One Of The Most Life-changing Things I Ever Learned Came From Mythbusters, Where They Tested And Proved

One of the most life-changing things I ever learned came from Mythbusters, where they tested and proved (with cognitive testing puzzles and reaction time tests) that lying down and resting with the intention to sleep STILL provided significant mental benefits over just staying awake, even if a person couldn’t fall asleep in the amount of time they had. 

It helps me to actually sleep to know that just lying down with my eyes closed is still doing me some good, and helps me to not freak out/beat myself up when I stay up later than intended. Any amount of rest is better than no rest!

So if you didn’t know that…now you do

The Tortured Poets Department (thoughts and ideas)

- Taylor declares herself the head of the department - presumably containing more tortured poets. Who might they be? Is this relevant? How would she tie them into the concept? Other songwriters (Stevie Nicks, Carole King…)

- Or, is this a pre-existing department in her head where the poets she used to write about (The Lakes) exist and she has now found her way back into this department either because she feels tortured in the "drained and beat up" sense of the word (but she does not want to end up that way?)

- Or she feels that her songwriting, which is a coping mechanism for her, has been restricted and she is struggling to operate in this confined space - thus she thinks of herself as a tortured poet?

- Maybe this will explore the time she's spent within the tortured poets department: the effect it's had on her and how she realises it's not what she wants or maybe acceptance that this is who she is

- Did she end up a tortured poet because she was trying to process and couldn't express what was happening in her life and in an effort to make sense of it all ended up creating the album in secret?

- Ending up within this department has clearly resulted in Taylor doing a lot of relfecting on what songwriting means to her, more specifically diaristic songwriting.

- We know she’s been wrestling with the concept since at least 2019 and her discussions with Patti Boyd, then Paul McCartney, Matt Berninger, Besser , Aaron, etc. she’s come at it from both sides looking at muses and how they felt about being a muse, as well as the songwriters who rely on them. Something she hasn’t publicly done is to talk to other artists, particularly women, who have written about men in their lives.

- Diaristic songwriters and their muses. This quote from the article below is so powerful - because it felt like for some, Taylor wasn’t taken fully seriously until she ‘wrote about characters she created’ whereas this situates writing about a muse as being a true test of songwriting: "These moments when songwriters get sincere and grounded with their odes, lambasts, laments or love letters to their muse are sometimes when music is at its very best. They call upon a deeper sense of introspection that goes beyond noodling away in the studio until you have crafted something resembling a song. When the muse enters the fore, the songwriting committee is sent packing and an act of individualism comes racing out."

Far Out Magazine

10 famous muses behind some of the greatest songs ever

"To be included in something that Joaney had written, I mean to this day it still impresses me."

(I have an entire pitch ready about a documentary where Taylor interviewed these songwriters and muses which would be released with the album just so by the way - think Stevie Nicks, Carole, Joni, Bruce etc)

- Florence being a collaborator on the album seems fitting considering this quote from 2015 (x):

"Taylor said that you must sing about what's happening in your life," Welch says.

- How did this become an issue for her?

Reflecting on her last relationship: they got together and she wrote Rep, an album she’s described as a love story amid the noise. There were probably no issues in the relationship with her diaristic songwriting when it was just songs about her falling in love and mostly dealing with the ramifications of 2016 and its fallout. But by the time she was writing Lover they had now been together 3 years with all the ups and downs and arguments and fights that brings (along with the love). One of Lover’s criticisms was ‘why does it still focus so much on the early part of the relationship’? She seemed to bend herself into a pretzel to talk about the songs without mentioning or connecting them to a relationship she was in - including songs that were so obvious about her and Joe on their face. It was like she was allergic to connecting him to any of the songs which begs the question - was that because he wanted it that way and she was desperately trying to comply with it, coming off weird at times even since we all knew who and what the songs were about. Separately, the songs that moved beyond the early days and hinted at issues, were sort of glossed over, with her taking all the blame. The ‘breakup song’ DBATC was attributed to ‘her friends having relationship splits’ and the Netflix film. But critically this was the last time she wrote an album in her traditional autobiographical diaristic form. By the time she got to 2020, bigger issues had clearly been happening and she had to deal with that in the best way she knows how: via songwriting. But again it seemed like she did not want to put him/their relationship on main while it was still ongoing - maybe to protect herself or him, or both. She again seemed fine with throwing herself to the wolves in songs and taking all the blame, but did not want to do that to him. Perhaps a big part of how she was processing - or maybe that she wasn’t processing like usual - was the issues were ongoing so that she was still in the midst of a problem without knowing the resolution while writing.

