Loving him was like...what?
"Red" Deep Dive episode out now!
You may know all the words to this old favorite song, but do you know what they mean? In this week’s deep dive, we’re unpacking “Red” from Red (Taylor’s Version). After our previous episode on fall where we talked about why this is an autumn-coded song, we spend even MORE time trying to understand the many (many) metaphors (or is it similes? Analogies?) Taylor Swift uses to describe this relationship.
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Today’s Extra Credit - Brought to you by Jodi
We are 11 episodes in and I have already developed a reputation for making Taylor’s love songs about her career. But think about it—in addition to being a modern-day Shakespeare, Taylor Swift is also a Business Woman. (“I’m not a business man / I’m a business, man!” from Jay-Z immediately comes to mind when I write this sentence. Unfortunately, this line is from a Kanye West song). Taylor is equally as thoughtful in her business and career decisions as she is her songwriting, and selecting the song “Red” was the first time I got to explore her career decisions a little more deeply.
I’ll admit I didn’t intend to go all first-year-MBA when I picked the song. I just liked the line “like the colors in autumn so bright, just before they lose it all” and thought that it’d be a natural fit for an episode about fall. The more I tried to find a literary connection between fall and this song, the more I saw the symbolism of both fall and red as they relate to Taylor’s career. But this isn’t the only song, or album, where Taylor’s music mirrors her career journey.
Speak Now or forever be accused of not writing your own songs
Taylor’s third album, Speak Now, is arguably the first time her music is informed by a career choice. It’s the first album she wrote completely on her own—a decision made in reaction to criticism that she didn’t write her own songs. It was so important for Taylor Swift to make sure people knew she was a songwriter (a great songwriter, at that) that she took sole writing credit on all 14 songs.
“I made a decision that would completely define this album: I decided I would write it entirely on my own. I figured, they couldn’t give all the credit to my co-writers if there weren’t any. But that posed a new challenge: It really had to be good. If it wasn’t, I would be proving my critics right.”
If you’re thinking, “why is a songwriting choice a career choice instead of a musical choice,” I’ll preview next week’s topic for you and share that as songwriter, Taylor is in charge of the means of production. She’s the owner of the words, the ideas, and then as the performer, the song itself. Most singers don’t write their own songs. Songwriting completely solo, without a collaborator, is a bold career choice that set Taylor Swift apart and helped establish her brand as a masterful songwriter.
Loving him was red…burning red
Following Speak Now, Taylor hit another crossroads in her career. With three solid country albums behind her by the age of 22, she felt her glory days may already be behind her. At the same time she felt she had hit a pinnacle in her country career, she also wanted to explore a shift into pop music. But how does a successful country artist abandon her roots and start anew in pop?
Her next album, Red, uses the color red as a metaphor for the tension between her country past and her pop future. The name of the album—Red—plays with the color red’s own tensions: love and danger, passion and power. “Red stands for many things, all of them potent. Paradoxically–for a color associated with action and energy–red is universally used as the color that means ‘stop.’" Call it paradox, tension, or dichotomy, the color red has two opposing forces within it. Know what else also has two opposing forces within? The album Red—it has country and pop songs. There’s that career shift in action in the name of the album itself!
“Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall” - The Great Gatsby
In the re-record of Red (Taylor’s Version), Taylor also seems to use fall as a metaphor for this career shift. Why is fall the perfect metaphor for Taylor’s career at this stage? Well, fall is a season of endings and beginnings. Leaves change color before they die and fall to the ground. A new school year begins. The harvest signifies the end of the growing season. As I mentioned in last week’s episode, according to InterestingLiterature.com,
“because autumn is so often associated with those falling leaves, and with the end of summer, it frequently symbolises the autumn of one’s life, of a more subdued phase in the human lifespan when the ‘summer’ or prime is past and one is entering one’s twilight years.”
This aligns beautifully with the role that the album Red plays within Taylor’s musical career. By the time Red comes along in 2012, she was already an incredible success, with 4 Grammy awards to her name. We know from the song “Nothing New” Taylor felt she may already be past her prime. She literally saw herself as being in the autumn of her life. And we know from her interviews that she was using this album to transition from country to pop, to mixed critical success. This transition makes Red a perfect fall album—the ending of her country career, AND the beginning of her pop career. Past her country prime, entering her pop infancy. Taylor was right—she was in the autumn of her career, but it was just her country career that was ending.
Did Taylor see this connection when she wrote and released the Red album in 2012? Maybe? Maybe not. Nothing in the actual album screams “fall” except two lines:
Autumn leaves falling down like pieces into place - All Too Well Like the colors in autumn, so bright, just before they lose it all - Red
But with the re-release of Red (Taylor’s Version), perhaps Taylor finally saw the symbolism between fall and this point in her life, and fully embraced the fall metaphor as a result. The album cover features Taylor wrapped in a camel coat and hat (too heavy for spring, too light for winter—must be fall!); the All Too Well (10 Minute Version) short film is practically an ode to fall-foliage; and Taylor did a video re-enactment of her Tumblr post about fall from 2014, full of Red (Taylor’s Version) spoilers. All signs point to “embracing fall as a metaphor for this stage in my career” according to this unofficial professor of Taylor Swift.
Look what you made her do
In the interest of not actually writing a dissertation on Taylor’s career via Substack, I’m going to fast-forward to reputation in 2017. Along with Speak Now and Red, the lyrical and creative decisions for this album directly reflect the challenges she was facing in her career at that moment. Taylor famously released this album with zero promotion (“there will be no explanation, there will just be reputation”) after a particularly turbulent few years of backlash in the press. At the time, everyone attributed this decision and the songs themselves to her feuds with Kanye West and Kim Kardashian. But what we now know is that during this time Taylor was trying to renegotiate her contract with her record label in order to buy the rights to her masters. Her label, Big Machine Records, would not let her own her music without a “pay for play” model where she would record one new album for each of her old albums she wanted to own. Not a fan of this tactic, reputation would be her last contractually obligated album of the contract she signed at 15.
Knowing all this context, press strategy (or lack thereof) on reputation feels deeply linked to this contract dispute. Promoting an album is usually pretty necessary in order to drive album sales. But with her record label retaining ownership of her masters, perhaps Taylor didn’t want to drive up sales as much as possible—which would explain the lack of promotion.
The lyrics on reputation also seems to allude to her career challenges. “I don't trust nobody and nobody trusts me,” she sings on “Look What You Made Me Do.” Could this be about Kim Kardashian secretly recording her conversation? Perhaps. Could this be about getting the bad end of a deal from your record label, whom you’ve worked with for nearly half your life, leading you to lose trust in those who were supposed to have your back and support you? Highly possible.
What else points to reputation as a response to her record label dispute? The video for “Look What You Made Me Do” features all the “old taylors” fighting each other, and Taylor trying to break something—her old albums, perhaps?—out of a vault.
I’m going to pause here on this song because otherwise it’ll spoil everything I want to say when we deep-dive this album. (But who else is seriously excited for reputation (Taylor’s Version)?!) I’m also going to pause myself on analyzing all the other songs that I believe have to do with her career instead of a romantic relationship. But I will list them out….
“Getaway Car”
“This is why we can’t have nice things”
“The Man”
“My Tears Ricochet”
“Mad Woman”
“It’s Time to Go”
“Nothing New”
“You’re On Your Own Kid”
“Vigilante Shit”
“Karma”
“Bejeweled”
Fear not, this is not the end of me overanalyzing Taylor’s songs and making them all about her career decisions! Tune into this week’s episode for more on RED, and keep an eye (or ear?) out for some of the other songs on future episodes!