#well me and taylortruther

[wavesoutbeingtossed]

SHE MADE THIS VIDEO FOR ME YOU’RE WELCOME

[taylorswiftstylequestions]

Hi!! I had sent an anon to taylortruther who pointed me in your direction! So Im very curious how would you describe Taylors style over the years?

Apologies if you have answered asks like this in the past, I heard about your book and the tour! Which is super awesome

Hi! Thanks so much that's really nice of them to send you over my way. This is difficult to answer succinctly. Especially because I could talk about it at such great length I wrote an entire book dedicated to the subject haha.

If we wanted to get very short and broad-speaking with it I'd say Taylor's feminine style has consistently underpinned her public image as someone girlish and relatable while evolving subtly in aesthetic to serve the 'era' she is evoking through her music. I do a very quick rundown on it era by era on this page on the blog here as well.

If you wanted to get very granular about her fashion evolution in a way that I think gets at the nuance and intention behind how she dresses through every era, I wrote a book for it which is available to pre-order here!

[taylortruther]

my friend has to write an essay on the all too well short film & its symbolism etc for uni and asked me for some background info cause she knows im a swiftie. so i explained to her the importance in the use of colour in taylors discography and by the end she asked me, if i had read that in some article lol imagine her face when i told her no, its my tumblr newspaper taylortruther askjaskjdak

THIS IS SO FLATTERING you are nice to share this bestie. also! how fun to imagine taylortruther.tumblr.com in a bibliography

[stood-onthecliffside]

thoughts on beach89? photos, themes and titles of vault tracks?

ohhhhhh i LOVE this question i think

this post by @sayitslove and this post by @taylortruther are beautifully done and worth a read!

anyways now the photos -> i think they are appropriate as to what the vaults may sound like! the 'tip toeing' one and 'ballerina' gives me very very heavy mirrorball vibes when no one is around, my dear you'll find me on my tallest tiptoes// i'm still on that tightrope i'm still trying everything to get you laughing at me,,, i also think in hindsight 1989 as an album + era was very mirrorball in itself (getting more and more slut-shamed because she was gaining a lot of fame, trying a new genre especially when tons of people wanted to fail including her label being label discouraging and country people especially men perceiving her as a threat, she was as a girlie in her 20s was going through refer to her billboard speech 'you think i am dating to much? okay here is an album about friendship. you think that my music boring and repetitive? okay here is an entire shit of genre' etc etc).

the screaming one -> just the last american dynasty vibes all the way and miss americana and the heartbreak prince although it can be argued that they are very interchangeable songs! i mean she was portrayed as 'an evil woman' who never apologises holds a grudge is and a 'man hater' and writes about her relationships only. so it is so fitting for 1989.

the ice cream one -> is actually my favourite cause it perfectly meshes the suburban or beach and the city which means that she is embracing both sides. this edit by @hits-differently is so telling! given that they all (public during 1989) are calling her a 'slut!' yet she is so unbothered.

the vault tracks

'slut!' -> as i have been saying that i have a feeling that new romantics is going to transition into slut (production-wise) and it would cover all the 'rumours' as mentioned about in new romantics,, i personally think it would be very 1989 as we know it because the core theme of og has always been addressing the wild accusation and just beating the narrative made by the public. i think this edit by @dancingwiththecoven explains it well,, almost as if taylor is acknowledging a word that was used against her and giving it a new meaning.

say dont go -> i am assuming it to have the themes of all you had to do was stay and how you get the girl! i think it is going to be how the story is over but she is still rooting for the two of them. i know this not going to happen but i would love to see first taylor repeating dont go dont go in a pleading voice with a phone call effect on it and then a choir joining it until it is just her again saying that again and again in a high pitched voice and then suddenly it stops (like the calling being cancelled)

now that we dont talk- this like lowkey throwing me off because it feels like a sad song but i have a feeling that she might be a bop with sad lyrics yes but with out of pocket lyrics as well. something like now that we dont talk i have clinging onto your best friend lips every night or something idk!

is it over now-> again feels like a sad song may not but seem like a letter being addressed to the fire situation where she writes a long ass message but deletes it. might go on a limb and say we might get an electric guitar on this.

suburban legends -> i am actually very very excited for this! i do see this as a sad bop honestly as i was saying to @alwaysleadstoyou a month before it gives me the vibes of astronomy by conan gray. defo see it as two lovers who grew apart, although they didn't want to and although they were so talked about and everyone's favourite couple in the suburb (re champagne problems) they moved on but no one else did. lyrics seems like cowboy like me and dorothea,,, production false god.

now the transition from city to beach is a controversial one; i almost dont care. i understand how the beach is more suitable for the 'new taylor' as growth, and understand that the beach makes more sense now that she is older and wiser(especially with out of the woods mv i.e., meeting herself on the beach she is finally clean etc etc). while i understand that others would want the bustling noisy city as she is re-recording NOT making a new record! and the opener does start with welcome to new york.

i just think that she moved to the beach because the vaults match the vibe more with it and just rolled with that. also, i cannot find my post before 1989tv was announced cause of tumblr system but i think it sums this up perfectly she can go anywhere she wants just not home because she left a part of her back in new york to a house, not a home, all alone 'cause nobody's there

[sorry for the very late reply nonie! but i was invested!]

