close read #1: seven by taylor swift

if seven has 0 fans, i am dead

folklore may well be forever heralded as Taylor’s magnum opus, but it is far from my favorite of her oeuvre. i could – and i might – write a whole other piece dissecting my feelings on that unarguably seminal, formidable project – but for now, let’s just say i personally … am lukewarm on it.

but seven is one of my exceptions. it was love at first listen, and it’s been an enduring affair. thematically, Taylor’s no stranger to youth, childhood and (loss of) innocence, but her approach here – simultaneously in-the-moment and retrospective – is so particularly interesting to me. this is Taylor wielding her craft (not a trick!) to produce a song only an incredibly adept songwriter could coax into being.

so what is it about seven for me? let’s get into it, line by line.

Please picture me in the trees

she begins by alliteratively entreating us to picture her as a child – which nicely sets up both the in-the-moment and retrospective frames she moves between through the song. the internal rhyme (me / trees) lets her take her time in delivering this line – which she does in an airy, light head voice that persists through the verse.

Taylor rarely begins a song so high or in head voice. she likes to start low and go high, and typically even in her high notes, employs a clear, decisive tone with a lot less air. on my initial listens, i couldn’t stop imagining Sufjan Stevens singing this track instead, likely because of its airiness. there’s a vulnerability to her head voice here; it’s unsupported, defenses down. so there’s something disarming and intimate about this song, right from the get-go.

I hit my peak at seven
Feet in the swing over the creek
I was too scared to jump in

one word; enjambment. she wrote these lines for the retired English major girlies! they’re a masterclass in the technique; each line stands alone but modifies the prior in a somewhat unexpected way. and then, there’s the pendulum-like motion of a swing, subliminally drawing attention to temporality, and the 23-year chasm that lies between the song’s two frames.

also overarching in this triplet is the Swiftian concern of being past one’s prime (see: Nothing New, this is me trying), complicated by the fact that even her professed peak was plagued by some fear and inhibition. the last line called to mind and contests Fearless, which features both the lyric “You take my hand and drag me, head first, fearless” and the song Jump Then Fall. though the contexts of jumping (and falling) are very different – in Fearless, it’s love and not a creek – i want to consider this evocation in conjunction with these next lines:

But I, I was high in the sky
With Pennsylvania under me
Are there still beautiful things?

on my very first listen, i was surprised she mentioned Pennsylvania (perhaps even more than i was by her mention of India). the mythic story of Taylor Swift begins at The Bluebird Cafe in Nashville, TN and crystallizes with Fearless’ breakout. prior to folklore, her Wyomissing, PA upbringing had so rarely been factored into her canonical narrative.

narrative in its many forms is a massively Swiftian theme, one that has been particularly thrown into relief by her proclamations re: eschewing it. when she asked to be excluded from one, and relatedly dropped a whole project that was no explanation, just reputation, she only drew attention to how understandably fraught her relationship to the concept was. mentioning Pennsylvania, on the other hand, eschews narrative via an impressively casual de-mythologization of self. under no external threat, she introduces instability to her thus-far tightly controlled story. how does a Northeast childhood fit into the tale of enterprising country breakout turned atmospheric pop star? it doesn’t!

Sweet tea in the summer
Cross your heart, won't tell no other
And though I can’t recall your face
I still got love for you
Your braids like a pattern
Love you to the Moon and to Saturn
Passed down like folk songs
The love lasts so long

i’ve realized that one of my favorite things in a work is specificity that stems from attention to detail. and Taylor is often wonderful at employing it in an almost montage-like fashion. some of my favorite lines of hers – “Salt air / And the rust on your door” also comes to mind – engage multiple senses in a quick, vivid flash. “Sweet tea in the summer” absolutely does this – but it is also a little bit funny. Taylor, we know you lived in Pennsylvania as a kid. you just told us. is there a reason you’re invoking a traditionally Southern drink? this contradiction plagues me, especially since i can’t help but ascribe so much weight to her mention of Pennsylvania. but i guess you can drink sweet tea in Pennsylvania.

an irony i do enjoy here is that she remembers her friend’s braids, but not her face. the lack of image produced by “And though I can’t recall your face” makes the imagery that surrounds it all the more vivid.

it would be so easy to just say – oh, she definitely chose Saturn because it rhymes with pattern. but this is folklore, and folklore is deeply related to myth, and Saturn is also Kronos, the god of time; that underlying theme of temporality is back. “to the Moon and to Saturn” is undeniably spatial, but it’s kind of beautiful that Saturn lends the vast distance in this line – more vast than a seven-year-old could truly comprehend – a temporal aspect of similar gravitas too, one that’s reinforced by this verse’s final couplet.

