Welcome to the final post! We’ve come a long way together. But before we can get to the fun stuff, I have some outstanding business. I’ve been caught red-handed trying to skip the Holiday EP. Here are my thoughts.

**The Taylor Swift Holiday Collection**

IT’S A COUNTRY CHRISTMAS ALBUM??? Oh no, and she’s adding verses to Last Christmas. This is truly bizarre. If I knew about this from the beginning I would have expected that her label was full of assholes. They totally convinced her to put out a holiday album to pump up her sales numbers, I’m certain of it. If it was her idea, let’s pretend it wasn’t. Christmases When You Were Mine is certainly no Christmas Tree Farm. I can’t believe she wrote a Christmas break up song. I personally abhor Santa Baby and can’t believe I’ve been coerced into listening to it. I’m disappointed that someone spilled a tractor and a dirt road into my Silent Night. Oh, finally! Someone has asked the life-defining question, “what would happen if God never let it snow?” Playing violin in a rendition of White Christmas is like playing the slide whistle in Fire and Rain by James Taylor. I should’ve listened to everyone who told me to skip it.

#**RANKINGS**

Y’all were vocal about wanting to know these rankings so I spent a whopping SEVEN HOURS on refining my opinions here. I hope you see some placements that delight and shock you.

**Albums**

5) reputation

The first time I listened to this album, I thought it was signaling my death. If this is what Taylor Swift was turning into, I wanted to ghost everybody and fail my bet. Then, a very helpful Parsnip suggested I watch the tour video instead of relistening to the album. Once I saw it on stage, I understood what I was missing. The album is great, but the performances are gold. If this was a ranking of live performed music, this would be at the top.

4) Lover

Yeah, I know! But I really like it, because it has the attitude of rep with a sound that clicks a little better for me personally.

3) Evermore &
2) Folklore

I almost considered these two albums as one piece, but I wanted to make this a top 5 list and I didn’t mind formally writing that I do like Folklore better than Evermore. Great albums, super relaxing and meditative for me and they took me to some emotional places that I’m still wandering through as I type this.

1) 1989 TV

Put the album on in my car. No, really, do it. It sounds great, it makes me want to drive through the city, park on the street and eat a $27 bowl of ramen. You won’t see many songs from this album down below, but what you don’t see is that of the tracks I ranked 16-20, four of them were from this album.

**Songs**

I stayed up until 2am, skipping through her discography and finding the songs I liked the best at the end of this whole adventure. I watched the clock roll back to 1am as I listened to each track again and again, ordering my list until the clock read 2am a second time.

Honorable mentions to I Heart ? and Mean, the two songs I liked the most from her first three albums. Those albums aren’t for me, they have never been for me, and I won’t be likely to listen to them again on purpose. But if they come on, I’ll feel a way about my memories of this adventure.

How did I pick these? Simple, which ones do I want to sing when I’m alone, driving at 2am on the way out of the middle of nowhere? Which songs do I want to save to my library, so I can revisit them again someday when I want to remember that strange first week of November in 2023? When someone laughs when they hear I reviewed every one of her songs in a week, which ones do I want to play them to prove it was all worth it? Here are my answers.

15) Evermore

14) Begin Again (TV)

13) Birch (Big Red Machine)

12) Lover

11) New Year’s Day

10) betty

9) the 1

8) willow

7) Paper Rings

6) Run (TV) [ft Ed Sheeran]

#5) Everything Has Changed (TV) [ft Ed Sheeran]

Don’t tell me I might like Ed Sheeran. I’m not going to find out. This is good enough. I’ve decided it’s good enough!

#4) ivy

This is the best song on evermore. Fight me. When she hits the chorus and that harmony comes out of the ground, I feel my brain pour out my ears.

#3) Style (TV)

1989 as an album has my favorite sound. Even over the folk albums, this is the sound I want to hear the most. And it’s a car song. And it’s got the ever-beltable chorus.

#2) The Last Time (original) [ft Gary Lightbody]

It hurts to put this song second. I wanted to put their names at the top of my list, really I did. It was in first until my very last listen of my Final 15 playlist. I love the mood, the message, and most of all the harmony. But it was in the front portion of her career, and she had an even greater track inside her, that took me, even if I didn’t know it at the time, from Football Fan —> Swiftie Man.

#1) invisible string

This track is flawless. It has the bright sound, the sad voice, the storytelling, the pace, the wordplay, she growth (she sends those babies presents!), the optimism. And it’s so, so fun to sing.

