Everyone here was someone else before**

[asakiyume]

Having enjoyed a number of hits from Taylor Swift's 1989 album, I decided to buy the CD. And I enjoyed (and continue to enjoy) it very much! It's a rumination on the various ways you can feel and react during a love affair, how you can feel such intensely contradictory things at different moments (or in different relationships, but really, almost all of the emotional states could be reactions to the same relationship, but in different moods and states of self-perception).

I lent it to Wakanomori, who had a take-it-or-leave-it reaction, but remarked, "She really does go on about her own red lips, doesn't she." And she does. Three songs, two of them sitting cheek to cheek on the CD, feature red (or cherry) lips.¹ Is that body-positivity? Vanity? Conforming to traditional femininity? Enjoying herself? Probably all of those. But what it got me thinking about was how many images repeated across songs, sometimes word for word. This could be the sign of someone with a very small word horde, who has to keep reusing things, but what if we gave her the benefit of the doubt and assumed it was artistry? What if it's the album equivalent of creating a sestina? Since thinking that, I've been meaning to do an analysis, and . . . Here it is!





The songs are listed in order of appearance on the CD, with two songs on the sidelines, "Welcome to New York" (which comes first) and "Shake It Off" (the first big hit from the album; it occurs at about the two-thirds mark). Those two songs, unlike the rest, express liberation from the love game; they're confident, outward-looking, optimistic. As you can see if you turn your head sideways, they share some words too. But it's the links in the main sequence that interest me.

The words and phrases she repeats are breathless, grab my hand, perfect storm, go down in flames/burn it down, daydream, red/cherry lips, mad love, bullet holes/bulletproof, wildest dreams, scars/permanent mark, cheeks and kisses, and rain, along with a four-song riff on driving and car accidents.

The short fat arrows show repetition of images between contiguous songs. Look how many there are! In some cases, they show development (how do you get the girl? With kisses on cheeks, the singer persona says in "How You Get the Girl," and then in "This Love," she specifies, "your kiss, my cheek"). Sometimes it's a change in perspective: in "Blank Space," the singer persona is a nightmare dressed like a daydream; in the next song, the lover has a daydream look in his eye.

The car/driving riff is both funny (the guy "can't keep his wild eyes on the road" in "Style," so is it surprising that in the next two songs, there are car crashes? He hits the brakes too soon in one and drives off the road in the next) and a good metaphor for talking about relationships. A poet I admire, Christina Ruest-Hall, has written about how poetry can be therapeutic because metaphor lets us explore painful things without addressing them directly. I think the driving-crashing riff does that here.

And now look at the long thin lines--they show connection of images between songs that are distant. In "Blank Space," the lover in the song is breathless. In "Bad Blood" the singer persona can't breathe. And then, in "Clean," the last song of the album, the persona can finally breathe. In "Blank Space," in which the singer persona describes herself as an unpredictable, erratic nightmare of a lover, she creates a perfect storm. In "Clean," a perfect storm washes away all the remains of a bad love affair. Or take the "grab my hand" line. In "Blank Space," the proffered hand is an enticement to a disaster; in "I Know Places," it's an offer of escape from pursuers. Almost universally, things get better/stronger: in "Bad Blood" Band-Aids don't fix bullet holes, but by the time we reach "I know Places," the singer persona and her lover are bulletproof.


So yes: I think this [ETA: by which I mean, her choice of words, not my diagram!!] shows deliberate artistry in service of unifying the album, both through direct song-by-song links and through links that connect songs that are distant from each other. By using repeated images in different contexts, she's emphasizing that it's the same situation seen from a new angle. They're not particularly startling images--they're pretty stock, in fact--but that makes the songs accessible to a wide audience. Nice job, Taylor Swift! You've got a good album here!

**from "Welcome to New York"
¹And speaking of cheeks, they are featured in three consecutive songs, as you can see from the handy chart.

Comments

[oiktirmos.livejournal.com]

This is the most brilliant album cover I have seen. And it could be in a chapter of Donald Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming.
http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/taocp.html

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

I'm glad you like my mad diagram :-) It is definitely very flow-chart-esque.

[amaebi.livejournal.com]

In fact, the authors of the Bible did the same thing, in creating a saga of their understanding of HaShem, continuing over about five hundred years. Though we wouldn't know if the books hadn't been assembled into such a saga.

Hmmm. I should look at Hebrew Bible aporypha to see if similar words and images jump out at me from there.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

So did people doing renga (linked verse) together in Japan: there were rules about images being repeated and spaced. If you used a powerful image (like the moon), then the next couple of links needed to also feature it--and then it couldn't come up again for a good while.

[amaebi.livejournal.com]

Ah! I know unbelievably little about Japanese poetic forms. Just American-Anglo versions of haiku and tanka.

I do know sestinas.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

You sound like you have a pretty good amount of knowledge. I only know this stuff because of grad school.

Sestinas are wonderful.

[amaebi.livejournal.com]

Sestinas, said my college poetry teacher, are wonderful for obsessive material.

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

I love this sort of close reading.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

They're fun to do--hell, pattern finding is like humankind's second- or third-favorite hobby.

