2022 And We Still Here

Y’all…. I’m speechless. This is a comment Karlie left on her new YouTube video today…. Not straight… I-

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.

“the lips i used to call home” but like in a bestie way

a double proposal happened at tonight’s show during love story!!🤩🫶🫶

I am 100% convinced pumpkin anon is legit. I mean there’s just no way they could’ve written these messages w so many parallels to ttpd w some phrases being almost exactly the same. And there’s undoubtedly more connections between them. My mind is absolutely blown rn

March 17 in Glendale, AZ — Mirrorball/Tim McGraw

March 18 in Glendale, AZ — State of Grace/This Is Me Trying

March 24 in Las Vegas, NV — Our Song/ Snow on the Beach

March 25 in Las Vegas, NV— Cowboy Like Me w/ Marcus Mumford/White Horse

March 31 in Arlington, TX — Sad Beautiful Tragic/ Ours

April 1 in Arlington, TX — Death by a Thousand Cuts/Clean

April 2 in Arlington, TX — Jump Then Fall/The Lucky One

April 13 in Tampa, FL — Speak Now/Treacherous

April 14 in Tampa, FL — The Great War w/ Aaron on guitar/You’re On Your Own Kid

April 15 in Tampa, FL — Mad Woman w/ Aaron on piano/Mean

April 21 in Houston, TX — Wonderland / You’re Not Sorry

April 22 in Houston, TX — A Place In This World / Today Was A Fairytale

April 23 in Houston, TX — Begin Again / Cold As You

April 28 in Atlanta, GA — The Other Side of the Door / Coney Island

April 29 in Atlanta, GA — High Infidelity / Gorgeous

April 30 in Atlanta, GA — I Bet You Think About Me / How You Get The Girl

May 5 in Nashville, TN— Sparks Fly/Teardrops On My Guitar

May 6 in Nashville, TN— Out Of The Woods / Fifteen

May 7 in Nashville, TN— Would’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve / Mine

May 12 in Philadelphia, PA— Gold Rush / Come Back…Be Here

May 13 in Philadelphia, PA— Forever & Always / This Love

May 14 in Philadelphia, PA— Hey Stephen / The Best Day

Do you ever think about how in Taylor’s widely-recognized pro-LGBTQ+ song You Need to Calm Down, she included a very significant line that says “Shade never made anybody less gay”? (x) Do you ever think about how Taylor is a master with word-play and in exclaiming gay and shade, she is not only saying shade (as in homophobia and hatred targeted at members of the community) cannot diminish someone’s gayness, but also that the metaphorical shade from being closeted doesn’t diminish someone’s gayness either, that not being out doesn’t make anyone any less gay

Or about how in The Archer she sings “I’ve got a hundred thrown-out speeches I almost said to you” (could this perhaps be coming out speeches?) and “They see right through. Can you see right through me? I see right through me”?

Or about how in Daylight, she ends the album Lover with, “You gotta step into the daylight and let it go”?

Or do you ever think about Taylor has publicly recognized the delicacy surrounding coming out? How in her 2018 pride speech before Delicate, Taylor prefaced the song acknowledging this saying, “I want to send my love and respect to everybody who in their journey and in their life hasn’t yet felt comfortable enough to come out ... and may you do that on your own time and may we end up with a world where everyone can live and love equally and no one has to be afraid to say how they feel”?

Do you ever think about any of that? Because I do a looooot.