Sad songs say so much, as the man said. And in the case of a brand new Taylor Swift song, “You’re Losing Me,” some of her fans believe the lyrics say plenty about her relationship status over the last year or so.
If her material is nothing if not almost always immediately quotable, “You’re Losing Me” has some lulus, starting with: “I wouldn’t marry me either / A pathological people pleaser / Who only wanted you to see her.” The overall tone, though, is less sad than weary, bordering on fatalistic: “Do I throw out everything we built or keep it? / I’m getting tired even for a phoenix / Always rising from the ashes / Mending all her gashes / You might just have dealt the final blow.”
The new track is not widely available, officially, as it was released exclusively on a CD edition that currently is only available to fans patronizing her merchandise stands at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, NJ, this weekend. Fans were so eager to get their hands on the disc, because she had advertised it as the only way to get the new song, that lines began forming in earnest at the stadium on Thursday, well in advance of the merch stands opening up for the day at 12:30 p.m. Friday. Inevitably, some of the first attendees to get their hands on it went back to their cars and uploaded the ravenously anticipated new track for the rest of the world to hear… and to scour for perceived personal details.
The song is not a letdown in that regard. It’s being billed as a “Vault Track,” written during the same writing sessions that produced the smash “Midnights” album. It would hardly have fit, stylistically or thematically, on that record, as the album tended toward upbeat, sensual fare, while this is the first song Swift has put out in years that appears to describe a present-day relationship in unhappy terms and is likely to be perceived as personal, not fictional. Naturally, first reactions were that it might describe cracks in a years-long relationship with actor Joe Alwyn, which seemed to be characterized in much happier terms on the rest of “Midnights” as well as four albums preceding it.
The mention of marriage, or the lack of it, will be particularly provocative to fans. Swift had sounded almost dismissive of matrimony in a recent song, “Lavender Haze,” the leadoff song of “Midnights,” which included the verse, “All they keep askin’ me is if I’m gonna be your bride / The only kind of girl they see s a one-night or a wife,” while eschewing the idea of “the 1950s shit they want from me.”
The overall lyric of the song is a play on the “we’re losing him/her” often heard in emergency room situations in medical shows. A kind of deathliness is at play throughout the number, as Swift sings, “I sent you signals and bit my nails down to the quick / My face was gray, but you wouldn’t admit that we were sick.”
The downbeat tone of the song is in contrast to two other new songs that Swift released late Thursday night, both of them more widely available as part of a digital deluxe version of “Midnights” subtitled the “Til Dawn Edition.” Neither was an all-new song, but both were enthusiastically embraced — a remix of “Karma” with rapper Ice Spice and a fresh version of “Snow on the Beach” with new, extensive lead vocals from co-writer and featured artist Lana Del Rey.
Chris Willman
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