Taylor Swift's Still Waters Run Deep

Water, in all its forms, feels evocative of memories— the coolness of rain on a hot day, the lapping of the ocean in the evening, the splash of the pool in a friend’s backyard. Taylor Swift’s memory-driven music has an universal appeal to the emotional life of listeners, exemplifying how music should be an estuary, a meeting place for connection between artist and listener. After the release of evermore, we (Caroline & Julie) noticed that the metaphor of water itself seemed to be inherent in Taylor’s music, and how in every form it reflects aspects of Swift’s emotional and lyrical journey from ambitious teenager to world-renowned artist. Swift’s water imagery gives listeners a full range of experiences from first loves, danger, separation, and heartbreak, to reflection, protection, vulnerability, contentment, and forgiveness to prove the progression of her changing beliefs about love (because “like any real love it’s ever-changing”).

The earliest of water references in Swift’s discography reflect her mindset on love at the time; it is our lyrical introduction to how she views the correlation between rain and relationships. Early Swift is enthralled with the way rain falls in pivotal romantic moments, shading longing, kisses, and even fights in a carefree, incandescent light: the light of young love. These innocent feelings are all over her first three albums; as Swift shaped her sound, she was also shaping her first relationships and her penchant for weaving her personal life into her lyrics, and all of these elements mature and coalesce from Taylor Swift to Speak Now.

Swift loves a secret tryst on a rainy day; in tracks like “If This Was a Movie” she imagines “You would, you would if this was a movie/stand in the rain outside till I came out,” and in “Hey Stephen,” she packs on the sweetness with “Cause I can't help it if you look like an angel/Can't help it if I wanna kiss you in the rain, so.” Swift is not afraid of getting drenched; in fact, she welcomes it in her second album’s title track “Fearless,” singing “And I don't know why but with you I'd dance/ In a storm in my best dress, fearless,” and in “Sparks Fly'' off of Speak Now (“Drop everything now/ Meet me in the pouring rain/Kiss me on the sidewalk/ Take away the pain”). She also welcomes rainy conflict in Fearless, seen in everyone’s favorite toxic relationship bop “The Way I Loved You,” “And it's 2 a.m. and I'm cursing your name/I miss screaming and fighting and kissing in the rain/so in love that I acted insane,” and rainy reconciliation, admitting to a lover, “I said leave but all I really want is you/ To stand outside my window, throwing pebbles, screaming I'm in love with you/ Wait there in the pourin' rain, come back for more'' in “The Other Side of The Door.”

While Miss Swift relates rain to the precious thrills of first romances and crazy loves, she also equates precipitation with sadness, the dimming of those once dazzling loves to a mere flicker. In a state of reflection in Fearless’ “Forever and Always,” she wonders what went wrong, “Oh, and it rains in your bedroom/Everything is wrong/ It rains when you're here and it rains when you're gone/ 'Cause I was there when you said forever and always,” and in “Sweeter Than Fiction” she remembers past sadness now rendered insignificant by the happiness of a relationship, “Now in this perfect weather/It's like we don't remember/The rain we thought would last forever and ever (forever).” In debut album track “Cold As You,” Swift laments the way rain dampens the day’s end like the end of a relationship, “Oh, what a shame/what a rainy ending given to a perfect day.” She fondly remembers sensory moments in “Fearless” (“There’s something bout the way/the street looks when it’s just rained”) and in Speak Now’s more mature “Last Kiss,” “I do recall now the smell of the rain/ fresh on pavement/ I ran off the plane,” and longs for a probably futile fairytale ending in the whole of “Come In With the Rain” on Fearless (“Just know I'm right here hoping/ That you'll come in with the rain”). Here, she wishes that rain would represent what it used to be for her.

Her idea of rain as a sign of yearning, sweetness, and even melancholy remembrance of a good relationship changes with “Dear John,” the nearly seven minute tearjerker off of Speak Now. Swift’s connotation of rain turns sour as she sings “You paint me a blue sky and go back and turn it to rain,” pouring out her feelings on a manipulative and very different relationship from those she previously experienced. Curiously, we receive little to no other rain references until 1989, when Swift harkens back to the ideals of her rose-colored earlier hits in “How You Get The Girl,” giving a step- by- step guide to how to win a girl’s heart. At this point in her history, she’s more jaded; this is a reflection of a fantasy world where men would do everything right. Swift imagines an apologetic suitor on the doorstep, “Stand there like a ghost/Shaking from the rain, rain.” Here, rain is still the hallmark of romance, a callback for her loyal listeners to nostalgic sentiments from her younger years, and in recent years, a backdrop Swift still loves in her particular fondness for rainy stadium tour shows.

