I know the reason why Taylor Swift and Joe Alwyn Broke Up

Read below!

So, Taylor Swift and her boyfriend Joe Alwyn broke up after 6 years together.  People feel really bad about it.  Some of her fans are laying bouquets down in front of the apartment they used to share in the West Village, like someone is dead.  Publicly, the breakup was blamed on busy schedules and growing apart, which is never actually the reason for anything, and so the mourners are also curious on the subject of why.  Why did they break up? They want Taylor to write a breakup album to explain the shocking split, and she will probably do it. She’s very good humored about stuff like that.

But if you ask me (no one did, but that is what this substack is for) she’s done more than enough to explain the reasons for their breakup in her recent work.

Now, I don’t want to deplore the Swifties for missing this.  They are always decoding Taylor, trying to find clues (what they call “easter eggs”) to her intentions, but Taylor usually leaves very concrete easter eggs for them to find— like having to use numerology to figure out her birthday or something.  And that is all well and good, but it does seem to strangle a T.S. Eliot style close reading of Taylor’s lyrics that focuses more on the psychological or linguistic.  And maybe she likes it that way.  Maybe its a way to protect her artistic vulnerability which I respect and will now destroy.  Idk.

Anyway, here goes!

For context, one (me) can trace the Joe Alwyn relationship (which started in this godforsaken hell where I live, New York City) right back to Taylor’s song “Delicate” on the 2017 album “Reputation.”  Here Taylor tells the story of a guy she’s super attracted to who is always meeting her at dive bars in the east village and who will not define the relationship in any way.

She writes poignantly of this classic situation, “We can't make any promises, now can we, babe?/But you can make me a drink/ Is it cool that I said all that?/ Is it chill that you're in my head?/ 'Cause I know that it's delicate.”

On “Reputation” Joe emerges as a sort of James Dean-esque character, intimidatingly gorgeous, impossible to pin down, wearing Nikes and black jeans together like some kind of boss.   On her next album, “Lover” Taylor writes about the mechanics of how to get into a relationship with an incredibly hot yet squirrelly guy like this, in case you want to know.     But here, Joe emerges as a slightly different personality, handsome yes, but also given to mapping expository parameters in arguments, making her ocillate between suspicion and self recrimination, which she mostly accepts uncritically as a necessary good.  “I’ve been the archer/I’ve been the prey” she sings softly on “The Archer” the fifth song off the album.  “Who could ever leave me darling/and who could stay?”  She continually remonstrates herself being dramatic in arguments, “I blew things out of proportion, now you're blue/Put you in jail for something you didn't do,” she sings in the song Afterglow. But hey, maybe he did it!  He would not be the first person in black jeans to do it, I’ll say that.

She also supplies the most complete chronicle of how Joe and she got together, a song called, “Cruel Summer” which tells the story of people crying in New York cabs and then eventually getting into a relationship.

Initially, Taylor describes her relationship as a “fever dream” where she is  “always waiting for [him] to be waiting below.”  Then Joe apparently breaks up with her, rather harshly, "You say that we'll just screw it up in these trying times…I’m always waiting for you just to cut to the bone.”  This is where she starts crying in a car. Finally she makes some kind of desperate plea that he seems very happy about.   “And I screamed for whatever it's worth/“I love you, " ain't that the worst thing you ever heard?/He looks up grinning like a devil.”

So she finally gets her man.  Did she have to suffer?  Yes. But she did it.

Anyway, next, there is a pandemic. The two love birds are stuck in a house together which is the best thing to do with a squirrel guy who is always cutting to the bone.   Taylor strokes Joe’s ego by pretending to write songs with him.  Most of the songs she writes about Joe in this period reference the fact that they are extremely good friends and cosmically connected, like “Invisible String” or Cowboy like Me.”  Which is sad.  It probably felt very intimate to write songs together, even if he probably didn’t really help at all.

But then eventually pandemic ends and we get  “The Breakup Album” that everyone wants— “Midnights."

The first song, Lavender Haze is rather confusing to analyze, since Taylor has supplied an explicit interpretation for it that I disagree with like all true adherents of New Criticism.   She has said it is about an ‘all-encompassing love glow,”  And furthermore, “about the act of ignoring that stuff to protect the real stuff.”

But if this is true, the lyrics although ostensibly about all encompassing love glow, have a slightly more ambiguous feel to them.  “Starin’ at the ceilin' with you/Oh, you don't ever say too much/And you don't really read into/My melancholia.”

So we are expected to believe that when hyper communicator Taylor, a woman who has  made a career of asking her listeners to read into her melancholia and finds easter eggs, loves it when a guy “doesn’t say too much” and doesn’t “read into” her.  What woman likes that? Especially her?

One of the interesting things about Midnights as an album is that a lot of the songs, implicitly or explicitly allude to pop classics (Anti-Hero has the tight syncopation and lyrical insouciance of Criminal by Fiona Apple, “Best believe I’m still bejeweled” is Taylor’s version of Single Ladies by Beyonce with way less snappy lyrics, sorry Taylor)    Lavender Haze  seems quite explicitly related to Jimmy Hendrix’s  Purple Haze both sonically, (in the tripping licks that are repeated slightly inverted twice, in the beginning of the song, and lyrically (what is the difference between a Lavender Haze and a Purple Haze?  You tell me.  I have no idea).

In Purple Haze, Jimmy Hendrix is either in an all-encompassing love glow with a woman or incredibly high on drugs and famously asks, “Am I happy or in misery?” Which is in some ways the implicit lyrical tension involved in Lavender Haze.   Is this a love song or a song about the isolation of being vaguely ignored, trapped in some kind of fog with someone who “isn’t even listening.”   

But perhaps the best and saddest song about Joe is probably “You’re on Your Own Kid” which, by the way, no one on Reddit thinks is about Joe and everyone thinks is about her experience in the music business.  But hear me out! You have come this far in my newsletter.

The song starts "Summer went away/Still, the yearning stays.” Summer, as we know from “Cruel Summer” is the time in which she met Joe, who she was “always waiting for.”   But she “plays it cool with the best of them” which we know she did because we just listened to the song Delicate.  It’s all about playing it cool!  The verse continues with Joe “smoking with his boys” and her arriving at a party and coming to a conclusion that Joe “never cared.” Leading her to realize that she is “on her own.”

Although initially angry at her effort she put into the relationship, “I gave my blood, sweat, and tears for this/I hosted parties and starved my body/Like I'd be saved by a perfect kiss.”   The song arrives at an interesting conclusion, that perhaps there was some aesthetic utility in her permanent state of discomfort, “‘Cause there were pages turned with the bridges burned/Everything you lose is a step you take.” It was her yearning for Joe that has lead to great art, that she may be on her own, but perhaps that is the permanent state of the artist. “You’re on your own, kid/Yeah, you can face this/You’re on your own, kid/You always have been.”  It’s depressing as hell, but probably has the virtue of being true.

And don’t even get me started on Bejeweled! Seriously don’t!!!  I could be here all day.

So here is my message to Gen Z.    Do not put bouquets on Taylor’s street to mourn this relationship.  This is just another hipster horrible who dates you for 6 years without marrying you, while telling you that you are always blowing things out of proportion and your suspicious mind is to blame for all arguments. Then you have to write the song “Best Believe I’m Still Bejeweled” in order to make sense of it.  NYC is full of these people and its an occupational hazard of living here.   Taylor, thank you for this genius concept album about this!!!