The narrative continues to be exhausting. At least in my feed, every bit of commentary seems to boil down to some version of this Instagram Reel of Taylor repeatedly smacking Kim Kardashian, Matty Healy, and Joe Alwyn with a metal chair. Oh, there are variations. Here’s a middle-aged man arguing that “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived” is really about Scott Borchetta and his decision to sell her masters to Scooter Braun. Here’s a post on the deranged subreddit r/SwiftlyNeutral which indignantly asks whether Taylor considered how her perceived shade towards Kim Kardashian might make North West, her ten year old daughter, feel. Even Jake Gyllenhaal, a full fourteen years removed from their three-month fling, is still catching strays in this album, at least according to People Magazine.
This sucks. As I’ve written before, mapping everything in a Taylor Swift song onto an autobiographical celebrity narrative is a horribly depressing and restrictive way to view this art. It leaves no room for interpretation, it closes off emotional entry points to listeners who have no personal experience dating famous actors and rock stars, and it forces us to evaluate these songs along moral, rather than artistic, axes. This lens demands that we ask questions like “did Taylor Swift break up with Joe Alwyn in a problematic way” (incredibly boring and fundamentally unanswerable), instead of more interesting questions like “how does the use of that synth pad in ‘Down Bad’ make me feel?” and “What does it mean for everything to ‘come out teenage petulance’? As I worried she would, Taylor has steered directly into this reading, saddling the album with proper nouns, identifiable characteristics of exes, and even a capitalized K, I, and M in a freaking song title. She has in the past bragged about never naming names in her songs, and has complained that anyone who believes that she’s just “writing songs about her ex-boyfriends” is taking a “sexist angle.” On this album, she has ceded this moral high ground. She’s named names, and if we’re taking that angle it’s because she’s begging us to.
And the worst part of it all is that it distracts from the most important question of all: What does this album say about ghosts?!
As it happens, quite a lot. A friend of a friend “just ghosted” the subject of “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived.” Florence Welch tells us that she “barricaded in the bathroom with a bottle of wine/ well me and my ghosts, we had a hell of a time” on “Florida.” “My beloved ghost, sitting in a tree, D-Y-I-N-G,” Taylor sings on “How Did It End?” a delightfully morbid metaphor that combines nursery rhymes with Faulkner-esque temporality tricks. The narrator of “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me,”1 leaves from the gallows and levitates down your street, pretty wraith-like behavior if you ask me. We even get a reference (seemingly out of the blue, not really related to the rest of the line or song) to the Holy Ghost on “LOML,” which is exciting if only because all three entities in the Holy Trinity have now been mentioned in Taylor Swift songs! But today, I want to focus on the ghostliest ghost song of them all: “So Long, London.” Track five. The big kahuna.
“My Tears Ricochet,” another track five ghost song from folklore, opens with a chorus of soprano ghosts, completely acapella, gently shrieking the two-measure phrase that will make up the primary backing track of the song: “hoooo-hooo-hooo. Hooo-hooo-hooo.” Immediately, we are transported to a graveyard, with long shadows, roman numerals, gothic engravings, and a ghost narrator, who has risen from below to address her own funeral procession. Taylor fully commits to the set and setting, mentioning “hell,” “ashes,” and her “dying day,” all within the first verse. And she underscores this musically by leaving the ghostly “hoo”’s completely alone, without any guitar, percussion, or any other instruments. For most of the song, it’s just her and the ghost chorus, exactly as it would be if we were actually there in that graveyard.
“So Long London” attempts a similar trick in the opening bars, with another soprano acapella chorus singing “So Long London,” in an arpeggiated call and response, with familiar “hooo”’s haunting in the background. It reads less ghostly and more like a children’s choir singing at a funeral to me (maybe with some ghosts behind them), but it’s still effective in evoking a specific deathly environment. I remember hearing the choral opening to this song on my first listen through the album, coming in stark contrast to the straightforward low-fi synth-y pop production of the previous song “Down Bad,” and leaning forward in my seat. This song was going to sound different and I was excited.
Nope. After three repetitions, a new robotic voice enters with a “swooooop,” leading to a pulsing 808-drum track and more low-fi synths. The choir never returns, one of many intriguing choices that Taylor makes and then prematurely discards in this song. We’re never fully sure where we are and what is happening, which makes it frustratingly difficult to locate the role and significance of the ghosts involved.
As Olivia Fair pointed out in her Pitchfork review of this album (6.6/10!), the narrator alludes to five different causes of death for the song’s subject. Let’s count them out:
1. “My spine split from carrying us up the hill.”