Taylor Swift wouldn’t be Taylor Swift without a little drama, and with her maturing lyricism and growing fame came a sense of underlying danger that seemed to silently lurk around her relationships. The beginnings of this can be seen throughout Speak Now, her sole authorship of the entire album at the age of twenty after a series of professional blows, including the K*nye debacle at the MTV awards and whispers of doubt that Fearless was not good enough to take home Album of the Year at the 2009 Grammys. Swift writes with more caution, surveying the potential damage that could take place and often taking the plunge anyway, seen in Speak Now’s “Sparks Fly,” where she cites the danger of a hot man that could knock down all her defenses (“The way you move is like a full on rainstorm/ I’m a house of cards”). In “Ours,” the danger lies in the judgments of others (“Stakes are high/ the waters rough”), although the true danger would turn out to be the man himself, a narcissist masquerading as a man who’s just afraid to give more than half his heart. In this era, she seems to see an excitement in the high risk, high reward mentality of her relationships, diving into love despite criticism. Later, on 1989’s “This Love,” she expands the metaphor of risky waters with the lyrics “Clear blue water/ high tide came and brought you in/ skies grew darker, current swept you out again,” indicating the instability involved in trusting someone at a precarious personal point. Even in folklore’s “seven,” Swift remembers her early apprehension with potentially hazardous waters: “Feet in the swing over the creek/I was too scared to jump in.” This teetering between relative safety and the unknown keeps Swift’s writing during this period intricate and unpredictable, much like the waters that come with relationships.

You may have noticed that Swift’s triumphant tumult of an album wedged between country and pop sounds, Red, is missing from water imagery analysis. Well, that’s because apart from vague references of “He was tryna to skip rocks on the ocean,” from the song about Ethel and Bobby Kennedy called “Starlight,” no water metaphors appear on the album. Yacht club parties aside, this album is dry, parched, a desert that features very little water imagery. Since Joni Mitchell already wrote Blue, Swift carefully avoids blue associations, selecting red things like fire (as in “Begin Again’s” “all love ever does is break and burn and end”), favoring land-based imagery of the “And right there where we stood/ Was holy ground,” the titular lyric of “Holy Ground.” Then “Treacherous” is a dangerous hike through “quicksand,” and “this slope is treacherous/ this path is reckless,” giving us no water imagery to work with but serving us big incline energy which feeds into future cliff imagery. I guess water is not thematically cohesive to an album titled “Red.” We’re annoyed that we cannot live in Red analysis longer (as this is one of Caroline’s favorite albums to discuss) but fire, cliffs, territory, and color imagery are all separate essays, so let us return to the water.

Aside from picturesque precipitation and dangerous seas, Swift also makes the case for the calmer motif of bodies of water representing thoughtfulness, reflection, or love; like snapshots in time, we are able to envision the scene Swift creates in her lyrics. In her younger years, these lyrics take on a warm glow, like in “Mary’s Song,” “Take me back to the creek beds we turned up/ 2 a.m. riding in your truck and all I need is you next to me,” as she retells the love story of married couple or in “Tim McGraw,” “The one we danced to all night long/ the moon like a spotlight on the lake,” recalls romantic late nights with a first crush. In keeping with the romance of quiet privacy, “Mine’s” storyline’s beginning occurred while they were “sitting there by the water” as a new relationship blooms (“You put your arm around me/ for the first time”). Amidst later efforts to hide away on “invisible string,” Swift subtly calls out their server for disturbing the peace on their getaway: “Bold was the waitress on our three-year trip/ Getting lunch down by the Lakes.” Contemplation also takes on a less rosy tone in folklore’s bodies of water in “the last great american dynasty” as Rebekah Harkness is described “Pacing the rocks, staring out at the midnight sea,” in a rare moment alone, apart from a party, and in epiphany, where Swift’s grandfather is caught in a split second of realization and recognition of the horrors of his situation (“crawling up the beaches now”). Swift uses these bodies of water as backdrops to intimate, personal, and vulnerable moments for the characters in her songs.

