On the verge of some big mysterious event at MSG, BD McClay goes deep on her songs about relationships and marriage:
In Love Story, Swift sang: “This love is difficult / But it is real.” That real and difficult love remained her ideal across most of her 12 albums. Love you chase, love you let go; love that heals you and breaks you; love the false god, love the king of your heart; love as freedom, love as prison; but never, never, easy love. I’ve always liked this side of Swift, this scheming screwball heroine who wears a thousand disguises to pursue a man so that she can reveal that she is, as one of the great screwball movies says, “positively the same dame”. The twist in the songs, though, unlike the movies, was that the guy always knew. It made Swift’s stories truly emotionally satisfying – that the hard work was a true labour of love because it was also completely unnecessary. That’s the thing about Americans, of which Taylor Swift is a superlative example: we don’t really trust anything that is not hard work. She wants us to know she has guitar string scars on her hand.