← all Middle 8 videos
9:06 · 1,431 words of transcript · watch on YouTube
- The method behind the album is the point: written in isolation, with Swift writing from the perspective of people she had never met as well as people she had known.
▶ 00:00:18
- She said outright that three songs form a teenage love triangle, each giving one participant's view of the same events, which is what makes the album readable as fiction.
▶ 00:00:36
- The chronological starting point is august rather than the first of the three, because it sets up the summer affair that the other two look back on.
▶ 00:01:07
- The unnamed narrator of that song is the only one of the three who never gets a name, so her song is her single chance to speak.
▶ 00:01:44
- betty is the 17-year-old boy returning to school afterwards, with the affair already common knowledge through a classmate who passed it on.
▶ 00:02:46
- His account supplies the missing cause: he walked out of a school dance after seeing her with someone else, and the other girl pulled up beside him on the way home.
▶ 00:03:25
- The story ends on a cliffhanger, with him turning up at her party to apologise and no indication of how she answers.
▶ 00:04:05
- Swift has said one of the images behind the album was a cardigan still carrying the scent of loss 20 years later, which is why the third song reads as the girl looking back from much later.
▶ 00:04:47
- Because the two songs speak from different points in time, the question of whether she took him back is genuinely unresolved by the three tracks alone.
▶ 00:05:47
- The larger reading is that the whole album, rearranged, follows the fictionalised life of Rebecca Harkness, the previous owner of Swift's Rhode Island house, which is a remarkable thing to build in quarantine out of the building you are stuck in.
▶ 00:07:06