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

Pareidolia - it explains so much about us as a species!

[pameladean]

It's positively Homeric!

P.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

^_^

I feel a little embarrassed bringing all this weight to bear on pop songs, but it's fun!

[pameladean]

I was not being remotely sarcastic. Pop songs deserve just as much analysis as anything else. I can't really say with a straight face that Homer was pop songs, but his work was certainly popular. And of course that repetition you document is a characteristic of oral poetry.

P.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

That's true! About it being characteristic of oral poetry.

Maybe Taylor Swift's favorite images are like her oral fingerprints (the way Homer's epithets were his).

[pameladean]

That's just what I was thinking -- sorry I wasn't clearer.

P.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Please don't apologize! It's hard to read tone in textual communications, but I didn't take your initial comment as critical at all--I felt/feel a little embarrassed all on my own, without any outside criticism. And your subsequent remarks made me feel at home and able to venture to say more. And the fact that i echoed what you said is just my way of nodding, I guess? Restating as agreement. Anyway, you *were* clear, the fault, if there's any fault, is only on this end. But maybe there's no fault :-)

[pameladean]

Absolutely no fault. You were feeling a little embarrassed and I was a little oblique, and there we are. It's all good.

P.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

Oooh, this is fascinating. I have TSwift's other CDs; I should see if they show a similar progression of images.

I do know that she likes to reuse images. I am pretty sure that there's at least one song in every album that references rain: rain pouring down, kissing in the rain, running out in the rain to catch up with a lover or escape from a fight. Driving features a lot too: sitting in the front seat next to a boy is the positive image, cars crashing the negative.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Oh do! And let me know. I also notice that the very memorable, if odd, use of "scarlet letter" in "Love Story" also occurs in her recent song, "New Romantics."

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

It is an odd use of scarlet letter - I guess as a metaphor for any kind of sexual transgression, rather than specifically adultery? In "Love Story" as far as I can tell her sexual transgression is falling for a guy her parents don't approve of; in "New Romantics" it looks more like bad relationship decisions.

"Love Story" uses another one of her favorite images, tossing rocks or pebbles at the beloved's window as a romantic gesture, except here it's so abbreviated it might not be intelligible without the context of her other songs: "you were Romeo, you were throwing pebbles, and my daddy said 'Stay away from Juliet.'"

I often feel in Taylor Swift's songs that there's a private world of imagery here and the songs are simply windows onto that.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

I guessed that about throwing pebbles in the lyric! Glad to have it confirmed.

I feel as if the song "That's how you get the girl" is basically instructing the guy to behave like the Romeo-boy in "Love Story" (a song I love--have I said so? The first time I ever heard it, I had *no idea* how it was going to end--I thought it was maybe going to be a song about a relationship that went south. And then it ended with a happily ever after! I cheered.)

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

I am a total sucker for Taylor Swift songs - although actually a little less with the new album: it's very good but it's less, hmm, swooningly emotional? than a lot of her earlier work.

But I love the fact that Love Story is so unabashedly a wild romantic fantasy, with all the excitement and drama of tragic romance - the secret lovers! torn apart by society! balconies and hidden garden trysts! "cause we're dead if they knew" - but with a happy ending.

The costumes in the music video are pretty awesome too. They're the kind of costumes a romantic teenage girl would sketch when the class discussion of Romeo and Juliet got boring and I love it.

[inspirethoughts.livejournal.com]

Wow...thats such a cool flowchart you made of her songs...makes me wonder how small her world is. :)

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

I actually admire how she is able to take these small store of images and turn it to so many purposes.

[sovay]

Since thinking that, I've been meaning to do an analysis, and . . . Here it is!

It's wonderful. (It would make a perfect album cover.)

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

You're the second commenter to suggest it as an album cover, which bemuses me a little? I meant it only as a tool for visualizing connections. But I'm really glad you do like it!

[sovay]

You're the second commenter to suggest it as an album cover, which bemuses me a little?

I don't know, it looks like the kind of symbolic summation of the album that would make me interested in the music inside.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Well that pleases me! I've definitely found it absorbing. *Musically* I expect it's pretty ordinary, but I like the tunes, and I was definitely in the mood for many different looks at love when I got it, so all in all it was perfect.

[heliopausa.livejournal.com]

:D I don't know the album, but I like the analysis very much!

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Thank you! I had fun doing it.

[khiemtran.livejournal.com]

Interesting, thanks! Sometimes, when I can't sleep on long flights, I like to listen to an album on repeat with the volume turned down so it's barely audible. The last time I went to the US, I ended up listening to 1989 about three or four times, end on end. Since I was drifting in and out of sleep, it was a very interesting experience...

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

What sorts of things did drifting-to-sleep you notice?

[khiemtran.livejournal.com]

I didn't notice the sorts of repetition you noticed, but some tracks like New Romantics or Out of the Woods, were very strange to wake up to/drift off to, because there was some quite strong imagery there. Also, I kept waking up at Welcome to New York and then wondering what had happened to that song that seemed to have been skipped this time around...