Words by: Akira Kerr
Art by: Janae Hunter

Whether you want to admit it or not, Taylor Swift is one of the greatest songwriters of all time. She has such an acute awareness and understanding of human emotion, as she puts into words the feelings so many of us have had but can’t quite explain. She weaves surprising rhyming couplets, threads through the eyelets of literary fiction and stitches together beautiful phrases to create a tapestry of musical symphony for her listeners. She is a lyrical genius.

So without further ado, here is my ode to Taylor Swift’s poignant and heartfelt lyricism, where based on lyrics, I’ll break down my top three favourite Taylor Swift songs of all time.

3. Champagne Problems

I don’t know about you, but this song never fails to make my eyes well up with tears. That final chorus after the bridge—ugh Taylor why do you do this to me? Over simple piano chords and trilling guitar, Taylor cultivates a narrative where her speaker is reflecting upon having rejected an engagement proposal from her partner. Reminiscent of the regret and shame felt by the speaker in ‘Back to December’ from her album ‘Speak Now’, the speaker is the one causing heartbreak, but this time the bitter end of the relationship is really no one’s fault.

For much of this song, Taylor sings from the second person, but rather than it being messaging of “you inflicted this pain on me” it is “you had this pain inflicted on you by me”. A very concrete way of this in Taylor’s work, is in the lyrics ‘I dropped your hand while dancing’ compared to the scene in her ‘All Too Well (10 minute Version)’ short film, where the protagonist’s partner drops her hand. Another significant pairing between these songs is having the ‘All Too Well’ protagonist endure “plaid shirt days”, compared to how the rejected lover in ‘Champagne Problems’ is “cured” by “flannel”. It can be seen here that these flannel shirts serve as a motif for periods of heartbreak throughout Taylor’s discography. Taylor Swift has her speaker express sincere empathy and compassion for her now ex-lover, as she notices all of the repercussions her rejection has had, from the now meaningless photograph of her in his wallet, to the wasted Dom Perignon champagne (a $400 bottle of bubbles!).The heartfelt embrace of culpability is what makes this song devastating. She endures and accepts the criticism from “hometown sceptics” and has to resolve to hoping her ex-partner, in leaving her behind, will “find the real thing instead”.

In the concluding verse, the only things changed from the first appearance of the chorus in the song is the shift from the pronoun “I” to “she”, and the switching of one word in each line to reflect how the “she” won’t hurt him in the way the “I” did. The way the song is concluded follows the same narrative pattern typical of songs on her album ‘Fearless’ like ‘Love Story’ and ‘White Horse’, where a clear resolution is established at the end of the song. But what makes it so emotional to me, is that it strays from the ‘I will be ok, I will succeed’ trope of this storytelling style to ‘you will be ok, you will succeed’, where the protagonist can only wish her ex-partner happiness without her.

2. ‘The Last Great American Dynasty’

‘The Last Great American Dynasty’ (TLGAD) is an upbeat song that features on ‘Folklore’, and is one of Taylor Swift’s only songs that depicts an overt biographical story of a historical figure. Rebekah Harkness was a well-known philanthropist and patron of the arts born in 1915. As Taylor sings in TLGAD, she and her second husband Bill Hale Harkness, the “heir to the Standard Oil name”, bought a house in Rhode Island.

The pair threw lavish parties with high-profile guests, where at one point Harkness ‘filled the pool with’ Dom Perignon (that’s gonna cause some champagne problems, amiright?). Then in 1954 Bill passed away from a heart attack. His death is alluded to as Taylor sings “it must have been her fault his heart gave out”. Upon his death she inherited a huge amount of wealth and continued to indulge in luxuries and eccentricity. Like Taylor Swift, Rebekah Harkness drew media attention for both her outlandish and her completely reasonable behaviour. It’s from this that Taylor found a muse in Harkness, where she evidently finds joy in witnessing a woman who owns her wildness and indulges in her freedom—even if it causes outrage to the extent of a damaged beyond repair reputation.

Much of this song is written in quotations, where the speaker is actually the townspeople around the Rhode Island house. This can be overtly reflected back to the way Taylor Swift’s life is recorded by what people say about her, rather than the things she is able to say about herself. The gossip and tabloidization of these two women mark their legacy. At the end of the song, Taylor pulls it all together by revealing that after being empty for 50 years, she had bought the house Harkness had once terrorised the town in. She echoes the same chorus that appears throughout the song, however uses the ‘I’ and drops the ‘they said’ which spins the narrative so that she sings this part of the story representing herself. It’s a powerful yet subtle move, as she is able to take control of the story. I love this song for the joy and excitement that comes through in telling Rebekah Harkness’ story, but also for the cheeky way Taylor has once again challenged the media’s representation of girls who just wanna have fun.

1. ‘Peter’

Here it is folks, here is the track that I believe is Taylor Swift’s most phenomenal piece of lyrical work. One of the more low-profile tracks on her latest album ‘The Tortured Poet’s Department’, ‘Peter’ is a song from the perspective of Wendy in the world of Peter Pan. With more connections with the alternative title of the original play “The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up”, Taylor’s song depicts the yearning voice of Wendy as she gives up on dreaming Peter would keep the promise he made to her that “[he was] going to grow up, then [he was] going to come find [her]”.

I like to think that this song, while it uses the story and metaphor of Peter and Wendy, is actually from the perspective of Betty who has now given up on love with James. Many fans of Taylor’s 2020 album ‘Folklore’ will know that there is a fictional love-triangle between highschool students Betty, James and Augusta (or Augustine) across three songs on the album. In this original story, we can deduce that Betty and James were a young couple in love. They were in the same homeroom, and Betty was a little bit more shy and reserved than James. From ‘Cardigan’, we can see that Betty is in awe of James, and loves the way he loves her, because she seems to feel like she isn’t worthy of that kind of affection. As she sings he ‘gives [her] his weekends’ and puts her on when she feels like “an old cardigan”, there is an overt power balance at play, where Betty comes across like she feels inferior to James. So one summer when James began a love affair with Augusta, Betty was at the mercy of the two of them, and could only hope that James chose to come back to her once the “thrill” of the affair had “expired”.

In ‘Peter’ we see Betty as a 20-something-year-old woman who has given up on having a serious relationship with James because of his seeming inability to grow up. In the Long Pond recording sessions, Taylor Swift talks about how she envisions Betty and James ending up together. But perhaps she’s reflecting that while this could have been a promise they made to each other, it didn’t eventuate because James didn’t mature. I can imagine that Betty may have taken him back after his affair with Augusta, but after a short time, James wanted a “lost boys chapter”, or in other words, he ‘needed time to work on himself’. In ‘Peter’, Betty is in a period of resignation where she has accepted he is never coming back to her, but she is much more self-assured than the younger version of her we see in ‘Cardigan’. She has a momentary lapse in courage in the beginning as she asks “Was it something I did?”, but throughout the song the blame is squarely placed on James. This is depicted as Taylor sings with emphasis on the fact that “the woman” compared to the boy who couldn’t grow up, “has turned out the light” on James, and the “shelf life of those fantasies” of being together “[have] expired”.

There is so much more I can say about this song. But if in the simple line “Peter losing Wendy” in ‘Cardigan’ Taylor was foreshadowing Betty’s eventual realisation that she can do better than James, well, our Miss Swift is obviously a lyrical genius.