Musings on “Mine”
a cold threw off my rhythm this week — let’s get cozy & chat about Taylor Swift
Taylor Swift kicked off her “Eras Tour” last Friday night, and I’ll be honest — I was enraptured by social media for those fateful few hours, eager to see what outfits she’d wear and which of my old favorites she’d pull out from the arsenal. …But she barely played anything from her seminal 2010 release Speak Now?? The nerve??
Speak Now meant the world to me when I was in middle school. So much so that I’ve been slowly working on a longform project inspired by the album, which has been collecting dust for a few months…Today, armed with righteous fury, I decided to dig up the old drafts, make some edits, and share an excerpt.
“I said that you write wannabe Taylor Swift songs. Not that you had literally stolen Taylor Swift’s songs.”
If I claimed I was being bullied in that moment, I would be lying. My pre-teen accuser was right, and he was also rightfully super annoyed: I brought my songwriting notebook to school every day that year, desperate to impress and be proofread, and I drove my seventh grade English class insane. I hadn’t yet learned the intricate politics of art-sharing, or the more obvious fact that songs registered better when sung than scrawled on paper. I also felt alone and sad and wanted to be heard. And…yeah. I did want to be Taylor Swift. Sue me.
Speak Now had come out in fall of that year: Taylor’s first exclusively self-written LP. I had been a fan prior to that point, as most Pennsylvanian tween girls were, but this was the first “era” that I actively partook in. I begged my dad to drive me to Target for the red version of the CD with exclusive bonus tracks. Devoured the codes and pictures in the booklet. Insisted that my friends give all my favorite tracks a listen.
My dad took songwriting seriously and aspired, passionately, to wear that hat himself. Growing up, I watched him try many times to teach himself guitar, buying endless thesauruses and chord dictionaries along the way. He idolized Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen, and would gush for days on end about his favorite turns of phrase. These men seemed self-assured and untouchable, rare apocryphal saints in our insular religious household.
I’m tempted, for narrative’s sake, to say that I never quite identified with that masculine pantheon, but the fact is that it didn’t phase me. I was a tomboy who loved to make up songs in my room, and the mantle of Dylan never quite felt out of reach (as naive and arrogant as that sounds now). It was, however, horribly uncool to like the same things your parents subjected you to, day in and day out. So I picked out my own saints, carved parasocial icons in my own image.
Taylor gave my father and I ground to connect on; I still remember popping that Speak Now: Target Exclusive CD in on the drive back from the store, revealing the first playful notes of “Mine”. It was a huge radio hit at the time; we were both more than ready to sing along. But my favorite thing about playing music for my dad was the conversation. I liked to hear his thoughts. “Careless man’s careful daughter. That’s a great line,” he’d say. And I’d glow with pride to think that the music I enjoyed was smart and worthy of a grown-up’s listen.
“Mine” was one of the first earnest love songs I remember ever connecting to. Taylor made it clear that the song was fiction, a fantasy about what a relationship could be — this freed it from the icky strings of reality that entangled so many other love songs; her own and others. An angsty, single 12-year-old whose friends had all started to kiss and date, I didn’t save much time for happy tales of romance. But I took strange solace in the fact that Taylor wrote from a place of yearning, speculating about what love could be like, grounded only in contrast to the failed relationships she had experienced herself and observed in her family.
Of course, this itself was speculative on my part. It’s naive to call every relationship that ends a failed one, and I’d later learn a ton from friends and partners who went on to leave my life by choice. And while Taylor’s parents divorced the year after Speak Now hit shelves, I had no way of knowing whether her pain mirrored mine at that time, as the fault lines in my own family started to violently shift. But “Mine” gave me space to huddle up and hide when the real world was too cold for comfort. The song’s subtle sarcasm made it bitter enough to feel true.
