Celebrities’ private selves are unknowable and uninteresting, but when the old “Taylor Swift has too many exes” comment rears its head, I think two things:
she should have more;
quality and quantity.
Realistically, some of these exes were probably pretty nice, and each party moved on unscathed (“now I buy their babies presents”). Pressure on those relationships might have been mostly external, paparazzi, mean tweets—the line from “I Know Places” to “Lavender Haze.” Since “All Too Well (10-Minute Version)”, nowadays the accusation is that Taylor Swift milks decade-old relationships for the drama. “Would’ve Could’ve Should’ve” from Midnights (3am Edition) reaches even further back, almost 15 years. Its presumptive prequel “Dear John” was the first time in her catalog Taylor Swift judged1 an age gap: “don’t you think 19’s too young?” More compelling than age for their alignment, “Dear John”’s chorus ends with “I should’ve known.”
We don’t even need to stray from Midnights to contrast retrospectives on more even-footed relationships. The hometown sweetheart ballad “Midnight Rain” has a neat parallel outro:
I guess sometimes we all get
Just what we wanted, just what we wanted
And he never thinks of me
Except when I'm on TVI guess sometimes we all get
Some kind of haunted, some kind of haunted
And I never think of him
Except on midnights like this
Despite this song’s scary pitch shift effect that sounds like an AI-generated Akihiro Miwa, it’s one of my favorites. It’s apology and nostalgia: “I broke his heart cause he was nice,” “Back to December” meets “’tis the damn season.” And then look at “Would’ve Could’ve Should’ve”: “I can’t let you go,” “I regret you all the time.”
Besides this and “All Too Well (10-Minute Version)’s emphasis on age, they also both rely on death and burial: “after three months in the grave” and “the tomb won’t close.” Get me goofy enough and I’ll argue the religious imagery of “Would’ve Could’ve Should’ve" is Paschal, if you see the risen Christ as the walking dead. In the words of “the 1,” you don’t dig up the grave of a chill relationship.
Taylor Swift thinks too much about what happened when she was 19 and 20? She was a child. I don’t care that she could vote. I felt infantilized when my older friends told me I was a kid then, but who can deny that fucked up early experiences, however brief, follow you for years? To be a child is more than your ID, it’s being the tarot’s fool, unaware you’re collecting the wounds and neuroses that will scar you for life.
I loathe the local and clickbait pursuit of assigning songs and albums to certain exes. Firstly, it’s naive to declare each album a containment chamber for certain relationships. Secondly, she warned us off this project in reputation’s supplementary materials. Thirdly, she’s also open that a large portion of her catalog is fanfiction for movies, books and probably Grey’s Anatomy. I think it’s totally reasonable for her to keep writing about the men who fucked with her head the most until she dies. There isn’t a statute of limitations.
But I also think listeners need to be mature, as in not flooding the comments of Jake Gyllenhaal’s Stephen Sondheim tribute post, as in understanding these songs aren’t diss tracks or a scorned woman siccing her fans on someone she likely hasn’t spoken to since the Obama administration. “Cold was the steel of my axe to grind for the boys who broke my heart,” goes “invisible string.” It’s unfortunate that these newer songs are so gray and contain so much nuance totally lost on Internet culture. “I should’ve known” becomes “You could’ve spit me out,” putting responsibility on the “promising grown man” while being aware of how her youthful stubbornness sealed the deal: “the God’s honest truth is that the pain was heaven.”
Unusually for someone from Kentucky, I only got into John Mayer recently. I was 13 when Speak Now came out, so think of all the people younger than me who’ve never heard “Your Body is a Wonderland.” My induction is a consequence of shopping for guitars. I’ve watched “Neon” live a bunch of times. I have empathy for his 2000s spiral, as I do for anyone in that celebrity age group. Nowadays, he knows and keeps to his audience of bros and dads who probably hate women and aren’t impressed by Taylor’s competent rhythm playing when they all desperately need metronomes. He is the Taylor Swift ex I think about most as a totally separate person whose artistry I respect.
My point is not to be a John Mayer apologist, but to say Taylor Swift has more interesting feelings besides (but including) spite. Some of it may well be for a 45-year-old man who spends his time touring with a few of the Grateful Dead hawking $3000 strats. But her midnight thoughts of vengeance seem reserved for Scooter Braun and Kanye West: dudes who messed with her capital and reputation, which is capital.
Hi all, I’m alive after the worst summer of my life! If you liked this and are so inclined, fund my yarn coping @kdlrose on Venmo and PayPal.
I am trying to minimize Twitter usage. My two Instagrams are now for silog (semi-seriously) and knitting.
And if you can recommend where I can buy a functioning GameBoy Advance SP and Pokemon FireRed or LeafGreen, please reply!!
She notes smaller age differences in “Mary’s Song (Oh My My My)” (my dark horse debut favorite), “…Ready for It?” and “Gorgeous,” but the point stands that 19 and 21 are baby ages.