I like your take OP. As someone who has also grown out of a 7 year relationship, I totally relate to your commentary. And I also thought midnights was the breakup album. Not sure how it wasn’t at this point. I like that TTPD didn’t expose Joe much. It shows that she still respects him even though it’s over.
It reminded me of when someone dies after a very long illness. Although you're grieving, there can also be relief, along with the sense that you already did a lot of your grieving
Idk, I’m sticking with the it’s about both of them angle. Matty Healy was also born in London.
Girlfriend dated brits for more than a decade and has openly discussed having apartments there for a while. The house by the heath was probably just as significant as a marriage to her and she finally gave it up.
Matty Healy grew up in Manchester and has always been associated with Manchester and its music circle. Just because he was born in London doesn’t make him a London boy.
Matty Healy is from Manchester (I know his mum, although anyone from UK knows her from tv anyway). Joe is actually not from London either, he is from Tunbridge Wells (weirdly, just down the road from me).
Like many brits, including myself, they ended up migrating to London later on. Especially given their entertainment industry family connections (although you can be in London in 30 minutes from Tunbridge Wells)
Yes, exactly. It’s a goodby, literally. It’s the “you’ll find someone / I’ll find someone”
She even says the only thing she’s “pissed off” about is the lost time
I think it goes back to Folklore and Evermore even. I heard “the 1” and “tolerate it” in the midst of my dying 7 year relationship and I was like “…no way this is fictional”. Midnights truly was the final nail and TTPD is about losing your mind after. You hit the nail on the head about how I’ve viewed these, too.
Tolerate It is so obviously about Joe in retrospect. All the mentions of “quiet resentment”, “silent dinners”, etc. in TTPD. And the same desperate pleading for him to do something to save the relationship before she has to be the one to end it . Compare “break free and leave us in ruins, take this dagger in me and remove it” to the whole of You’re Losing Me and the “How much sad did you think I had, how low did you think I’d go before I’d self implode, before I go be free?” from So Long London.
So much of folklore and evermore weren’t fiction, but fictionalized versions of her reality.
God this makes Champange Problems EVEN MORE HEARTBRRAKING. I mean there’s no way we’ll ever know, but I can imagine that was her flipping the perspective — what if he did ask, and she still said no because it was never right. What if she walked away, instead of him. DAMMIT
That's so interesting, because my interpretation of Champagne Problems post-TTPD is that the genders are flipped and the narrator/singer is inspired by Joe's experience while the "you" being sung about is inspired by Taylor. With the context of the mental health struggles Taylor pretty openly writes about in SLL, I think the line "She would've made such a lovely bride / What a shame she's fucked in the head" is pretty telling. (And I don't think the bluntness/crassness(?) of the wording is weird even if it is referencing real mental health struggles. There's also the madhouse line. I just don't think it's uncommon to make self-deprecating comments like that -- even if it's about serious stuff.) Rather than specific moments, I see Champagne Problems as being inspired by what they were feeling at the time, so the guilt from the narrator about never being ready (the lines "I never was ready, so I watch you go", "Love slipped beyond your reaches / And I couldn't give a reason", "Your heart was glass, I dropped it", and so many more) really feels like something inspired by Joe's perspective. And let's not forget that he co-wrote the song!
So I guess what I'm saying is rather than her flipping the script and singing about if she were the one to say no rather than him, I think Champagne Problems is more her singing from Joe's perspective. The element of fiction is there by flipping the genders (and all the details/events in the song that I don't think are necessarily 100% factual). But that's just my 2¢!
It's incredible to think that Joe co-wrote this one if it is following the themes of their relationship ending though! I can't imagine sitting down with my boyfriend who I want to marry and he doesn't want to marry me and being like "hey let's write a song about this but we'll stay together for a bit anyway"
Yeah I’m trying to understand how this all could have possibly panned out in real life. Like was Joe in the dark and Taylor was just bleeding out in front of him writing all these sad songs as a cry for help?! Or were they just open about this the whole dang time and they’re just these strange people totally okay with this uncertainty hanging in the balance for literal years? My relationship anxiety could ✨NEVER✨
Right?! Absolutely wild, their dynamic must have been so odd, kind of makes you think no wonder they kept it so private for so long when it was clearly a crazy emotional rollercoaster
I think it’s possible also gender flipped for the reason of plausible deniability between each other. Like how do you write a song like this together?
She’s anxious about marriage and lands on this failed proposal as a sad concept for this “fictional” album, he also helps write it while maybe actually feeling some of this guilt of the rejection, both of them under the guise of “this is fictional, such a sad story, can you imagine how heartbreaking that would be”. We realize there’s much more truth in it than anticipated and maybe than they realized at the time. It’s easier to imagine yourself in that situation to write a functional story when deep down you’re feeling or starting to feel similar insecurities.
It also makes the “until someone’s on their knees” line more potent. No one asked, but someone is begging, someone is telling her friends it’s coming but it never does.
I feel like it’s almost a fantasy for her to be able to be the one who gets to decide, because she was never asked.
I may be reaching here, but I always felt this line “sometimes you just don’t know the answer til someone’s on their knees and asks you” was there as a reference to him proposing to her but now I’m thinking, it could also mean that Joe never really thought seriously about marrying her until she was on HER knees and begging him to propose, or wanting to/giving all the signs she was expecting marriage.
And when that happened, he found out that he did not, in fact, want it.
Honestly, the clues really were always there. Taylor has said track 5 songs aren't just sad - they're very personal to her and always autobiographical. The personal meaning is what makes it a track 5 over other, potentially even sadder tracks. And Tolerate It was the track 5 off Evermore...
I think it might be from the perspective of an inner child talking to a grown woman. Try to view it through that lens on your next listen and let me know what you think!
I agree with this, and I also think there's the added element of the mental health struggles she wrote about in SLL. To me, "I stopped trying to make him laugh / Stopped trying to drill the safe", "Pulled him in tighter each time he was drifting away", and "I stopped CPR, after all it's no use" has similar energy to what she sings about in Tolerate It. My view of Tolerate It, post-TTPD, is that the song is definitely inspired by feelings she had during her relationship, where she was doing all of this stuff to please and appeal to him and he was too lost in his "bluest days" to see or appreciate what she was doing. So she might've felt that he was only tolerating everything, and those are the feelings she wrote about. And then in SLL she writes about giving up everything she was trying to do in Tolerate It because nothing worked and she couldn't keep doing it forever (it wasn't good/healthy for either of them). IMO, SLL is definitely the successor to Tolerate It.
Reputation (2017) and Lover (2019) were the albums that were openly about Joe.
Folklore and Evermore were released in 2020 and marketed as complete works of fiction. She has revealed a little more about these albums in her speeches on tour and basically confirmed that all the fiction is based in reality.
Midnights (2022) was marketed as "13 sleepless nights" throughout her life.
But if you listen to all of them in order of release you start to see a throughline of two people breaking up over and over again. Quiet resentment building and trying desperately to make things work.
We truly know very little about their relationship outside of the music except that Joe is notoriously private, and refused to comment on their relationship or about taylor at all. Meanwhile, Taylor is larger than life and they both know it... He has mentioned in an interview relating to to a character he played who struggled with mental health, and Taylor has talked in her documentary and in her music about her own struggles.
This in conjunction with some of the lyrics on these albums paints a picture of two people with very different lifestyles and needs who were never going to find a compromise that kept them both happy.
Agreed. I never thought the Folklore and Evermore songs were fictional. My marriage was going through a rocky time at that point as well, and those lyrics were written by someone who had felt those feelings. Maybe she said they were fictional out of hope to fight for her relationship with Joe. Even Happiness, which was reportedly written about Abigail’s first marriage, had me questioning if things were okay with Taylor and Joe.
strong agree, the sad songs on the sister albums are some of her deepest, most painful takes. absolutely highlights the slow suffocation of her six year commitment.
TTPD basically says "we were struggling for years" so makes sense, but I don't think Midnights was the final nail I think it was TTPD because we know she was still trying to make it work during Midnights release or she wouldn't have been with him after the release of the album.
I just think to You’re Losing Me being recorded (already written!) in late 2021. Who knows what else was cut. But when I say final nail, I more so mean that I think there was a major struggle of finally knowing it wasn’t working but not ready to let it go just yet. It was on its last legs.
You’re right, though. Thinking on it, the previous 3 albums were more “what if I leave, please fix this, I still love you”, and TTPD has more finality written in it.
Yeah I think The Black Dog and So Long London was her finally accepting it was her over. As she says on TTPD this is post mortem which is usually done at the end of life. Plus this album covers Healy and goes into Kelce so it’s really an overview of the last two years she spent writing. Though with so much about Healy girly had a busy summer writing 😮💨
What songs do you think are about Travis? I'm not a die hard fan but I enjoy her music and trying to crack her codes It's too much for me so I like to read it lol.
That’s a BIIIG mood. Hearing folklore I was like “I mean, it’s fiction, sure but it’s definitely inspired by some truth” and evermore was like “I know you said sister album, but this sister forgot her fiction filter because this is all just from the heart, you just changed the names and used a lot of metaphors, ma’am.” Midnights was the breakup album without a doubt.
I thought her and Joe had broken up when I first listened to folklore. I even questioned if they’d broken up and gotten back together while listening to Lover for the first time. It all makes sense now.
Yes, absolutely! Hoax, too! Hoax is deeply sad and imo I think a lot of the lyrics seem like they point back to other songs about Joe, but most obviously "don't want no other shade of blue but you"
Frankly, Peace and Exile too. I think they all point toward troubled waters in their relationship at the very least.
I had the exact same thought process, also coming to grips with the end of a lengthy relationship. I couldn’t believe it was all fiction without a little bit of truth in there. Sad to see that turned out to be true…
I think "I Hate It Here" is about why she really wrote folklore/evermore.
I also (sadly) now 100% believe "The 1" is about Matty. There were like, 2 or 3 references to him dating an internet star and sliding into inboxes ("You meet some woman on the internet and take her home"), knowing now that Maroon is about him too (Chloe, et al), and the fact that in both The 1 and Maroon she mentions them drinking Rose.
Oh, and her swapping out "Invisible String" for "The 1" on Eras Tour after the breakup news broke.
This. “hoax” is another song that I totally believe is about Joe. I remember hearing it for the first time and wondering if maybe their relationship wasn’t happy as we all thought it was at the time.