I was a flight risk, with a fear of falling / Wondering why we bother with love if it never lasts
While I now condemn my nosy pre-teen speculation, the song is undeniably self-depreciating, and makes constant reference to a history of pain, particularly in the narrator’s family history. Taylor is no stranger to a fictionalized narrative (see all of Folklore as well as Speak Now’s own title track), but this one has layers. Each utterance of “I can see it” frames the core story, begging it to be real. And whether that lovelorn narrator is Taylor, navigating the complicated prelude to a family divorce, or yet another character in the mastermind’s matryoshka doll, the song’s pivot from hopelessness to triumph was just what I needed back then. Like many girls my age, I felt like I had a real friend and confidante in Ms. Swift. Or perhaps I felt honored that she had chosen to confide all this in me, that I had cracked another in a sea of her infamous secret codes.
The years leading up to a divorce are an extremely challenging time for the children in a household. For me, nearly aged out of my parent’s house by the time those fateful papers were served, they’re when the bulk of my suffering happened. The summer before I started high school, after a fateful falling out, I actively begged my mom and dad to split. I was tired of constantly over-hearing fights, and of standing at their epicenter, blaming myself. I was tired of playing confidante to two grown, self-governing adults, when I could barely manage my own depression and anxiety, or the loneliness I felt each day at school.
I became an adept escapist — burying my nose in books and anime streams alone in my room, drumming up new ideas of love and sex that I could call my own. By detaching these ideas entirely from reality, I developed versions that felt safe. Safe from harm, sure, but also safe from scrutiny. No one in these stories would reject me for my jokes or my bad haircut. All mistakes could be instantly forgiven.
When my first boyfriend asked me out, I said yes. Shortly after this, I actively avoided him for months, making myself impossible to know. I was terrified of making mistakes, or of letting him look at me for too long. I had no one to ask for advice on how to love or be lovely. I sabotaged the entire operation, and when he broke up with me on Facebook messenger, I cried for a week straight.
I had played games deliberately with the first person who’d ever wanted to date me. I was livid with myself, fearing that I’d never get that opportunity again. What I really had wanted throughout those months was reassurance that I was worth the effort — the effort it would take to understand me, and the effort it would take to unlearn the harmful patterns I called home. Suffice it to say, this isn’t a functional or mature strategy for approaching relationships. But it’s something many of us turn to when we’ve been hurt.
You learn my secrets, and you figure out why I’m guarded / You say we’ll never make my parent’s mistakes.
What makes “Mine” so special, and so powerful after all these years, is its relentless willingness to portray an ideal. With each line of the song, Taylor expands her vision to include everything she (or her character) needs to hear, with no space for shame or apology. There might be self-loathing in her voice as she dubs herself a “flight risk” or even a “careful daughter”, but we learn early on that these selves have been transformed. Healed. Made new. They live in the past tense. In the present, she is a rebel. “She is the best thing that’s ever been mine.”
In the early days of her career, Taylor caught a lot of flack for writing about relationships, and particularly for casting them in fairytale lighting. As if the beauty of song throughout time has not so often been escapism, construction of utopia through ever bolder sonic choice and lyricism. But even earlier tracks like “Love Story” are not without their angst and conflict, situating perfection not as something everyday, familiar, but rather distant and fantastical. Yearned for from afar. This format is perfected in “Mine” — a power pop miracle seasoned with cold, hard truth.
Miracles like this are what drew me to music in the first place, and to wanting to write my own. I didn’t really want to be Taylor. And God knows I didn’t want to be my dad… But I was yearning for closeness to him, and what he represented. And I was yearning to escape. To conjure a world where we could get along and share our comforts. I wanted to build a perfect moment and furnish it with images, climb inside to try and make a permanent home. Seated in the car, perhaps, popping in a new CD: “Careless man’s careful daughter. That’s a great line.”
Thanks for reading, and for letting me do something different this week. My world has been all death metal1 and doctor’s appointments lately — This was a nice detour.
Next week, I won’t be publishing anything because I’ll be on a work trip. Fun stuff coming after that!
Until then: Give yourself permission to want big things.
Clare
I saw Death to All in Philly last night and it was just about the best thing I’ve ever experienced. A glistening celebration of joy and rage and love and grief. Just fucking awesome and fun. Please catch them on this tour if you get the chance, I’m still buzzing from the show.