#*memory

[taylortruther]

very late i know but it just struck me that ttpd standard might be the only album where taylor doesn’t talk about wanting to be remembered by a lover. the very first, Tim McGraw, is about that hope and want

i remember a post where you mentioned that you have been thinking about how taylor has been digging into her past. it does then stand out that for the first time that very swiftian wistfulness is missing from the standard edition

it also may be one of the first albums since speak now that she doen’t talk about how she will be haunted by someone (loml is followed by TSMWEL where she decidedly says i’ll forget you). idk this adds to my initial impression that ttpd was an album that was written in the midst of a trying time but also an album that is about putting away things in her past. the anthology colors the latter impression

oooh interesting! i think it's a sign of how she knew she had to move on.

we do get a few vulnerable moments where she asks if he misses her: do you miss me in the shower? does it feel alright to not know me? if you want to break my heart, say you loved me... previously, her request to be remembered often seemed to point at her fatalism: nothing good can last, so please remember the good parts when we're over.

and ttpd seems to be releasing herself from that, too. she doesn't want to be remembered or pined for - actually, that seemed to be a destructive wish in her past. she wants to look towards the future and find a person who wants to be with her, for real, forever. or at least she just wants to be true to herself, living in reality.

[cerviideath]

I have no idea how we haven't realised this sooner but the reason why we had been misdiagnosed with bi polar disorder, even though to us we obviously don't have it, is because we are a system. The psychiatrist who diagnosed us was a dick who didn't even listen to what we actually had to say 'cause we were just a stupid crazy kid to him, and I can see how us switching could've been on the surface misinterpreted as rapid cycling when we were confused and tried our best to explain it. I think if we actually talked to a good psychiatrist who gave a fuck about us the idea of us having a CDD would've come up way sooner at the time.

[taylortruther]

You guys are not going to like this, but I have a theory that loml might be about two people, and those two people are NOT Matty and Joe.

At this point we can all agree that nearly every song on TTPD is about two people...so my theory for loml is that it's about Matty and Harry.

Okay, so the Matty references are obvious. Now putting aside the obvious point that Harry has a song called 'love of my life' already, I still have other reasons to believe it's about him.

Firstly Taylor seems to attribute many songs se has written bout someone at first to another person later. I get the feeling she did that with many 1989 songs, relating them to Matty after she met him. I think while revisiting what went wrong with Matty, she was taken back to the 1989 "era", if you will, and found some inspiration.

Also, in loml, she talks about "waltzing back into rekindled flames", a very "when we go crashing down we come back every time" esque lyric. Obviously it can apply to Matty as well, but I just wanted to point that out.

Also the "we were just kids, babe" line rubs me the wrong way because Taylor or Matty or Joe were NOT kids when any of them met.

Harry was 18 and Taylor was 23 when they dated though. They made mistakes and got back together and so on and so forth.

The ghosts/phantoms/cemetary references remind me of Two Ghosts, the song Harry famously wrote about Taylor. Also, "Mr Steal Your Girl" and One Direction has a song called Steal My Girl.

Also, I feel like loml has a lot of the same themes as Question..?, which imo is also a song that's about both Harry and Matty? Like her most famous "kiss in a crowded place" was the NYE one with Harry? Also the glaring callbacks to OOTW is always so confusing to me. Like the song is to be interpreted as a Matty song because of the dickhead guy line, but then why so many 1989 references?

Maybe because those two relationships in her life were so close together and both very quickfire, fleeting yet impactful...so she tends to intermix both at times.

Again, I'm not a haylor and OH GOD NEVER a maylor...this is just my theory. I mean she references past players in her life like Jake and Kim and even Calvin if you consider the 'bully' lyric in Chloe et al...so it got me thinking thoughts.

mmm i am not convinced. i mean, anything is possible, sure, and inspiration can have many sources. but... what is the broader implication of these callbacks that you think she's making to harry? do you think he is the love or loss of her life? does this return anywhere else on this album? why do you think she might want to reflect on that, when the epilogue makes it clear this album is about her feeling a "restricted humanity" that led her to making specific decisions that were "self harm"?

i do think you're picking up on how taylor revisits themes throughout her discography, though.

she's been singing about ghosts (bad blood, cardigan), being haunted (sparks fly, haunted), wanting to haunt people (tim mcgraw, wildest dreams), memories torturing her (the "what if" in chloe et al for example but also all too well!) for her entire career - but especially later, because, well, the older she's gotten the more memories she's made or regretted.

imo this is one of the reasons why i look in people's windows is so poignant. "i'm afflicted by the not knowing, i'm addicted to the 'if only'" - this idea, concept, theme, motif, whatever, appears in her entire discography.

as for "we were just kids, babe" - it's not a literal line about being being a minor, it's about revisiting the past and hoping to rectify past mistakes. we see it resurface throughout her discography as well (like 1989 and midnights, as you pointed out!), but especially this album: here at the park where we used to sit on children's swings wearing imaginary rings (fots), he was my best friend down at the sandlot (my boy), you said you were gonna grow up then you were gonna come find me (peter), down that passage in time back to the moment i crashed into you...too impaired by my youth to know what to do (chloe et al.)

