How do u feel about the trio of cardigan/betty/august?
This is a really obvious thing to say but I love the way each song is the same story, or, more accurately, different angles on the same story, told so differently in voice, production, and expression that there’s no danger of there being a repeat. Each angle of the story doesn’t just get a fair shake—they get their own complete story, each capturing a totally different feeling and so each both stand alone as a good song and makes up a thread of a larger story.
But. In truth. I’m most interested in this trio for what it tells us about Taylor. I care about the three characters but not in the way I care about actual fictional characters? They’re one step removed from me and so I don’t have any feelings about them as people specifically that are boiling up in my heart. If we think of Taylor’s work as a house she’s built, cardigan, august, and betty are like little miniatures, if that makes sense. I marvel at the craft and the brilliance of it more than I lose myself in actually wandering around the rooms of their story. Which isn’t to say they are LESS than her other songs—because they are all so so brilliant. I just can’t listen to them the same way I listen to Taylor sing about her own love life or the way I think about fictional characters in stories and movies. They, in their personhood, are less real to me than that. Not because she does a bad job because she DOESN’t. Each person behind each song feels fleshed out and she speaks in their voice with such confidence and accuracy—betty, the song, especially is unnervingly accurate in its intonation and inflection—but just because of my relationship to them as a listener. So the thing that makes me emotional about these songs is Taylor.
Because I think this trio is Taylor closing out her years long-journey with writing about love in its youngest stages, first love, teenage love, foolish love, maddening love etc. etc. with a dramatic, beautifully show-off-y flourish. It doesn’t mean she won’t ever come back to this at some point. But she, the artist, has finished with this subject in that she’s moving forward into the painful, beautiful, and of necessity much deeper world of adult love and life. It’s not an accident that peace and hoax follow Betty and that both are songs that reflect and muse on her most current self, her 30 year old self. And of course this trio of songs would be Taylor’s last project in the study of young love! She used to LIVE it, writing beautiful, messy, heartfelt songs from the place of being Betty or August and only now, once she’s truly moved past that and grown up and found both what she was looking for all along and a million times more than that, can she look back and understand what it is and so write the whole story, a whole story, from all three sides. She can write cardigan with a perspective not just on love long gone but on her younger self and her younger self’s need to be loved and chosen and she can understand it all with such clarity. She can write the perspective of the “other girl” and love her and understand her and empathize with her because she realizes, “I was you too.” And her final touch, her true masterpiece, is writing from the perspective of all those boys she railed against for years, all the boys she used to carry the torch for/“grind her axe for” because only now can she understand him too. Betty is a brilliant song because it captures James’ headspace, heart, and flaws with accuracy and without judgment. We look at it and we see clearly the kind of boy he is and some of us react more strongly to him and some of us more gently—he’s meant to be controversial! he’s the reason this love triangle is even happening!—but the point is that Taylor has removed herself enough to paint him clearly. Him! The, in a sense, subject of every single ONE of her breakup songs throughout her entire career! For her to step back and be like “and now I tell your story.” It’s a power move, a stroke of genius, a brilliant work of craftsmanship, and an act of love and sympathy and understanding all at once. It gives me chills!
So yeah. I think the trio is important because it is the final product of Taylor’s years of experience and growth in this subject of young love. It’s her taking all her accumulated wisdom and sympathy and insight, uniting them with her current non-bitter adult perspective, and crafting a three-dimensional world for the story of young love to live in forever. She immortalizes it here! The whole thing! In the world of a story that isn’t her own anymore (even though it is built from her heart and her experience and her memories.) it’s so generous and funny and moving. It’s the most TAYLOR thing in the world!
And it’s an ending. It feels that way to me at least. This is her closing the book with a flourish on this part of her life, on this narrative thread.
That’s why it makes me cry when peace starts and she sings “our coming of age has come and gone” because it really freaking has. And we were there for all of it.
(I have to go sob into my pillow now, bye.)
