2014, 48:41, standouts: clean, i know places, new romantics
in 2014 i experienced what was, at the time, the worst year of my entire life. my mom died, my dad moved my now stepmom into our home weeks after that, i was 19 years old and very directionless but i had one bright spot that kept me going.
ryan.
we met playing world of warcraft in november 2013. our friendship developed quickly and we spent an inordinate amount of time together, exchanging numbers and snapchats finally in january. i was giddy because i liked him so much and those feelings grew until they felt like hunger for months. like was no longer like it became capital L love.
ryan, despite his terrible commitment issues, general lack of emotional availability, mental health issues i wanted to desperately fix despite him never asking that of me, tried. he tried to be there for me but he had his own flaws and issues too, something a younger version of me didn’t understand at the time.
now we weren’t ever officially together. we decided not to define the relationship out of comfort for both of us but as far as i was concerned, he was my boyfriend. i treated him as such and there were a lot of times where i felt like i was his girlfriend in return. the year passed, summer came and went, and fall finally was cast upon the world like a spell.
on october 27, 2014 the album 1989 was released. on october 29, 2014 my heart was so broken i felt i’d never recover.
ryan told me we needed to cool things down because he met a girl in person he liked and wanted to try things with her.
now as a 28 year old woman with a plethora of life experience i can tell you what i was feeling was heartbreak, of course, because i cared about this man. loved him, even. but above all what i was feeling was the insurmountable grief of the year that had nearly fully passed by. everything i refused to acknowledge felt like a wall to scale and so this album became a reprieve for me.
listening to a woman i viewed as wiser than myself sing about heartbreak, returning to yourself, not letting lost love define you felt empowering in a way that only a 19 year old can understand. blasting shake it off in my car on the way to my nannying gig, dreaming of another love to how you get the girl, mentally rewriting my own narrative to this love, wishing to embody the burning wit of blank space while mouthing the words in the shower.
for weeks i listened to nothing but this album in its entirety except for clean.
i pulled the lyrics book out of the cd case the day i bought the album and read the words to clean and decided i needed to save that for when i finally felt it. clean. new. no longer in need of a love that didn’t serve me.
on november 12, 2014 i locked myself in my childhood bedroom and listened to clean by myself for hours on repeat. i sobbed until my throat was raw. i ignored my younger sisters knocking completely, something out of character for me. everyone could see i was miserable but i felt like this is the moment where i was able to let it all go.
i was bound and determined to be done. to clean all remnants of him from my life, to be someone new, to abandon the dust covered shelves in my heart where my memories of him resided.
yes i know this was a span of roughly 3 weeks, have i mentioned i was 19 and everything felt huge back then?
on november 19, 2014, ryan asked me how i felt about him. i told him i liked him more than i thought i would. three days later my period of being “clean” was over. we were back on.
hours spent sobbing to clean became hours listening to this love because the narrative had truly been rewritten. this love came back to me!
well at least for a little while. when the prospect of our relationship moving from long distance to in person became a reality and not just a concept, he ghosted me. by april 2015, we were over. i sent him one final text message wishing him well in june and he never responded.
clean once again became a regularly rotating song for me. screamed while driving to my new job in a new city in a new state. sobbed late night in my bed alone. this time clean had to stay, i was determined.
so negatives of 1989 TV: jack antonoff, lack of max martin production shows, vocals once again sound overly smoothed and ai-esque which is an issue with all of these re-recordings, these albums are a blatant cash grab no matter the narrative around them (and it’s working so go figure), a hollow version of a truly wonderful pop album that was inventive at the time it was put out.,……