In addition to those larger bodies of water, Swift peppers in another form of watery release - swimming. She equates this common practice with moments spent with those closest to her and imbues it with a sense of escape from the crises that come with being such a figure. In folklore’s “the lakes,” she sings, “I bathe in cliffside pools/with my calamitous love and insurmountable grief,” taking a moment to process her most difficult years with her best blue-eyed boy by her side. In “Paper Rings” she recalls a more enjoyable swimming experience, “In the winter, in the icy outdoor pool/when you jumped in first I went in too,” showing that even in the cold, she trusts her love to lead her into calm waters, or, that all waters seem relatively calm when she’s by his side. evermore’s “marjorie” crafts a nostalgic image of Swift’s maternal grandmother also enjoying the peace of a placid surface, referencing “long limbs and frozen swims;” swimming as a form of immersion, a baptism, for Swift in these lines, from clamor to silence, from grief to love, from painful memory to new traditions.

1989’s water imagery concludes with the closing track, “Clean,” as an accumulation of intensity of the loss of a relationship, the sorrow of heartbreak, the need to rid oneself of a former love. This song closes her first glamorous foray into pop in full album form, steering the boat of her career in a new direction. The rain is no longer a romantic backdrop that characterized the theatrics of previous eras, but now water acts as a force of nature symbolic of renewal— she is baptized into new life. Really, the biblical imagery is the entire structure of the song, beginning with a drought in the opening lyric,“The drought was the very worst,” resulting in a flood, “Let the flood carry away all my pictures of you/The water filled my lungs.” This flood, though, is restorative, “Rain came pouring down when I was drowning/ That's when I could finally breathe,” ushering in relief for the speaker. The rain turns to a storm that turns to flood that fills, fills, and fills the house of her being, washing away, cleansing her of this person, but also of her former self. Of course the dark clouds return in her next album, but let’s just sit with what we’ve heard for a moment until you are… ready for it?

Three years and personal history happenings that could fill tomes later, Swift releases her sixth studio album, reputation, in which the opening track, “...Ready For it?” attempts to prepare us (nothing could have prepared us) for a brand new Swiftian attitude. Swift clears her throat, then dives into a dramatic number fueled by the desire to experience the intensity of feelings felt for a new man away from outside attention (“we’ll move to an island”). This love is steeped in stealth, (“But if I'm a thief, then he can join the heist), secrecy (“island breeze and lights down low/ no one has to know''), and superiority (''Every lover known in comparison is a failure”). In the island imagery of “... Ready For It?,” water acts as a barrier, a source of separation. This is a dark, twisted sister of folklore’s “the lakes'' in the desire to be alone with said lover, protected from the outside world, in a state of isolated excitement in “..Ready For It?” or in isolated melancholic bliss in “the lakes.” This separation is also metaphoric of the divisiveness of her public reputation during this era and intervening years since 1989. Also, we see water and or island imagery as a separating mechanism in more negative contexts in consecutive albums, first in a fight with a lover “I lived like an island/ punished you with silence,” in Lover’s “Afterglow,” then in the general distance of the speaker and the addressee, “sitting on a bench on coney island/ wondering where did my baby go,” in evermore’s “coney island,” and ultimately, between the speaker and a perpetrator (perpetraitor) of hurt, “Guilty, guilty/ reaching across the sea/ that you put between you and me” in evermore’s “closure.” These insistences of water as separation are poignant in occurring on records in the aftermath of very negative media attention, representing Swift’s loss of intimacy with the public at large, and then post-reputation, where the loss of her masters severs intimacy with her label and former ally.

