I love that The Archer is a song that for all of its painful self-reflection is not about wallowing but instead is about changing the narrative. “I jump from the train, I ride off alone, I never grew up, it’s getting so old” are lyrics about a certain pattern of behavior and they’re met with the simplicity of the lines “help me hold on to you.” “All of my heroes die all alone” literally refers to a narrative that has a certain romance to it, despite its tragedy, after all, it is all of her HEROES die all alone, but Taylor doesn’t want it. She wants her story to end differently so it, too, is met with the line “help me hold on to you.” And that line in itself is worth talking about it because asking for help and reaching out of yourself is the only way you CAN change the narrative, any narrative. You can’t rely on your own strength to carry you through, and Taylor isn’t making that mistake. This line ANCHORS the song, again and again. Every wave of anxiety, every moment of feeling like she’s drowning is countered with the steady, the quiet, the persistent, the almost-muttering line of “help me hold on to you.” It becomes her life-line, her through-line. The only answer she has to the attacks she’s facing. And then! after the bridge of the song lays open her deepest fears, that she can and does see right through herself too, after facing a reality that must feel impossible to change, she is still met with an answer but the answer this time is the answer to the question of the whole song. The answer to the way the narrative is changed. “Who could stay?” she asks throughout. “You could stay,” she says at the end. “Help me hold on to you” and “you could stay.” These are the ways the narrative of sadness and isolation and anxiety could be changed and IS and it’s changed because she WANTED it to be. Not solely. He had to want it too. But she wanted it and so she asked for it, over and over and over, underneath and throughout everything. It’s a prayer and a mantra and a cry for help with all the simple dignity we, in our proud spirit of independence, think can’t apply to a cry for help but it DOES. It. Does. It’s just such a perfect song.
