for help and did not get any because she was told she was making the issue up  So I got wasted like all my potential-- okay so let’s talk about this one 

1. wasted potential is of course a common phrase that we’re playing on 

2. “i got wasted” has the meanings of “i got drunk but in a way that was giving up my sobriety” and “i had things to contribute, but i didn’t, which is a moral and personal failing” and if you go a little further and take “wasted” to mean “thrown away like trash” that also implies a failure on the part of those THAT threw her away. like, all of the implications here of having had something to give and being tossed aside because there is no more efficiency attached and you aren’t Fulfilling Your Purpose is just fantastic, especially after the line about how she reached out for help that wasn’t given. 

And my words shoot to kill when I'm mad I have a lot of regrets about that-- 1. the words shoot to kill when i’m mad coming after the frustration of her wasted potential is great because it shows that there’s still that resentment towards the people that helped the narrator end up in this situation and she takes it out on them 2. she regrets doing so, whether because they don’t deserve it or because it doesn’t help that. 3. the “i have a lot of regrets about that” line is a motif in the song, but both times it comes back it’s more regrets for things she feels she has no control over than things she’s done 

I was so ahead of the curve, the curve became a sphere Fell behind all my classmates and I ended up here-- i think that this one’s pretty self-explanatory? anyone who was a gifted child knows the feeling of having been great at academics but not necessarily socially or in fields that translate well to “real life” and then ending up at the bottom of things because the skills that you were building left you ill-fit for the way that world actually is. 

the instrumentation and bounciness of betty just feels so nostalgic and childhood summer-lovey in a way that works perfect for two young lovers coming back together after a fight 

6. i don’t know, other than the 1 this album just really feels like what it was going for. there’s a lot of great running themes that make it FEEL like folklore and a few of the songs take some great stuff from folk songs which helps 

the emphasis on narratives and perception and especially movies helps with that. 

as a whole with running themes and motifs and junk, this is definitely some of tswift’s best work. maybe THE best work. some of the songs aren’t necessarily “fun” to listen to and i wouldn’t choose to put some of them on just individually, but they make for a great whole. 

7. i’m not saying you have to listen to folklore because i don’t make your choices but there’s a lot of great stuff on it so