Taylor Swift - Folklore

would not occur to me to compare “cardigan” to “all too well”

They're both post-breakup songs in which the narrator focuses on small, specific details (no?)

Isn’t “cardigan” post-reunion?

yeah, I guess the guy comes back in "Cardigan"

This may be a #ControversialOpinion, but I think "Cardigan" is even a better/more interesting song than "All Too Well," thanks to its precision and economy.

― Day 1 fan (morrisp), Tuesday, June 6, 2023 3:57 PM (thirty-four minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

It's not

lol agreed, Alfred

yeah that’s a bridge too far cmon now

here we are again

I remember it all too well!

Tired: "We're dancin' 'round the kitchen in the refrigerator light"
Wired: "Dancin' in your Levis / Drunk under the streetlight"

I think part of the point of “Cardigan” is that for all the narrator’s professed certainty she leaves entirely unclear whether she actually takes dude back. He “comes back” to her, standing in the porch light etc., but it’s entirely possible that she tells him to fuck off at that point.

yes I suppose that’s true, and I don’t think the song is bad, but it is my least fave on an excellent album.

but since I’ve been listening to the album twice a day of late, it may grow on me

I love the couplet “knew I’d curse you for the longest time / chasing shadows in the grocery line”, not sure if those two lines are supposed ti be ‘linked’ but yeah they convey that sense of ambiguity about how she feels about dude

also “I knew EVERYTHING when I was young” breaks my heart for some reason

Yeah I think it's more interestingly ambiguous/complicated than one of her more straightforward "we were made for each other" songs...

Yes, the key aspect of the "EVERYTHING" is not that she knew he would come back to her, but that she knew (or anticipated) that he would leave her (and leave her devastated) in the first place. The "they" in "When you are young they assume you know nothing" could be the world at large but it could also be anyone she dated including the "you" of the song. She was clear-eyed enough to know he would ultimately betray her sooner or later, but let it happen anyway because what are you supposed to do when you are in love?

The song I pair it with is not "All Too Well" or "Mary's Song" or "That's How You Get The Girl" or "Love Song" or "Invisible String"; it's "Fifteen". That song is about the illusions of youth: "When you're fifteen and somebody tells you they love you, you're gonna believe them."

But the narrator of "Cardigan" doesn't necessarily believe. Even the chorus is rife with ambiguity: "You put me on and said I was your favourite". Does she actually accept that she is his favourite? Or is it just something she allows herself to accept in the moment because it's comforting?

A key aspect of Taylor's best songwriting on Folkore and Evermore is the way she plays with this kind of ambiguity, and I wish it was talked about more (and that some interviewer would ask her about it, or really ask any intelligent question about her songwriting - but I've griped about that before). Almost all of her best songwriting in this era - "August", "Cowboy Like Me", "Ivy", "'Tis The Damn Season", "Tolerate It", etc. - occupies this space where choosing (or allowing oneself) to be emotionally dependent on another person is fraught with risk and/or sacrifices (variously: autonomy, security, a clear sense of independent self-worth) and even a song like "Cowboy Like Me", which from a distance sounds like a love song, becomes more complicated when viewed up close: "I'm waiting by the phone like I'm sitting in an airport bar", "We could be the way forward, and I know I'll pay for it", "forever is the sweetest con". There's an undercurrent at work which I suspect is a deliberate disavowal of the kind of fairy tale predestination her songwriting is typically associated with (but which she's been moving away from since at least her third album).

(even "Invisible String" is kind of the opposite of how it appears on the surface: "Isn't it just so pretty to think..." The narrator's saying it's a comforting fiction, she knows that in reality life just isn't that simple or straightforward, which is why she now sends presents to the babies of her ex-lovers, but imposing structured narratives is part of how make sense of a deal with the messiness of real life)

Also hard to hear “Isn’t it pretty to think…” and not be reminded of the final line of that Hemingway novel.

I've never really listened to much Taylor Swift on purpose (for starters, in this house I don't have a choice), but whenever I hear stuff from "Folklore" it clicks that this is the album I've always wanted Taylor to make. Really lovely songs, strong lyrics, really confident in its commitment to a mood minus a lot of the try-hard vibes that sometimes turn me off.