And I've been meaning to tell you
I think your house is haunted
Your dad is always mad and that must be why

this is a heartbreaking triplet. in diction, retrospective Taylor completely fades away; but her presence persists because she’s who the audience is sitting with in understanding the less-than-ideal home situation that young, in-the-moment Taylor is simplistically attributing to supernatural forces. and the notion of haunting also works from both frames; it brings forth in-the-moment Taylor’s youth and naïveté through her unquestioning belief in ghosts; it’s also retrospective Taylor’s reference to ghost stories, one of the major forms a folktale can take.

And I think you should come live with me
And we can be pirates
Then you won't have to cry
Or hide in the closet

not to engage in blinkered intertextuality, but these lines are so Jo March in Greta Gerwig’s Little Women-coded. the way she says “We can leave. We can leave right now. … I can make a life for us.“ to Meg just before her wedding. and “Should we run off and join a pirate ship?” to Laurie, just moments before his heartrending proposal.

not to mention the closet. Saoirse Ronan’s is the most queer-coded mainstream-adaptation Jo we’ve gotten. “I don’t see why I ... I can’t love you as you want me to.” does so much work for this angle, as does Greta’s use of dual temporal frames(!!) that serve to build ambiguity about Jo’s ending into her work by either converging or diverging, depending on the reading of the film you subscribe to. for the record, i don’t think these two examples of dual temporal frames are executed in, or work, the same way at all; i just love this coincidence.

Please picture me in the weeds
Before I learned civility
I used to scream ferociously
Any time I wanted

this might be my favorite part of the song, and i think it ties so intrinsically to my earlier claims re: Taylor’s loosening grip (in a good way) on her own narrative. here, she’s hearkening back to a time before her narrative begins, a time before she was restricted into civility, into being a “nice girl,” as she details in Miss Americana. as a little kid in Pennsylvania, she could quite literally do what she wanted, with little scrutiny. even the fear and inhibition of her earlier iteration of this structure (“I was too scared to jump in”) is absent here.

and i’m willing to bet the isolation of the pandemic was pretty much the next time she felt this way.

so folklore is her ferocious scream. prior to it, even as the music landscape shifted, she’d remained incredibly loyal to the conventions of a release cycle. a lead single with a flashy music video, sent to radio; maybe one other pre-album single given the same treatment. perhaps a promo single, if one or both of the other pre-album singles failed to resonate. folklore, on the other hand – it was almost like she woke up on July 23, 2020 and decided she’d drop an album the next day. because she felt she could – any time she wanted.

Passed down like folk songs
Our love lasts so long

this album is called folklore. folklore is oral tradition. as a result, it has no rigid boundaries; it’s subject to change, to fusion, to omission, to addition. my theory is – and here’s where i need you to bear with me – that part of its meta-project was to take The Taylor Swift Story and turn it timeless by freeing it of some of its limiting constraints, some of its media-trained party lines. i think that, in isolation, when not forced to contend with and live up to her persona every hour of every day, Taylor could deprioritize her narrative in an emancipatory way that actually served how she will go down in history. i see folklore as a dismantler of the overly of-their-time – and in her context, not that compelling! – primary narratives she’d started to build just pre-pandemic; of political engagement and social activism and a particularly shaky attempted demonstration of on-trend-ness via recruiting then-most-followed TikToker Loren Gray for a music video.

as part of this project of transcending the Moment, Taylor was able to deftly write this song in two temporal frames that meld and co-exist. and then, concurrently do Midnights and her re-recordings, replete with once-excluded tracks that are resultantly both present and past. and right now, guide a captive audience (that sadly has not yet included me) through her 17-year career every Friday, Saturday and Sunday night. she’s really harnessed her ability to exist at once in all these temporal frames; which has enabled her to ascend beyond known narrative shapes; which has made her less prescriptive about how she wants to be remembered – unlike on Long Live, one of the earliest expressions of her fervent wish for a seat in collective memory, which is ornately detailed with fairytale flourishes and opposition writ large in many forms, from pretenders to cynics to dragons. she no longer needs to ask; she now knows she will endure, and that (almost) no opposer could make her look anything but incredibly impressive.