[elenaferrante]

I was talking to @taylortruther (🫶🏻) yesterday about this book we both read, and she reminded me of a beautiful quote from it: “No marriage makes sense. Especially not to the outside world. A marriage is its own world.” Whilst the book might mention a marriage specifically, it is obviously applicable to any relationship, really, and as Rae told me, is definitely very appropriate for what we are seeing happening between taylor and joe, and I think the emphasis really is on we are seeing happening. That is because we are not, never were, and never will be involved with that relationship, so there are so many, many things we don’t know! A lot of details and context and history we’re missing! Also as @it-feels-like-a-perfect-night wrote earlier today, I think wanting to know what happened is normal and fair, as it is to discuss it tbh, but it’s important to keep in mind that what we are discussing are theories and not facts. Let’s remember that there are two real people involved. Let’s be kind, let’s be empathetic (not just towards joe and Taylor, but towards each other as well)

[bisluthq]

I also am not sure if this popular or not, but I feel like so many white gaylors will jump to homophobia when they are held accountable because they would rather play victim than ask themselves that maybe turning a straight white woman into the lesbian Jesus is problematic. It’s just a little concerning to me because some people will go oh so two women can’t be gay, white and femme, and I don’t think anyone is making that argument. I am not.

Ya I mean soft Gaylors - me as well and like @taylortruther of two people I know who are essentially soft Gaylors but like conspiracy antis - do deal with homophobia. That’s true. But saying “you don’t want to believe two white femme women can be gay!!!” is a lie lol.

Meet a blonde singer songwriter and her femme ex girlfriend I liked when they were together and stan more in hindsight:

Like these women were gay together lol.

Karlie and Taylor weren’t.

Babez move on.

[wavesoutbeingtossed]

I know you don't like discussing the muses but i love your takes and perspectives and i had to ask you about this. after listening to ttpd, did you have the impression that she really loved matty more than any of her exes/previous relationships?. And listening to the whole album as a whole would you call it the ''matty album'' or do you think there are more prominent themes in there than their period together?. (hope this doesn't bother you, feel free to delete if you don't feel like answering it)

hey anon! You're right, I don't really like to get into the muses as I don't really think there's anything to add to the conversation at this point, and ultimately I don't think it matters.

That being said, and with the caveat that I am not Taylor and I do not know Taylor so I cannot speak to her thoughts and can only make relatively educated guesses based on being an avid consumer of her work and a student of the human condition (lol), no I do not think Taylor loved Matty more than anyone else. I think there was maybe a brief period in the thick of things where she *thought* she did because she was not thinking clearly and was in full-on denial, but to me the message that is loud and clear in the album (and more or less explicitly stated in the epilogue) is that it was not any kind of real love affair. It was certainly infatuation and lust and the promise of something more, and there may have been some love as well, but he was in no way the love of her life by any measure.

I would call it a "Matty album" insofar as they're about events in which he was present, sure. But I feel it much more as a Taylor album, if that makes sense, even though I know that's a cop out because every album is to a degree. I can't explain it well, but I don't see TTPD as a Matty (or Joe) album in the way that I would maybe say Red is a "Jake" album or 1989 may be a "Harry" album or even Lover being a "Joe" album whatever, because even if they don't figure in all the songs, that kind of heartbreak permeates so much of the material.

The thing about TTPD and the Matty situation is that the Matty situation is really a Joe situation (which in some ways is actually partially a Jake situation). I always say I hate treating Taylor like a character so I hate speaking about her and her work in this way, but you don't get the Matty situation without the Joe situation precipitating it. It's @taylortruther's now-infamous donut vs. hole analogy. The reason Taylor makes the choices she does with Matty is directly tied to what happened with Joe that made her feel she needed to. Which is not to say Taylor isn't responsible for her own actions or doesn't have agency in her own life, but I mean it in that the situation in which she found herself with Joe, and the pain it caused, is what made the alternative so comforting and perhaps even necessary in her mind. It's why it makes it so hard to "paternity test" the album, because the stories are inherently intertwined and you don't get the former without the latter.

