Taylor Swift: "New Year's Day"

The last song on "Reputation" is justly praised:

There's glitter on the floor after the party
Girls carrying their shoes down in the lobby
Candle wax and Polaroids on the hardwood floor
You and me from the night before, but

Don't read the last page
But I stay when you're lost, and I'm scared
And you're turning away
I want your midnights
But I'll be cleaning up bottles with you on New Year's Day

You squeeze my hand three times in the back of the taxi
I can tell that it's gonna be a long road
I'll be there if you're the toast of the town, babe
Or if you strike out and you're crawling home

Don't read the last page
But I stay when it's hard, or it's wrong
Or we're making mistakes
I want your midnights
But I'll be cleaning up bottles with you on New Year's Day

Hold on to the memories, they will hold on to you
Hold on to the memories, they will hold on to you
Hold on to the memories, they will hold on to you
And I will hold on to you

Please don't ever become a stranger
Whose laugh I could recognize anywhere
Please don't ever become a stranger
Whose laugh I could recognize anywhere

There's glitter on the floor after the party
Girls carrying their shoes down in the lobby
Candle wax and Polaroids on the hardwood floor
You and me forevermore

Don't read the last page
But I stay when it's hard, or it's wrong
Or we're making mistakes
I want your midnights
But I'll be cleaning up bottles with you on New Year's Day

Hold on to the memories, they will hold on to you
Hold on to the memories, they will hold on to you
Hold on to the memories, they will hold on to you
And I will hold on to you

Please don't ever become a stranger
Whose laugh I could recognize anywhere
Please don't ever become a stranger
Whose laugh I could recognize anywhere


Here are a few reasons why this works so well. In the first verse, Taylor is like a location scout. She is setting the scene with brief, memorable images. "Glitter on the floor," "girls carrying shoes in the lobby," "candle wax and Polaroids on hardwood floors." In a few words, the backdrop is painted; each image suggests disarray, wooziness. ("Discovery is looking at the same thing everyone else sees--and seeing something new." Instead of writing about the party, TS will write about the morning after--and there's your million-dollar idea. That's all you need.) At the end of the first verse of "Summertime," DuBose Heyward jumps from the natural world to an observation about his protagonist: "Fish are jumping; the cotton is high; hush, little baby, don't you cry." Something similar happens in TS's song: "Like the glitter on the floor, like the discarded shoes, you and I are a bit of a mess on the morning after."

"I want your midnights, but I'll be cleaning up bottles with you on New Year's Day." "Midnight" is meant not just to refer to a big party, but to any great success the lover might have. "Cleaning up bottles" stands in for a relationship's longueurs, for rough patches. This is so simple, and also effective. A more-pedestrian metaphor in the second verse: The "long road" via taxi is, of course, shorthand for the marriage TS is anticipating in her own future. (Do you know, after that exhaustive car-reference listing the other day, I still missed many references? "All the boys with their expensive cars, their Range Rovers, their Jag-yoo-ars, couldn't move me quite like you do." "Loving him is like driving a new Maserati down a dead-end street."Flew me to places I'd never been; now, I'm lying on the cold hard ground." "Midnight. You come and pick me up. No headlights." The list goes on.)

And then two final observations. "Hold on to the memories, they will hold on to you." This is a preoccupation of Taylor's--how people leave marks on you, whether you want this or not. ("Someday, when you leave me, I'll bet these memories follow you around." "Carve your name into my bedpost."
"There's an indentation in the shape of you; you made your mark on me." Also, note the subject/object inversion--a favorite TS trick. "Hold on to memories, they will hold on to you." "You don't know about me; I don't know about you." "Everybody's watching her, but she's looking at you.") The final repeated phrase ties in with TS's lifelong obsession with ambivalence: "Please don't ever become a stranger whose laugh I would recognize anywhere." It's a striking line, because of course someone whose laugh you recognize isn't really a stranger. But the English language allows for some weird bits of paradox. And we know precisely the kind of person TS is talking about. It's a fitting, concise gesture toward a career-spanning fixation of TS's: the idea of shades of grey, the complexity inherent in any meaningful relationship. ("I see you around in all these empty faces." "When we go crashing down, we come back every time; we never go out of style." "It takes everything in me not to call you.")

OK, I have to talk about some other smart twists on this album. "This is why we can't have nice things. Because you break them, I have to take them away." Addressing Kanye West as a small child with a shattered vase is an enjoyable twist (enjoyable for me, at least). A quick catalogue of several of TS's old dress references:

Standing in a nice dress, staring at the sunset

In a storm, in my best dress, fearless

Good girl thing and a tight little skirt

You're still all over me like a wine-stained dress I can't wear anymore

See the lights, see the ball gowns

I talked to your dad, go pick out a white dress

Dear John- The girl in the dress cried the whole way home

So it's memorable when, on "Reputation," TS says, "Only bought this dress so you can take it off." There's a kind of winking there. The shedding of the dress is also the shedding of the person who fixated on dresses, over and over, on previous albums. And then also: the way form underlines content on "Delicate." A smart idea: A song about a fragile "courtship." The tone, the volume, the onslaught of questions all underline the main preoccupation: In some cases, early dates can be like a feat of plate-spinning at the circus. Is Taylor Swift on par with Stephen Sondheim? No, she is not. But I like all the ideas. The compulsive observing, the compulsive writing. And you? Is this an aid in your listening?

P.S. The "glitter on the floor" reference. I can't help but think of Billy Eichner's GLITTER AND RIBS.

http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/taylor-swift-performs-reputation-song-years-day-fans/story?id=51038508