Everybody knows by now that the riveting "Dear John," on Taylor Swift's new album, Speak Now, is about John Mayer. But did you know there's also one other song on the album we can now say with certainty is also about Mayer?
The second Mayer number of which we speak, "The Story of Us," is the song everybody thought was about Joe Jonas. Which is not to be confused with the one that really is about Joe Jonas, "Last Kiss." Or the numbers about Taylor Lautner or Owl City's Adam Young.
A lot of these little confusions and mysteries are cleared up by the lyric booklet for
Speak Now. As usual, Swift has capitalized seemingly random letters in the printed lyrics for each song, and as usual, the capitalizations aren't random at all. They spell out sometimes cryptic, sometimes obvious "secret" messages, usually about who or what inspired the tune.
Swift is notoriously coy about outrightly confirming any of these song subjects in interviews. She claims it's because she's shy about discussing personal issues in person and can only do it in song. But given her tendency toward transparency, I suspect it's less about reticence and really more about the kid in her playfully coming out: She just enjoys forcing us to get out our decoder rings. (Not that she is half-old enough to remember decoder rings. But you get the picture.)
One of the bigger revelations comes in the secret message that comes with "The Story of Us," a song about awkwardly avoiding an ex at an awards telecast. String together the capital letters and you get: C-M-T-A-W-A-R-D-S. Which says a lot in just nine letters.
When fans first got wind of this song, most assumed it was about seeing Joe Jonas at the Grammys or AMAs or one of the other awards telecasts they've both attended since breaking up in 2008. But Swift told me that it was the last song written for
Speak Now, and that she penned it right after getting home from the show in question. Knowing that it involved a reasonably fresh wound, I mistakenly assumed that it was really written about her and Taylor Lautner, since news accounts of the People's Choice Awards this past January described how the two managed to avoid running into one other, just weeks after their December 2009 breakup.
If so, what can we glean from the lyrics about her feelings? For one thing, that whenever they split, she was not at all over it by June. The chorus has them on different sides of "a crowded room, and we're not speaking/And I'm dying to know/Is it killing you/Like it's killing me?" Later, she sings of "losing my mind when I saw you here/But you held your pride like you should have held me.../Why are we pretending this is nothing?" From the sound of it, she held out the faintest of hopes for a reconciliation: "This is looking like a contest/Of who can act like they care less.../The battle's in your hands now/But I would lay my armor down/If you'd say you'd rather love than fight."
In "Dear John," meanwhile, her armor is definitely on when she sings of the subject's "dark, twisted games" and "sick need to give love then take it away," before she triumphantly describes "shining like fireworks over your sad, empty town." But the hidden message for "Dear John" underscores the ballad's vulnerability: LOVED YOU FROM THE VERY FIRST DAY, it says.
MINE
The opening track and first single is already practically a standard, having been rush-released way back on August 4, in response to a leak. Who's it about? Definitely not one of Swift's longer-term steadies, but a shorter-lived crush. (If you had to attach a name to it, it could be
Glee actor Cory Monteith, whose are-they-or-aren't-they-dating friendship early in 2010 never seemed to amount to much. Or, it could be about an infatuation so short-lived we never got to hear about it.)
I asked Swift how "Mine" fit with the true confessions theme of the album, since the bits about marriage clearly go beyond the sphere of sheer autobiography.
"It actually is a confession of some sort," she responded, "because this is a situation where a guy that I just barely knew put his arm around me by the water, and I saw the entire relationship flash before my eyes, almost like some weird science-fiction movie. After I wrote the song, things sort of fell apart, as things so often do. And I hadn't talked to him in a couple months. And the song came out, and that day I got an email from him. And I was like"-she claps her hands-" ‘Yes!' Because that one was sort of half-confession, and half-prediction or projection of what I saw. And the fact that it came across so clearly to that guy that he would email me meant that I had been direct enough."
How did the fellow in question take to realizing that their brief flirtation had resulted in an entire fantasy of togetherness, arguing, falling apart, and married reconciliation-ever-after? Swift suddenly became coy. "Um... I don't know. I didn't really respond. But he was sort of like, ‘I had no idea... I realize I've been naïve.'"
SPARKS FLY
"Sparks Fly" is apparently the oldest song on the album, having been performed live-and leaked to the web via a crude concert recording-back in 2008. So hardcore Swift fans are familiar with the bones of this song, if not yet the revised lyrics and arrangement. The chorus is still the same as in the live bootleg that's circulated among fans for a couple of years, but some of the verses have been changed. Among the new lyrics: "My mind forgot to remind me you're a bad idea." Some of the changes make the protagonist of this upbeat song a bit cockier than before. A line that once went "Something that'll haunt me when you're not around" has had a role-reversal switch, so that she now promises to give her b.f. "something that'll haunt you when I'm not around." Apparently she's a little more confident of her charms than she was two years ago.
BACK TO DECEMBER
This song, which was already released on iTunes, doesn't leave many doubts about who it's addressed to, since Swift broke up in Lautner last December. It's been widely noted that it's her first "apology" song. She is, after all, known more as the singer of "Picture to Burn" than for writing songs acknowledging that maybe it's her picture that should've been burned. But she emphasizes that, for her, repentance was no mere lyrical exercise.
"I've always sort of felt like I try to write songs that the people that they're about deserve," she told me. "And up until now I haven't really felt like I really, really needed to apologize to someone and someone deserved that from me. It's just necessary. From knowing the situation and writing honestly, I can't leave that part out, and I don't think I should. And I think that you should be able to say that you're sorry to someone, and sometimes the best way I know how to say anything is in a song... I think that for me, especially playing that song for the first time for people around me, like my family and my friends, they made that point right away-like, ‘You realize you've never done this before. You've never really apologized to someone in a song.' I guess I wasn't conscious of that when I was writing it, because it just was exactly what I needed to say. It wasn't like ‘Oh, I haven't covered this emotion yet.' It was just a new emotion for me to feel."
SPEAK NOW
Also already released on iTunes, the title track is the frothiest song on the album, at least sonically, with Swift trying out an uncharacteristic vocal style that's closer to Feist than her usual, more conversational approach toward singing.
"The song was inspired by the idea of bursting into your ex-boyfriend's wedding and saying ‘Don't do it'-which was originally inspired by one of my friends and the fact that the guy she had been in love with since childhood was marrying this other girl," she explained to me. "And my first inclination was to say, ‘Well, are you gonna speak now?' And then I started thinking about what I would do if I was still in love with someone who was marrying someone who they shouldn't be marrying. And so I wrote this song about exactly what my game plan would be...
"When titling an album," she explained last month, "for me the first step is I go down the titles of the songs I have so far, and see any of those titles could be the recurring theme throughout the entire record. At this point I had probably 70% of the songs that ended up being on the album. And I just kept going back to ‘Speak Now,' because I think it's such a metaphor, that moment where it's almost too late, and you've got to either say what it is you are feeling or deal with the consequences forever. And I feel like that's such a metaphor for so many things that we go through in life, where you can either say what you mean or you can be quiet about it forever. And this album seemed like the opportunity for me to speak now or forever hold my peace."
