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00:00It's just been really fun to kind of expand the musical experience
00:03past just listening to a song.
00:05One of the things that makes Taylor Swift's songs so addictive
00:09is that they exist in a larger musical universe.
00:12We're pretty used to this in film and TV,
00:14but few artists have applied the cinematic universe approach
00:17so extensively to music.
00:19In folklore, there are a lot of songs that reference each other
00:21or lyrical parallels.
00:23The Taylor Swift cinematic universe tells a unified narrative
00:27of a woman navigating her place in the world.
00:29It's a universe full of recurring characters.
00:32Episodes pick up one after another,
00:34narrative threads resolve albums later,
00:37and it always comes back to the prime importance of love
00:40and the bravery of making yourself vulnerable.
00:43I want to still have a sharp pen and a thin skin and an open heart.
00:49Here's our deep dive into the motifs and takeaways of the expansive TCU.
00:55There were some fans that thought I had something to do
00:57with Avengers Endgame because we had the single coming out the same day,
01:00and I have a song that was called Endgame,
01:02and so they were like, oh my god, she's going to defeat Thanos.
01:10Speaking of universes that are really addictive to Enter,
01:13we have been watching Panic, our new episode of The Takeaway,
01:16for Amazon Prime Video is about Panic.
01:19I finished it in less than a weekend.
01:21I was really hooked.
01:23Were you hooked on it?
01:23I was really hooked on Panic.
01:25I thought that every episode there was something that was revealed.
01:29It's also really relatable in the sense of there's a lot of just coming of age,
01:34but then it's heightened by this intensity of danger and challenge that, you know,
01:40it makes you think, what would I do?
01:41Wine Man's Bluff challenges you to face three fears at once.
01:45Fear of darkness, fear of falling, and fear of the unknown.
01:49It had just a great atmosphere.
01:51It was a little bit Twin Peaks, a little bit Friday Night Lights, a little bit Hunger Games.
01:56So after you watch Panic, go watch our video on Amazon Prime Video YouTube channel.
02:00We clear up everything.
02:01Suzanne, if you tell me to watch a show, I'm going to watch a show.
02:04I am actually telling you to watch the show.
02:11All great stories need a compelling hero or heroine,
02:14and Taylor Swift has never disguised the fact that the narrator in her songs is a version of herself,
02:19singing about her experiences.
02:21I think it's going to be really crazy to look back when I'm older
02:25and look at these albums as these diary entries from different times in my life.
02:30But what's unusual about her semi-autobiographical style is that there are actually
02:35multiple versions of her self-proxy, an array of Taylor heroines.
02:39When we first meet her, she's the ordinary high schooler.
02:42She's not high up the social hierarchy, but instead someone who's,
02:46as a bonus track on her first album puts it, invisible.
02:48And you just see right through me.
02:51Part of the reason Taylor Swift cut through so quickly was because of this relatable persona.
02:56She was a teenage girl singing to teenage girls about being a teenage girl.
03:00I'm 17, never gotten married or had a kid, I'm not going to write songs about that.
03:04Right.
03:04But I will write about what I have been through or what my friends have been through.
03:07The flashes of rural America on these early songs and their firm
03:11rooting in the country genre also play into her ordinary girl-next-door-ness.
03:15This imagery of Taylor the country singer grounds her as a peer of her audience,
03:20someone they might run into on the street.
03:22But while she paints this rural life as idyllic, Taylor also introduces a quest narrative.
03:27This is a big world, it was a small town.
03:32Which turns her from ordinary high school country girl
03:34into a more classic leading lady.
03:37When Taylor sings, I'm just a girl trying to find a place in this world,
03:40we get the impression that that place isn't the small town life
03:44she's already described, but something bigger, brighter, and further away.
03:48This narrative arc mirrors Taylor's own journey,
03:50moving at a young age from a Christmas tree farm in Reading, Pennsylvania,
03:54to Nashville to pursue becoming a musician.
03:56I was just sort of kind of looking around at all these big buildings
04:00and all these important people and wondering how I was going to fit in.
04:05And in her songs, Taylor the dreamer and striver persona is boldly ambitious,
04:10yet sensitive and fragile.