**Lyrics**

C’mon. It’s impossible for me to rank these right now. I can’t even bundle my favorites very effectively, I’d miss a bunch! I’m not the kind of person that would have flagged three or four phrases out of thousands and carried them all the way here in my memory. I can’t answer which one was the most gut wrenching, freeing, thought provoking, clever or impactful. If you want to see which lines popped for me while I listened, they’re right there in the track reviews.

#**Surprise Song: The Car Lore Essay**

Throughout this project, I was seeing road signs for interesting essay ideas fly by as I drove through this discography. I knew I couldn’t take those exits because we had a lot of miles to cover, but there was one theme that kept encouraging me to pull over and rest awhile. This still isn’t a lot of time to spend with a topic, but since we finished a day early I wanted to give this theme a test drive. Let’s talk about car lore.

Singing about trucks isn’t exactly unique to Taylor’s country music. It’s one of the holy trinity of annoying country music topics – truck/tractor, whiskey, blue jeans. And it’s no wonder why, either. The greatest American metaphor for freedom and self-actualization is the car. Add a bed on the back for hauling lumber and a tow hitch for hanging truck nuts, and you’ve got an equally powerful symbol of masculinity. The truck is inseparable from rural American culture. Chevy vs Ford is the rural equivalent of which colors you’re wearing in a 90s rap album. When Taylor burst onto the scene with her first three albums, you’d be hard-pressed to find someone who thought, “wow, this girl sure talks about trucks a lot.” It came part and parcel with the genre.

What started as a joke for me, complaining about the country music trope, slowly became a curiosity. I’ve not listened to enough female country singers to know for sure, but I thought it was notable how often Taylor sang about being in the passenger’s seat of someone else’s car. I dismissed it initially. She’s a young girl, of course boys with cars are an exciting topic to sing about. She probably doesn’t have a license yet. But as I learned that this wasn’t just some girl writing these songs, I started to question her purpose in the choice of recurring image. Before I get started, I owe an enormous thanks to the tumblr blog TaylorSwiftAndX for saving me uncountable hours searching for lyrics.

My hypothesis here is fairly simple, but due to the multi-layered and branching nature of her thematic play through the years, it’s going to require a few sentences to get the idea across.

First, the car is a foil for her house (for those who aren’t literature nerds, a foil is a character who contrasts with another character, typically to expose some qualities about each other). Taylor stays home when she’s lonely, sad, and single. That’s what the house is for – well, that and watching Law and Order with her cats. Conversely, she’s in the car when she’s up to something. Sometimes it’s to be with boys, sometimes it’s to get away from boys, sometimes it’s just to be happy. On special occasions, it’s to escape from the police. But for Taylor, being in a car is often the same thing as being in a relationship.

Second, she places a lot of meaning on being in the passenger’s seat of a car. Being a passenger means submitting yourself to the control of another, being vulnerable to their decisions, and it often is used to show which direction the love is flowing in the relationship. What about when she’s in the driver’s seat? Well, that’s a whole big thing and we’ll get there.

Finally, there’s a strong distinction between beat up cars and fancy cars. Taylor ties authenticity with beat up trucks, and being fake with fancy cars. The best place in the world for Debut Taylor is in the passenger’s seat of a truck with the right boy next to her. The worst place for Red Taylor is in the back of a big black car with Riviera views, and when she’s done with you she says to call a cab and lose her number because she doesn’t want to be in your car anymore.

Don’t take my word for it, let’s take Taylor’s. The best way forward will be to break this down by album. And please note, when I refer to relationships going forward I’m painting fictional and real relationships with the same brush.

In Debut, the album starts with not one, but two songs that lead with trucks. Tim McGraw features a boy with a Chevy truck that has a tendency of getting stuck. This truck is the inaugural truck, a relationship that she’s out of and which likely had some challenges because it kept getting stuck. But she still hopes the guy thinks of her when he’s using the car radio. In Picture To Burn, Taylor sings a breakup song about hating the boy’s stupid old pickup truck, and calling out that she was never allowed to drive. This is such a teenage thing, not letting someone drive your car, but also it’s a control thing. Knowing what she does in the LWYMMD music video, he might have been on to something. When describing her exciting relationship, Taylor describes her happy place, riding shotgun with her hair undone in the front seat of his car. Not to cherry pick, we also see her driving home alone in Teardrops On My Guitar, so she’s played with the image of herself behind the wheel even this early.

