Member Since: 12/13/2011
Posts: 26,638
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“Begin Again” is as much a dialogue with Swift’s catalogue as a story of a budding relationship. The song’s first line is one she’s used before (in “Fifteen”), and she wields her tunes’ temporal geography for thematic purposes: where Swift narratives used to take place on Tuesdays (“You Belong With Me” “Forever and Always”), “Begin Again” culminates “on a Wednesday, in a café.” It’s as if she’s Bill Murray waking up at the end of Groundhog Day; on the final track of Red and after four albums obsessing over the minutiae of romantic tumult, Taylor emerges with this spare, tentative tale of rebirth. “I’ve been spending the last eight months/Thinking all love ever does is break and burn and end,” she whispers over brushed drums and gentle mandolin, her tones awed, her words still aching with hurt. Swift enjoys formal exercises — it’s part of her country tradition — and this has those in the malleability of the repeated “…but I do” refrain, which traverses the separation between private thoughts and public behavior (“You don’t know how nice that is”) and the present and the past (“He didn’t like it when I wore high heels”). But as important are the breaks with formal songwriting structure, which lends the song verisimilitude: the superfluously specific James Taylor reference, for instance, or the wordy, overly detailed description of certain Christmas traditions. Nevertheless, when it comes to getting over things, these mundanities matter.
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Also, I like Iain’s emphasis on “I watched it begin again,” because Taylor frequently writes her songs as if she were observing her own past rather than narrating it. See also her recurring use of the phrase “this is me verbing” i.e. “this is me swallowing my pride” (“Back to December”) or “this is me praying that…” (“Enchanted”). Or how she uses film terminology: “you flash back to when he said…” (“Forever and Always”) “I close my eyes and the flash back starts” (“Love Story”). For someone whose music is supposed to be so decisively drawn from her real life, she delivers her narratives with a palpable remove.
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She's an american legend.
Her average is higher than Beyonce and P!nk as well