04:12As she puts it in the liner notes of her second album Fearless,
04:15Fearless is having fears, Fearless is having doubts,
04:18Fearless is living in spite of those things that scare you to death.
04:22Vulnerability is a theme Taylor returns to again and again,
04:26especially on the track fives of her records.
04:28Picking a track five is sort of a pressurized decision.
04:32Which tend to be the space for the TCU to become the most introspective and tragic,
04:37or as Lucy Harburn puts it for NME,
04:39all aboard the superhighway to heartbreak and pain.
04:42I kind of started to like put the songs that were really honest,
04:46emotional and vulnerable and personal as track five.
04:50Across these emotionally open ballads, we glimpse reflective Taylor,
04:54developing the heroine's deep, insightful power as an artist.
04:58A track five always brings the Taylor heroine down to earth,
05:02reminding us that even though in other spots she might elevate herself
05:05to the level of a glamorous Elizabeth Taylor or Grace Kelly,
05:08underneath it all she's still a regular person,
05:11experiencing our same insecurities and painful life lessons.
05:15Time won't fly, it's like I'm paralyzed by it.
05:19Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang of the Las Culturistas podcast
05:23make the distinction between Taylor and Tay-La.
05:25For them, Taylor is the quieter, honest artist.
05:29She's being Taylor on this.
05:31While Tay-La is the fierce, performative pop star
05:34who comes out in her more melodramatic,
05:36or combative publicity-seeking moments.
05:38I love when she's like a pop star bratty,
05:41like sort of big sound, like that's Tay-La to me.
05:44It's Tay-La who loves the drama and sings to the haters
05:48on very public beef tracks, addressing her substantial list of feuds,
05:52delivering the campy fun of videos like Bad Blood,
05:55and its cold-blooded nemesis pretty clearly meant to be Katy Perry.
05:59While Taylor supports herself with a star-studded supporting cast, or squad,
06:03to show off who's in her corner, so to speak.
06:06Building on beefing Taylor, we get Taylor the Madwoman,
06:09who's almost cartoonishly, gleefully angry and vengeful,
06:13making it feel fun to lean into the behaviors that tend to get women labeled insane.
06:18Got a long list of its lovers, they'll tell you I'm insane.
06:24In The Man and Madwoman, this persona takes on a righteous, feminist anger.
06:28The most rage-provoking element of being a female is the gaslighting.
06:33In the video for Look What You Made Me Do,
06:35which maybe shows Taylor at her angriest and maddest,
06:38a dark spin on her as the leading lady.
06:41I'll be the actress starting your bad dreams!
06:45She lines up a range of recognizable Taylors and pits them against each other.
06:49We are never ever getting back together.
06:51Music video, shake it off, music video ballerina, red tour.
06:55Here, she's self-mocking through some of the least flattering versions of herself,
06:59as seen and defined by others.
07:01Stop making that surprise face, it's so annoying.
07:04There she goes, playing the victim, again.
07:06Like the calculating cutthroat villain from Katy Perry's Swish Swish,
07:10or the snake she was branded as during her beef with Kim Kardashian and Kanye West.
07:15The Tayla part of her enjoys clapping back at the haters,
07:19even relishing having her reputation tarnished,
07:21because far from taking the high road, it's a lot more fun
07:24and sells more records to fight back.
07:27What are you doing?
07:28Getting receipts.
07:29I'm gonna edit this later.
07:30Yet despite the song's dramatic assertion that the old Taylor or Taylors are dead,
07:35these versions of herself still remain key facets of her character
07:39that make up the full picture of Taylor Swift.
07:41The feuter, the emotionally vulnerable person,
07:43the down-to-earth country girl,
07:45the madwoman with an empowered, slightly cheeky rage,
07:48the naive high schooler at heart.
07:49These all take a more mature form in her recent work,
07:53but they're all still highly visible pieces of her identity as an artist.
07:57There's also Taylor the business mogul guiding her own destiny,
08:01as she's illustrating with her project to re-record her first six albums
08:05after her enemy, music executive and investor Scooter Braun bought up the masters.
08:10Which brings us to Scooter Braun.
08:12Now could you re-record?
08:14Oh yeah.
