Growing Sideways, Gazing Back

The Taylor Swift of evermore is our pop Heraclitus: nothing here happens for the first time, everything's a return to something, a rewrite, a re-take, a retraction, a chance to remember and do it again; "I replay my footsteps on each stepping stone / Trying to find the one where I went wrong," as she says in the title song, and it feels right even if you think she's never wrong. Most of the fifteen internet-available tracks either look back to some failure in her past, or imagine physically going back to a place, an imagined or real hometown, or else commemorate the dead: it's practically spooky — at once a surprise pre-Christmas gift and a belated present for Halloween — and it's about the sensation of looking back when you feel (as who hasn't felt?) that you never fit in.

It's also Wordsworthian. William Wordsworth spent a lot of time wishing he could have stayed in the country, remained tied to the land, assimilated the virtues of the peasants he never could be, qualities of evermore we'd chalk up to the persistence of Romanticism-in-general, if not for the presence of Cumberland and the Lake District, by name, at the tail end of folklore. Wordsworth looked back on his own career, and to his youth, and to his youthful best friend, who happened to be his sister: in one of his signature lines, "The picture of the mind revives again."1 Swift, too, keeps reviving things again, finding subjects in places and people she's left, in her own prior songs (on which see below), in characters who assimilate a sense of loss the writer herself can't process, and in in her own fame, which separates her from the girl she was. Angst over growing up, in evermore as in its elder sister folklore, blends into angst about how she's no longer the girl next door, and both of them feed a genre-specific fear about losing the authenticity that country artists, especially crossover country artists, have to establish anew every time they return to a country audience (cf. Kacey Musgraves's "Dime Store Cowgirl").

But of course Taylor Swift doesn't have to prove she's still country to keep her career: she can do whatever she wants, unless she wants (this year) to go on tour. Some of the same parts of evermore whose lyrics mash the nostalgia buttons present themselves, musically, as cerebral electropop. When she protests, in "closure," "I'm fine with my spite and my tears and my beers and my candles" she's doing it over sheet-metal beats, bleep-blorps from a twiddly basement, and (we love this part) 5/4 time throughout. Swift's country-ness was always (unlike, say, Musgraves's) deliberate and constructed, even if parts of her every-teen persona were genuine: the Abigail Anderson of "Fifteen" was real (and is still part of Swift's inner circle2) but "Tim McGraw" was clearly aspirational. The new album's "cowboy like me," with its slippery slide-guitar conclusion, takes place in an airport lounge: the cowboys (she's confirmed) are jet-set con artists having a fling, not sunburnt guys with lassos and hats. Red and 1989 were Swift's announcement that she could make worldwide, citified, modern-day hits: evermore sounds like proof to herself that as long as she can do it with only a couple of backing musicians, she can do anything she likes.

And what she likes, what she wants, right now, is looking back. Breakup songs look back to other breakup songs, describing in mournful piano chords a romance that ended long before the song began: songs that lament relationships that other people wouldn't let her grieve, because they considered her an ungrateful child, a fickle harpy, a lucky duck with "champagne problems" (the title is a pun, meaning both #FirstWorldProblems and a big wedding gone wrong). Songs promise (as "willow" has it) that the past can come back "like a Nineties trend," a trend from Swift's own childhood, a sequel to 1989 and to 1989. Other songs remember dead romances ("happiness"), or lost people, and try to bring them forward into the now: "you're alive, you're alive in my head," from "marjorie," is the kind of thing you say because you wish and you hope it were true. That rising keyboard figure behind the verses feels like Orpheus, walking upstairs with his lost love; she'll never go all the way. Swift has confirmed that "marjorie" commemorates her grandmother, Marjorie Livesay, an opera singer whose recorded voice Swift used as a backing track.3