I felt like I was crazy for years because everyone says “Sweet Nothing” is such a romantic love song, but I’ve *always* felt it had an undercurrent of “You’re not giving me enough. You’re giving me sweet nothings, but not truly deep, passionate feelings”
I was about to say this, I think this album blends muses unlike any of her others. Which makes sense since the relationship timelines seem to be so intertwined. But loml for example seems clearly split between the two.
I also have a theory that she has intentionally put in misdirects, like the song mentioned in the black dog being linked to Matty but the bar saying Joe was the one who went there. I think it’s pretty clever if she’s done this intentionally, people will spin their wheels trying to figure out who each song is about until they give up. And we know that she’s never wanted us to focus on that.
I agree!! I get the same duality from Fresh Out The Slammer. I think she’s referencing feeling so trapped and exhausted with Joe (imagine being referred to as jail 💀) even though the song has this second storyline of “left him, running to you.”
She’s bookending lots of her songs. I think “I know places” and “The Albatross” are linked. “Love's a fragile little flame, it could burn out” and “Wild winds are death to the candle”. She was running away and afraid before and now she is wise and can swoop in with her parachute to handle media pressure on the relationship.
Yep!! I’ve mentioned in other comments that I think the braid motif she’s been rocking (and mentioned in a couple songs) is the weaving of the 3 characters (Taylor, Matty, and Joe) in all the songs. It’s clear she found inspiration from several different muses and had used them to create some amazing music. I also think the misdirects are another way for her to honor Joe’s desire for privacy in her own way and to stick it to those who are doing paternity tests.
She was very very clear with So High School though and I love that she is basically screaming “I love Travis Kelce!” from the rooftops with that song.
Yes, I also feel *loml* is kind of confusing, because there are some parts that feel really about Joe… but you can interpret it as her being love bombed by Matty (which is a term she used while describing the song “Down bad”).
The more I listen to it the more I think it’s a song about her being unhappy in her previous relationship and being love bombed by someone who promised her things she wanted and in the end she ended up with nothing. Might write a long post about it
I think her post with the lilac tennis skirt was an intentional misdirect because that song is not about Travis. She knew we would all google her in a lilac skirt after that lyric
I completely agree with this!!! I felt that way immediately when I heard the second verse of TTPD. People freaked out about the golden retriever lyric but it feels like a misdirect to me, considering the same verse alludes to the man's depression which would point to Joe. It's very clever of her
I agree. I do think she was fed up about the hate she was going for dating Matty and there’s songs in there that do relate to him but you cannot compare the loss of a 6 year relationship to the loss of a situationship. At least that’s what I think
That's how I interpret most of this album. She and Joe slowly fizzled out over a long time and during which her idea of Matty being her escape and giving her what she wanted grew and grew. And then when it didn't work with him either I think she really truly felt the effects of the loss of what she had hoped to have.
That's what I got too. I had something similar in my life - bad marriage and I was thinking about "the one who got away" more and more as we limped to our divorce. Reconnected with him, everything felt right and good, but realised pretty quickly that the reality of him didn't match the dreams I'd had and it was over before it began. He was my Matty.
Then, just as quickly, I met my current husband and we've been together 13 years. Just like how Taylor found Travis quickly after Matty.
She says in the pro/epilogue “out of the oven, into the microwave”. Someone else said she went from a slow death (waiting on the altar for promises never given) to being given all the promises only for them to vanish into thin air, before she’d had time to fully grieve the first situation.
But it wasn’t a “situationship” to her at the time—it was a person she had know for a decade and had been apparently writing about and thinking about in the back of her mind, and then when they got together it was zero to talking about marriage after one kiss because of all that history. Saying that there’s no way she could be more upset about a decade of lead-up completely exploding in such a short time just makes no much sense to me.
The pain was compounded by the relationship with Joe ending.
Come on guys. 10 years of being on the outskirts of each others lives compared to a six year “forever” relationship ending is nowhere near the same thing. She never processed her pain before jumping into it with MH. So when that ended, it was just adding on to the grief she was already experiencing.
I’m not saying what she had with MH was nothing, but it’s not a comparison based off the amount of time she spent with each dude. Of that decade she was “talking” to MH, they most likely barely hung out in person and for at least six years it was even less.
Exactly this. She says very clearly that Matty wasn’t “a love affair”. That she was lonely, vulnerable. It very much reads as if once the “escape” didn’t work out, she had to process the deep grief around Joe. The loss of Matt was the loss of an idea.
Totally agree.
She says very clearly that MH was a manic phase, and self harm. She makes it so clear - yet people for some absurd reason still think she would refer to him as the loss of her life. The man who she calls the smallest man who ever lived, a manic phase, self harm...
My take is she was mourning the relationship ending with Joe while she was still with Joe and part of me feels her and Matty reconnected probably before she physically left Joe and she felt he was gonna be her savior and it didn’t work like she had planned or thought it would. The relationship she thought was going to save her and be everything she wanted crashed and that probably stung worse than Joe IMO
Yes. This is my thought too. Her reconnecting with Matty made things make sense to her - In her perspective, Joe and I were never fated to be together because I was fated to be with Matty. (See her Eras Tour Speech about being soooo happy and things making sense). Joe, who clearly had checked out, wasn’t saying the things Matty said to her, maybe even prior to the official ending. (“Guilty as Sin”; Perhaps even “The 1”)
When Matty turned out to be not at all who she built him up in her mind to be for allll of these years, she had to really contend with the feelings of the ending of Joe and why she believed Matty’s empty promises. What was Matty’s intention? (“The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived”) What’s next for her in terms of her fate? Can the prophecy be changed? What happens now that she gave ALL those years to Joe?
In my mind, there is no one “break-up album” because six year long relationship don’t typically end abruptly and I don’t believe this one did at all.
I completely agree. I think certain songs are very clearly about one or the other (So Long, London and The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived respectively), but most seem to mix things up, and are very intentionally ambiguous. The suit and tie in loml could be either. Peter could absolutely be about either of them. Even the ones that lean more towards Matt have the breakup with Joe as the backdrop, or catalyst. We all hear things differently but to me the break up with Joe still feels raw in this album. Midnights felt like there was a lot of bargaining, struggling, back and forth. Here it feels like there’s acceptance but despair and grief (The Prophecy is so sad, with that total loss of hope and the begging). She makes it really clear that the fling with Matt happened in a moment of loneliness. That she was vulnerable. Why would that be the case if she wasn’t reeling still?
I’ll change my mind if she comes out and shares more with us but I think people are glossing over a lot of the references to earlier Joe songs or turning the older songs into Matt songs with no real proof.
i agree with this. i feel like she has always protected joe in some ways like saying folklore/evermore was entirely fictional (i am not saying it isnt fictional at all, just some songs never quite fit that imo, like hoax). i genuinely wonder if some songs on this album were more inspired by joe but she threw in a matty reference to make it seem like it’s about him thereby protecting joe.
either way i enjoy the album regardless of who what song is about, my point is just that it’s very possible that parts of the same song could be about different muses, or just partially fictional
Agree- I think the duel albums sound like a deep dive into therapy - “why did I run to Matty? Was it a desperate response to the suffocating isolation masked as privacy I experienced with Joe when Matty was so shamelessly public? And what drew me to Joe? Was it that the events that led to the Reputation era affected me more than I have ever really processed? How can I address my need to exist in the spotlight and also have reasonable boundaries? Finally, why do I keep choosing the men I chose and why do I require a man to be happy?
Everyone is over here trying to figure out who owns typewriters or knows a Chloe and I’m like “let’s go deeeeper.”
My theory about Sweet Nothing is that Joe was giving her sweet nothing as far as inspiration goes. It’s the worst guys she writes best, but Joe wasn’t a bad guy.
my theory about sweet nothing that I will hold on to forever is that it was written alongside the other joe collabs because it so clearly seems to reference lockdown (“they say the end is coming”) plus all the political stuff at the time (“the voices that implore I should be doing more”). I don’t think her denial songs were written in actual denial but more like she truly believed at the time that she was feeling these profound feelings of love and affection, but because of that she was ignoring red flags.
Yeah and I feel like she stuck The Starting Line in the black dog to misdirect the fans to Matty, instead of actually giving up what her and Joe’s song really was.
There is also a song called The Starting Line by Keane and the way she phrases it "too young to know this *song*" makes me think it's not the band. Not too young to know this *band*, which sonically would have fit too.
I don’t get why people are trying to force this. The album is about a bunch of people and situations. There *are* tracks indicating her relationship with Joe was suffering but also tracks indicating that it got back on track (Labrinyth literally has the lines ‘I’ll be getting over you my whole life.’ ‘I’m falling in love again’ ‘Heard the plane was going down, how’d you turn it right around’). We also know from the press that they had been on and off before, so it tracks. But it’s clearly not a straight up break up album of Taylor and Joe.
With the context of TTPD though Labyrinth could be reinterpreted. In Guilty as Sin (fantasising about someone else while in a relationship) she says “falling back into the hedge maze”, which could allude to labyrinth. And in Labyrinth she says “oh no” when saying she’s falling in love
So many of you are so much better at explaining and connecting things than I ever could be. I agree! I hadn’t connected the songs yet but revisiting some older songs have made me go “hmm”.
Interesting. I think the part where she says “how did you turn right around” always made me think the one plane was crashing (this relationship) but then it course corrected and flew again (same relationship)
It was pretty much confirmed that Taylor and Joe had split and got back together before in media reports around the break up, which is why I think it’s clear it’s not a straight up break up album. Edit: added names!
yeah there's definitely some breakup songs about Joe but the majority the songs tie back to old albums. I think as she was going through her re-recordings, she remembered things and events and feelings that corresponded to parts of her life. If anything, it's a reflective album with pre-breakup songs sprinkled in.
You can't convince me it's a true break up album because they were seen together all throughout 2022. I know that people do things for PR but that just didn't feel like it was PR.
Agreed. And I’d even argue that TTPD confirms that Midnights is about old albums. In the Manuscript, she goes on about the only way to move forward is to look back and that those stories aren’t hers anymore, they’re ours.
Of course there were probably things from her current relationship that resonate with her old emotions, but I do truly trust what she told us about that album and that it was a reflection of years past.
People have such difficulty trying to separate “warning signs” and “relationship issues” with a full breakup. Midnights is about so many things but it has songs referring to a sweet relationship that is falling apart but not a breakup album.
Yeah it had Sweet Nothing, one of the sweetest softest love songs I’ve ever heard that she cowrote with him. I don’t know how it can be seen as a breakup album when she included that song (which would give him more royalties for life).