The scary sense of rage (we love it, but she is scary) in reputation’s opening track, “.. Ready For it?” rises, then recedes, on the latter half of the album, for in Swift’s personal life, she was doing one of the scariest things of all—falling in love, ultimately learning to lead with her vulnerability again. The album swims through waters of anger and love, introducing us to a new man* that terrifies us because of the level of certainty in which she writes about him; totally uncharacteristic of the leading men of her previous love songs. Water ebbs and flows throughout the album, but first and foremost, reputation is a concept album, a complete journey that transforms both Swift and the listener. From the opening thrums of “...Ready For It?” to the closing twinkles of piano keys in “New Year’s Day,” we are suddenly privy to an intensely personal and tempestuous time, one in which not even her most loyal fans knew what was going on in her life (“No one physically saw me for a year,” Swift explained in her Netflix doc Miss Americana, as pictures of her bodyguards carrying a suspiciously large suitcase from her infamous Cornelia Street haunt to an idling car come to mind). In her introduction and early interactions with this new man, she is angered by his beautiful appearance, shown throughout “Gorgeous” as she sees the inherent risk in falling for him (“Ocean blue eyes looking in mine/I feel like I might sink & drown & die”). This sentiment also highlights the fact that yes, he is hot, and that in itself presents situations in which Swift could end up with her guard down, something that she does anything to avoid at this point. The fact that he appears in the midst of this turbulent time is no mistake; the danger he presents is the danger of real, true love. Swift soon develops a sense of fierce protection over their bond, as seen in “Dancing With Our Hands Tied,” promising to “hold you as the water rushes in,” just for a chance to “dance with you again.” She fears this good, pure thing will be taken from her, and she’s fully prepared to swim recklessly if need be; she is quickly realizing how far she’ll go for the man whose “deep blue painted me golden.” In “End Game,” she imagines a coastal bliss, where they’re shielded from prying eyes and the faint hissing of snakes, “I don’t want to hurt you/ I just want to be/ Drinking on a beach with/ you all over me.”

Although missing from the list of lyrics that include rushing rapids in reputation, I’d be remiss to not mention “Getaway Car,” the album’s crown jewel. With a booming bass, slinky synths, and a full admission of guilt, we suddenly understand the context of that fateful night at the Met. Without “Getaway Car,” and the emotional rollercoaster it presents, (“I was riding in a getaway car/ I was crying in a getaway car/ I was dying in a getaway car/ said goodbye in a getaway car”) we wouldn’t have the most piercing look into Swift’s psyche (“being bathed in her brokenness,” if you will) since she gave us the marvel that is “All Too Well,” and we wouldn’t be prepared for the themes of the album that follow.

The penultimate “Call It What You Want” represents Swift’s growth over the course of the album as she makes peace with her indicted-by-the-Internet past; it’s an ode to newfound love, burnished by personal tragedy and molded by an unwavering certainty of commitment, adventure, and attraction. The pride she feels for their love practically radiates through her vocals as she states, “I’m doing better than I ever was.” Post-hurricane, her “windows boarded up after the storm,” she relishes in calm waters and safety as her love protects her from the wind of past oceans seeping in, “he built a fire just to keep me warm.” Across reputation, Swift settles scores and settles into new beginnings with her hot man/true love, all while delivering banger after banger. Like sinking into a warm bath after a stressful day, listening to the tell-all of one of the most ludicrous years of pop culture and its ensuing love story through the eyes of its inarguable star will only leave you with one thought: it just felt so good.

In terms of the overall Swiftian arc, Swift’s seventh album, Lover is the least informational about the superstar’s psyche, but there are still some great songs. First we see the storm metaphor as a reference to political turmoil in “Miss Americana and the Heartbreak Prince,” (And now the storm is coming, but/ It's you and me/That's my whole world”). They jumped into that pool in “Paper Rings,” took a “rainy cab ride” in “London Boy,” and in the sultry saxophone number, “False God,” Swift references the Atlantic Ocean that separates her and her London boy as a metaphor for the emotional risk of the relationship, “We were stupid to jump/in the ocean separating us.” In “Cornelia Street,” Swift and her blue-eyed dream boy bring back the early sweetness that rain represents in a relationship as they “bless the rains on Cornelia Street,'' so that they can spend time holed up together in her New York City rental. And finally, the island lyric in “Afterglow” whose next verse could elicit a mythical water reference, “I lived like an island, punished you with silence/Went off like sirens, just crying” if she means a singing siren from Greek mythology that lures sailors to their dangerous coast, but most likely she means just an alarming device. Ultimately, Lover produced one of the greatest bops of all, “Cruel Summer,” and is a fun culmination of retraced classic Swift motifs for her first record that she owns in full with a new label.

