Tea Time! We *might* Be Getting Blank Space (Taylor's Version) On April 16th. Here's What I Know For

!!!!!

I find myself regularly searching for analysis posts I’ve made in the past so I’m putting together this list to keep track of some of my favorites. I’m essentially making this for myself but if anyone else finds these old posts interesting then that’s great too. 😊

Song + Video Analysis

10/20/20 Ready For It As A Roadmap for Taylor’s Coming Out Journey

8/23/20 Mirrorball / Don’t Take The Money (Connections)

8/8/20 The Lakes: Taylor Takes Us to Bridge City And Hints She is Through With Bearding

11/13/21 All Too Well Short Film: 7 of Spades is Highlighted, Perhaps Calls for Patience

11/15/21 IBYTAM: The Bride Is Pretending to Love the Groom While the Spotlight is on

11/15/21 IBYTAM: Taylor Knocks the Groom Over then Breaks the Chains

Social Media + Other Analysis

10/18/21 Rethinking Spade’s Final Messages

10/22/21 Karlie Leaves Easter Egg in her IG Stories for Taylor’s IBYTAM Rose Dress

11/15/21 SNL Promo Calls Back to Night Taylor and Karlie Met

12/12/21 Taylor’s t-shirt is of the Friends pilot episode where Rachel leaves a man she doesn’t love then Monica takes her in as a roommate!

2022

8/2/21 Was Spade Trying to Tell Us 2022 is Important? (I believe this is the first 2022 theory)

11/28/21 New Year’s Merch Celebrates 2022 and Possibly Hints at Jerklie Breakup

This November 13th has truly been a celebration.

How it Started:

How it’s going:

‘Twas a happy Kaylor anniversary. Cheers to many more years.

https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMFoMadkb/

The implications of 'Cause all the boys and their expensive cars / with their Range Rovers and their Jaguars / Never took me quite where you do 🥹

I’m drunk in the back of the car and I cried like a baby coming how from the bar → to kiss in cars and downtown bars was all we needed → standing in your cardigan, kissing in my car again, stopped at a streetlight, you know I miss you

okay but what about that huge safety pin hanging on the wall in the scene where Sadie is laying in bed 🤔

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Make an analysis of Lover and it’s MV. I would especially love to hear your thoughts about the bridge. It’s so heartbreakingly beautiful. 😭🤧

Ok ok. Let’s settle in because I’m going to talk about a lot of stuff in this post.

It’s starts out with the girl sitting on the living room floor of a modest, sort of suburban house on Christmas morning, alone, looking at her new snow globe. Inside the snowglobe is a large house. Taylor said this was inspired by the snow globe mentioned in YAIL, about “her friends” falling in love. Of course I believe YAIL is about when she and KK fell in love. The snow globe metaphor doesn’t really make sense being about anyone else. But it fits kaylor perfectly (VSFS13, and also the glass closet.)

Home is an important theme is this album, especially in this song but I’d also argue that it is what Cornelia St is about. And it’s referenced in INTHAF. Home is a place, but it’s also a feeling. Feels like home. And I think that her person is what feels like home to her. And since they have a secret love, home is the only place they can truly be themselves. Wherever that home is at any given moment.

So having this video for this song, which is the title track of the album and TS has said is her favorite song she’s written, take place in their imaginary home (and a future home with a family) I think is very important.

As we enter the house our first visual is a long zoom into a long hallway full of doors covered in Christmas lights.

I almost immediately thought of the 1989 tour visuals for IKP:

 https://youtu.be/mfIuMrXxkcI.

I just reblogged a couple of posts about this tour visual which I think is extremely interesting. To summarize, it represents the surreal nature of the closet. IKP was written in Jan 2014 and I believe it is about how she would approach her new relationship with KK, and the tour visuals would have been created after kissgate. When you watch it, please note the Magritte imagery and the panther wearing a Magritte bowler hat, and that there are no panthers anywhere in this song (KK’s fashion nickname is the panther, and Magritte’s main theme in his art is playing with perceptions and the bowler symbolizes hiding in plain sight.)

Another thing I noticed in this tour visual is the hallway turns upside down toward the end: 

This reminds me of the orange room in the Lover video, which is also a very surreal place.

Ok, so now that we’ve established a link to IKP and that is set in Jan 2014, let’s move into the rest of the video.