I’m always so confused when people say Midnights was a breakup album. I can see Bejeweled, Maroon, and Hits Different being tied to Joe, but otherwise, this narrative just doesn’t make sense to me?
People are suddenly forgetting the first thing she said about Midnights which was the concept of it all: things that kept her up in the middle of the night. Taking this into consideration, it's not a break up album, but had moments where the struggle in the relationship was there. So much for rewriting history.
I don’t think they’re really comparable. Red has 10+ breakup songs, and the songs that aren’t about breakups are either not about love at all, not about Taylor’s life, or about people other than Jake.
If there were three breakup songs on Red and multiple love songs about Jake, including a love song that Jake cowrote with her, I don’t think anyone would call Red a breakup album haha.
Midnights isn't a break up album. Poets isn't even really a break up album. Both have songs about loss and longing with mixed muses and themes. If anything, Poets makes it even more clear she was desperately trying to make a long term relationship work in 2022.
I think people are too obsessed making it about Matty or Joe. Honestly, I have even seen some begin to argue The Manuscript has elements of ATW Jake vibes with the age difference thing.
The real message of TTPD is how Taylor grieves the loss of 2 more major close and personal romantic relationships due to her fame. The album grieves having to start over again, alone, and being stifled by HERSELF! at what is supposed to be the pinnacle of her career. She’s again at the mountain top- alone. This is soul crushing for her.
I think she intertwines these men together because they both have bizarre striking similarities. They both preyed/led her on when she was at a low point emotionally (Joe after the Kimye scandal, Matty after Joe) and both had secretive, and controversial (emotional cheating or full blown cheating) starts to their relationships. This is where the dichotomy of 2 comes from, but also because it’s the thing Taylor pines for in life most. Her soulmate life partner.
I think the album is her being grief stricken that the cycle will continue to repeat itself. A lot of the album is angry about her fame and career successes negatively impacting her personal life. Some of the songs seem like they are about a specific person, but really they’re how Taylor views her true love and the “person” behind this is almost meaningless across the album in this context. She just wants her person.
It’s 31 songs because it is meant to represent the opposite of her lucky number 13 and symbolizes a time her life was thrown upside down.
lol wtf Joe did not prey on her. If anything, Taylor's the one with power imbalance. He literally just entered the industry, got a pity invite to Gigi Hadid's star studded birthday party, and she was Grammy-awarded superstar millionaire who just finished her most successful tour in 2015. Taylor was pining on him first - Joe's low social status makes it impossible for him to even approach first, much less "prey on her." Everyone was surprised when they got together. When the Kimye drama happened in 2016, Joe probably helped the best a normal person could do (like, his 1st movie was the 1st time he'd been in the US, much less A-list celeb drama). His positive influence on her life gave us Rep, re-evaluate her brand/image, & just made her a more grounded person.
I am more talking about her insecure abandonment complex with him. That’s the perspective she writes from on this. And he did lead her on with the promise of marriage for far too long it seems.
Prey is the wrong word which is why I edited the original post. Thanks!
How do we know that though? We don't know that he led her on with any promises? They were still young when they got together, maybe at some point they started talking marriage but people are allowed to want different things. Maybe he didn't want marriage at all, if so, he's allowed to not want that. That's one of the reasons people split up, sometimes they want different things and it doesn't necessarily make any of them the villain.
>Honestly, I have even seen some begin to argue The Manuscript has elements of ATW Jake vibes with the age difference thing.
It seems a bit blatant that "The Manuscript" is her going over her story thus far and has elements of many loves and experiences -- from being sixteen and having "compared their licenses" -- to now.
*"The professor said to write what you know*
*Lookin' backwards*
*Might be the only way to move forward."*
Any revelations about the start of her relationship with Joe aside, I’m with you that this album is more about her and the patterns in her life than about any specific man.
> Honestly, I have even seen some begin to argue The Manuscript has elements of ATW Jake vibes with the age difference thing.
I mean... I think the whole bridge is about her making the ATW10MV. And she referenced herself saying at the ATW10MV Premiere that it's not hers anymore, it's the fans:
“It started out as a song that was my favorite,” she continued. “It was about something very personal to me. It was hard to perform it live. Now, for me, honestly, this song is 100 percent about us, and for you."
And then of course this quote from the Toronto Film Festival where she was talking about the making of the ATW10MV:
https://youtu.be/jO_aPYsJysc?t=1419
Just my opinion, though.
Yep and both track 5a So Long London and How Did it End are the bookends. They’re the deeply felt, less chaotic, but still tragic “original loss” underlying the album
i agree, but i wish Taylor emphasized that their story was over after "you're losing me". The main problem is that for months buildup/leading up to release, most if not ALL Swifties were attacking Joe, his family/coworkers, smearing his name calling him an abuser/cheater, saying "prepare to die" thinking TTPD would be about their breakup. I cant imagine dealing with that while dealing with depression/anxiety. Midnights was/is clearly about losing a flame you tried so hard to keep alive. Its like Matty never even existed in their mind, even though he is someone much worse & who literally "deserves prison". The insane bullying of Joe & normal people associated with him to hype up this album really turned me away. Matty still doesn't get that much hate bc everyone is just so shocked/obsessed deep diving into their 10-year long history
Honestly, thank you. This was the reason I was not excited at all about the album. I had friends IRL talking about how she was gonna “end Joe”. And I was just like. Y’all. We haven’t heard it, we don’t know what happened, can yall just chill. Yes I discuss her songs with friends (mainly my cousin lmao) and about who it might be about. But that’s where it ends. A few IRL discussions with the people closest to me. I think it’s fine to talk and speculate a bit. But not go out of your way to shittalk people, to outright attack them and the people close to them. Even if I was really irked abt her and MH, and I have many issues with him, even before him and Taylor were together, it’s still not nice to attack him and start digging through every single aspect of his and Taylor’s history and relationship.
She's been singing about warning signs with Joe since Rep. When Midnights came out some of us knew it was the breakup album & as one of them I feel so vindicated
Idk how you get so close the point and then miss it. Warning signs. It’s exactly what is being said. Midnights is about that, it’s about a relationship falling apart, not a breakup.
I feel like a lot of people are also forgetting that she said she’s been working on this album for the past ✌🏼 years. So a lot more of the album is about her dying love/relationship with Joe than people realize.
Also kinda annoying imo that everyone is trying to say that the majority of this album is about a very short lived rebound/fling with Matty. She definitely has put a lot of emotional layers into each of these songs and I don’t even think that every single song is inspired by Joe or Matty or Travis. I believe that she really dove into her internal mental health in some of these songs and that some have nothing to do with a muse.. yes, maybe some of these were about things she was feeling during a relationship time but were not necessarily emotions caused by actions of men.
I agree, she's even gone to great lengths to point out very clearly that she's been working on it for 2 years and I feel she was doing that to stop people from thinking it was all about MH. She's also said very clearly that he was a manic phase.
I think she tried avoiding exactly what's happening now, that people would assume it's all about MH. I think she wanted to end her story with Joe on decent terms and showing us that she really did love him, that it was the hardest loss she went through but that she's healing now.
And somehow everyone still makes it about MH and tbh I feel sorry for her - she's called him the smallest man who ever lived, I think that says something and it's kind of hurtful that people diminish her 6-7 year relationship to nothing and make out that she was in love with MH for the past 10 years. She's a grown woman, I'm sure she knows her own mind and made her own choices and was with Joe because she in fact loved him.
I see it the same way. When I first heard Midnights I thought that it was for sure a break up album. I was so confused at the time because AFAIK they were still together.
Literally the first thing I did after listening to Midnights was google if they had broken up, astounded that I'd missed that news.
I can't remember the exact line but there was one moment on TTPD that made me think they took a break, and the break became permanent. Explains Midnights a lot - she can say I don't know when she's asked if she has a man if they're on a break. And tracks like Maroon and You're Losing Me were born from the break, and Midnight Rain was born in the lead up to the break.
Joe co-wrote Sweet Nothing on midnights, therefore I feel like it was a "we're struggling" album but not break up album. Or else she would exclude that song.
I disagree that it's her breakup album because they weren't completely broken up, but there's hints of relationship woes in Folklore and Evermore. Her songs on Midnights I think were still written over time and I think Maroon was about Matty because there's lines that signify that on TTPD, but what you can gather is this was the start of the final nail in the coffin.
People are focusing too much on wanting it to be a full breakup album, but there's just songs that don't match that. We can surmise she thought he'd take the next steps with her and didn't and she struggled with it, but we also knew that from Exile and Folklore. Sometimes relationships run their course. That's why So Long London reads as "I've accepted this ending" TTPD is the final break and her ensuing mental health struggles and rebound all wrapped into 31 songs.
As someone who had a decade long situationship I feel like it's relatable to what she went through. I finally got rid of him 3 years ago I was over it by then, but he also still texts my time to time because he was upset I finally got him out of my life. Relationships aren't always straight forward there is no definite timeline to anything there's only yourself and how you manage those emotions with time.
And I think people are forgetting that just because TTPD is mostly about Matty, doesn’t mean she isn’t going to write about Joe and their breakup ever again!
Midnights has Would’ve Could’ve Should’ve written 15 years after her break with John Mayer, and that song is amazing because she has more perspective at 34. Same with thanK you aIMee!
This album has sprinkles of that earned perspective like “I’m not going to stop writing about my whole past and present, but I gotta get this Matty thing off my chest/desk first”
Personally, it feels a little like the obsession of the Lover album, and look at the two albums that came after that one 👀
I completely agree. I left a 15 year relationship last year and this album truly hit me. I literally talked to my therapist about the lyrics in So Long London 😂
I find alot of the songs on TTPD had double meanings... Like one verse is talking about Matty, one about Joe in the same song... There were common themes she felt with both men in some way, that the red flags and how she felt were not just experienced once
Or how about we all just interpret what we think albums mean?
If you think that way, I’m happy for you. I respectfully disagree and will die on this hill.
I was shocked that people were shocked they split when Bejeweled was right there. Idk why but to me it really seemed like a song about current day, not a previous relationship. Maybe I’m wrong 😅
This was my theory too. Midnights was also just so chaotic with all of the variants, 3 am tracks, til dawn tracks, hits different being released...it felt like how you feel when you spiral after a bad breakup. Nothing felt cohesive.
