Talk to me about Cornelia street/the Bolter! I have thoughts but I want to hear yours!
aaaaaah I’ve been having a moment with Cornelia Street from Lover Live From Paris so this seems like an excellent time to segue to the Eras mashup version! You know I love me a Girl And Her Guitar Doing A Bit At A Coffee House moment.
(First of all, the way her voice has become even richer since 2019 is so wonderful. At the end of the Cornelia Street section when she belts out “And baby I’m so terrified of if you ever walk away, I’ll never walk Cornelia Street again,” she does this lovely crack with her voice at “again” that just sounds sooooooo good. She does it again a bit at “as she was leaving”/“felt like breathing” a couple of times after that too. I love when she lets a bit of the country girl out for effect.)
This is such a cool mashup because I love how it comes down to “I don’t want to lose you, I hope it never ends,” but as she was leaving it felt like freedom.
It once again tells the whole story of a relationship, from the rush of infatuation at the start to fleeing for her life at the end when it’s over. I also just realized that it starts with “we were in the backseat drunk on something stronger than the drinks in the bar/‘I rent a place on Cornelia Street,’ I say casually in the car,” and The Bolter chorus is “Started with a kiss, ‘Oh we must stop meeting like this,’ but it always ends up with a Town Car speeding out the drive one evening,” so there’s a parallel with the car driving them to the beginnings of their home at the start of the relationship and the getaway car taking her away from it at the end.
Also love how the dialogue in both songs are like, these bits of flirty banter, but become so heavy with the context of the song filling it in by the end.
“We were a fresh page on the desk, filling in the blanks as we go,” is one of my favourite lyrics (and is sisters with one of my other favourites, “don’t read the last page, but I stay when…” in New Year’s Day) because isn’t that what all young love is about? When you haven’t written your story yet, and you’re figuring things out as you go along. Which, incidentally, is paralleled at the end of with The Bolter and “ended with the slam of a door, but she’s got the best stories,” but also, “all her fucking lives flashed before her eyes,” because Cornelia Street and the moment it represented became one of those many lives! And she had to leave it just like she left all the other versions of herself! She ran like it was a race! And then she took a detour! And now she’s off to the next race!
I love how she transitions from “there’s escape in escaping” in The Bolter bridge back to, “I hope I never lose you, I’ll never walk Cornelia Street again,” because to me it’s almost the story of: She kept leaving until she found a reason to stay (Cornelia Street), then got scared that she was going to be the one who got left because finally that moment in time was worth fighting for. It’s like the facade of The Bolter persona drops and the tenderness of Cornelia Street takes over, like: I didn’t want to have to leave this time, but I had to do it to save myself. I’m never going to walk Cornelia Street again, but maybe that’s OK, because it too is just one of my many fucking lives that I’m leaving behind to find my new self. It felt like the time she fell through the ice and came out alive.
I also love how at around the 5:00 mark, when she’s ad-libbing building up to the outro with “as she was leaving, it felt like breathing,” the last time she finishes the section with, “it looked like freedom.” And then it transitions into “I don’t want to lose you, I hope it never ends, but as she was leaving, it felt like freedom.” It very much feels like another version of, “I’m just getting colour back into my face”! Like, she thought losing this was going to be the worst thing that could ever happen to her, but she had to listen to her gut in the end to run, and that actually brought her back to life and let her reclaim her life.
And this is maybe a tangent, but one thing I always took out of The Bolter, aside from it being a song of all time, is that to me one of the things the song is saying is: her gut would tell her it was time to go, but the way she went about it was destructive— yet that doesn’t mean she wasn’t right to listen to the cracks in the floorboards. And by mashing it up with Cornelia Street, it’s like this story is saying: the cracks (her gut) told her she had to go, and thus she had to walk away from Cornelia Street for good. And just because she once didn’t want to lose this doesn’t mean it wasn’t ultimately the right decision to leave. I love the parallel between her being terrified of her lover leaving her in Cornelia Street to her having to be the one to leave them by the end of The Bolter. Again, it’s just kind of the full circle of it all, and you get the first and last page of the story.
(also on a other tangent that just made me think of the parallel between “We bless the rains on Cornelia Street, memorize the creaks in the floor,” and “That's when she sees the littlest leaks down in the floorboards and she just knows she must bolt”! Like the things that made up the good times and felt like home eventually broke them apart! Remember looking at this room we loved it cause of the light, now I just sit in the dark and wonder if it’s time!)
Thanks so much for this one! This was such a wonderful mashup to revisit! I love how in so many of the mashups, it feels like she’s using the older song as a memory and the newer song as the reflection upon it.
