i can do it with a broken heart is the cuntiest song she has ever released

go here and let me know what your short term top artists from spotify (within the last 4 weeks) are in the tags!

it’s very interesting how preoccupied everyone is with muse discourse when i’m like well if these songs aren’t about my life

“This dorm was once a madhouse” I made a joke, “Well, it’s made for me” champagne problems – t.s.

the manuscript is so genius especially as the closer — a nod to the song that is widely considered her magnum opus, written about her first major heartbreak and the first time she was promised the world and had it ripped out from under her, how she periodically “returns to the manuscript” to look back and reflect, and then referencing the experience of directing actors to tell the story in the short film, and concluding that the story isn’t hers anymore — just like she says in the prologue that the events that are written about in TTPD are no longer her reality, just a snapshot of a moment in time, her “tears made sacred” by processing them through her art.

what’s interesting about this album is that she seems to explore every type of lyricism that she’s ever tried. there’s pop. there’s weird. there are folkmore style metaphors. there’s intensely diaristic writing. there are larger stories carefully placed between the lines of specific short narratives. there’s a lot of everything. she is in the weeds and pulled back at the same time. jaime had a lot of discourse about the betty speeches last year and wondered if taylor might’ve chosen a middle ground between fictional narratives and live-streamed public autopsies, and the middle ground turned out to be all of it all the time.

I’m too tired to do this but How Did It End really is the story from beginning to end. The mutual suffering from mental illness, her retreat from the spotlight, trying to make themselves fit into each other’s lives, the attempts to play grown up, the intrusion of fame/celebrity, the breaks, the insinuation of infidelity, the gossip, the maybe allusion to a certain life event, the pulling away from each other, the prying eyes all around hunting for all the details…