08:15This project reclaims the Taylor Swift heroine character
08:18and her journey as hers and no one else's.
08:26I've spent quite a bit of time writing breakup songs.
08:29Then, of course, there's the series of romantic heroes
08:32who play opposite the Taylor heroine in stories of love and heartbreak.
08:36But I've got a blank space, baby, and I'll write your name.
08:41In the early days, when Taylor the heroine is still young and naive,
08:45a lot of agency is given over to these heroes.
08:48A repeated image on her first album is the car, or pickup truck.
08:52Just a boy in a Chevy truck.
08:54She's riding shotgun with her hair undone on Our Song,
08:57and complaining bitterly about the stupid pickup truck
09:00you never let me drive on Picture to Burn.
09:02In high school, a vehicle is status,
09:05elevating these boys in the social hierarchy.
09:07He's got a car.
09:09These early love stories are very archetypal.
09:12Love in these small-town romances is dramatic and epic,
09:15like it feels in the movies.
09:16Music starts playing like the end of a sad movie.
09:21As she gets older and her love life becomes more public,
09:24Taylor reverses this process, taking men who already have a lot of social status
09:28and reducing them to the level of a high school boyfriend.
09:31In songs about her relationship with Jake Gyllenhaal,
09:33the space of the car again feels important,
09:36likening him to those high school boyfriends she once knew.
09:39In All Too Well, they're getting lost upstate,
09:41and in red the perspective flips and it's Taylor in the driving seat.
09:45Loving him is like driving when the room was a ride
09:49down a dead end street.
09:51She's also showing that this new love is more out of control,
09:54and maybe defined by a power imbalance.
09:57Although on We Are Never Getting Back Together,
09:59she claims that power back, transforming him into an uber recognizable,
10:03mansplaining hipster.
10:05Love for Taylor is also dangerous,
10:07a theme that's prominent in the songs about a more bad boy romantic hero
10:11who enters the TCU scene with that James Dean daydream look in his eye.
10:15Harry Styles.
10:16What are your thoughts on Taylor?
10:18What are your thoughts on Taylor?
10:19In Style and I Knew You Were Trouble, both about him,
10:22the love story is defined by images of crashing down,
10:25and lying on the cold hard ground,
10:27and once again, a driver in a car who can't keep his eyes on the road,
10:31whose journey could end in burning flames or paradise.
10:34If in the Jake songs the heartbreak stops her in her tracks,
10:37then on these songs it's like she's fully aware of,
10:40perhaps drawn to, the danger.
10:42I guess you didn't care, and I guess I liked that.
10:45She also shows more sexual agency in style.
10:49There's a lot of, like, sensual imagery going on here.
10:53She's trying to show you, like, I am sexual.
10:56But the repeated refrain of out of the woods,
10:58are we out of the woods yet, calls to mind the feeling
11:00of a relationship that you know isn't sustainable,
11:03with the video repeating the motif from I Know Places of being hunted.
11:07This was a relationship where I was kind of living day to day,
11:11wondering where it was going, if it was going to go anywhere,
11:14if it was going to end the next day.
11:16What's so striking about Styles as a character in the TCU is that
11:19Taylor's and Harry's real-life relationship was incredibly short-lived,
11:23and according to countless articles over back in early 2013.
11:27So it's truly as a fictional character that Styles looms large in the TCU,
11:32as a ghost largely embellished by Taylor's mind,
11:35who's also instantly recognizable to us based on our collective imagination of the figure.
11:40I talk about in another song on the record,
11:42A Crooked Love, which is kind of like never quite synced up right.
11:46He's essentially the personification of that figure all of us have a version of,
11:50the one who got away, or the great love who could have been,
11:53with eyes so inviting I almost jump in as she sings on Evermore's Gold Rush.
11:58That song isn't confirmed to be about him,
12:01but it's hard not to see this TCU-recurring character in the lyrics
12:04about a boy who grew up beautiful, whose hair falls into place like dominoes,
12:08while everybody wonders what it would be like to love him.
12:11But when Taylor says she doesn't like a Gold Rush,
12:14she refuses to want the boy that everyone is after,
12:17vowing instead to carve a more unusual path.