The major "theme" of the album to me is the loss of a very specific, very personal dream, and the way in which she lost it, and the way in which grieving that loss drove her to make the choices she did. We're all talking very delicately about it because it's a sensitive topic, but it's late on Friday and few people are going to see this, so I'm going to say it: it's the give you my wild, give you a child of it all. The yearning she expresses both overtly and sub-textually for having a family in the album is palpable in a very iykyk kind of way, and it's the realization that those plans are not going to come to fruition in the way she had once imagined that drives a lot of the pain she experiences, and makes her jump at the chance to find that again with someone else.

I started a draft post about the theme of womanhood and motherhood on TTPD three months ago that I never finished because I ran out of time and ran out of steam, but it was the most striking thing to me on the album, not because I didn't know that she wanted those things because that's been obvious for years (definitely since Lover, and again, peace put it all on the table), but because the vulnerability she expressed about it on the album is incredibly moving, and it's so generous of her to trust listeners with those feelings and experiences.

Again, it's the thirtysomething of it all.

She is in relationship A which she at one point believes is forever, one which she at one point believes is going to lead to marriage and children. She is so committed to that dream that she either ignores or tries to fix serious issues that may otherwise lead others to think the two people in the relationship are incompatible, both because she loves the person deeply and because she feels that this is meant to be the way she achieves that dream. She gives it her everything, and it still dies a slow, painful, onerous death, and she feels like it may take her along with it. The dream of getting married and presumably having a family gets taken off the table: how we don't know and will likely never know because that is private between the parties involved. All that matters in the context of the album is that those plans never come to fruition and never would.

Then you have relationship B, an old flame who knows just enough buttons to push both to trigger and to flatter. A person who she presumably trusts with very sensitive, personal information as her life slowly crumbles, and this person is telling her all the things she wants to hear because he knows about what is happening in relationship A because she's told him. Person in relationship B doesn't get an "in" with her and sell her this dream unless what happens in relationship A precedes it. It's not a grand love affair for the ages, it's not a mutual decision on building their own dream together. It's Person B learning about what is happening with Person A and saying "I can do that!" even if he can't or doesn't. The dream he sells her is a rental car; it's not his own, he's just borrowing it from someone else and selling it back to her.

And the reason she falls for it is because it is what she aches for the most in her personal life, and she is grappling with it disintegrating, so she (unfortunately for her) falls for the easy way out, and in turn sells herself a story about how this must be fated, and this must be meant to be, because this person wants all the same things she does and she didn't even have to bargain for it! Well, yes, because she fed him the dream in the first place. (Like a mark falling for a sleeper cell spy.) It's too good to be true because it isn't true. IMO Person B doesn't come running out of the gate with the marriage/baby/dream life promises unless he knows that is what she most desires. But what's left unsaid out of all of it is that: those dreams were her dreams because they were her dreams with Person A. It was a whole life they had together, and a whole life they had planned for in some fashion, and a whole life that has to be dismantled in the aftermath.

So all this to say, yes, on the surface, Matty is a "main character" on the album, but truly he's a side character to Taylor as the narrator and person experiencing it and Joe as the ghost bit-player-who-haunts-every-scene. (Again, I hate referring to real people as characters, it gives me the absolute ick, but in this case it's the only way to answer the question.) I jokingly call it the Matty album for shorthand or when I want to say something out of pocket, but really, it's a disservice to the album to say that because it's not a muse album as in it's about the romance (like, say, Red often is), it's about a soul-crushing heartbreak that goes beyond it. The romance is the symptom, not the cause.

The loss of youth is tied in with all this: she's not 22 anymore. She isn't even 32 anymore. She had a very specific idea of what her life was going to look like at this point and had planned for that life, and it goes up in smoke. But again, to bring the womanhood into it all: there is, unfortunately, a deadline for these things. You're with someone for over half a decade you think is going to be your life partner and father of your children and and then he's not. You spent half a decade building this relationship for it to crumble, but now you're in your mid-30s and you don't necessarily have another half-decade to build that trust and faith in someone else before being ready to start a family. And maybe you're scared that anyone else who may become your partner will need that much time to build that trust and faith, because that's kind of all you've ever know in relationships. But lo and behold, someone comes into your life you once had feelings for and maybe now do again and is offering you everything you want and thought you'd have by this point in your life right now. It feels like an elixir that as we find out is actually poison.

That youth is not just the chance for motherhood, but it's also the hopes and idealism and belief in the future that often gradually erodes as we age. But for Taylor as well, it's also tied into the trauma of what she went through particularly in 2016, which kicks off a lot of things on the album as well (her retreat, her relationship with Joe, the pivoting in her career, etc.). That event caused a pretty clear before/after in her life (like a few other events, I suspect), and another major theme in the album is her finally grappling with the full weight of that. They're all different branches of the same tree of the story of TTPD and her life.

