Day 32: What's in a Name?

Pretty early on into this project I caught on to a strange trend in Taylor Swift's music. Her early works often give the featured characters, usually love interests, names, while her more recent songs hardly ever do so. Here's a list of the songs that do this, including which album they belong to.

Teardrops on my Guitar - Taylor Swift

Stay Beautiful - Taylor Swift

Fifteen - Fearless

Hey Stephen - Fearless

Dear John - Speak Now

I Almost Do* - Red

Wildest Dreams* - 1989

It's worth noting that scholars disagree on the interpretation of I Almost Do and Wildest Dreams, some (myself included) reading certain lines as including names while others disagree and read them differently. I'm not going to force my beliefs on you, beloved audience, but I would recommend at least familiarizing yourself with both sides of the argument. Regardless it's clear that at the very least these songs have less explicit names for the characters.

It's also worth noting that Abigail is the only named character who isn't a current or former love interest. I think this is mostly a consequence of Taylor's usual topics. After all, most of her songs are about men she's loved. While there are many notable exceptions, it makes sense that most of the names characters will be love interests since most of the characters in all her songs, named or not, fall under this category.

It's not difficult to argue the truth of this trend, what is much harder is trying to uncover why it exists in the first place. One argument is the genre shift from country to pop, but I find this less than convincing. If feels true that country songs will name their characters more often, but I have yet to see any data produced by my contemporaries to support this.

An argument that I find slightly more convincing is that of timing. Again I have seen no data to support this, but less current songs in the mainstream have named characters than those in the past. I know that 2006 wasn't that long ago, but consider that earlier in Taylor's career she borrowed musical elements from many more artists than she did in her later albums. Of the older troupes she made use of, using specific names is pretty minor, but noticeable enough that as her style evolved these uses slowly faded away.

I didn't cover the specifics of how she uses the names so that i could keep this post on the shorter side, but some of them are pretty interesting, Let me know going into that seems interesting and I may dive further into it in a future post.

See you tomorrow,
-C