Earlier I said that the outro of Death by a Thousand Cuts was “very Teardrops on my Guitar” and yeah let’s talk about that.
I think of making the outro a fragment of a verse as a signature Taylor thing, but in fact she’s done it less and less over time–until Lover. Let’s see, I count:
- 4 on Taylor Swift
- 3 on Fearless
- 3 on Speak Now
- 2 on Red
- 0 on 1989
- 1 on Reputation
- and 4 on Lover, more than she’s had since her debut album.
So, why? I think there’s a sort of traditional verse-chorus-bridge song structure she’s working from. The verse introduces the song. The chorus provides the central theme. The bridge builds to an emotional climax–and then by returning to the chorus and the central message, the song can end on a note of resolution. If she’s violating that, it’s to subvert our narrative expectations.
Ending on a verse feels jarring. It disrupts the narrative progression and introduces a sense of stasis and circularity: instead of ending at the end, we’ve gone around in a circle and come back to the beginning.
It also feels ruminative in a way that calls attention to the (often highlighted, in Taylor’s case) metanarrative of her writing process. You get the feeling that she started writing this song to solve a problem, and now the song is written and nothing has actually changed, and all there is to do is go back and perfect the verses.
So I think you see this less when she’s changing or moving somehow, and more when she’s spinning her wheels, needing to process whatever she has to process through writing before she can move on. Over time she’s gotten increasingly self-assured, and you see Confident Taylor on Lover too; obviously on songs like Me! and IFTYE, but also on songs like Lover or Daylight, where she just knows what she wants to say.
But then there are the songs with verse as outro:
- The Archer
- “who could ever leave me, darling, but who could stay?”
- Cornelia Street:
- “I’m so terrified of if you ever walk away … that’s the kinda heartbreak time could never mend”
- Miss Americana
- “you and me, that’s my whole world”
- Death by a Thousand Cuts
- “I ask the traffic lights if it’ll be all right, they say I don’t know”
It feels like after years of trying to shed her vulnerability, she’s ended up in an immensely vulnerable place. She doesn’t know if she would be okay without Joe, and she doesn’t know what to do about that. And her just throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks is how we ended up with this mess of an album, but at the end of the day she’s stuck.