#without her needing to restrain from telling stories that real life ppl are inevitably a part of

[iwanderthroughthesenights]

Something that stood out to me a lot from this album is the intentional de-personalization of extremely personal feelings and stories. She seems to have decided for this project that in order to be free to be completely honest in her art (which tbf she always has been but never as much as this album), she needs to visualize herself, and thus her stories, as a third party, an external entity on which she's conducting a post-mortem examination. Her 2016 self and the hate train she suffered after Snakegate is reimagined as Cassandra, a character from Greek mythology who had visions in her dreams but no one believed her and instead she was punished. Her anxiety of holding her lover's career back is instead described as The Albatross, this girl who everyone has been warned to stay away from bc she causes problems and is a liability. Her sweet, innocent childhood self is depicted as a robin, a feisty little bird full of life, dreams, and potential who has yet no clue of the cruelty of the world.

Consequently, the characters in her life are, too, bestowed upon fictional characters from stories that have been told before and/or are familiar in some way to the listener (aIMee the girl from this allegorical high school which is actually Kim Kardashian, Peter the boy who never grew up and stayed forever in Neverland who actually is her long-term ex partner, both her and her lover's separate romantic involvements imagined as Chloe or Sam or Sophia or Marcus, her real life therapist referred to as The Professor etc). By using the representation of well-known characters from widely popular stories and myths with names and all, she creates an even deeper line of emotional connection with the listener. Then, the 4th wall is delightfully broken in Clara Bow, where she refers to Clara Bow and Stevie Nicks as the inherent precedents to Taylor Swift. But what's even more brilliant about this is that in this way, she is making Taylor Swift into a character in and of itself. She is actually attempting to externalize Taylor Swift from Taylor the real-life woman. By narrating her stories through tangible entities presented as completely external to herself, she is inhibited by the safety of this fictional/allegorical lense through which she's allowing her stories to be consumed, and as a result, she has unlimited freedom to be more personal than she has ever been in her art before.