Love it, a wonderfully visceral description of the dangers of an inequitable, codependent relationship. But this comes less than a minute into the song. And yet it’s quite hard to imagine her surviving this. This is some John Wick level plot armor right off the bat.
2. “I stopped CPR after all it’s no use. The spirit was gone we would never come to.”
This one’s awesome too, if a little repetitive. She’s trying to resurrect the relationship, but she can’t because she’s part of the “we,” and she can’t perform CPR on herself! But this is obviously incompatible with the last one, you really need an unsevered spine to even attempt CPR. I’m also docking points here for the use of the word “spirit”, which head-fakes towards the presence of a ghost without following through, just like the introduction did.
3. “Two graves, one gun. I’ll find someone.”
I wrote last week that the songwriting on this album was not constructed in a way that lets the listener figure out what’s going on in real time, and this is a good example. The image of two graves and one gun is great storytelling, by working with negative space and letting the listener do the mental forensics to figure out this must have been the result of a murder-suicide. But the listener better figure that out quickly, because the next line “I’ll find someone” comes right away, less than a second later, and it completely undercuts the image of the graves and the gun. You can’t find someone else if you’ve done a murder-suicide, that’s in many ways the whole point!
4. “And you say I abandoned the ship, but I was going down with it. My white-knuckled dying grip, pulling tight to your quiet resentment.”
These are some gorgeous nautical metaphors (I particularly like the image of his quiet resentment being the mast of the relationship, something that is both unruly and destructive, but also integral to the function of the larger apparatus), but the temporality is confusing. The narrator was going down with it? Did she or did she not? If you start to go down with a ship and then swim away when you’re halfway down, then you are in fact not going down with the ship! And when did the subject, who presumably did end up drowning here, have time to accuse the narrator of abandoning it?
5. “You swore that you loved me but where were the clues? I died on the altar waiting for the proof, you sacrificed us to the gods of your bluest days.”
This one is almost too convoluted to unpack (who is the sacrifice, the narrator or the relationship?), but here’s my best attempt. For the couple’s fifth anniversary, the narrator expects the subject to plan a Gone Girl-style scavenger hunt full of inside jokes and references to their magical relationship to prove his undying love for her. But he forgets. Outraged (“Where were the clues?!” she screams in a rage), she commits ritual suicide in a nearby cathedral. Somehow, he shows up just in time for this sacrifice, which he then helps perform because he thinks it might cheer him up from his bout of depression. I don’t know, let me know in comments if have a better idea.
Any one of these five metaphors, even the scavenger hunt ritual suicide, could serve as the basis for a killer Swiftian Track-5 break-up song. Shoving them all in (along with some other non-fatal ones too, including a drilled safe, a house on a heath, and a wound with undone stitches), and jerking rapidly from one to the next, dulls each one. I had to listen to this song five different times, often pausing and rewinding the same few seconds over and over, to decipher any of this. And even after that, I’m not sure how the ghost/child choir in the opening connects to any of this. I think she could have left it out completely without compromising the song, whereas the opening to “My Tears Ricochet” is, like all aspects of any masterpiece, completely essential.
There was one phrase that packed a punch for me right away, though. In the pre-chorus between fatalities #1 and #2, she sings “How much sad did you/ think I had did you/ think I had in me?/ Oh the tragedy” The melody rises with each line, lingering on “saaaad” and “haaaad” as her voice grows more pleading and desperate. She sings this again in the second pre-chorus, then adds another line: “just how low did you/ think I’d go ‘fore I’d/ self-implode, ‘fore I’d have to go/ be free.” For all the elaborate language and imagery in this song, this phrase is constructed completely out of small, basic words like “sad” and “low” and “free,” and it gives me the wonderful feeling that I’ve gotten so many times listening to Taylor’s music, where I get to think “Wow, how did no one think of that?” The line “how much sad did you think I had” is so obvious, so clear, so easy, and yet no one got to it before last weekend. It’s a gift that only a genius artist and writer can offer to her audience. Too bad the rest of this song is so musically and thematically cluttered that it doesn’t shine even brighter. And too bad that in a song that is so obsessed with fatal imagery, that opens with another choir of shrieking sopranos, it’s never clear who is haunting who.
I have a lot more to say about this song, and I’ll save most of it for a future blog. For now, I’ll just point out that she recycles the drum track from Jack Antonoff’s nauseatingly ubiquitous 2012 hit “We Are Young,” and I find that incredibly distracting.