please tell us your bigger than the whole sky / would've could've should've Thots
oh no, you're gonna get me started on two of my favourite songs and I won't be able to stop 😂 This has turned into a very rambly stream of consciousness post, my apologies. The TL;DR is that to me, they're fascinating explorations of the ways in which faith (and I don't necessarily mean religious) can guide us or lead us astray, buoy us or cast us adrift.
I know there are all kinds of interpretations of the songs and their place on Midnights and in Taylor's discography. I've touched on this before, but one thing that has struck me about Midnights is that it's an album about loss and depression and questioning in the aftermath, and so many songs on there feel like "what ifs": moments in time where it seems like everything changed from that point forward. (That's a real fucking legacy to leave, indeed.)
I've written about it elsewhere on this blog, but something that connects both songs to me is how they deal with faith, as I said at the outset. Specifically, WCS is the point at which she believes she/the narrator loses her faith due to what happened to her, and BTTWS delves into how unmoored in the wake of another loss when she/the narrator feels in a world where she no longer has the faith she once held. It's, I could have gone along with the righteous to I'll say words I don't believe.
I know the wording sounds similar between the two songs, but they aren't exactly the same, and to me their intent is completely different, though equally marking. @taylortruther even answered an ask about this a while back. As she put it in the post:
what i like about it is that would've could've should've is a pretty glib phrase, in my experience, and sometimes shaming. like, don't dwell on it, you could've done things differently, but you can't change it now. and these are two songs about dwelling and not being able to move on from something that changed her (or the narrator).
In WCS, it's like a call and response in her head: if you would've, I would've. You could've, and I'd never. "Would've, could've, should've" in the pre-chorus is like she's chastising herself, as in, I should've have known better, except by the end we know: no, she couldn't have known better, because he should've, and did. (Don't you think I was too young? You should've known.) It's angry and pained.
In BTTWS, the order's a little different (What could've been, would've been, should've been you.) To me, the context is completely different in that it's not recrimination like in WCS: it's a sad, pining daydream about someone/something that never came to exist or no longer exists. Whereas in WCS the words are her not only beating herself up with regret, but reading the person who harmed her for filth, in BTTWS it's a tender elegy for an entity that left her before its time.
One of the most interesting similarities between the two songs, to me, is that they both deal with the fallout of an event outside the narrator's control, with some omniscient figure pulling the strings instead, and the narrator's reaction to each of them is a markedly different stage of processing or grief.
In WCS, she's grappling with the guilt that this is something she thought she wanted, only to realize much later on that someone else was making these choices for her. The Devil should have blinked, he should have spat her out, he shouldn't have touched her first, he shouldn't have put her on a pedestal only to bury her in the ground. He was the one with the power in the situation, and he did something to her (or, in her words, took something from her) that left her filled with regret and shame. She believed she wanted this, but only now does she know she should never have been put in the position where it was even an option.
In BTTWS, the narrator is grappling with something being taken from her that was beloved and is now sorely missed. The guilt in this case is her wondering if there were anything she could have done to prevent whatever happened that led to its loss. If she'd stayed on her knees, as it were, would the outcome have changed? (Which is an interesting contrast to WCS: WCS implies that she was part of the righteous-- until the events in the song, which made her fall from grace. Here, she doesn't consider her righteousness until the thing is gone away. Kind of like bookends thematically, in a sense.) Is her lack of faith or piety the reason this happened? Or is it because of a cascading series of random events she doesn't even know about that ultimately led to this? To me, it's like, in WCS, she knows exactly why it happened (even if she doesn't know why he did it), but in BTTWS, she has absolutely no idea what led her here, which is part of why she can't find the words for it.
It's interesting, because even in WCS there's an admission that part of her thought she wanted this: The god's honest truth is that the pain was heaven. If you never saved me from boredom, I could've gone on as I was. Hence the regret that she fell into temptation (lol sorry can't help it-- the Catholic guilt is strong in this one) and was led so astray-- I miss who I used to be. In BTTWS, esoteric ~you~ is something that is unquestionably very much wanted-- I've got a lot to pine about, I've got a lot to live without, I'm never gonna meet what [...] should've been you-- and the guilt stems from feeling like she there could have been something to keep ~them~ here. The loss of what could've, would've, should've been this ~thing~ leaves a hole in her and her future. The narrator is haunted by what happened to her in WCS, but in BTTWS, she's haunted by what didn't happen, in a sense.
If Midnights in an album, as the fandom popularly theorizes, about looking into your past to try to understand your present and protect your future, those two songs are clear examples of ruminating over a specific event (either recent or long ago) and wondering if there were any way to prevent the pain and loss in the current moment.
This is probably far more than you ever bargained for for an answer, and as you can tell I could wax poetic about this for ages. I think WCS is one of the cornerstones of her discography, because it is such a raw depiction of trauma and its aftermath, and I think fills in the lines of so much (certainly between Speak Now and TTPD). And I think BTTWS is actually vital to understanding both Midnights and TTPD, like it's a bridge between the two albums, because it is the starkest depiction of grief and depression. The "every single thing I touch becomes sick with sadness" is the same kind of mindset that leads to writing so much of Midnights, and mood-wise it's a direct pipeline to Fortnight which then sets the scene for the rest of the album.
If you're interested, I wrote a long-ass post diving into the 3am tracks (before we knew that TTPD even existed lol) and wrote quite a bit about WCS and BTTWS there too. And my song tags (particularly the bttws ones) probably have more stuff in there too!
