Day 87: Princess Charming

Taylor Swift's self-titled debut album from 2006 may not be her best work, but despite all it's weaknesses it has one quality in abundance: charm. My personal favorite track from this album has to be Our Song; it just has so much character. Taylor Swift's (the album) biggest problem is the relative homogeneity of the songs, but Our Song is unique enough to make a name for itself, and actually makes pretty good use of metaphor.

"Our song is a slamming screen door, 
Sneaking out late tapping on your window,
When we're on the phone and you talk real slow,
'Cause it's late and your mama don't know"

This song is well constructed on many levels. The idea is that Taylor realized she and her fella didn't have "a song", but he reassures her that they do and lists the above lines as reasons. His reasons are the various youthful, rebellious things about their relationship with a running theme of secretive meetups. A relationship's "song" is meant to symbolize the connection two people have, so these lines suggest that their relationship doesn't need an external song because there are so many things they like about each other. That's all fine, but what I like more is an often overlooked clever aspect at the very end.

"I was riding shotgun with my hair undone in the front seat of his car,
I grabbed a pen and an old napkin 
And I wrote down our song."

But here's the thing guys: this song is Our Song. Do you see what she did? It's pretty clever! It takes an already established conception of what the phrase "our song" means and turns it on it's head at the very last minute. Taylor's writing rarely gets that clever, but when it does it really leaves an impression.

I can't help but like this song, it's so upbeat and fun! Sure, it's a little repetitive and doesn't actually give that strong a sense of what their relationship is like, but it does a perfectly acceptable job. I'm not going to dive in too deep because there really isn't that much to dive into, so I guess I'll just end it here! There are only 13 more posts and I will be going into more depth as to what they will be about tomorrow! Stay tuned!

See you tomorrow,
-C