We start off with the two of them hanging pictures in the green room. Green represents newness and hanging pictures is symbolic of settling into a new place. In this case, the home represents their early relationship. Next we have them in the surreal orange room, playing games on the ceiling. I’ve mentioned before we have multiple references to them playing games at the start of their relationship. And here they are literally playing games in this upside down, surreal world of the closet. I would also argue that orange girl from the YNTCD MV represents a closeted lesbian who lives in the gaylor park but who doesn’t participate in any of the activities, because she can’t, and she is eating oranges whole, which adds a surrealism to the scene. And of course we have Taylor in orange in the giant cage in the LWYMMD video. So orange=closet. Closet=surreal.

Next we move into the Red room. But first we glimpse the two of them frolicing up the stairs. They are giddy. You can really see the excitement of a new relationship. This is the sort of mood captured in I Think He Knows.

On the wall is a painting of…a fox hunt.

HANG AWN, is that a IKP reference? 

They dance in the red room and TS sings happily on her guitar. The love interest is wearing a yellow tie and pants that matches TS’ yellow dress. The red room is the only room where their clothes don’t match the color of the room. So I think the yellow clothes are an important symbol of happiness (sunshine/golden) and this may indicate that even though they are in the red room, this love isn’t red, or at least not all red. It’s golden.

And then we cut to a…blue sink?

What the heck? why would you show a sink? Just a sink. A close up and a long shot of. a. sink. It must mean something. HANG AWN is that a reference to ships sinking? Well not this time! Ha, you see what I did there? So we’ve moved into the blue room, which contains the fishbowl. TS agreed this room represents 1989 era and that the fishbowl represents her lover jumping into her fishbowl life without hesitation. So what we’ve seen so far is the implementation of the plan from IKP (glass closeting, Tree was hired, they are BFFs to the public.)

We continue switching from room to room showing various scenes of domestic bliss. There’s a lot of dancing. Remember TS called KK her favorite person to dance with.

But then, a change. Instead of just the two of them, now there is a party. It’s new years and they’ve invited others into their home. The love interest’s yellow tie has turned orange

and Taylor seems to get jealous as another woman hits on him. His reassuring smile should calm her jealousy but instead it leads to a fight. I believe this represents them hiding their relationship from the public. Again, orange represents the closet. So someone is hitting on her love right in front of her because no one knows they are together. I don’t think this is an actual New Years Party scene that happened. In fact I think the whole New Years party theme from NYD and here is a metaphor for the party that was the 1989 era. Gazelessstares did a wonderful post about this over a year ago. It’s also a metaphor for how they don’t necessarily get to spend time together at big events like New Years eve anymore, but they get the metaphorical new years day (the quiet, private day that represents the future.)

So they have a fight. This seems to be a big one. Does it represent one fight or an ongoing argument they have about how to handle things? Either way, the middle part of the video shows this difficulty. The love interest tries to reason with her in the bedroom, but TS is not having it. She goes off to be by herself. We see her in every room playing music alone, while her love interest is agonizing over things in the Red room. Finally the love interest joins TS in the attic. She is surprised and happy he joined her, they reconcile and reflect on all their happy times (watching the home movies.) Once again, we have joy in the relationship. This episode solidfies their status and the rest of the video continues with happy domestic scenes in their home, while they are still sometimes seen in the upside down orange room playing PR games.

Finally, we pull out from their rainbow home and come out of the snowglobe and see that the modest home from the opening scene shows the future. They now have a child and are continuing their domestic bliss as a family.

So in summary, I believe this video is telling the chronoglical story of their relationship, from early 2014 to sometime recently, with a lovely glimpse at what they hope for in their future. The brilliant thing about this is that it almost fits just fine with the Toe narrative. This is of course because the Toe narative was designed to mimic kaylor. But one thing I always find fascinating about I Know Places is that she wrote it in the middle of the night and recorded it the next day, with an urgency to make sure it got on the album. In Jan 2014. And yet, she was publicly single at the time. And then when she got into a public relationship more than a year later, she did not follow the advice from IKP. Nor did she for her next public relatioship, 2.5 years after writing IKP. It was only when she was ready to take a break from public life that she got herself a public secret relationship (an oxymoron, but it’s what we have.) 

This video makes me so soft.

reblog this if you’re jewish or your blog is a safe space for jewish people

in light of recent events as well as a new rise in creating nazi ocs I think this post is an important one to have on your blog if you stand behind your jewish followers or are jewish yourself.

Women Taylor Swift has dated or hooked up with

I haven’t seen a masterpost about all the women Taylor has dated/hooked up with, so I tried to compile one. Much of this is from kaylorevidence (see also kaylorevidence.com) who is a genius. ENORMOUS thanks also to the people who originally posted about this: @jennyboom21, @all-my-possessions, @tallcurlygirl, @karlitakloss, @taytaysbeard, @whaler13bg, @gaylorcastle, @karlieskupkake, larrienation aka @helplessgay, @svnshineswift (and everyone I’m forgetting! I’m sorry!). I’ve tried to credit every source but I’m sure I left some out so just let me know if so! In case links break, screenshots of almost everything are here.