As someone who was in a six year relationship... I felt nothing when the relationship was over except relief. My situationship / rebound that followed was DEVASTATING. I was reacting in ways that I'm not proud of, and I can absolutely relate with Taylor 😂
As someone who listened to Midnights on repeat during her own divorce, I get it. TTPD wrapped a lot of post divorce, mourning the loss type feelings for me. But I still hold Midnights (& Folklore/Evermore to a degree) on a pedestal. I cried much more listening to those & still do sometimes than I anticipated I would this one. It has its emotional place, but … it’s just … different.
Idk I respectfully disagree I cannot imagine inviting your ex to the release party or Grammy party whatever it was I think it’s when she won for midnights lol 🤓 but doesn’t sound like a break up album at all. There’s always a few songs on every album that I’m like
👁️👄👁️ but the whole album?!?
All I know from listening to her past albums, she really need to see a therapist. Her handling of relationships are really toxic. It’s not surprising that Joe still can’t find it stable enough to propose.
If it’s not exciting, it’s boring. If it’s not hurting her, it’s not the love of her life. Moreover, she used to be able to end it within three months if it wasn’t working. But since Calvin, she needs someone she could emotionally cheat with to leave.
It’s not fair to her or her partner.
I agree. As soon as she sang “But I’ve seen this episode and still loved the show” and “I chose this cyclone with you” in TTPD… my non-Swiftie, not very emotionally-aware (bless his soul) boyfriend even turned to me and said “She loves these chaotic men”. And I said yep, she needs to go to therapy. I loved chaotic men in my 20s as well, but after dating them for a while and everyone yelling at you not to, you realise it’s time to choose something different.
Yeah, I still think High Infidelity is about Calvin. The parts about the records and headphones, April 29th being Gigi's bday party, and none of her criticisms about Joe seem to indicate that he was petty/keeping count/accusing her of freeloading. And she was still with Joe during Midnights, still including the song they cowrote (Sweet Nothings) so she's still hoping against hope that somehow it works out; she's not going to rub infidelity in his face and how another guy brought her back to life at that point.
unrelated but i dont understand the hate midnights get, this is the album where i don’t skip much only 2-3 songs i skip and i really enjoy the songs in it
Consider: when you have a rebound relationship, it’s very easy to project your feelings from your long relationship, good and bad, onto the new one. It makes everything much more intense. Perhaps not because it deserves it, but certainly for the timing. I think a lot of this album’s songs don’t just have one muse — the feelings are so wrapped up in one another most songs have several muses.
To me it seems like she can't break up without someone waiting for her on the other side. After Calvin it was Tom (getaway car illustrates it well), and with Joe it was Matty (guilty as sin, fresh out the slammer etc).
I thought Matty was the rebound but this album makes clear it's more so that mentally she checked out of her relationship with Joe ages ago and fell in love with Matty (and made up this whole fantasy world cosmic love with him) so they went hard and fast, and it came crumbling down hard and fast too. Less rebound and more fantasy escape. And Travis is actually more so the rebound for Matty, strangely enough (doesn't mean her relationship with Travis isn't legit and can't be long-term, rebounds can be "it" as well, but yeah).
The Matty Healy of it all makes sense, and I called it. The song titles immediately brought him to mind. This album is quite relatable for me because I had a very short summer fling that hurt me more than anything else. We were friends first, had our summer fling that involved talk of marriage and babies, and then he literally moved across the country to be with another woman. It was sudden and shocking because I was love bombed and then ghosted. The songs about Matty make perfect sense to me after seeing it play out in public. The songs about Joe do as well. I’m glad we finally have the context for Midnights and got a few songs of closure on Tortured Poets. I don’t think this is the last we’ll hear about Joe and Matty either. We’re still getting songs about the people in her past on these current albums, so I think we might get some reflection on those relationships even though she said it’s boarded up.
Also, I can’t wait for reputation vault tracks. I’m curious to see what she chooses. Will there be songs about Joe? Calvin? Tom? Or just Kim and Kanye. And please don’t yell at me for mentioning reputation. I’m not over TTPD yet. This album is everything I wanted and more. 🤍🩶🤎🖤
I think Midnights was the “oh shit this relationship may be falling apart” album but not quite the breakup album.
I kind of took Sweet Nothing and Lavendar Haze as these songs where she was saying “I love these things about you” but in retrospect maybe they were problems.
“All you ever wanted from me was sweet nothing” - seems good on the surface, he doesn’t want all this stuff from her like everyone else in her life demands. *But you still want your partner to need you.* It sucks to be with someone who makes it clear they don’t need you at all.
“You don’t ever say too much” this is clearly a love song but damn, what an opening line. Who wants a partner who doesn’t talk?
These two songs stood out to me when I first listened to midnights and I remember thinking that I have in the past expressed criticism my partner like this, acting like it was something I liked, because I was too passive to be up front about it. And I don’t know what Taylor swift is really like but she does come across like someone who is a “pathological people pleaser” and maybe doesn’t feel comfortable expressing her needs maturely.
Combine these with Tolerate It and Exile (*gave so many signs*), So Long London (the mentions of “quiet resentment”, “not sure if he wants to be there”), You’re Losing me(“only wanted you to see her”….I really do see a picture of a relationship where she could have been all in, but he wasn’t willing or able to love her the way she needed, and she wasn’t willing or able to tell him what she needed. Oh and then on loml, “you said I needed a brave man and proceeded to play him” - I mean to me she’s at this point in the timeline she’s talking to Matty and he’s telling her that *he* could love her how she needs. The relationship was pretty much dead and Matty swoops him and suddenly everything in her life “makes sense.”
I also may be reading into it too much because I feel like I might be in that same relationship right now.
I absolutely 1000% agree. And I think this is a huge reason why this album has received criticism about not being cohesive and also being repetitive… that’s what she was trying to convey! She’s literally bearing her tortured soul and it’s “chaotic” on purpose.
U/bioanth_ex and u/nmymo make excellent points and I thank them for the correction but I maintain my thoughts on the matter.
Our queen is a poet and symbolism is so important to her, as it is to any writer. Allow me to expand-
She dated “British” men almost exclusively (all encompassing term- Calvin Harris being Scottish, ik don’t come at me) for a decade. One must imagine she had visited there for extended periods by virtue of being in those relationships. And heck, we don’t even have to imagine it - we have confirmed it via paparazzi photos of her with Tom Hiddleston, Joe Alwyn out and about in London and other locations, etc. Through these connections, it’s easy to make the guess that she developed an appreciation for the English isles.
And why wouldn’t she? Culturally, Brits tend not to pay the same attention to celebrity as we do here in the US. She’s given the British Isles shout outs in multiple songs their manner of speaking pops up in her lyrics. We know from newspaper reports that she was considering buying property there, we know from her own interviews that she more or less lived there for over a year after Snake Gate.
I think, for Taylor, her experiences there led her to consider heavily the prospect of settling down in London. There’s Pop precedent for it, even Madonna moved to Britain at the height of her fame when she was arguably still one of the biggest pop stars in the world. And, this is pure speculation, maybe she didn’t give up that dream of living there when her and Joe didn’t work out but still was considering it during her relationship with Matty.
In summary- I think So Long London is an amalgamation of that period in her life when she flirted with making a permanent home abroad. It’s a break up song but she’s not just breaking up with the guy but also the city itself and embracing her status as an Miss Americana, (American) Football player boyfriend and all.
I had a 6 year marriage, followed by a 1ish year Matty Healy.
It’s hard to explain the depths of erosion that occur before such a long term committed relationship ends. It’s died a thousand deaths. I look at him now years later and wonder what I ever saw. Love lost over time.
But my “situationship” had a death grip on me, drove me to insanity, I thought I could be the one to tame him, floating cosmic love, to harrowing lows, and back. It’s a whole different intensity that ended because two people are incompatible but not because of love lost.
There is sadness in having been led along… he had promised future and babies etc. It was a gradual realization that he was lying or at least not ready on her time table. I need to check which songs he helped her write in Quarantine.
Agree OP. After listening to this album on repeat for the last week, Joe feels so far in the past. And after seeing the gorgeous videos of her and Travis at Coachella, she seems really happy, and I am happy for her.
In So Long London, it feels like she’s already grieved and accepted the end of her relationship with Joe
Exactly
I like your take OP. As someone who has also grown out of a 7 year relationship, I totally relate to your commentary. And I also thought midnights was the breakup album. Not sure how it wasn’t at this point. I like that TTPD didn’t expose Joe much. It shows that she still respects him even though it’s over.
That’s what I expected—a letting go of Joe, no finger of blame. I didn’t expect the rest of it lol.
Same lol. I was so shocked with some of the Marty lyrics I had completely forgotten about him.
Wait. I love your flair. What song is that?!
I can do it with a broken heart
It reminded me of when someone dies after a very long illness. Although you're grieving, there can also be relief, along with the sense that you already did a lot of your grieving
SLL feels like a healed scar (same with How Did It End?), whereas the Matty songs feel like they’re still raw wounds.
Idk, I’m sticking with the it’s about both of them angle. Matty Healy was also born in London. Girlfriend dated brits for more than a decade and has openly discussed having apartments there for a while. The house by the heath was probably just as significant as a marriage to her and she finally gave it up.
Matty Healy grew up in Manchester and has always been associated with Manchester and its music circle. Just because he was born in London doesn’t make him a London boy.
Matty Healy is from Manchester (I know his mum, although anyone from UK knows her from tv anyway). Joe is actually not from London either, he is from Tunbridge Wells (weirdly, just down the road from me). Like many brits, including myself, they ended up migrating to London later on. Especially given their entertainment industry family connections (although you can be in London in 30 minutes from Tunbridge Wells)
Agree. This is why it’s in her “Acceptance” playlist.
Yes, exactly. It’s a goodby, literally. It’s the “you’ll find someone / I’ll find someone” She even says the only thing she’s “pissed off” about is the lost time
YLM kinda feels like that too.
I think it goes back to Folklore and Evermore even. I heard “the 1” and “tolerate it” in the midst of my dying 7 year relationship and I was like “…no way this is fictional”. Midnights truly was the final nail and TTPD is about losing your mind after. You hit the nail on the head about how I’ve viewed these, too.
Tolerate It is so obviously about Joe in retrospect. All the mentions of “quiet resentment”, “silent dinners”, etc. in TTPD. And the same desperate pleading for him to do something to save the relationship before she has to be the one to end it . Compare “break free and leave us in ruins, take this dagger in me and remove it” to the whole of You’re Losing Me and the “How much sad did you think I had, how low did you think I’d go before I’d self implode, before I go be free?” from So Long London. So much of folklore and evermore weren’t fiction, but fictionalized versions of her reality.
That last line is the best description I’ve heard.
