@theholidayslingerlikebadperfume I am so glad you left these tags on this post, because now I have an excuse to yap a little bit about my personal favorite overarching thesis to explore in regards to Taylor's music, which is this: you can trace almost every single theme, event, narrative motif, character/narrator journey, etc. in Taylor's discography back to Speak Now as an album, and WCS is the song that singlehandedly blew the lid off of that (and TTPD is the album that truly explores the farthest depths of this by literally being a story about a textbook trauma reenactment, if you compare it to my little Speak Now narrative arc below, but that's an essay for another time that I promise I am 100% writing and not just constantly putting off sfsdfds).
On an album posed as a journey of reflection through past sleepless nights, Would've Could've Should've stands out in how overtly it calls back to Speak Now. Unlike many of the other songs on Midnights, which are a bit more vague and elusive regarding their topics and eras of reflection, it's basically impossible to come away from a first listen to WCS and not make the connection between "Don't you think nineteen's too young to be messed with?" and "I never would have danced with the devil at nineteen."
That in and of itself is well known. But it goes a bit farther when you take WCS into context with the rest of the 3AM tracks, and you realize that there is a trilogy being told in reverse.
The Great War, Bigger Than The Whole Sky, and Would've Could've Should've all employ overarching, connective usage of specific metaphors and iconography that illustrate a story about a young woman grappling with a traumatic life experience. WCS discusses the actual traumatic incident/experience itself, serving as the earliest point in this trilogy's timeline; BTTWS serves as an interlude to represent a mourning of the younger self/"girlhood" that she mourns in WCS (and later properly in TGW's bridge), and TGW introduces the listener to a narrator in the present day and lays the groundwork to explore how this trauma effects her, even years removed from the actual event itself. She's lashing out at her current lover, blowing up at them any time they reach out and try to offer her support, and this conflict is illustrated through overt lyrical parallels to WCS:
"Cursed you as I sleep talked" vs "Can't let this go, I fight with you in my sleep," indicating that memories of this person/trauma are impacting the narrator's ability to sleep soundly, and are spilling over into unintentional attacks towards her new lover
"Tore your banners down, took the battle underground" vs "Years of tearing down our banners, you and I," once again creating a hallucination in the narrator's mind that her new lover is the same as this past one; she is treating them now in the exact same way that she wishes she could fight against the person who originally hurt her
"Maybe it's the past that's talking, screaming from the crypt" vs "The tomb won't close, stained glass windows in my mind," directly connecting both songs through the imagery of a crypt/tomb and insinuating plainly that the reason she's treating her new lover this way is because the tomb of this past relationship/trauma refuses to close
"My knuckles were bruised like violets, sucker punching walls" / "Your finger on my hair pin triggers" vs "Memories feel like weapons," once again reinforcing that these flashbacks to this past trauma cause her to think that she's reliving that same situation with her current partner
This is just a personal interpretation, but I like to think the line "Maybe it was egos swinging, maybe it was her" is referencing the narrator's younger self/sense of girlhood that was stolen in WCS; this idea of her younger self being the person who is fighting this nightmare version of the past lover, trying desperately to win, but over and over again she keeps losing. And like a child accidentally hitting their parent when they try to pull them out of a fight, the narrator--both her past and present self--accidentally catch her current lover in the crossfire of her anger.
Ultimately, Would've Could've Should've on it's own simply fits the promoted concept of Midnights as an album: It's a song reflecting on a sleepless night, spurred on by memories of a bad past experience. However, taken in conjunction with the rest of the songs it released alongside, a clear linear narrative appears--and reveals that the specific emotion/experience explored in WCS goes deeper than a one-time reflection. It effects things beyond the constrained walls of that particular song, and the usage of direct lyrical callbacks to create a cohesive, ongoing story across multiple songs indicates this.
Which means it doesn't just start and stop at The Great War. If WCS started with Dear John, you can bet some of it bleeds into everything between that song and The Manuscript.
This is a long enough post, so I won't derail with yet another insanely long, specific lyrical analysis ramble, but I feel like you can trace the general arc of this traumatic incident across multiple Speak Now songs: I Can See You → Sparks Fly → Mine → Ours → Superman → Innocent → Haunted → Dear John. Across this arc, you can see the narrator fall in love, commit herself to the relationship despite external concerns and conflicts, and ultimately come to see the painful downfall of it all. (Sound familiar? 👀).