12:20The TCU also features a series of less central love interests.
12:24The singer was so heartbroken when he ended things,
12:26she penned her song Forever and Always about the boy bander.
12:30Sometimes her breakup songs border on beef tracks too,
12:32as with Dear John, a track five meditation on how John Mayer wronged her.
12:37Don't you think I was too young to be mixed with me?
12:42But what's maybe most interesting about Taylor's use of love songs
12:46is that she's never strayed from singing about romance,
12:49even though this has been used as a stick to beat her with.
12:52What do you care? You go through men faster than Taylor Swift.
12:55You know what Taylor Swift? You stay away from Michael J. Fox's son.
12:57On Lover, she fully embraces this image of herself,
13:00and she's more explicit than ever about who she's singing about.
13:04London Boy doesn't quite reference Joe Alwyn by name,
13:07but it's a clear outline of their relationship.
13:13Alwyn even breaks through to a deeper level of the TCU,
13:16becoming a co-creator on Folklore and Evermore,
13:18though he fittingly adopts a character name,
13:21authoring his own fictional persona within the story universe.
13:24I only wish our other two co-writers were here,
13:26Justin Vernon and William Bowery.
13:28William Bowery is Joe, as we know.
13:31Yet even as the drama of her romantic life has lessened
13:34with this stable relationship,
13:36I also was falling in love with someone who
13:39had a really wonderfully normal, balanced, grounded life.
13:43The importance of love remains central in the TCU.
13:46I wanted the chorus to be these, like,
13:48really simple existential questions that we ask ourselves when we're in love.
13:53Can I go where you go?
13:54In the TCU, love is the emotion that underpins everything.
13:58Love is the great unknown.
13:59It's like, and that's why I write songs about it.
14:01And that draws out so much of who we are, for better or worse.
14:05While you might expect that the Taylor heroine's well-documented lessons
14:09in heartbreak might have turned her into a more closed-off person,
14:13instead, over time, her great strength, musically and personally,
14:17is that she continues to make herself vulnerable,
14:19if with a more clear understanding of the risks.
14:22In her early Track 5s, there's a sense that she's viewing
14:25her vulnerability as a weakness.
14:27In Cold As You, the narrator calls herself a mess of a dreamer,
14:30with the nerve to adore you.
14:32In White Horse, when Taylor sings,
14:34I'm not a princess, this ain't a fairy tale,
14:36this ain't Hollywood, this is a small town,
14:38the heartbreak feels deflating.
14:40She's let down that real relationships don't match up
14:43to her youthful, idealized notions of love.
14:45Stupid girl, I should've known.
14:48Then, in her Discussions of 1989, she describes a turning point,
14:52where she no longer goes into relationships expecting them to be the one,
14:55but with that realization that it's the anomaly if something works out.
14:59Skipping ahead to the two Track 5s that we know are about Joe Alwyn,
15:03in Reputation's Delicate, she is stripping herself down to her rawest,
15:08understanding that vulnerability is a risk you have to be willing to take.
15:11And then there are these moments where it's very like,
15:14oh my god, what if my reputation actually makes the person that I like
15:18not want to get to know me?
15:20And in Lover's The Archer, she is confronting the reality of her past,
15:24taking a break from the joys of her new happy relationship
15:27to face her tendency toward self-sabotage.
15:29The past is still present in the TCU.
15:32Just as much as we might not like to admit it,
15:34this is often true in our lives.
15:36Taylor's previous loves are framed as ghosts.
15:38Stand there like a ghost, shaking from the rain.
15:42Wonder how many girls he had left and left haunted.
15:46Ephemeral and distant, yet specters which nonetheless
15:49can't fully be gotten rid of.
15:51Still, when she sings,
15:52my mind turns your life into folklore,
15:54I can't dare to dream about you anymore.
15:56Whether or not this is inspired by Stiles or another,
15:59it's really about the person we imagine a love with in our dreams,
16:03an ideal to which no reality can compare.
16:06Even more so than any particular real person,
16:09it often feels that Taylor is talking about a more mythical dream man,
16:13or ghost she's forever found in her music.
16:15In the video for Willow, she's united with a soulmate figure
16:19across different time periods and worlds
16:21that crucially she accesses through her piano.
