“Dorothea” Is The Girl From “Illicit Affairs” And “‘Tis The Damn Season”
We have a cross-album song trilogy people! Let’s break this down.
“Illicit Affairs” stars a young girl engaging in an affair with an older lover. It’s a song where the girl is at her most broken vulnerable state. She remarks that she has taken “the road less traveled by” and that he went from romancing her in beautiful rooms to using her in “meetings in parking lots.” He’s also made her into such a dirty little secret that she has to “leave the perfume on the shelf that [she] picked out just for him.”
Now let’s head to “’Tis the Damn Season.” Very similar imagery shows up, linking the two songs. Dorothea has left their hometown to become a star (and also quite possibly to get out of this toxic situation). Yet, the temptation of the good days works like “a drug that only works the first few hundred times.” She affirms this drug has this hold on her still as she goes back to “the road less traveled by” from “illicit affairs” when she says in this song “the road not taken looks real good now, and it always leads to you and my hometown.”
She remarks that she parked her car “right between the Methodist and the school that used to be ours.” This, I believe, was the parking lot that the two of them had a history of meeting up at in “illicit affairs.” She follows this up by saying that “the holiday lingers like a bad perfume.” In “illicit affairs” the perfume was something that she initially wanted to use to attract him to her, win him over, only to realize that he truly wanted nothing meaningful with her. I think the holiday lingers like a “bad perfume” not because it’s off-putting, but because she knows wanting him that same way is bad. It’s a “bad perfume” because it was the one she used when she wanted him to want her so desperately. She doesn’t want to go back to the lows she experienced in “illicit affairs.”
Then we get to “Dorothea.” This song, I believe, is from the perspective of the man from “illicit affairs.” After she leaves him and becomes a star in LA, he finds himself missing what they had. He recalls their relationship with more fondness (probably because he was the one with all of the power), so he writes her a letter (this song). In “illicit affairs” it is established that they know each other very well as speak “a secret language” and “see colors” that they simply can’t share with anyone else. This is how he can write to her with confidence that “[she’ll] always know [him].” She too, knows how deeply he knows her when she says in “‘Tis the Damn Season” that she wonders about him, “the only soul [she’s] ever known who can tell which smiles [she’s] fakin’.”
He has kept up to date with her rise to fame. He sees her through a “tiny screen” (phone) as she’s “sellin’ dreams, sellin’ makeup and magazines” and hanging out with her “shiny new friends.” When she returns to her hometown in “’Tis The Damn Season” she accepts the phoniness of the lifestyle she leads now in L.A. with “those so-called friends who’ll write books about [her].”
Neither one of them have truly moved on from the draw they once had to each other when things were “good.” However, unlike the headspace she was in during “illicit affairs,” she has the perspective that their relationship will never be something with real romantic permanence. When Taylor Swift wrote “Babe,” a song about infidelity, Taylor strikes down her lover by saying, because of the cheating, that it would be the last time she would call him “babe.” In THIS song relating to infidelity, Dorothea uses that same affectionate term. He can “call [her] ‘babe’ for the weekend.” They’ll have a one-night stand, reigniting this affair, for one brief weekend and then she leaves.
He wants to rekindle the past with someone who shines so much brighter than him now. She wants to take the briefest run down memory lane to recapture what felt real, even though it never was, while she’s taking her vacation away from all that feels fake about her life in L.A.
We STAN a complex lyricist in this house! <3