Fearless Taylor finds herself laughing on the car ride home with her mom, a great example of a loving relationship and how some real life car rides mattered so much to her growing up. She also gets into a car with a boy in The Way I Loved You, but in this album she’s mostly focused with the aspect of being in motion. Fearless is saturated with talk about the way she wants the boy to drive. We see Taylor behind the wheel as she drives away both in Breathe and in Bye Bye Baby.

Taylor is surprisingly mum about cars in Speak Now, but they aren’t entirely absent. We return to the world of vehicles with a bang in Red. Red Taylor is Fearless Taylor with a macchiato and a manicure – cleaner, caffeinated, and a little more sophisticated. In the eponymous track, Taylor describes loving Scarf Guy like driving a Maserati (God’s most perfect creation) down a dead end street. That’s a very fast car to be driving such a short runway, symbolizing both the short length and abrupt end of her relationship. This car is also quite expensive – as we will see, this is a note from Taylor that Scarf Guy isn’t trustworthy. Treacherous explains to us that nothing safe is worth the drive, a nice metaphor for how relationships have inherent risk. Taylor also puts a car in front focus for Run, a song where she describes escaping from the world’s problems with someone special. This time, she brings the car around to show she’s in charge of the decision to get away. Finally, in All Too Well, we have a powerful image of Taylor being tossed a set of car keys, and dropping them. This event is still mysterious to me and I don’t have time to really dig into it, but it sticks out in a major way. Another one within this song is how he almost ran the red because he was looking at her, a strong and eyebrow raising reversal of the typical love-flow direction typically dictated by her driver and passenger placements, especially considering the real life context. Is the driver being disingenuous, ignoring the rules, and putting her in danger?

We find ourselves now in 1989, with Taylor describing a long drive that could end in burning flames or Paradise – a succinct way to describe the two extreme conclusions for a relationship. In Wildest Dreams, we have a heartbreaking realization that despite this relationship being doomed, this driver wants to take her away from the city and return to that rural environment of her first albums. Similarly, in I Wish You Would, she finds herself passing her street and replaying her memories while she rides in his car with the windows down, and in the next stanza she’s out of the car, reminded of him when headlights pass her window. In this song about longing, she wants to be back in that car. Before we exit this album, I want to bring to mind that beautiful Shelby Cobra in the Blank Space music video, getting the shit beat out of it in a song about how she’s willing to date a bad boy – so of course, when she ends the relationship with this kind of man, it’s perfectly represented by obliterating an expensive car.

We’ve arrived. Are you ready for it? I referenced before that she crashes a car in LWYMMD’s music video, which is an incredible visual metaphor for her character in this album not caring when she wrecks a relationship. In Kind Of My Heart, she once again paints the unworthy boys in expensive cars like Range Rovers and Jaguars. But the Pinnacle of car lore rests in a song I initially brushed off: Getaway Car. In the rep movie, this song starts with a powerful speech, leveraging evocative language to describe a gauntlet of abuse and its effects on her. The moving poem reaches its conclusion as the camera lands on her, in the driver’s seat of world’s sexiest Jaguar E-Type, on a big pink X. The song itself starts with a man driving the car, one described as where nothing good can start. This car-relationship isn’t going to get far, and there are sirens giving chase. Taylor’s drunk, and telling the driver to just GO. In the bridge, Taylor tells us that she switches to the other side, into the driver’s seat. Now the chorus is about HER driving the getaway car, leaving the guy behind and leaving this pile-up of relationship drama in the dust. From this point in her discography, we see her taking charge more often. On the next album, Lover, she shows this change. In I Think He knows, she explicitly states “I’ll Drive,” and in Paper Rings she wants to drive away with him, not bothering to be specific about who’s behind the wheel.

Jumping ahead to Midnights, Taylor sings a lyric with multi-faceted significance in the song Vigilante Shit. She leads us to thinking about her dispute with Voldemort and his divorce, stating that she’s thick as thieves with his ex-wife and that she looks so pretty driving in his Benz. As if it wasn’t clear in context, she drives home his untrustworthiness by talking about his expensive car.

This brings my enormous essay about car lore to a close. It’s fascinating to watch her relationship with cars in her songwriting evolve over the albums, and I hope she finds the right wheels for her someday. Maybe a nice, dependable ’87 Chevy like you might find on country roads in Kansas? But I’m not one to speculate.

#**FINAL THOUGHTS**

I don’t know what will happen to me after this. Will I put music on absentmindedly, and find myself listening? It doesn’t sound like me. The only way for me to know for sure, is to find out. I don’t know when that’ll be or where it’ll go, but I had the very best time here with you and with Taylor Swift.