16:24I loved the feeling that I got immediately upon hearing the instrumental.
16:28It felt like somebody standing over a potion,
16:31making a love potion, dreaming up the person that they want
16:35and the person they desire.
16:41There was a point that I got to as a writer
16:45who only wrote very diaristic songs,
16:48that I felt it was unsustainable.
16:50In the permanent feeling love story that began on Reputation
16:54and solidified on Lover, a chapter also closed.
16:57A more mature feeling Taylor seemed to be looking forward in her personal life.
17:01I've loved you three summers now, honey, I want them all.
17:06So what would be the next phase of the TCU?
17:09Would I not be able to write breakup songs anymore?
17:11I love breakup songs.
17:132020's Folklore and Evermore begin a new chapter
17:16in which Taylor builds out the universe
17:18through a larger cast of point of view characters.
17:21I get to create characters in this mythological American town.
17:28Taylor had written in other characters' voices before.
17:31Mary's song on her debut album was a love story
17:33from the perspective of her neighbors,
17:34but here she is reaching for stories that aren't hers,
17:37and using them to add new shades and textures to the TCU.
17:41I had been wanting to write a song about Rebecca Harkness
17:45since 2013.
17:48On The Last Great American Dynasty,
17:50she channels her madwoman side into the story
17:52of another rebellious woman who flouted convention,
17:55New York socialite Rebecca Harkness,
17:57who once dyed a neighbor's dog Key Lime Green in a fit of anger,
18:00and whose Rhode Island house Taylor happens to own.
18:03I had a marvelous time ruining everything.
18:08The reboot is also reflected in Taylor revisiting known spaces,
18:11from her older material, like high school, and love triangles.
18:15So on Folklore, through the intersecting narratives of Betty,
18:18August, and Cardigan, we get a familiar story of a boy, James,
18:22cheating on his love, Betty, with an unnamed girl.
18:25And I've been kind of in my head, like, calling the girl from August,
18:28either Augusta or Augustine.
18:30But whereas before the TCU only focused on the Taylor stand-in's point of view,
18:35now we get all sides.
18:37On Betty, we hear James' mea culpa,
18:39as well as his insecurity and his excuses.
18:42I'm only 17, I don't know anything.
18:44I've written so many songs from a female's perspective
18:47of wanting a male apology.
18:48We decided to make it from a teenage boy's perspective,
18:51apologizing after he loses the love of his life.
18:54This is thrown back at him on Cardigan,
18:56when Betty is the narrator and declares,
18:58I knew everything when I was young.
19:00Betty tells us what it feels like to be treated like an old cardigan
19:03under someone's bed, while James misses her standing in her cardigan,
19:08an object that feels like a more fleshed-out,
19:10sophisticated version of All Too Well's scarf.
19:12Left in the scarf there, it's your sister's house.
19:17Meanwhile in August, from the point of view of the other woman,
19:20the narrator is more self-reflective and the song lets us empathize
19:23by grounding us in her experience of the relationship with James.
19:27She's like really a sensitive person who like really fell for him,
19:30and she was trying to seem cool and seemed like she didn't care
19:34because that's what girls have to do.
19:35Whereas in the Picture to Burn video, her character exclaimed,
19:38He let her drive the truck? He never let me drive the truck.
19:41On folklore, we see growth in how the two girls don't blame each other.
19:45The idea that there's like some bad villain girl in any type of situation
19:50who like takes your man is actually a total myth,
19:53because that's not usually the case at all.
19:55Likewise, Invisible String and Madwoman are gateways
19:58into the opposing character perspectives from Jane Eyre.
20:02In Invisible String, Taylor aligns with the novel's leading lady,
20:05referring to a line spoken by her love, Mr. Rochester.
20:08I have a strange feeling with regard to you, as if I had a string
20:12somewhere under my left ribs, tightly knotted to a similar string in you.
20:17But on the latter, she's identifying with the novel's
20:19Madwoman in the Attic, Rochester's first wife, Bertha.
20:22No one likes a mad woman, you made her like that.
20:28The other classic Taylor Swift narrative of the small town girl
20:31who leaves for the big city is also revisited from a different perspective on Evermore.