I could talk about this stuff forever, but I'm going to stop here because it's long enough and I should save stuff for one of the dozens of drafts I have half-baked lol. But this is just something I needed to get off my chest perhaps.

[wavesoutbeingtossed]

I don’t think JA is evil or anything but it is odd to me that even ignoring the cheating lines in the peripheral of the album, everyone’s reaction to “he didn’t want to marry her and kept her in quiet stasis for years” is “ oh he’s not bad”.

Not even from a talking about celebrities perspective. The numerous references to wanting children and lost youth on the album just hits so badly in your 30s. And it’s odd to me that wasting someone’s time to that extent while resenting their success is looked at as being a good guy. It just seems like trivializing an issue women have

Anon, I don’t mean this directed at you specifically, just a blanket reminder for myself that I don’t really care to discuss these men generally because I don’t think they’re worth the time or space and frankly, I don’t know enough about them or care to to devote space to them on my little fan blog.

That being said, I think the reason my take on it is more… subdued is because, well, unfortunately I think the situation inferred from Taylor’s music is so, so common. I have several friends (two in particular I can think of) who went through situations so eerily similar to the one Taylor and Joe presumably went through. Which is not so much to say that I’m being parasocial, but more that all breakups are the same to quote @taylortruther. It’s not to condone the men’s behaviour, but more to say that even amongst “dull normals,” most of us have firsthand or at least secondhand experience in it and have had to navigate the same conflicts.

I have no opinion on whether Joe is good or bad because I don’t know anything about him beyond Taylor’s music and I have zero interest to learn anything further. I have my own guesses as to what went down, which are probably similar to what most people around here are assuming, and it’s again so painfully pedestrian, especially for people in their 30s. Which is obviously so painful as a woman of childbearing age who is hoping to have those things.

I do agree that there is a lot of trivializing of these issues for women in general, and especially for Taylor in general in TTPD. Not to be all “I/we understand Taylor better” about it all, but there’s soooooooo much in TTPD that I think *a lot* of people are not picking up, which is why i say over and over again that it really is the thirtysomething album. (Which is not to be ageist lol, it’s more a state of mind.) Like, while I am not someone who foresees having children or even getting married myself, most of my close friends are and have, and so much of what Taylor sings about literally and subtextually is so painfully obvious to me and palpable that I’ve been shocked at how it’s been glossed over. (Maybe you don’t fully understand it until you’re sitting on your friend’s bathroom floor consoling her as her entire life crumbles before her eyes? Or is that just me?) But, many of us here on tumblr dot com have picked up what she’s put down.

I think it comes down to: even with “good” guys (and particularly with those who aren’t), the whole family thing does *not* mean the same thing to them, because the time constraints just don’t apply to them. You’d hope your partner would feel why it was pressing to you, but unfortunately I can think of a lot of people even in my own life who’ve experienced this same conflict with their partners. Because men can drag their feet until they think it’s the “right” time in a way women simply can’t. I had a friend who had a very Joever-like breakup over that very issue and it’s so, so painful and can also drive them to make questionable choices in the immediate aftermath.

Then when you add the whole resentment/whatever issue on top of it… it’s… a lot.

[taylortruther]

https://www.tumblr.com/taylortruther/731349724103393280/oh-see-now-i-think-shes-had-a-boob-job-just-years?source=share

I'm not that anon, but I agree with you Rae. I'm also similarly built to Taylor, and I think people also forget the overall changes her body went through from even just 1989 -> rep alone. She got overall thiccer, which translates to boob fat. Late 20s to 30s transition will do that to your body as well, not just bras. Minor surgery is still a possibility, but there's so many factors here that people forget or just don't know cause they haven't hit that place on their own.

it's me!

yep exactly. weight, hormonal changes as you age, stress, bras, and natural breast shape can do a number on how your breasts appear. and a 34C (for example) in one person can look entirely different, like a 34A or 34D, on another.

[taylortruther]

https://www.tumblr.com/taylortruther/737088329549561856/oooh-do-you-have-an-accent-rae

Lmao I'm in Houston, so pretty multicultural metro, plus family who is not from here (Grandpa was a pilot and my mom & her siblings were born worldwide), so I don't really have one either.

HOWEVER, the way I get a drawl when I get frustrated 🫣 my students always laugh at me when it happens

HAHAHA you really can't help it sometimes. i say y'all all the time along with every combination. y'all'dve and y'all'er (as in y'all'er gonna love it!)

and i love to say "well" with like fifteen vowels. hwaell!