[taylortruther]

Glitch is not about Matty … and anyone referring to Harry as a 2 month situationship hasn’t done their research (be grateful but much like Jake wasn’t 3 months and done, neither was Harry).

yeah i'm very hesitant to start saying "all these songs were actually about matty!" for many reasons. standard disclaimers apply: we don't know what we don't know, anything is possible! but taylor was clearly in a lot of pain about the dissolution of her and joe's relationship. i don't personally think she was writing a bunch of romantic sexy songs about matty in secret for years. i just think the "what if"s came back with a vengeance when things with joe got really bad.

[taylortruther]

you can't get rid of it. plea / defense / damage / perfume / proof

[taylortruther]

I've been thinking about what you said about the topic of pictures/memories and being known and I think a good example of it is in 'seven,' 'dorothea' and the seven slam-poem in The Eras Tour.

'seven' is a song about childhood naivety. In the song, she's speaking to a childhood friend. I think a big part of the song addresses all of her childhood friends in Pennsylvania. When she says, "Please picture me in the trees // please picture me in the weeds" she asks them to remember her as she used to be. This is why she starts the poem with "Say you remember me standing in a nice dress" because both lines ask someone to remember a specific picture of her that is almost sacred. In seven she is asking to be remembered for her best moments when she was free and ferocious. In Wildest Dreams, she is asking to be remembered beautifully, despite the inevitable ending of the relationship.

Contrary to popular opinion, I don't think dorothea is about Selena Gomez. I think the song is a self-insert and it's kind of clear that 'tis the damn season is very personal. "If you're ever tired of being known for who you know, you'll always know me" is a great line and it's also a sentence I think Taylor would love to hear. In both seven and dorothea there is the topic of recalling childhood memories. In seven it is Taylor who recalls them and begs her childhood friend to remember her from these memories and in dorothea, it's the lover who recalls these memories and wonders if his old flame thinks about them too. seven is the question and dorothea is the answer. There are only a handful of people who actually know Taylor before she got famous (a handful compared to the number of people who know her now) and I think a big part of her longs for the ones who know her true self who hasn't been affected by fame.

Even Joe didn't know that Taylor. Their entire relationship survived the worst storm caused by her fame.

this is very beautifully written, thank you for sharing!

you are so right and wildest dreams and seven are companions. in wildest dreams, she's cynical about how long they'll last because of her history; in seven, she knows she can't return to those simpler times.

they're pleas to be remembered but, more than that, they are taylor's way of mourning and crying out that forces larger than her have changed her.

(see also: can we always be this close? + i wish i could brainwash you into loving me forever + if god forbid fate should step in and force us into a goodbye...please tell them my name)

[taylortruther]

I felt like I forgot something!! That Long Live connection is devastating oh my god.

I don't know if I can articulate the "hiding in plain sight" dkkwkfk it's a loaded line. I usually think about "nobody physically saw me for a year" when I hear it. I know we joke about Taylor hiding in a suitcase but how many times she actually went out with a baseball cup and sunglasses? Quite literally hiding in plain sight. Maybe she even met a waitress who told her she looks like an american singer.

And also like, the amount of times Taylor was struggling but put on a happy face and no one realized she was suffering. The 1989 era, in 2021 she said she spent the og Red era crying between interviews, and now in hindsight we know she was also struggling during the end of Fearless era / beginning of Speak Now era. Through her music she always showed us her suffering, like what you said about Long Live, "may the memories break our fall", The Lucky One, I Know Places, New Romantics, but despite her laying all these clues in plain sight and showing us her wounds, we still see her as a guiding light. We know she's walking to a house, not a home, but we also don't because we don't pay attention and she's so good at hiding things while telling the whole truth.

OOOH okay yes yes yes. like. she wants to be remembered, but 'only you get to decide what you are remembered for' and 'you are not damaged goods' and she is known by everyone but nobody because she's a mirrorball doing everything she can to keep us looking at her and you need to find another guiding light and she's trapped by this cage of her own making oh my god