20:36Dorothea and Tis the Damn Season flesh out the good part of that life
20:40she left behind and the negative parts of her big city success,
20:43i.e. going to LA and her so-called friends,
20:46that make her yearn for a simpler, more authentic time.
20:49There's a sadness for how this simpler life is pretty much inaccessible
20:53to someone as famous as Taylor with her champagne problems,
20:56which adds another layer to why she's adopting these new characters' voices.
21:00I try not to ever really say where I am the most.
21:03You mentioned that you keep wound dressing with you?
21:07Yeah, I've had a lot of stalkers.
21:09If the other Taylors we saw in the Look What You Made Me Do video
21:12are all actualized versions of who she's been,
21:15these new characters are parallel universe versions,
21:18people she may have become had things turned out differently.
21:22In Happiness, Taylor's mature acceptance of what her exes contributed to her life
21:26demonstrates emotional growth and seems to signal a true moving on from the past.
21:32It goes to, I haven't met the new me yet,
21:35the person I'm gonna have to become in order to get over this,
21:38this person who's gonna have to have new hobbies
21:40and fill their time with new things other than you.
21:42Yet a key theme in the TCU is also staying true to the person you've always been.
21:47Growth is also never fully achieved, but a process you have to keep working on.
21:52In Evermore's Long Story Short, Taylor sings,
21:54past me, I want to tell you not to get lost in these petty things.
21:58But the album still contains the track Closure,
22:01which seems to be dissing Kim Kardashian and declaring,
22:04I'm fine with my spite.
22:05The TCU's genius lies in the fact that there really aren't
22:09that many precedents for it in musical terms.
22:11But modern culture is shaped by the fan experience,
22:14and Taylor Swift not only gets this, but also feeds it.
22:18I did a Spotify vertical video for Delicate,
22:21and I painted my nails the exact color tones that I wanted the next album to be.
22:26She understands which characters we're hoping to meet again,
22:29planting clues and Easter eggs.
22:31So I love to communicate via Easter eggs.
22:34Wrapping up storylines and offering cliffhangers,
22:36like an epic author who grasps what her audience is really coming for.
22:40With music, so much of the meaning is about interpretation,
22:44and filling in the blank spaces.
22:45I think the best messages are cryptic ones.
22:48With Taylor Swift, listeners aren't just given license to do that,
22:51we're encouraged to, thus becoming characters in the TCU ourselves.
22:56Try your hand at writing.
22:58It's like one of the most cathartic, healing, therapeutic things I've ever done.
23:03Our new episode of The Takeaway is about panic.
23:05Yeah, Susanna, so what did you think about that ending?
23:08Yeah, I thought it was fittingly chaotic.
23:10It's a show that does make you disoriented,
23:14there are a lot of threads to follow.
23:16I thought the twists were really enjoyable.
23:19It was adrenaline-fueled.
23:21It's definitely a show that you really want to talk about after.
23:24Most of us, hopefully, are not playing a game like Panic,
23:27but I think we can all relate metaphorically to so many of the lessons that come out in this.
23:32And we really confront so many of our own fears,
23:34our real fears and our imagined fears,
23:36and fears that we put in our own way,
23:38versus the fears the world sort of throws at us, too.
23:41You got to know what to be afraid of, when to be afraid of it,
23:44and you got to know the difference.
23:46I kept thinking about sort of what my challenges would be,
23:48and the fears, and I don't even want...
23:50What would be...
23:52Do you want to tell us that?
23:53I don't know if you want to share this.
23:54What would be your individual challenge?
23:56Ray had a few.
23:58Being buried alive, definitely.
23:59That's scary.
24:01I think everyone's going to enjoy it.
24:02And after you finish the show, go watch our video,
24:05Amazon Prime Video YouTube channel.
24:07Take away.
24:07Clear everything up.
24:09I know there are a lot of questions that you're going to have
24:11when your head's spinning a little bit at the end.
24:12And more importantly, tell you what it all meant.
24:14Watching the takeaway is a huge part of supporting the channel and what we're doing.
24:20So please check it out.
24:37united...
24:41Accessibility
24:42United
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