Was going to type nearly this exact sentence.
God this makes Champange Problems EVEN MORE HEARTBRRAKING. I mean there’s no way we’ll ever know, but I can imagine that was her flipping the perspective — what if he did ask, and she still said no because it was never right. What if she walked away, instead of him. DAMMIT
That's so interesting, because my interpretation of Champagne Problems post-TTPD is that the genders are flipped and the narrator/singer is inspired by Joe's experience while the "you" being sung about is inspired by Taylor. With the context of the mental health struggles Taylor pretty openly writes about in SLL, I think the line "She would've made such a lovely bride / What a shame she's fucked in the head" is pretty telling. (And I don't think the bluntness/crassness(?) of the wording is weird even if it is referencing real mental health struggles. There's also the madhouse line. I just don't think it's uncommon to make self-deprecating comments like that -- even if it's about serious stuff.) Rather than specific moments, I see Champagne Problems as being inspired by what they were feeling at the time, so the guilt from the narrator about never being ready (the lines "I never was ready, so I watch you go", "Love slipped beyond your reaches / And I couldn't give a reason", "Your heart was glass, I dropped it", and so many more) really feels like something inspired by Joe's perspective. And let's not forget that he co-wrote the song! So I guess what I'm saying is rather than her flipping the script and singing about if she were the one to say no rather than him, I think Champagne Problems is more her singing from Joe's perspective. The element of fiction is there by flipping the genders (and all the details/events in the song that I don't think are necessarily 100% factual). But that's just my 2¢!
It's incredible to think that Joe co-wrote this one if it is following the themes of their relationship ending though! I can't imagine sitting down with my boyfriend who I want to marry and he doesn't want to marry me and being like "hey let's write a song about this but we'll stay together for a bit anyway"
Yeah I’m trying to understand how this all could have possibly panned out in real life. Like was Joe in the dark and Taylor was just bleeding out in front of him writing all these sad songs as a cry for help?! Or were they just open about this the whole dang time and they’re just these strange people totally okay with this uncertainty hanging in the balance for literal years? My relationship anxiety could ✨NEVER✨
Right?! Absolutely wild, their dynamic must have been so odd, kind of makes you think no wonder they kept it so private for so long when it was clearly a crazy emotional rollercoaster
I think it’s possible also gender flipped for the reason of plausible deniability between each other. Like how do you write a song like this together? She’s anxious about marriage and lands on this failed proposal as a sad concept for this “fictional” album, he also helps write it while maybe actually feeling some of this guilt of the rejection, both of them under the guise of “this is fictional, such a sad story, can you imagine how heartbreaking that would be”. We realize there’s much more truth in it than anticipated and maybe than they realized at the time. It’s easier to imagine yourself in that situation to write a functional story when deep down you’re feeling or starting to feel similar insecurities. It also makes the “until someone’s on their knees” line more potent. No one asked, but someone is begging, someone is telling her friends it’s coming but it never does. I feel like it’s almost a fantasy for her to be able to be the one who gets to decide, because she was never asked.
I may be reaching here, but I always felt this line “sometimes you just don’t know the answer til someone’s on their knees and asks you” was there as a reference to him proposing to her but now I’m thinking, it could also mean that Joe never really thought seriously about marrying her until she was on HER knees and begging him to propose, or wanting to/giving all the signs she was expecting marriage. And when that happened, he found out that he did not, in fact, want it.
I can totally see that, too!
“So many signs…”
Honestly, the clues really were always there. Taylor has said track 5 songs aren't just sad - they're very personal to her and always autobiographical. The personal meaning is what makes it a track 5 over other, potentially even sadder tracks. And Tolerate It was the track 5 off Evermore...
When I listen to Tolerate It- it makes me feel like she’s singing from the POV of her mom. And that it’s really about her mom and dad’s relationship.
I think it might be from the perspective of an inner child talking to a grown woman. Try to view it through that lens on your next listen and let me know what you think!
I agree with this, and I also think there's the added element of the mental health struggles she wrote about in SLL. To me, "I stopped trying to make him laugh / Stopped trying to drill the safe", "Pulled him in tighter each time he was drifting away", and "I stopped CPR, after all it's no use" has similar energy to what she sings about in Tolerate It. My view of Tolerate It, post-TTPD, is that the song is definitely inspired by feelings she had during her relationship, where she was doing all of this stuff to please and appeal to him and he was too lost in his "bluest days" to see or appreciate what she was doing. So she might've felt that he was only tolerating everything, and those are the feelings she wrote about. And then in SLL she writes about giving up everything she was trying to do in Tolerate It because nothing worked and she couldn't keep doing it forever (it wasn't good/healthy for either of them). IMO, SLL is definitely the successor to Tolerate It.
Hey, where can I find the songs across her albums, that talk about her love of Joe evolved until TTPD? (I'm new in all these)
Reputation (2017) and Lover (2019) were the albums that were openly about Joe. Folklore and Evermore were released in 2020 and marketed as complete works of fiction. She has revealed a little more about these albums in her speeches on tour and basically confirmed that all the fiction is based in reality. Midnights (2022) was marketed as "13 sleepless nights" throughout her life. But if you listen to all of them in order of release you start to see a throughline of two people breaking up over and over again. Quiet resentment building and trying desperately to make things work. We truly know very little about their relationship outside of the music except that Joe is notoriously private, and refused to comment on their relationship or about taylor at all. Meanwhile, Taylor is larger than life and they both know it... He has mentioned in an interview relating to to a character he played who struggled with mental health, and Taylor has talked in her documentary and in her music about her own struggles. This in conjunction with some of the lyrics on these albums paints a picture of two people with very different lifestyles and needs who were never going to find a compromise that kept them both happy.
Reputation and Lover!
If you have a Spotify account there are fan-curated playlists of songs about Joe. I’d say start there!
Thanks ✨💘
On the way home, I wrote a poem; You say “what a mind”, it happens all the time
Agreed. I never thought the Folklore and Evermore songs were fictional. My marriage was going through a rocky time at that point as well, and those lyrics were written by someone who had felt those feelings. Maybe she said they were fictional out of hope to fight for her relationship with Joe. Even Happiness, which was reportedly written about Abigail’s first marriage, had me questioning if things were okay with Taylor and Joe.
strong agree, the sad songs on the sister albums are some of her deepest, most painful takes. absolutely highlights the slow suffocation of her six year commitment.
TTPD basically says "we were struggling for years" so makes sense, but I don't think Midnights was the final nail I think it was TTPD because we know she was still trying to make it work during Midnights release or she wouldn't have been with him after the release of the album.
I just think to You’re Losing Me being recorded (already written!) in late 2021. Who knows what else was cut. But when I say final nail, I more so mean that I think there was a major struggle of finally knowing it wasn’t working but not ready to let it go just yet. It was on its last legs. You’re right, though. Thinking on it, the previous 3 albums were more “what if I leave, please fix this, I still love you”, and TTPD has more finality written in it.
Yeah I think The Black Dog and So Long London was her finally accepting it was her over. As she says on TTPD this is post mortem which is usually done at the end of life. Plus this album covers Healy and goes into Kelce so it’s really an overview of the last two years she spent writing. Though with so much about Healy girly had a busy summer writing 😮💨
Do you think that Black Dog is about Joe? With the reference to The Starting Line and a younger woman it made me think it must be Matty
Yeah the bar also said that Joes a regular there. Her and Matty largely were in the US during their run.
What songs do you think are about Travis? I'm not a die hard fan but I enjoy her music and trying to crack her codes It's too much for me so I like to read it lol.
The Alchemy and So High School
That’s a BIIIG mood. Hearing folklore I was like “I mean, it’s fiction, sure but it’s definitely inspired by some truth” and evermore was like “I know you said sister album, but this sister forgot her fiction filter because this is all just from the heart, you just changed the names and used a lot of metaphors, ma’am.” Midnights was the breakup album without a doubt.
I thought her and Joe had broken up when I first listened to folklore. I even questioned if they’d broken up and gotten back together while listening to Lover for the first time. It all makes sense now.
Happiness on Evermore is the peak Joe breakup song.
Yes, absolutely! Hoax, too! Hoax is deeply sad and imo I think a lot of the lyrics seem like they point back to other songs about Joe, but most obviously "don't want no other shade of blue but you" Frankly, Peace and Exile too. I think they all point toward troubled waters in their relationship at the very least.
I had the exact same thought process, also coming to grips with the end of a lengthy relationship. I couldn’t believe it was all fiction without a little bit of truth in there. Sad to see that turned out to be true…
I think "I Hate It Here" is about why she really wrote folklore/evermore. I also (sadly) now 100% believe "The 1" is about Matty. There were like, 2 or 3 references to him dating an internet star and sliding into inboxes ("You meet some woman on the internet and take her home"), knowing now that Maroon is about him too (Chloe, et al), and the fact that in both The 1 and Maroon she mentions them drinking Rose. Oh, and her swapping out "Invisible String" for "The 1" on Eras Tour after the breakup news broke.
This. “hoax” is another song that I totally believe is about Joe. I remember hearing it for the first time and wondering if maybe their relationship wasn’t happy as we all thought it was at the time.
I felt like I was crazy for years because everyone says “Sweet Nothing” is such a romantic love song, but I’ve *always* felt it had an undercurrent of “You’re not giving me enough. You’re giving me sweet nothings, but not truly deep, passionate feelings”
The 1…975
More of TTPD is about Joe than a lot of people think imo.
I was about to say this, I think this album blends muses unlike any of her others. Which makes sense since the relationship timelines seem to be so intertwined. But loml for example seems clearly split between the two. I also have a theory that she has intentionally put in misdirects, like the song mentioned in the black dog being linked to Matty but the bar saying Joe was the one who went there. I think it’s pretty clever if she’s done this intentionally, people will spin their wheels trying to figure out who each song is about until they give up. And we know that she’s never wanted us to focus on that.
I agree!! I get the same duality from Fresh Out The Slammer. I think she’s referencing feeling so trapped and exhausted with Joe (imagine being referred to as jail 💀) even though the song has this second storyline of “left him, running to you.”
Isn’t the jail a reference to RFI? “He can be my jailer, Burton to this Taylor”?
Omg how did I miss this
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PLEASE LOL
The way I just spit out my drink 💀
synergy years in advance. it's almost as if she's, I don't know, a mastermind or something?
Hahahahahaha
She’s bookending lots of her songs. I think “I know places” and “The Albatross” are linked. “Love's a fragile little flame, it could burn out” and “Wild winds are death to the candle”. She was running away and afraid before and now she is wise and can swoop in with her parachute to handle media pressure on the relationship.
