AP Taylor Swift

"Now the sun burns my heart and the sand hurts my feelings" This is a re-air of one of our favorite episodes. We’re  looking at the literary symbolism of summer — freedom, danger, nostalgia, and everything in between. Jenn breaks down "Cruel Summer" (Lover, 2019), Jodi covers "August" (folklore, 2020), and Maansi digs into "hits different" (Midnights, 2023). Along the way we bring in The Great Gat...

"I like shiny things, but I'd marry you with paper rings." To celebrate Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce's wedding, we each picked a song from Taylor's discography that captures a different perspective on marriage:  the fairy tale proposal of "Love Story" (Fearless, 2008), the anti-materialist love declaration in "Paper Rings" (Lover, 2019), and the suburban married-life contentment of "Wi$h Li$t" (T...

“Life was a willow and it bent right to your wind”  This week, we finally try to find the actual meaning behind Taylor Swift's "willow" (evermore, 2020), starting with the witchy mythology behind the title (hello, Hecate, Greek goddess of magic and the underworld) and tracing a real power dynamic underneath it.  Two ways to get more of AP Taylor Swift: Substack: free subscribers get episode update...

“In silent screams and wildest dreams, I never dreamed of this. This love is good. This love is bad. This love is alive back from the dead.” This week we’re setting sail on one of history’s greatest epics, Homer’s The Odyssey, and asking a very important question... did Taylor Swift write it? (We’re mostly joking. Mostly.) In this Show & Tell episode, we each make the case for a Taylor Swift s...

"A mess of a dreamer with the nerve to adore you." This week we're deep diving "Cold As You" from Taylor Swift's self-titled debut album (2006) — and it's a heavy one. What reads on the surface as a teen heartbreak song turns out to be a meditation on indifference, power imbalance, and the particular kind of scar that forms not from cruelty, but from being simply not cared about.  Subscribe for fr...

"How's your heart after breaking mine?" This is a preview of our paid After School episode,  a continuation of our "Fearless" album deep dive.  We go through every Platinum Edition bonus track and Fearless (Taylor's Version) vault track and ask the only question that matters: why didn't these make the original 13? We argue "Mr. Perfectly Fine" was too pointed for a 19-year-old still being marketed...

"You drew stars around my scars, but now I'm bleeding." This week, we're doing a Show & Tell episode on one of Taylor's most recurring literary devices: scars. From the ice-cold wounds of “Cold As You” from her debut album to the wistful “cardigan” of folklore and the Kingpin-Taylor energy of “CANCELLED!” from The Life of a Showgirl, we trace how Taylor's use of scars has evolved from pure pai...

"It’s me, hi, I’m the problem, it’s me.” This week, we (finally) go line-by-line through what might be Taylor Swift's most psychologically dense song: “Anti-Hero” from Midnights (2022). From the Hamlet-coded antihero definition, to the “Beauty and the Beast” reference lurking in "tale as old as time," to ghosts and Freud, this song keeps delivering new angles. We each came to the song with our own...

“Seems the only one who doesn’t see your beauty is the face in the mirror looking back at you.”This week, we’re doing a Show and Tell on one of literature’s most enduring symbols: the mirror. From Narcissus to Dorian Gray, Snow White’s magic mirror to Alice Through the Looking Glass, mirrors have long served as devices of identity, vanity, the supernatural, and the soul, and Taylor Swift is no str...

“I was ridin’ shotgun with my hair undone,” and the rest is history. This week, we do a full line-by-line deep dive into a classic, “Our Song” (Taylor Swift, 2006). Join us as we discuss the self-referential recursion (she wrote a song about their song, and that song is their song) and the sounds and silences Taylor chose to define a teenage romance. This is Taylor before anyone believed in her, h...

“It's the first kiss, it's flawless, really something, it's fearless.” Over on our paid feed on Substack, we’'re in our Fearless era (literally), diving deep into Taylor's second album track by track for our After School paid subscribers. We go through all 13 original tracks,  from the sparkly country-pop opening of "Fearless" to the quietly defiant closer "Change,” examining what each song adds t...

“I’ll be your father figure.” This week, we’re diving deep into one of Taylor Swift’s most underrated literary tools: alliteration. From the phonetic cadence of a teenage Taylor on Debut to the silky-smooth flow of reputation’s Call It What You Want, to the hard-hitting, power-packed punch of Father Figure from The Life of a Showgirl, we trace how Taylor uses the repetition of consonant sounds to...