Disclaimer: I’m sure this is riddled with errors! Repeat, I’m sure much of this is inaccurate (and furthermore it’s none of our business) but…curious minds 🤷. Some of the “sources” are laughable (The L Chat in particular) so take this with a grain or 10 of salt and do your own research too. I debated even posting this, but it seems like Tay is slowly coming out of the closet, so here we are…

According to @tallcurlygirl, these are the women Tay has dated/hooked up with:

Lacey [last name unknown] (2005)

Kelsey Morris (2005)

Emily Poe, fiddle player (aka Taymily) (2006-2007)

Claire Callaway, dancer (unknown when exactly. 2008 or 2009?)

Liz Huett, backup singer (unknown when exactly. 2008 or 2009?)

Kellie Pickler (unknown when exactly. 2009?)

Julianne Hough (late 2009-2010?)

Dianna Agron (aka Swiftgron) (2011-2013)

Karlie Kloss (aka Kaylor) (2013-present)

More detail on each one below…

Seguir leyendo

I have kind of an alternate theory on this line from “this is me trying”:

Pulled the car off the road to the lookout / Could’ve followed my fears all the way down

I’ve seen a lot of folks interpret it as s*icidal thoughts, which it definitely could be, and if so, I hope Taylor is getting help. 

But what struck me when I listened to folklore as a whole and considered her past work is the idea that jumping off the cliff may symbolize her coming out journey, where finally taking that leap would mean publicly coming out.

Let’s consider for a moment that Taylor’s car ride is her life in general. She’s on the road, always moving forward, always reinventing herself and planning and staying the course. Analyzing Taylor’s use of cars in her music is a whole separate topic, but for the sake of my argument, let’s say this car she’s in on “this is me trying” symbolizes her life’s journey.

She decides to pull the car over to the lookout. She takes a detour from her plans and her forward journey. What does she see when she peers over the edge? Her fears, some of which we can reasonably interpret as her fear of coming out publicly. She doesn’t make the leap, though. Something holds her back. Thus, “this is me trying”. She wasn’t quite ready to do it, but she’s trying. She makes folklore instead of turning to the whiskey to help process those feelings.

We hear similar themes on “my tears ricochet”, “hoax”, and “the last great american dynasty”.

On the first, she sings:

And I still talk to you, when I’m screaming at the sky

Many of us suspect that Scott & BMR were a big reason why Taylor decided not to come out early on in her career. Even if that’s not the case, it’s reasonable to assume that Taylor & Scott had many conversations about it, and Scott certainly knew that Scooby managed Karlie. If we believe that the masters sale prevented her coming out last summer, I’m thinking it makes a lot of sense that when Taylor is pulled over at the lookout and about to jump, she’s screaming at Scott to the sky. Not only was the sale what betrayed her, but the foiled coming out plan after so many years.

On the second, she sings:

Stood on the cliffside screaming, “Give me a reason”

I think this just echoes so many of the same anxieties. She’s just questioning everything, all of her life choices, why she’s in this position between a rock and a hard place, why she can’t just be “normal” (as in not famous) and live peacefully with her lover, why this love is so hard, why these outside forces are derailing her plans, etc, etc. She’s desperate. She’s at the cliffside and she’s ready to jump, but she can’t. She’s seeking any explanation for all of the feelings she’s having.

On the third, she sings:

They say she was seen on occasion pacing the rocks staring out at the midnight sea

Although this line is about Rebekah, I would argue that the purpose of TGLAD is to draw parallels between this “mad woman” (according to the town) and Taylor herself. Therefore, it’s reasonable to assume that Taylor relates to this behavior of pacing the rocks, and even if it’s not literal for her, she understands the anxiety inherent in someone who does so. “The Archer” could’ve been born out of this line in TGLAD (not saying it was but that it’s thematically similar). Taylor is pacing that cliffside and staring out at her fears in the stormy sea.

In this context, I also think it’s interesting that Taylor used a Humpty Dumpty reference to describe herself in The Archer:

All the king’s horses, all the king’s men / Couldn’t put me together again

Humpty Dumpty was literally sitting on a wall and fell off. He couldn’t be put back together. I think this is what Taylor fears the most from taking that leap, that she will never be the same. CAUSE WHEN SHE BREAKS, IT’S IN A MILLION PIECES.

This got long, but I hope you enjoy!