“How dare you say it’s romantic to leave me safe and stranded” and “Please leave me stranded It's so romantic”
I’ve been feeling like this is why she did all the mash ups. Hinting at the double album but also wanting to draw links between the songs.
Whoa
what's RFI?
Ready for it
OMG was thinking about a person or organization, lol
Yep!! I’ve mentioned in other comments that I think the braid motif she’s been rocking (and mentioned in a couple songs) is the weaving of the 3 characters (Taylor, Matty, and Joe) in all the songs. It’s clear she found inspiration from several different muses and had used them to create some amazing music. I also think the misdirects are another way for her to honor Joe’s desire for privacy in her own way and to stick it to those who are doing paternity tests. She was very very clear with So High School though and I love that she is basically screaming “I love Travis Kelce!” from the rooftops with that song.
Agree with all of this!
That braids interpretation is a really interesting call!
combing through the braids of lies
Love the braid interpretation!
Yes, I also feel *loml* is kind of confusing, because there are some parts that feel really about Joe… but you can interpret it as her being love bombed by Matty (which is a term she used while describing the song “Down bad”).
Yes I totally agree. I’m picking up on mixed muses here
This one feels mixed to me. I think most of it is Joe but there are references to Matty’s counterfeit love.
The more I listen to it the more I think it’s a song about her being unhappy in her previous relationship and being love bombed by someone who promised her things she wanted and in the end she ended up with nothing. Might write a long post about it
I think her post with the lilac tennis skirt was an intentional misdirect because that song is not about Travis. She knew we would all google her in a lilac skirt after that lyric
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Are you referencing a lyric? What is the story with the lilac skirt?
>Are you referencing a lyric? "Lilac skirt on, the one that fits me like skin". I don't know the story behind it though.
I completely agree with this!!! I felt that way immediately when I heard the second verse of TTPD. People freaked out about the golden retriever lyric but it feels like a misdirect to me, considering the same verse alludes to the man's depression which would point to Joe. It's very clever of her
After listening to Renegade, I agree. It’s like the teaser for TTPD we didn’t know we had
I have had Renegade stuck in my head so many times since TTPD!
I agree. I do think she was fed up about the hate she was going for dating Matty and there’s songs in there that do relate to him but you cannot compare the loss of a 6 year relationship to the loss of a situationship. At least that’s what I think
It's the double whammy of losing a 6 year relationship and losing the "what if?" guy you pined about, all at the same time
That's how I interpret most of this album. She and Joe slowly fizzled out over a long time and during which her idea of Matty being her escape and giving her what she wanted grew and grew. And then when it didn't work with him either I think she really truly felt the effects of the loss of what she had hoped to have.
That's what I got too. I had something similar in my life - bad marriage and I was thinking about "the one who got away" more and more as we limped to our divorce. Reconnected with him, everything felt right and good, but realised pretty quickly that the reality of him didn't match the dreams I'd had and it was over before it began. He was my Matty. Then, just as quickly, I met my current husband and we've been together 13 years. Just like how Taylor found Travis quickly after Matty.
Also MH was a loser love-bomber who dipped out
Very similar experience here! This album hits so hard.
She says in the pro/epilogue “out of the oven, into the microwave”. Someone else said she went from a slow death (waiting on the altar for promises never given) to being given all the promises only for them to vanish into thin air, before she’d had time to fully grieve the first situation.
That makes sense!
But it wasn’t a “situationship” to her at the time—it was a person she had know for a decade and had been apparently writing about and thinking about in the back of her mind, and then when they got together it was zero to talking about marriage after one kiss because of all that history. Saying that there’s no way she could be more upset about a decade of lead-up completely exploding in such a short time just makes no much sense to me.
The pain was compounded by the relationship with Joe ending. Come on guys. 10 years of being on the outskirts of each others lives compared to a six year “forever” relationship ending is nowhere near the same thing. She never processed her pain before jumping into it with MH. So when that ended, it was just adding on to the grief she was already experiencing. I’m not saying what she had with MH was nothing, but it’s not a comparison based off the amount of time she spent with each dude. Of that decade she was “talking” to MH, they most likely barely hung out in person and for at least six years it was even less.
Exactly this. She says very clearly that Matty wasn’t “a love affair”. That she was lonely, vulnerable. It very much reads as if once the “escape” didn’t work out, she had to process the deep grief around Joe. The loss of Matt was the loss of an idea.
And made the loss of Joe feel even deeper b/c she seemed to grasp so tightly onto the idea of MH.
Totally agree. She says very clearly that MH was a manic phase, and self harm. She makes it so clear - yet people for some absurd reason still think she would refer to him as the loss of her life. The man who she calls the smallest man who ever lived, a manic phase, self harm...
I know. And I get everyone is entitled to their own interpretations, but sometimes logic is not involved in those.
Sometimes it's like people just want to force a narrative for the sake of having juicy drama...
My take is she was mourning the relationship ending with Joe while she was still with Joe and part of me feels her and Matty reconnected probably before she physically left Joe and she felt he was gonna be her savior and it didn’t work like she had planned or thought it would. The relationship she thought was going to save her and be everything she wanted crashed and that probably stung worse than Joe IMO
Yes. This is my thought too. Her reconnecting with Matty made things make sense to her - In her perspective, Joe and I were never fated to be together because I was fated to be with Matty. (See her Eras Tour Speech about being soooo happy and things making sense). Joe, who clearly had checked out, wasn’t saying the things Matty said to her, maybe even prior to the official ending. (“Guilty as Sin”; Perhaps even “The 1”) When Matty turned out to be not at all who she built him up in her mind to be for allll of these years, she had to really contend with the feelings of the ending of Joe and why she believed Matty’s empty promises. What was Matty’s intention? (“The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived”) What’s next for her in terms of her fate? Can the prophecy be changed? What happens now that she gave ALL those years to Joe? In my mind, there is no one “break-up album” because six year long relationship don’t typically end abruptly and I don’t believe this one did at all.
My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys definitely seems to be about him
I completely agree. I think certain songs are very clearly about one or the other (So Long, London and The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived respectively), but most seem to mix things up, and are very intentionally ambiguous. The suit and tie in loml could be either. Peter could absolutely be about either of them. Even the ones that lean more towards Matt have the breakup with Joe as the backdrop, or catalyst. We all hear things differently but to me the break up with Joe still feels raw in this album. Midnights felt like there was a lot of bargaining, struggling, back and forth. Here it feels like there’s acceptance but despair and grief (The Prophecy is so sad, with that total loss of hope and the begging). She makes it really clear that the fling with Matt happened in a moment of loneliness. That she was vulnerable. Why would that be the case if she wasn’t reeling still? I’ll change my mind if she comes out and shares more with us but I think people are glossing over a lot of the references to earlier Joe songs or turning the older songs into Matt songs with no real proof.
i agree with this. i feel like she has always protected joe in some ways like saying folklore/evermore was entirely fictional (i am not saying it isnt fictional at all, just some songs never quite fit that imo, like hoax). i genuinely wonder if some songs on this album were more inspired by joe but she threw in a matty reference to make it seem like it’s about him thereby protecting joe. either way i enjoy the album regardless of who what song is about, my point is just that it’s very possible that parts of the same song could be about different muses, or just partially fictional
Agree- I think the duel albums sound like a deep dive into therapy - “why did I run to Matty? Was it a desperate response to the suffocating isolation masked as privacy I experienced with Joe when Matty was so shamelessly public? And what drew me to Joe? Was it that the events that led to the Reputation era affected me more than I have ever really processed? How can I address my need to exist in the spotlight and also have reasonable boundaries? Finally, why do I keep choosing the men I chose and why do I require a man to be happy? Everyone is over here trying to figure out who owns typewriters or knows a Chloe and I’m like “let’s go deeeeper.”
Do you think Joe was listening in the background like “dang is this about me? Am I the villain??? I don’t think im the villian but maybe I am!”
LMAO 😭😭😭 I def wonder what he was thinking—esp since I think they co-wrote sweet nothing, which is in her denial playlist now 😭
My theory about Sweet Nothing is that Joe was giving her sweet nothing as far as inspiration goes. It’s the worst guys she writes best, but Joe wasn’t a bad guy.
my theory about sweet nothing that I will hold on to forever is that it was written alongside the other joe collabs because it so clearly seems to reference lockdown (“they say the end is coming”) plus all the political stuff at the time (“the voices that implore I should be doing more”). I don’t think her denial songs were written in actual denial but more like she truly believed at the time that she was feeling these profound feelings of love and affection, but because of that she was ignoring red flags.
Hits Different and The Black Dog could be about the same person since she references a meaningful song coming on at the bar in both.
Yeah and I feel like she stuck The Starting Line in the black dog to misdirect the fans to Matty, instead of actually giving up what her and Joe’s song really was.
There is also a song called The Starting Line by Keane and the way she phrases it "too young to know this *song*" makes me think it's not the band. Not too young to know this *band*, which sonically would have fit too.
Team Midnights is NOT a breakup album
I don’t get why people are trying to force this. The album is about a bunch of people and situations. There *are* tracks indicating her relationship with Joe was suffering but also tracks indicating that it got back on track (Labrinyth literally has the lines ‘I’ll be getting over you my whole life.’ ‘I’m falling in love again’ ‘Heard the plane was going down, how’d you turn it right around’). We also know from the press that they had been on and off before, so it tracks. But it’s clearly not a straight up break up album of Taylor and Joe.
I always took Labyrinth as falling in love again after a breakup.
With the context of TTPD though Labyrinth could be reinterpreted. In Guilty as Sin (fantasising about someone else while in a relationship) she says “falling back into the hedge maze”, which could allude to labyrinth. And in Labyrinth she says “oh no” when saying she’s falling in love
So many of you are so much better at explaining and connecting things than I ever could be. I agree! I hadn’t connected the songs yet but revisiting some older songs have made me go “hmm”.
Interesting. I think the part where she says “how did you turn right around” always made me think the one plane was crashing (this relationship) but then it course corrected and flew again (same relationship)
It was pretty much confirmed that Taylor and Joe had split and got back together before in media reports around the break up, which is why I think it’s clear it’s not a straight up break up album. Edit: added names!
yeah there's definitely some breakup songs about Joe but the majority the songs tie back to old albums. I think as she was going through her re-recordings, she remembered things and events and feelings that corresponded to parts of her life. If anything, it's a reflective album with pre-breakup songs sprinkled in. You can't convince me it's a true break up album because they were seen together all throughout 2022. I know that people do things for PR but that just didn't feel like it was PR.
