All Too Well and Good Luck Babe are sister songs
To me, the song All Too Well (10 Minute Version) is so queer, and also a sister song to Good Luck Babe (Chappell Roan).
Disclaimer: Death of the author because the old Taylor is dead anyway, so I can make up whatever I want about this song. Once you put something out into the world, it’s open season for interpretation, and it doesn’t matter if the interpretation is ‘correct’. For the sake of this post, I’m referring to the relationship in All Too Well (10 Minute Version) as sapphic, because that’s how I choose to interpret the song, and it’s not a judgment on Taylor’s actual life. I’m also going to just say All Too Well, but I mean the ten minute version.
The lyric “I was thinking… ‘any day now, he’s gonna call it love’, you never called it what it was” is almost an exact copy of the lyrics “you don’t wanna call it love”, and “you can say that we are nothing but you know the truth”. The speakers’ lovers don’t want to admit that the relationship is love, that it’s serious, because doing so would force them to come to terms with their own sexuality. All Too Well differs from Good Luck Babe in how the speaker thinks about their own sexuality, with the speaker of All Too Well having complex feelings about their sexuality “I reached for you, but all I felt was shame”. The relationship in Good Luck Babe ends because the speaker wanted to be open about their relationship “I just want to love someone who calls me baby”, and in the lyric from All Too Well “maybe I asked for too much, or maybe this thing was a masterpiece before you tore it all up, running scared” it’s possibly implied that the speaker asked to be in the open, and her lover left her instead, because of her fear of coming out.
The relationship in both is also secretive. The speaker in Good Luck Babe longs to be openly dating her lover, and while the speaker of All Too Well seems more okay with being a secret, she still took the relationship much more seriously, “there we are again when nobody had to know, you kept me like a secret, but I kept you like an oath”. In the aftermath of the All Too Well relationship, the speaker knows she can’t publicly address their breakup, so she asks “just between us did the love affair maim you too?”. She wants to know if despite her ex-lover being the one to end it, and claiming the relationship wasn’t love, the relationship still affected her, too.
After both of these relationships end, the speakers’ lovers move on to straight relationships. In the iconic bridge of Good Luck Babe, Chappell sings “When you wake up next to him in the middle of the night, your head in your hands, you’re nothing more than his wife. And when you think about me all those years ago, you’re standing face to face with ‘I told you so’”, and in the chorus, she sings “you’d have to stop the world just to stop the feeling”. Despite her ex-lover’s attempts to forget the relationship and move on to men, she can’t, because what she had with the speaker was real, and her relationships with men were not. A similar sentiment is expressed in All Too Well with the line “back before you lost the one real thing you’ve ever known”; their relationship was real, but the lover in All Too Well preferred the safety of faking her way through straight relationships. Both people in All Too Well would rather forget about the transformative love affair, but they can’t, because “we’d swear to remember it all too well”. “It was rare” because it was a real relationship, a queer relationship, that neither of them had experienced before.
Basically, your honor, it’s gay.