Okay now we’re in it! folklore and evermore reside in water- adjacent imagery that still embodies danger, but in new constructions; a ship metaphor coupled with wave movement emerges as a prominent motif in the later half of her discography, especially the 2020 editions. The first ship reference, though, is from 1989’s “I Know Places'' with “loose lips sink ships all the damn time, not this time” (‘tis the damn season was not the first idiom Swift improved with a sandwiched ‘damn’) as a rebuke of public interference or gossip infiltration in this relationship as they attempt to outrun the whispers. Again, on 1989, a ship resurfaces: “Been losing grip on sinking ships'' in “This Love,” in which the whole song’s instrumentation and vocals resembles water movement. Swift’s background vocals echo like whale songs that reverberate off the ocean floor. Her voice moves with the sound waves that go “on and on,” the lead vocals are quieter than usual, she’s seductive in her siren-like whisper luring you into her lullaby. She inhabits the paradoxical feelings of “silent screams” in the vocals for the “this love”s in the background; the vocals are first said in the whispers of the background, then in echoey screams in the last minute of the song. The first half of the song is slipping like “Treacherous” is sloping, in the ship lyric, “losing grip on sinking ships” then the second half is a return, a coasting crescendo in the next line “you showed up just in time,” ushering louder, victorious percussive instrumentation. Swift uses the water imagery to resemble the leaving and returning nature of love like the ocean’s tides rise and fall.

Another song that proves a sonic motif that resembles wave-like movement is folklore’s “august,” with hints of the sea in the lyrics as well, “Salt air and the rust on your door/ I never needed anything more.” Further, “Your back beneath the sun/wishin' I could write my name on it,'' reinforces a beach setting in that you can almost smell the only partially rubbed in sunscreen. Sonically, the whole song sounds like it’s bobbing on waves like a buoy, mimicking the false sense of security of this “august” relationship encapsulated in the lyrics, “august sipped away like a bottle of wine/ cause you were never mine,” in that this relationship would only be afloat for a short time. folklore features several references to the physical movement of water in representing emotional turmoil. In “the lakes,'' in the line, “heart-stopping waves of hurt,'' or fleeing in “Leavin’ like a father/ Running like water, I'' in “cardigan.” Additionally, in “my tears ricochet,” the narrator utilizes a battleship metaphor to represent the warring relationship and ultimate separation between the speaker and the addressee, “I didn't have it in myself to go with grace/And so the battleships will sink beneath the waves.” They fire shots to sink each other’s ships, promising no reconciliation. Swift wields Poseidon powers to emphasize the cyclical nature of relationships that are unsteady or doomed.

In contrast, the water/ship metaphor in the opening song on evermore, “willow,” begins, “I'm like the water when your ship rolled in that night/ Rough on the surface, but you cut through like a knife,” representative of positive vulnerability. The narrator (Swift, we presume in this one) is the water, this everchanging, seemingly transparent thing that is “rough on the surface,” guarded, but this new stable man symbolized by the “ship” cut through the surface to access the vulnerability of the narrator in their relationship. Then “gold rush” streams thoughts of a daydream borne from “eyes like sinking/ ships on waters” in the pre-chorus that coaxes the narrator into belief in the imagined love, “so inviting/ I almost jump in," as Swift leaps in the chorus. But the lyrics shift from wishing in the first refrain, “And the coastal town we wandered 'round had nеver seen a love as pure as it/ And thеn it fades into the gray of my day-old tea/ 'Cause it could never be,” to disbelief in the second refrain “And the coastal town we never found will never see a love as pure as it/ 'Cause it fades into the gray of my day-old tea/'Cause it will never be.” Here, water signifies an allure, a mirage of the potential of this daydream like a less cheeky version of the “ocean blue eyes” lyric from “Gorgeous.” In folklore’s “peace” waves symbolize undulating emotions in the line, “If your casade, ocean wave blues come.” Swift promises emotional support and enduring love to the partner despite the context of the song being an acknowledgment that Swift can never truly provide peace. Instead, Swift realizes that peace is more than just circumstantial, “I'd give you my sunshine, give you my best/ But the rain is always gonna come if you’re standing with me,” asserting that instead of danger being external like previous water metaphors, she herself houses a well of danger due to celebrity. This draws an interesting comparison to the debut song, “Tied Together with a Smile,” in which Swift pays tribute to a friend that was struggling in high school, but in relation to peace, the chorus, “The water's high/ You're jumping into it/ And letting go/ And no one knows/ That you cry/ But you don't tell anyone/ That you might/ Not be the golden one/ And you're tied together with a smile/But you're coming undone,” seems to exemplify an early idea of “mirrorball” in the sense of “I’ve never been a natural, all I do is try, try, try,” in Swift’s own insecurity of self-doubt. Further in “Tied Together with a Smile,” she compares the friend’s unrequited love to a penny to illustrate the boy’s lack of appreciation for her, “Hoping it will end up in his pocket/ But he leaves you out like a penny in the rain," debuting her use of rust as a metaphor for emotional decline that continues in her writing as in folklore’s “this is me trying,” “I had the shiniest wheels, now they’re rusting.” Ultimately, the chorus reference to drowning (albeit dramatic) in “Tied Together with a Smile,” is representative of an overwhelm of negative emotions, an early example of Swift tying water imagery to emotional danger that is very prevalent in folklore and evermore.

