2020’s folklore and its followup evermore introduced an interesting twist in the way Swift’s work is perceived. In her personal life, the public assumption was that all was well, and so the songs were created more from her imagination, from Americana and folk tales, drenched in high metaphor. “The lines between fantasy and reality blur and the boundaries between truth and diction become almost indiscernible,” she said in her folklore liner notes. “Picking up a pen was my way of escaping into fantasy, history, and memory.” And so we largely didn’t prescribe certain songs to certain people (with a few notable exceptions, like “my tears ricochet”) and instead luxuriated in the mossy landscape she crafted.
In light of the Alwyn/Swift breakup, fans have gone back and tried to draw out behind-the-scenes footage from folkmore’s more biting songs, like “tolerate it.” Swift’s party line has previously been that she didn’t really mind when people did this investigating. She told GQ in 2015, “I don’t feel there is any injustice when people expand beyond my music and speculate on who certain songs might be about. I’ve never named names, so I feel like I still have a sense of power over what people say—even if that isn’t true, and even if I don’t have any power over what people say about me.”
But those investigations, while understandable, assume the wrong premise. It’s not that every song is a 100% factual news report of what she goes through at a given time, or that the metaphors just disguise the facts, it’s that the stories we’re drawn to — the ones we tell about ourselves and other people — still reveal true things about us whether we mean them to or not.
It’s been nearly a decade since that 2015 interview, and on TTPD we see her surrender some of that power, the need to control. Who is she but a person who can be sucked into bad boy mythologies and fantasies and avoidant attachment styles, just a girl, really? The easiest kind of pain to feel is the projected kind, the kind built on a thousand things that didn’t happen, but could’ve, if we’d held the pen.
Can you blame her? It was just “too high a horse for a simple girl to rise above it,” she says of the mean fans — “vipers in empath’s clothing” — who make “sanctimonious soliloquies” under the mask of protecting her in “But Daddy I Love Him.” (She’s just too soft for all of it!) It’s one of several jabs at her fans across TTPD; her devoted listeners are saboteurs trying to ruin her relationship. It’s “Love Story” with a grotesque frame, and she’s cast herself and her lover as Juliet and Romeo: destined, ill-fated lovers torn apart by people who claim to love her. And she believes the stories she’s telling herself, which makes it a tough listen when thinking about Healy specifically. But who are we to judge? She’s an unreliable narrator and acknowledges as much, but who isn’t?