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“We’d still worship this love,” she repeats, getting breathier on every take even as she bemoans relationship challenges (“Hell is when I fight with you”). “False God” sees Swift dabbling in more sultry territory, opening up with a subtle saxophone riff and then moving into a slow-burning R&B jam. “You like the nicer nurses, you make the best of a bad deal.” But ultimately the song is a kind of prayer: “Soon you’ll get better,” the phrase she keeps repeating, functions more as a plea than a proclamation, an uncertainty that the song’s delicacy echoes. “In doctor’s office lighting, I didn’t tell you I was scared,” she recalls. “London Boy”Ī sweet country lullaby, “Soon You’ll Get Better” sees Swift teaming up with her longtime idols the Dixie Chicks for an acoustic ballad about illness and hoping for health. “You said it was a great love, one for the ages / But if the story’s over, why am I still writing pages?” she wonders at one point - and then documents the ways she tries to get over heartbreak (“I get drunk, but it’s not enough,” “Tryna find a part of me that you didn’t touch”) with resigned resilience. “Death By a Thousand Cuts” is ostensibly a sad song, but it’s one of her prettier and more fast-paced Lover songs anyway, a sweet melody interspersed with a tinkling piano section that adds gravity to her melancholy lyrics. “Cornelia Street” isn’t a ballad, but it is filled with bittersweetness over a lush synth base. Her refrain - “I hope I never lose you, hope it never ends / I’d never walk Cornelia Street again” - packs a punch of relatability some places just become too drenched in difficult memories to handle our traffic after heartbreak.
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Swift cut her teeth on storytelling, and that background shines on “Cornelia Street,” which alludes to a Manhattan neighborhood and the beginning of a love story. “Miss Americana and the Heartbreak Prince” But more than anything, Swift gets to play with her attitude, dropping in signature vocal quirks over the toe-tapping beat, backgrounded by a chorus of dramatic sighs. Over a snapping rhythm, Swift gets playful on “I Think He Knows.” “He got that boyish look that I like in a man,” she talk-sings with rapid precision: “He’s so obsessed with me, and boy, I understand.” There’s a refreshing self-awareness and sense of humor to this first-crush love song, which is laced with references to Nashville and descriptions of infatuation. “I hate my reflection for years and years.” And while her lyrics are all fairly oblique, fans of Swift will surmise that when she says “I’ve been the archer, I’ve been the prey” she’s talking about how she has been cast in different lights at various times over her years in the pop culture discourse. “I cut off my nose just to spite my face,” she sighs intimately.
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Coproduced with Jack Antonoff, it has some of the more 80s sensibility that their previous work together (like “Getaway Car” and “Dress”) has also showed off. Released as a promotional single, “The Archer” shows a more introspective side of Swift over a skittering synth line. “And I cried like a baby coming home from the bar, said, ‘I’m fine,’ but it wasn’t true / I don’t wanna keep secrets just to keep you,” she recalls, showing some of the rawness of her feelings in a way that calls to mind the vulnerability of Reputation‘s “ Delicate.” 3. Vincent’s Annie Clark, “Cruel Summer” paints the picture of an emotional rollercoaster of a summer - new love and its uncertainties mashed up against the challenges facing pop stars in the public spotlight. “Cruel Summer”ĭriving and synth-forward with co-production from Jack Antonoff and St. “I forgot that you existed and I thought that it would kill me, but it didn’t / And it was so nice, so peaceful and quiet… It isn’t love, it isn’t hate, it’s just indifference,” she shrugs, sing-talking her way through the tune, even throwing in a laugh. “I Forgot That You Existed” is an album opener with a purpose: to show she’s moved on, which she says in no uncertain terms. Bright, light and bubbly, “I Forgot You Existed” sounds like Swift’s final rejoinder to the darkness of the Reputation era.