Still other new songs remember an old hometown, and an old, conventional high school-ish life: there's a Chevy in "champagne problems," and a meeting under the bleachers in "dorothea," and mud on your truck tires in "tis the damn season," a song that hates the holidays until it loves them, can't get enough of them. (What hometown? A fictional one, if it's southern: Swift grew up in horse-country Pennsylvania, as detailed in her song "seven," and then moved to Nashville, and then to New York.) Perhaps these songs are better understood as a nod back to her youthful songwriting tropes than to "real" places or memories — it's easy to forget now, but lyrics about trucks and hunky hometown boys with blue eyes were what initially vaulted Swift to fame, and she proved to be a world-class master of chronicling the aches and joys of high-school-girl existence, even as that very skill rapidly pulled her out of that world. The sonic environment in "tis the season," that heartbreaking marvel of a Christmas song, depends on repeated notes in successive beats (ONE-TWO three, FOUR-FIVE six-seven-eight) and on digital echoes, sounds that literally come back after they go away, just as Swift has come back. If you can take up with your hunky ex for a weekend and pretend you never left, pretend that you can go home again, why not? "If it's okay with you then it's okay with me."

It is also, sometimes, gay with me. Or, technically, bi with me: the next person who shoots down fanlore about Swift's queer songs by pointing out that she has a boyfriend (Joe Alwyn, who co-wrote several songs) will be rewarded with 50,000 links to Tumblr posts denouncing bisexual erasure. Swift still presents herself as a woman who dates men, with a late-blooming sense of her own worth: she's also writing, as she did on folklore, songs that tell stories from viewpoints that can't all be hers. "willow" and "champagne problems" are songs sung by a woman, to a man. "gold rush," on the other hand, piles up rhymes on "crush" around an object of desire whose hair falls in aureate waves, who grew up beautiful: "my mind turns your life into folklore." (Jill Gutowitz's excellent song-by-song breakdown links "gold rush" both to Harry Styles and to the Questing Beast of Swift RPF, Karlie Kloss.4)

Most of all, there's that magnificent ode, "dorothea," in which the singer-persona stayed in the South and the crush, or ex-lover, or best friend, moved away. It's the mirror-piece to "tis the damn season" (where Swift, now famous, comes back and the guy never left), but it also sounds and feels like the years-later sequel to "You Belong with Me," except that the rival is not a more glamorous girl but a glamorous, far-away adulthood. In both songs Swift argues passionately that her rival will "never know your story like I do," though Swift has migrated from stewing in the bleachers to making mischief under them, suggesting a different and perhaps more subversive type of teen ideal. The new one has Swift, with her twang and her tambourine, telling Dorothea "this place is the same as it ever was": "It's never too late to come back to my side," in Tupelo, where Elvis — and therefore white-people rock music — began. The otherwise thoughtful Annie Zaleski called "Dorothea" a song about "old friends."5 Yeah, right.

But here's the thing about queerness and childhood, queerness and teenage nostalgia and hometowns. On the one hand, queerness is not doing what the straights are supposed to do: not settling down, not marrying the "opposite" gender, not growing up. Queerness is "growing sideways," as the scholar Kathryn Bond Stockton put it; not settling down, not making the expected hetero match, not growing up. "There are ways of growing," writes Stockton, "that are not growing up"; she writes, too, of a gay child "wishing time would stop, or just twist sideways."6 On the other hand, unless you're fifteen or grew up in the Castro, if you're queer your past and your hometown are almost certainly less accepting than your present time and place. Queerness is immaturity, the girl crush you're supposed to outgrow, and queerness is nostalgia, the love of first friends (it's nice to have a friend). But queerness also inheres, for many of us, in not belonging, in needing to get away. And then, when you get away, you can look back. That's what evermore does, for all its raft of characters: it looks back with fresh and often queer-friendly eyes on Swift's country career, on her old feuds, on her former aspirations, on her former and imagined hometowns, and aches with the irreconcilability of the past and the present. Back there, that's where your first loves took place, where your heart (queer or not) began: that's where the songs grow. Even — or especially — if you have to make them up.

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Stephanie Burt (@accommodatingly) is Professor of English at Harvard. Her most recent books are After Callimachus (Princeton UP, 2020) and Don't Read Poetry: A Book About How to Read Poems (Basic, 2019). She's also at work on a book about the X-Men.

Julia Golda Harris (@goldagoldah) is a PhD student in American Studies at Harvard University. Her interests include lesbian cultures in the twentieth century, survival in the Anthropocene, and the process of queer history-making.

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