Past albums had mostly involved writing about relationships after they had ended when the issues within them had come to some resolution for better or worse. But for someone who uses songwriting to help processes emotions, how do you still do that (or how does it change), when the issue isn’t an argument with a start and resolve but instead an issue that plays out over months or years while you are still in the relationship?

Using songwriting to understand herself and her life, she probably felt a bit lost when the issues in the relationship remained unresolved: the private/public struggle, the marriage struggle, him using depression as a crutch to lash out at and blame her, her success vs his lack thereof, him not seeing how sick the relationship was making her, etc. Folklore and evermore allowed her to explore some of those themes without explicitly linking them to Joe and their relationship, as did her contributions to National projects (Renegade, The Alcott). And with Midnights she was maybe at her wit’s end of trying to figure out the unresolved/ongoing issues and that led her to reflect back on her past relationships - which also let her camouflage them in songs ‘about her past.’ Perhaps the early days of TTPD was her trying to get back to her usual: writing in real time as things happened even if issues aren’t resolved before doing so and not trying to camouflage or protect him? Or if maybe we have a combo of the 2 in TTPD (maybe the earliest songs continued her newer style and it wasn’t until the split that she returned to her original diaristic style in full). And if so what could an album containing the 2 styles - the 2 techniques and how she had been employing the newer vs the older - tell us about her reliability as a narrator of this particular story and time of her life (the relationship in full from Rep to TTPD)? And does this have something to do with the contrast between the very clinical and stark sounding bonus track titles versus the casual/slang messier sounding album tracks? Thinking too about the end of Midnights with Dear Reader and how that connects here too and if it’s important to this new album as well.

I really do believe that a lot of folklore, evermore, & midnights is a blend of her present and past experiences/emotions inspired by her going back and revisiting her earlier songs for the re-recordings

Like tolerate it, for instance?? Really strikes me as a combination of inspiration from her previous time in an age-gap relationship and her realizing that she was feeling a lot of the same things in her present relationship

“I polish plates until they gleam and glisten” reminds me of the all too well 10 min short film

But “I made you my temple, my mural, my sky, but now I’m begging for footnotes in the story of your life” really feels like it was about the relationship where she changed her whole life to suit his wants/needs and made him her muse for YEARS

“Where’s that man who threw blankets over my barbed wire?” = Where’s the man I fell in love with? Also a callback to “something wrapped all of my past mistakes in barbed wire”

if there’s so much love in the world, why do so many people feel unloved?

i think it's more that there's endless potential for love in the world rather than that the love is automatically there. giving love openly is a skill, but so is learning to identify and accept that love. both actively require that you practice doing them. many of us are out of that practice--on both fronts--or simply never learned how to begin with, i think.

It just occurred to me that “I love you it’s ruining my life” could be interpreted two different ways:

1) I love you (partner) and it’s ruining my life (the life that I’ve built for myself with other people and the public)

2) I love you (fans) and it’s ruining my life (private life and relationship)

I’ve been thinking about it as the first one this whole time and I still think that’s probably how she means it, but I’m also now enjoying thinking about the possibility that she’d use both interpretations in the song (we know she loves a switch up of lyric meanings throughout the song)

Like she misses interacting with her fans and the public and the outside world and it’s causing issues in her private relationship bubble

But then she realizes that that’s her life — that’s the life she always wanted and that she worked so hard to create for herself

So it becomes ‘but I still love you (YB) and it’s getting in the way of me living my life how I want to live it’