The 3 personas from the Anti-Hero music video, in their respective pen. We've been inside a series we didn't realize we were in,
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The Life of a Showgirl is brief and curated. It’s sparkly, if not superficial. Glitter-pen Taylor is giving the performance of her life, making the crowd cheer everything they want to see. There’s anger simmering just below the surface, but Problem-Taylor keeps it light because the show must go on.
Contrast that with The Tortured Poets Department. There were 31 songs, a very lengthy, in depth, collection of introspective compositions.
Taylor explains the concept behind this album with these words:
The songs introspect on her public and private lives, detailing tumult and sorrow via motifs of self-awareness, mourning, anger, humor, and delusion.
"There's a lot about this particular concept on The Tortured Poets Department," the 34-year-old continued. "What do we do to our writers, and our artists, and our creatives? We put them through hell. We watch what they create, then we judge it. We love to watch artists in pain, often to the point where I think sometimes as a society we provoke that pain and we just watch what happens."
And that brings us back to Haunted-Taylor in the house writing poems. Remember the highlights summed up from the letter that went along with this first version of Taylor we met in the Anti-Hero music video:
People have hated Haunted-Taylor. She fears they will despise her again. The crowd is fickle. Hero today, but look closely and find every flaw. She has to avoid the game by living by a strict code. She keeps herself busy to opt–out of the magnifying glass yet amplify her merits–writing with her quill pen.
Concept of Each Version of Taylor
Writing Their Own Individual Album
So I didn’t know the persona/album was happening until TLOAS was so….. Sparkly and surface-level. In thinking about where the lyricism and depth went, I realized–it was in TTPD. All of it. No glitter there what-so-ever, only greige. Now it makes total sense.
The Tortured Poets Department is Haunted-Taylor’s work written in Fountain Pen.
The Life of a Showgirl was Problem-Taylor’s perspective written in glitter
I hadn’t noticed the Taylor personas had each been granted an album for solely their own perspective until TLOAS was released. Even though Taylor tried to tell us with the very first video in the series: Anti-Hero. So I didn’t know what all the braids, and twos, and plaid were for back then. But now that I see the album concepts so closely matching each persona/pen, I realize Taylor already HAD released Big-Taylor’s perspective album. It was Midnights!
Here’s the abridged version spelling out Taylor’s concept for that album:
What keeps you up at night? …The tiniest notion of reminiscent thought that wanders off… The flame has caught. You're wide awake… Sometimes sleep is as еvasive as happiness. Isn't it mystifying how quickly we vacillate between self love and loathing at this hour? One moment, your life looks like a night sky of gleaming stars. The next, the fog has descended… Why can't you sleep? … Or was tonight the night you realized how solitary, how alone you really are, no matter how high you climb. The elevation just makes it colder… You've gotten lost in the labyrinth of your head, where the fear wraps its claws around the fragile throat of true love. Will you be able to save it in time? Save it from who? Well, it's obvious. From you… We twist in our self-made cages and pray that we aren't — right this minute — about to make some fateful life-altering mistake. This is a collection of music written in the middle of the night, a journey through terrors and sweet dreams. The floors we pace and the demons we face. For all of us who have tossed and turned and decided to keep the lanterns lit and go searching. Hoping that just maybe, when the clock strikes twelve...we'll meet ourselves.
See you there. Midnight sharp.
Taylor
Our notes from the Big-Taylor letter:
Remembering a time before all of this. Remembering that little girl she used to be, the ambitious teen. Now it’s all remembering details of choreography in dance and life. If Big-Taylor steps out of line, the crowd turns, but mostly she aligns with her practiced footwork. She must remember the crowd most of all–they are her overlord.
It’s a lot of thinking back in time, and also being beholden to the crowd.
Which sounds like sleepless nights ruminating about prior life events
and fretting about revealing your whole self at midnight.
We had all wondered what the big reveal was during the Midnights release. Then assumed it might happen after a countdown. Well, we’ve counted down: Midnights was Big-Taylor in fountain pen with the 3 AM tracks added on. The Tortured Poets Department was Haunted-Taylor writing in quill with the Anthology of extras released at 2 AM. And now that The Life of a Showgirl, third and final persona from the Anti-Hero music video has released her glitter tracks at 12:12 AM, and the TLOAS movie party showed the clock at midnight–we HAVE technically met all 3 pieces of Taylor.
Yet, it’s still unsatisfying as there was no “life-altering” reveal. And that’s where I think Taylor will bring the strands of the braid together. In TS-13 we’ll get the convergence of the three Taylors and find out what all that blurple-glitter vomit and blood was all about.
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