The Lyricism Of Taylor Swift #Swiftie

These days I wake up to Taylor Swift filling my social media feed(s). I hit like, retweet, repost, add to stories and move on to my Korean world. Then, there are the quiet hours after the kids leave for school and the husband for work. I walk around my home or fold clothes or work on documents with Taylor Swift crooning into my ears. I shake, shake off of the blues with peppy numbers.

Mostly though, her songs are a trip down nostalgia lane for me. No other song writer quite boasts the way she can take me back into the innards of my soul grieving over lost relationships like she can.

In “You’re Losing Me” she asks how can you say that you love someone you can’t tell is dying?

Yet, most suburban lives are subsisting on embers of dying love. Locked in relationships that drown from the demands of everyday life, I wonder how many women like me sing along and wonder how is it that She can see into our worlds with so much clarity.

In Clean she croons “When the flowers we’d grown together died of thirst…” and I remember the intimacy of the newly coupled days when even plants become children. In a few short words, she encapsulates the long arc of doomed relationships.

Shifting tracks in Midnight Rain, as she sings “He wanted it comfortable, I wanted that pain…” and later “And he never thinks of me… except when I am on TV…” she speaks for all of those women whose ambitions have them carving a path that they look back on in the loneliness of midnights. That ache, that pain, that wistfulness. Ugh!

In Paper Rings she is all of us stalking our crushes when she sings “Now I’ve read all of the books beside your bed…” or the sheer whimsy in “I like shiny things but I’d marry you with paper rings…”

My favorite though is Maroon where she sums up a relationship that is warm going cold with a short few words “The rust that grew between telephones…”

I often wonder what it would have been like if I had Taylor’s discography over my growing years and feel envious of all of those kids and young adults who have a vault of songs to dip into when the blues are too much to handle alone. For now, I will have to be content with reliving the zombie pain of young adulthood tempered by the maturity of middle age.

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