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There’s no ignoring the Travis Kelce of it all, either: The newly engaged Swift is happy, happy, happy, not to mention, well, undeniably a bit horny and making sure listeners know that those needs are met too. The track “Wood” is enough to make your mother-in-law clutch her pearls (“His love was the key / To open my thighs,” not to mention her aural smirk on the word “cocky,” or referencing “new heights of manhood” in a nod to Kelce’s…microphone), and “Actually Romantic” turns rivals’ trash-talking into dirty talk, complete with Swift claiming that her haters’ attention is “kind of making me wet.” Gone is Midnights’ “Lavender Haze” and its nonchalant “damned if I do give a damn what people say.” And in the same song, she insisted that she was in no rush to get wifed up: “All they keep askin’ me / Is if I’m gonna be your bride / The only kind of girl they see / Is a one-night or a wife.” Now, on “Wood,” “Girls, I don’t need to catch the bouquet / To know a hard rock is on the way.” Not enough? Fine, let’s be more explicit, as she is in “Eldest Daughter”: “When I said I don’t believe in marriage / That was a lie.” With Kelce, who proposed not long after Swift gushed on New Heights that she’d found the fairytale love that she’d been singing about for decades, she’s writing a new, forward-looking history.
She self-corrects the long-ago “White Horse” lyric from 2008’s Fearless, “Cause I’m not your princess / This ain’t a fairytale” in “Eldest Daughter,” where she echoes that original melody and declares, “But I’m not a bad bitch / And this isn’t savage” after admitting, in what is perhaps a nod to her initial brush-off of Kelce, “When you found me I said I was busy / That was a lie.” Answering her teenage self who yearned on her debut album for somebody who “might actually treat me well” in the next line of “White Horse,” Swift has come full circle from the hardened superstar she tried to present and admits her vulnerabilities, her need for love, that basketball hoop and the kids that she confesses to dreaming of in “Wi$h Li$t.”
And look at “Honey,” where she recontextualizes pet names she’s been called, the sweetness of love stripping away passive-aggressive “bless her soul”-type venom: “You can call me honey if you want / Because I’m the one you want / I’m the one you want / You give it different meaning / Cause you mean it when you talk.”
And there it is in “Opalite,” too. Opal is the October-born Kelce’s birthstone, and opalite is the man-made version of it. “Sleepless in the onyx night / But now the sky is opalite,” Swift sings, perhaps nodding to the theme of paralyzing, sleepless anxiety and darkest-hour regret on Midnights, one of her moodier offerings. “You had to make your own sunshine, but now the sky is opalite,” the song continues. No more “Invisible String,” folklore‘s ode to a long-destined romance: Swift and Kelce finding one another took work and intention (great job, Andy Reid), and now they’re here to reap the rewards of that—together.
History is written, after all, by the victors. And what is Swift, with all her historic sales and records, if not an all-time champion?
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Kase Wickman
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