"What could you possibly get for the girl who has everything and nothing all at once?" What happens when you reach a level of fame so singular that there's almost no one left who can truly understand your life? That's the question at the heart of "Elizabeth Taylor" (The Life of a Showgirl, 2025), and it's why Taylor Swift had to go all the way back to Hollywood's golden age to find her patron sain...

“Best believe I’m still bejeweled” and diving into an incredibly rich discussion this week! In this week's show and tell episode, we’re examining the age-old literary theme of luxury in Taylor Swift's music, through the songs “I Bet You Think About Me” (Red Taylor’s Version, 2021), “Bejeweled” (Midnights, 2022), and “Elizabeth Taylor” (Life of a Showgirl, 2025). Join us as we dive into how the mea...

This week, we are continuing our full album deep dive series for our paid subscribers, and finishing up our analysis of Taylor Swift's self-titled debut (2006). In this preview, we dig into the second half of this album where we start to really get a sense of who Taylor Swift was and the budding talent of the Taylor Swift we know today!  Subscribe for free to get episode updates or upgrade to paid...

"You had to make your own sunshine, but now the sky is opalite." This week we’re deep diving the second single from “The Life of a Showgirl,”  Opalite! We’ll explore why Taylor chose “opalite” over “opal,” what it means to create your own luck instead of waiting for it, and the song’s shift from being stuck in a cycle to finding resilience. Along the way, we debate who’s really speaking—is Mama Sw...

"Take me to the lakes where all the poets went to die." What's an AP class without a not-so-brief discussion about touching grass? In honor of Earth Day, we're exploring Transcendentalism — the 19th-century movement that said the divine lives in nature, not in dusty pews — and finding it everywhere in Taylor Swift's music. Jenn returns to "the lakes" (folklore, 2020) and pairs it with Ralph Waldo...

"Take a deep breath and you walk through the doors. It's the morning of your very first day." This week, we're going line by line through "Fifteen.” From the significance of 15 as an age that rarely gets its pop culture moment, to Abigail and the quiet power of female friendship, to the devastating simplicity of "and we both cried," we unpack why this deceptively simple song keeps hitting harder w...

“Time won’t fly, it’s like I’m paralyzed by it.” What happens when you try to pin down something as slippery as time itself? This week’s episode gets philosophical as we explore how Taylor Swift uses time as a literary device—as narrative structure, as metaphor, as a way to measure how much we’ve changed. From flashbacks and tense shifts to nostalgia and the ache of looking back, we unpack how tim...

“I cry a lot but I am so productive, it’s an art.” This week, we’re doing a deep dive on “I Can Do It with a Broken Heart” (The Tortured Poets Department, 2024, Track 13), written by Taylor Swift and Jack Antonoff. A continuation of our Strong Women series, this episode goes line by line through one of Taylor’s most devastatingly relatable songs. We explore the rhetorical triangle of the I, the you...

"Never be so kind, you forget to be clever; Never be so clever, you forget to be kind." We're celebrating Women's History Month the only way we know how: looking at strong women in Taylor Swift’s music. Jenn traces the wisdom and boldness Taylor inherited from her grandmother in "Marjorie" (evermore, 2020), Jodi unpacks the resilience hiding in plain sight throughout "I Can Do It with a Broken Hea...

This week, we're going line by line through "Down Bad" from Taylor Swift's The Tortured Poets Department (2024). Jenn, Maansi, and Jodi unpack one of the album's most emotionally raw — and unexpectedly hilarious — songs, diving deep into its extended alien abduction metaphor, what it really means to be "down bad," and how Taylor uses sci-fi imagery to explore love bombing, power dynamics, and the...

This week, we're giving you a taste of something brand new: our full album deep dive series, starting at the very beginning with Taylor Swift's self-titled debut (2006). In this preview, we dig into the cover art, the context, and what it meant to introduce yourself to the world as a 16-year-old girl in a genre that had never really made room for one. Want the full track-by-track breakdown — from...

"She had a marvelous time ruining everything" This week, we're doing a Show and Tell episode on one of literature's most enduring narrative structures: the Hero's Journey. We explore three songs through the Hero's Journey lens: Maansi unpacks the cross-generational dual hero's story in "The Last Great American Dynasty" (Folklore, 2020), Jenn applies the framework to "Down Bad" (The Tortured Poets...

"Your faithless love's the only hoax I believe in." This week, we're deep diving "hoax" from folklore (2020), written by Taylor Swift and Aaron Dessner. As a continuation of last week's Wuthering Heights episode, we go line by line through one of Taylor's most quietly devastating songs. We unpack the definition of "hoax" itself—humorous or malicious?—and find that the answer might be both. Along t...