The reason this arc is relevant to the WCS of it all is because, much like how the 3AM Trilogy shows how the events depicted in WCS still effect the narrator years on, this Speak Now narrative arc traces a line of thinking and behavior that you see repeated across many of the stories in Taylor's songs. Themes like jumping headfirst into things because of how enthralling they appear (ICSY, Sparks Fly → Treacherous, Gorgeous, Gold Rush, Guilty as Sin?), searching or grappling for a sense of control over a situation (Haunted → Mastermind, I Can Fix Him, I Know Places, Getaway Car), religion in association with love, and how trauma comes to warp it (Ours, Innocent → False God, Don't Blame Me, BDILH, State of Grace), and the romanticization of the mundane/family life, and how trauma has warped that as well (Mine, Ours, Superman, Foolish One → TTPD, Paper Rings, Lavender Haze, Peace, loml, The Manuscript).
And all of this is JUST about the emotional/romantic element of it all!! There is an absolutely valid reading of WCS out there that explores the idea of the "devil" being representative of fame and the music industry, and "nineteen" being a reference to the age Taylor was when she got her first break. This theme is obviously present in may of her albums, but hey, wouldn't you know it, Speak Now is the first album in her discography that directly revolves around the negative associations within those things, which means that groundwork laid in Speak Now can bleed out into Red, Reputation, TTPD, etc.
Speak Now was the first album to come after Fearless's big break, and Taylor has gone on record discussing changes she made as a response to negative feedback from that era. As alluded to in Miss Americana when recalling the 2009 VMA's incident, she cites this era as a catalyst for a lot of paths she would go down. She underwent vocal training for the album and the tour, in response to poor comments about her voice. She opted to write all of Speak Now on her own in order to prove naysayers wrong, not dissimilar to how the narrator of many of Speak Now's songs is desperately trying to prove the naysayers wrong about her own relationship. Ultimately, there is a core element of Speak Now that was born out of an innate desire to have the last word and be victorious, proving anybody who dared to comment about her wrong. Very "the pain was heaven" type mentality at play. And in regards to fame specifically, even before we got Castles Crumbling on the vaults (which obviously directly addresses a building fear that she was already past her prime and had to forever settle with her small window in the spotlight), we had Mean and Long Live--a tongue and cheek clapback to negative critics, and a bittersweet, warm thank you to her bandmates and the fans who had stuck by her, just in case this really was the end of everything that has just begun.
And then, of course, there's Innocent. Which, to me, is probably equally if not more important than WCS in terms of this analysis of her discography. While I don't care much for discussing Taylor's music in the context of "who" any song is about, it is relevant to acknowledge how Innocent is notably regarded a ballad of forgiveness aimed towards Kanye for upstaging her at the 2009 VMA's. However, similar to an interpretation of WCS in which "nineteen" refers to the age Taylor was when Fearless broke through, "thirty-two" in Innocent is also coincidentally the age that John Mayer was at the time. Which makes the potential relevance and depth of this song absolutely exceptional. It is not just a young woman sending an olive branch of forgiveness to an older man upstaging her star-studded moment, it's also a young girl desperately trying to cling to the idea of the man she loves, despite all his behavior telling her that he won't ever change. If Kanye represents the music industry, then John represents the idea of romantic connection, both men tied up in the singular pining of the age of "thirty-two". And Innocent becomes a song that is about retaining a sense of faith, both towards love and romance, and also towards music, two things that obviously serve as pillars of her entire identity at this point. With all of this in mind, it isn't a stretch to say that Innocent--the song that represents Taylor's final, desperately positive prayers to systems and ideologies she still holds faith in--is singularly representative of what she lost when she sings, "give me back my girlhood, it was mine first."
I just.... I simply don't know what else to say! Speak Now is simply where aaaaaallllll the origins lie for so many topics Taylor actively continues to explore in her songs, and I don't think nearly as much of this would have clicked for me if it wasn't for the release of Would've Could've Should've.
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