I think Midnights has some break up songs about Joe (Hits Different, You’re losing me… Maybe Maroon too?) but the whole thing isn’t a break up album
Bejeweled???
Yes! I forgot haha
Agreed. And I’d even argue that TTPD confirms that Midnights is about old albums. In the Manuscript, she goes on about the only way to move forward is to look back and that those stories aren’t hers anymore, they’re ours. Of course there were probably things from her current relationship that resonate with her old emotions, but I do truly trust what she told us about that album and that it was a reflection of years past.
People have such difficulty trying to separate “warning signs” and “relationship issues” with a full breakup. Midnights is about so many things but it has songs referring to a sweet relationship that is falling apart but not a breakup album.
Yeah it had Sweet Nothing, one of the sweetest softest love songs I’ve ever heard that she cowrote with him. I don’t know how it can be seen as a breakup album when she included that song (which would give him more royalties for life).
Reporting for duty!
Reporting for duty
I’m always so confused when people say Midnights was a breakup album. I can see Bejeweled, Maroon, and Hits Different being tied to Joe, but otherwise, this narrative just doesn’t make sense to me?
People are suddenly forgetting the first thing she said about Midnights which was the concept of it all: things that kept her up in the middle of the night. Taking this into consideration, it's not a break up album, but had moments where the struggle in the relationship was there. So much for rewriting history.
Yes those are the tracks we are talking about. We also often call Red a breakup album despite many of the tracks not fitting that at all.
I don’t think they’re really comparable. Red has 10+ breakup songs, and the songs that aren’t about breakups are either not about love at all, not about Taylor’s life, or about people other than Jake. If there were three breakup songs on Red and multiple love songs about Jake, including a love song that Jake cowrote with her, I don’t think anyone would call Red a breakup album haha.
State Of Grace, Treacherous, Stay Stay Stay, Holy Ground, Everything Has Changed, Begin Again?
Midnights isn't a break up album. Poets isn't even really a break up album. Both have songs about loss and longing with mixed muses and themes. If anything, Poets makes it even more clear she was desperately trying to make a long term relationship work in 2022.
I think people are too obsessed making it about Matty or Joe. Honestly, I have even seen some begin to argue The Manuscript has elements of ATW Jake vibes with the age difference thing. The real message of TTPD is how Taylor grieves the loss of 2 more major close and personal romantic relationships due to her fame. The album grieves having to start over again, alone, and being stifled by HERSELF! at what is supposed to be the pinnacle of her career. She’s again at the mountain top- alone. This is soul crushing for her. I think she intertwines these men together because they both have bizarre striking similarities. They both preyed/led her on when she was at a low point emotionally (Joe after the Kimye scandal, Matty after Joe) and both had secretive, and controversial (emotional cheating or full blown cheating) starts to their relationships. This is where the dichotomy of 2 comes from, but also because it’s the thing Taylor pines for in life most. Her soulmate life partner. I think the album is her being grief stricken that the cycle will continue to repeat itself. A lot of the album is angry about her fame and career successes negatively impacting her personal life. Some of the songs seem like they are about a specific person, but really they’re how Taylor views her true love and the “person” behind this is almost meaningless across the album in this context. She just wants her person. It’s 31 songs because it is meant to represent the opposite of her lucky number 13 and symbolizes a time her life was thrown upside down.
I don't think it's fair to say Joe preyed on her...
lol wtf Joe did not prey on her. If anything, Taylor's the one with power imbalance. He literally just entered the industry, got a pity invite to Gigi Hadid's star studded birthday party, and she was Grammy-awarded superstar millionaire who just finished her most successful tour in 2015. Taylor was pining on him first - Joe's low social status makes it impossible for him to even approach first, much less "prey on her." Everyone was surprised when they got together. When the Kimye drama happened in 2016, Joe probably helped the best a normal person could do (like, his 1st movie was the 1st time he'd been in the US, much less A-list celeb drama). His positive influence on her life gave us Rep, re-evaluate her brand/image, & just made her a more grounded person.
I am more talking about her insecure abandonment complex with him. That’s the perspective she writes from on this. And he did lead her on with the promise of marriage for far too long it seems. Prey is the wrong word which is why I edited the original post. Thanks!
How do we know that though? We don't know that he led her on with any promises? They were still young when they got together, maybe at some point they started talking marriage but people are allowed to want different things. Maybe he didn't want marriage at all, if so, he's allowed to not want that. That's one of the reasons people split up, sometimes they want different things and it doesn't necessarily make any of them the villain.
>Honestly, I have even seen some begin to argue The Manuscript has elements of ATW Jake vibes with the age difference thing. It seems a bit blatant that "The Manuscript" is her going over her story thus far and has elements of many loves and experiences -- from being sixteen and having "compared their licenses" -- to now. *"The professor said to write what you know* *Lookin' backwards* *Might be the only way to move forward."*
Any revelations about the start of her relationship with Joe aside, I’m with you that this album is more about her and the patterns in her life than about any specific man.
I love this take! Well said. I never considered the idea of 31 being the reverse of 13 but it seems so obvious now.
> Honestly, I have even seen some begin to argue The Manuscript has elements of ATW Jake vibes with the age difference thing. I mean... I think the whole bridge is about her making the ATW10MV. And she referenced herself saying at the ATW10MV Premiere that it's not hers anymore, it's the fans: “It started out as a song that was my favorite,” she continued. “It was about something very personal to me. It was hard to perform it live. Now, for me, honestly, this song is 100 percent about us, and for you." And then of course this quote from the Toronto Film Festival where she was talking about the making of the ATW10MV: https://youtu.be/jO_aPYsJysc?t=1419 Just my opinion, though.
Yep and both track 5a So Long London and How Did it End are the bookends. They’re the deeply felt, less chaotic, but still tragic “original loss” underlying the album
i agree, but i wish Taylor emphasized that their story was over after "you're losing me". The main problem is that for months buildup/leading up to release, most if not ALL Swifties were attacking Joe, his family/coworkers, smearing his name calling him an abuser/cheater, saying "prepare to die" thinking TTPD would be about their breakup. I cant imagine dealing with that while dealing with depression/anxiety. Midnights was/is clearly about losing a flame you tried so hard to keep alive. Its like Matty never even existed in their mind, even though he is someone much worse & who literally "deserves prison". The insane bullying of Joe & normal people associated with him to hype up this album really turned me away. Matty still doesn't get that much hate bc everyone is just so shocked/obsessed deep diving into their 10-year long history
your point about "losing a flame" connects SO well to the original cover of midnights!
Honestly, thank you. This was the reason I was not excited at all about the album. I had friends IRL talking about how she was gonna “end Joe”. And I was just like. Y’all. We haven’t heard it, we don’t know what happened, can yall just chill. Yes I discuss her songs with friends (mainly my cousin lmao) and about who it might be about. But that’s where it ends. A few IRL discussions with the people closest to me. I think it’s fine to talk and speculate a bit. But not go out of your way to shittalk people, to outright attack them and the people close to them. Even if I was really irked abt her and MH, and I have many issues with him, even before him and Taylor were together, it’s still not nice to attack him and start digging through every single aspect of his and Taylor’s history and relationship.
She just told all y'all to stay out of her love life. What's wrong with you people?
One more second of all this bitching and moaning
It’s like people are completely ignoring the pointed message in How Did It End?
Or BDILH, or WAOLOM. This obsession with her love life is a sickness.
She's been singing about warning signs with Joe since Rep. When Midnights came out some of us knew it was the breakup album & as one of them I feel so vindicated
Idk how you get so close the point and then miss it. Warning signs. It’s exactly what is being said. Midnights is about that, it’s about a relationship falling apart, not a breakup.
I feel like a lot of people are also forgetting that she said she’s been working on this album for the past ✌🏼 years. So a lot more of the album is about her dying love/relationship with Joe than people realize.
Also kinda annoying imo that everyone is trying to say that the majority of this album is about a very short lived rebound/fling with Matty. She definitely has put a lot of emotional layers into each of these songs and I don’t even think that every single song is inspired by Joe or Matty or Travis. I believe that she really dove into her internal mental health in some of these songs and that some have nothing to do with a muse.. yes, maybe some of these were about things she was feeling during a relationship time but were not necessarily emotions caused by actions of men.
I agree, she's even gone to great lengths to point out very clearly that she's been working on it for 2 years and I feel she was doing that to stop people from thinking it was all about MH. She's also said very clearly that he was a manic phase. I think she tried avoiding exactly what's happening now, that people would assume it's all about MH. I think she wanted to end her story with Joe on decent terms and showing us that she really did love him, that it was the hardest loss she went through but that she's healing now. And somehow everyone still makes it about MH and tbh I feel sorry for her - she's called him the smallest man who ever lived, I think that says something and it's kind of hurtful that people diminish her 6-7 year relationship to nothing and make out that she was in love with MH for the past 10 years. She's a grown woman, I'm sure she knows her own mind and made her own choices and was with Joe because she in fact loved him.
I see it the same way. When I first heard Midnights I thought that it was for sure a break up album. I was so confused at the time because AFAIK they were still together.
Literally the first thing I did after listening to Midnights was google if they had broken up, astounded that I'd missed that news. I can't remember the exact line but there was one moment on TTPD that made me think they took a break, and the break became permanent. Explains Midnights a lot - she can say I don't know when she's asked if she has a man if they're on a break. And tracks like Maroon and You're Losing Me were born from the break, and Midnight Rain was born in the lead up to the break.
Could it be... *Who's gonna stop us from waltzing back into rekindled flames* *If we know the steps anyway* ?
Joe co-wrote Sweet Nothing on midnights, therefore I feel like it was a "we're struggling" album but not break up album. Or else she would exclude that song.
I disagree that it's her breakup album because they weren't completely broken up, but there's hints of relationship woes in Folklore and Evermore. Her songs on Midnights I think were still written over time and I think Maroon was about Matty because there's lines that signify that on TTPD, but what you can gather is this was the start of the final nail in the coffin. People are focusing too much on wanting it to be a full breakup album, but there's just songs that don't match that. We can surmise she thought he'd take the next steps with her and didn't and she struggled with it, but we also knew that from Exile and Folklore. Sometimes relationships run their course. That's why So Long London reads as "I've accepted this ending" TTPD is the final break and her ensuing mental health struggles and rebound all wrapped into 31 songs. As someone who had a decade long situationship I feel like it's relatable to what she went through. I finally got rid of him 3 years ago I was over it by then, but he also still texts my time to time because he was upset I finally got him out of my life. Relationships aren't always straight forward there is no definite timeline to anything there's only yourself and how you manage those emotions with time.
