The full explanation of what’s going on with this is available here, but the short version is that over this month we’re doing a little essay-ish series connected to eleven songs I associate with August. They’re organized like an album, in the order listed below. Some of the writings will be more focused on the songs than others, and this is all vague enough in general that we don’t know exactly how it’s going to go. We’re finding out. Today, we’re onto Track 4.
Side A
6. “Rockin’ the Suburbs” – Ben Folds
7. “Meet Virginia” – Train
8. “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard” – Paul Simon
9. “Paper Planes” – M.I.A.
10. “Satellite Call” – Sara Bareilles
11. “L.I.F.E.G.O.E.S.O.N.” – Noah and the Whale
If you use Apple Music, a good friend and reader has put together a playlist of Tracks 2 through 11 here.
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I…I’m not sure how much I like this song? Listening to it, and really listening to it, the only portion about which I think, “Yeah, that’s great,” is the beginning of the chorus. But there are so many glimmers elsewhere—glimmers that I should add I can see why other people would love and just barely miss my own personal and by-no-means-better-for-any-reason preferences—and the whole is so cinematic…
This is part of the genius of Taylor Swift, right? Calling her a songwriter doesn’t seem to perfectly land. She’s more a song creator—maybe not the musical equivalent of a, I don’t know, Jason Isbell, but capable of creating, with various cowriters and producers and everything else, pieces of music that seem to always hit the role she’s trying to make them hit. It’s musical entrepreneurship. It’s audial cinematography. 1989 was the full step out of country and into power pop, and it was almost a compilation album in how diverse the music was relative to itself, and this soarer at the end managed to stand out alongside six or seven other songs that each stood out in their own manner, and that’s such a thing to accomplish, churning out I’d argue four songs (Blank Space, Out of the Woods, this one, and Shake It Off) that hold up without a question seven years later.
This came out right before the beginning of my junior year of college, and I remember listening to it on the radio while pulling up to Main Circle in the old car under sunlit leaves, all full and green, but I think the August with which it really resonates is a more mythic August, the breathless sort of August—the August of leaning as hard as one can into something destined to end so soon and so dramatically and so obviously. It’s an August from the cinema. That’s part of the genius of Taylor Swift, right?
brah has a crush. i see you.