Yet in evermore’s “long story short,” Swift employs a rare unifying wave metaphor, “My waves meet your shore/ ever and evermore” is a harmonious image, but again depicts herself as the moving water figure in the metaphor. On “evermore” the song, the ship metaphor upsurges beginning in the second verse, “Hey December/ Guess I'm feeling unmoored,” in which “unmoored” is a nautical term derived from a vessel that is not attached to the moor, articulating a feeling of personal rootlessness, a struggle to feel grounded. This wintry ballad quickens its pace in the introduction of Bon Iver’s verse in which the waves return, “I’m out on waves being tossed/Is there a line that I could just go cross,” illustrating a cast away feeling of being lost, longing for direction. Swift sings “And when I was shipwrecked/I thought of you” — this “you” is the lighthouse of hope, hope that cannot undo the wreckage but gives the narrator a reason to swim to shore. Throughout folklore and evermore, Swift uses the ship imagery to exhibit her safety being rocked, but it is also a maturity in the extended water metaphors across her discography, realizing that she has something of structure, something (or rather someone) to hold on to whilst experiencing potentially perilous waters.

From teardrops on her guitar to eyes leaking acid rain, Swift’s use of the water motif is just one example of the cleverly crafted, expertise of a writer in the literary sense, but also in a personal sense. For she evolves her constructed narrative of how she views love throughout her discography (she’s “spent her whole life trying to put it into words”) from dancing in the pouring rain to threats of storm to a ship on the verge of sinking; she articulates growing cynicism in love yet emerges with continual hope, a flotation device. In truth, she knows that this flotation device is not a lover or even herself, but music— the act of creating. In the folklore: Long Pond Studio session she calls making the album folklore “a flotation device” in finding purpose in the midst of quarantine, epitomized in the salient image of the “cardigan” music video of Swift clinging to her piano among the crashing waves of the sea. It’s a parallel image akin to those of the “Out of the Woods” video in which Swift is blue-dress-clad, shoulder-strong facing the sea (having made it literally and figuratively out of the woods) in illustrating her strength in self-preservation and perseverance in creation. Music is not a quarantine survival tool for Swift; this is the survival tool for Swift, always has been. She’s fluidity, transportive, transforming, all these properties of water, but music has been her anchor. The lyrical water through-line proves the exciting evolution every step of her career that is evident down to the molecular level of her language. She bruises, buries, blushes, bares, beautifies all of her feelings in the music—they’re her power that drove her to sail the waves of success and her power to brave the choppy waters of public opinion. With evermore, there is an eerie finality to the album in that she is so prolific in processing her own past experiences, earning how self-referential she is, but she’s charted her path so meticulously up to this point that as an audience there really is no prediction of her next coordinates. We get the sense that she’s done with her “boat against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past,”** but will captain her career towards a future of her own making.

* (Note: We’re just being coy, because we know he’s shy. For essay purposes he is The Blue Man. Further, this man is a water sign himself (Pisces, baby!), and often associated with the color blue, in “Cruel Summer”: “Oh, it's new, the shape of your body/ It's blue, the feeling I've got,” and in “hoax”: “Don't want no other shade of blue/ But you,” among many other references. This is the man she wants to build a boat and sail away into future waters with.)

** Of course, this is the famous last line of The Great Gatsby, a book which Swift has a penchant for mentioning.