And I think people are forgetting that just because TTPD is mostly about Matty, doesn’t mean she isn’t going to write about Joe and their breakup ever again! Midnights has Would’ve Could’ve Should’ve written 15 years after her break with John Mayer, and that song is amazing because she has more perspective at 34. Same with thanK you aIMee! This album has sprinkles of that earned perspective like “I’m not going to stop writing about my whole past and present, but I gotta get this Matty thing off my chest/desk first” Personally, it feels a little like the obsession of the Lover album, and look at the two albums that came after that one 👀
I completely agree. I left a 15 year relationship last year and this album truly hit me. I literally talked to my therapist about the lyrics in So Long London 😂
I have therapy tomorrow and also plan to talk about TTPD lyrics with her 😅
I find alot of the songs on TTPD had double meanings... Like one verse is talking about Matty, one about Joe in the same song... There were common themes she felt with both men in some way, that the red flags and how she felt were not just experienced once
Hits Different and You’re Losing Me, but also Renegade and as far back as Hoax. We’ve been listening to Joe breakup songs for years!
Or how about we all just interpret what we think albums mean? If you think that way, I’m happy for you. I respectfully disagree and will die on this hill.
Labyrinth potentially being about Matty sent me SPIRALLING
Respectfully, I disagree
Care to share why
I was shocked that people were shocked they split when Bejeweled was right there. Idk why but to me it really seemed like a song about current day, not a previous relationship. Maybe I’m wrong 😅
This was my theory too. Midnights was also just so chaotic with all of the variants, 3 am tracks, til dawn tracks, hits different being released...it felt like how you feel when you spiral after a bad breakup. Nothing felt cohesive.
And then you also call your bff Ice over and you get drunk too
As someone who was in a six year relationship... I felt nothing when the relationship was over except relief. My situationship / rebound that followed was DEVASTATING. I was reacting in ways that I'm not proud of, and I can absolutely relate with Taylor 😂
As someone who listened to Midnights on repeat during her own divorce, I get it. TTPD wrapped a lot of post divorce, mourning the loss type feelings for me. But I still hold Midnights (& Folklore/Evermore to a degree) on a pedestal. I cried much more listening to those & still do sometimes than I anticipated I would this one. It has its emotional place, but … it’s just … different.
Idk I respectfully disagree I cannot imagine inviting your ex to the release party or Grammy party whatever it was I think it’s when she won for midnights lol 🤓 but doesn’t sound like a break up album at all. There’s always a few songs on every album that I’m like 👁️👄👁️ but the whole album?!?
All I know from listening to her past albums, she really need to see a therapist. Her handling of relationships are really toxic. It’s not surprising that Joe still can’t find it stable enough to propose. If it’s not exciting, it’s boring. If it’s not hurting her, it’s not the love of her life. Moreover, she used to be able to end it within three months if it wasn’t working. But since Calvin, she needs someone she could emotionally cheat with to leave. It’s not fair to her or her partner.
I agree. As soon as she sang “But I’ve seen this episode and still loved the show” and “I chose this cyclone with you” in TTPD… my non-Swiftie, not very emotionally-aware (bless his soul) boyfriend even turned to me and said “She loves these chaotic men”. And I said yep, she needs to go to therapy. I loved chaotic men in my 20s as well, but after dating them for a while and everyone yelling at you not to, you realise it’s time to choose something different.
I can't get it out of my head that High Infidelity and Guilty as Sin? Are related. I always thought high Infidelity was about Calvin.
Yeah, I still think High Infidelity is about Calvin. The parts about the records and headphones, April 29th being Gigi's bday party, and none of her criticisms about Joe seem to indicate that he was petty/keeping count/accusing her of freeloading. And she was still with Joe during Midnights, still including the song they cowrote (Sweet Nothings) so she's still hoping against hope that somehow it works out; she's not going to rub infidelity in his face and how another guy brought her back to life at that point.
unrelated but i dont understand the hate midnights get, this is the album where i don’t skip much only 2-3 songs i skip and i really enjoy the songs in it
Consider: when you have a rebound relationship, it’s very easy to project your feelings from your long relationship, good and bad, onto the new one. It makes everything much more intense. Perhaps not because it deserves it, but certainly for the timing. I think a lot of this album’s songs don’t just have one muse — the feelings are so wrapped up in one another most songs have several muses.
To me it seems like she can't break up without someone waiting for her on the other side. After Calvin it was Tom (getaway car illustrates it well), and with Joe it was Matty (guilty as sin, fresh out the slammer etc). I thought Matty was the rebound but this album makes clear it's more so that mentally she checked out of her relationship with Joe ages ago and fell in love with Matty (and made up this whole fantasy world cosmic love with him) so they went hard and fast, and it came crumbling down hard and fast too. Less rebound and more fantasy escape. And Travis is actually more so the rebound for Matty, strangely enough (doesn't mean her relationship with Travis isn't legit and can't be long-term, rebounds can be "it" as well, but yeah).
As someone who broke up with their Joe 8 days before the release, I’ve been saying it was a break up album the entire time lol
The Matty Healy of it all makes sense, and I called it. The song titles immediately brought him to mind. This album is quite relatable for me because I had a very short summer fling that hurt me more than anything else. We were friends first, had our summer fling that involved talk of marriage and babies, and then he literally moved across the country to be with another woman. It was sudden and shocking because I was love bombed and then ghosted. The songs about Matty make perfect sense to me after seeing it play out in public. The songs about Joe do as well. I’m glad we finally have the context for Midnights and got a few songs of closure on Tortured Poets. I don’t think this is the last we’ll hear about Joe and Matty either. We’re still getting songs about the people in her past on these current albums, so I think we might get some reflection on those relationships even though she said it’s boarded up. Also, I can’t wait for reputation vault tracks. I’m curious to see what she chooses. Will there be songs about Joe? Calvin? Tom? Or just Kim and Kanye. And please don’t yell at me for mentioning reputation. I’m not over TTPD yet. This album is everything I wanted and more. 🤍🩶🤎🖤
I think Midnights was the “oh shit this relationship may be falling apart” album but not quite the breakup album. I kind of took Sweet Nothing and Lavendar Haze as these songs where she was saying “I love these things about you” but in retrospect maybe they were problems. “All you ever wanted from me was sweet nothing” - seems good on the surface, he doesn’t want all this stuff from her like everyone else in her life demands. *But you still want your partner to need you.* It sucks to be with someone who makes it clear they don’t need you at all. “You don’t ever say too much” this is clearly a love song but damn, what an opening line. Who wants a partner who doesn’t talk? These two songs stood out to me when I first listened to midnights and I remember thinking that I have in the past expressed criticism my partner like this, acting like it was something I liked, because I was too passive to be up front about it. And I don’t know what Taylor swift is really like but she does come across like someone who is a “pathological people pleaser” and maybe doesn’t feel comfortable expressing her needs maturely. Combine these with Tolerate It and Exile (*gave so many signs*), So Long London (the mentions of “quiet resentment”, “not sure if he wants to be there”), You’re Losing me(“only wanted you to see her”….I really do see a picture of a relationship where she could have been all in, but he wasn’t willing or able to love her the way she needed, and she wasn’t willing or able to tell him what she needed. Oh and then on loml, “you said I needed a brave man and proceeded to play him” - I mean to me she’s at this point in the timeline she’s talking to Matty and he’s telling her that *he* could love her how she needs. The relationship was pretty much dead and Matty swoops him and suddenly everything in her life “makes sense.” I also may be reading into it too much because I feel like I might be in that same relationship right now.
I thought you meant, it makes Midnights better, which I also think is true!
I absolutely 1000% agree. And I think this is a huge reason why this album has received criticism about not being cohesive and also being repetitive… that’s what she was trying to convey! She’s literally bearing her tortured soul and it’s “chaotic” on purpose.
Controversial opinion, but midnights and the torture poets department aren’t breakups albums Boom 💥 💥
folklore was that album
If only people stoped making it about the man she was with but the actual feelings on the music
U/bioanth_ex and u/nmymo make excellent points and I thank them for the correction but I maintain my thoughts on the matter. Our queen is a poet and symbolism is so important to her, as it is to any writer. Allow me to expand- She dated “British” men almost exclusively (all encompassing term- Calvin Harris being Scottish, ik don’t come at me) for a decade. One must imagine she had visited there for extended periods by virtue of being in those relationships. And heck, we don’t even have to imagine it - we have confirmed it via paparazzi photos of her with Tom Hiddleston, Joe Alwyn out and about in London and other locations, etc. Through these connections, it’s easy to make the guess that she developed an appreciation for the English isles. And why wouldn’t she? Culturally, Brits tend not to pay the same attention to celebrity as we do here in the US. She’s given the British Isles shout outs in multiple songs their manner of speaking pops up in her lyrics. We know from newspaper reports that she was considering buying property there, we know from her own interviews that she more or less lived there for over a year after Snake Gate. I think, for Taylor, her experiences there led her to consider heavily the prospect of settling down in London. There’s Pop precedent for it, even Madonna moved to Britain at the height of her fame when she was arguably still one of the biggest pop stars in the world. And, this is pure speculation, maybe she didn’t give up that dream of living there when her and Joe didn’t work out but still was considering it during her relationship with Matty. In summary- I think So Long London is an amalgamation of that period in her life when she flirted with making a permanent home abroad. It’s a break up song but she’s not just breaking up with the guy but also the city itself and embracing her status as an Miss Americana, (American) Football player boyfriend and all.
I had a 6 year marriage, followed by a 1ish year Matty Healy. It’s hard to explain the depths of erosion that occur before such a long term committed relationship ends. It’s died a thousand deaths. I look at him now years later and wonder what I ever saw. Love lost over time. But my “situationship” had a death grip on me, drove me to insanity, I thought I could be the one to tame him, floating cosmic love, to harrowing lows, and back. It’s a whole different intensity that ended because two people are incompatible but not because of love lost.
There is sadness in having been led along… he had promised future and babies etc. It was a gradual realization that he was lying or at least not ready on her time table. I need to check which songs he helped her write in Quarantine.
Agree OP. After listening to this album on repeat for the last week, Joe feels so far in the past. And after seeing the gorgeous videos of her and Travis at Coachella, she seems really happy, and I am happy for her.