Yeah this one's about Taylor Swift.

Coincidentally I wrote most of this between midnight and three in the morning.

photo by makaiyla willis

Like the rest of America, I’m a big fan of Taylor Swift. And since she’s currently on tour for her Eras concert, I’ve been listening to a lot of her music. Which has led to me thinking about something I find kind of interesting about her last album, Midnights, and haven’t really figured out: that the album’s¹ sweetest, saddest song (“Bigger Than The Whole Sky”) and its angriest (“Would’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve”) are very pointedly linked, even though they don’t seem like they should have much to do with each other.²

A kind of necessary disclaimer here: a lot of people tend to do a thing with Swift songs where they try to match the song to a person or an event or whatever. Well, that’s not really unique to Taylor Swift, obviously—like people love to say “this Joan Baez song is about Bob Dylan” or whatever—but my point I guess is that I’m not interested in developing a theory that has to do with any real events that have to do with a real relationship with a real per…