The Fearless Tour Appreciation Day


63/100 Pictures of Taylor Swift



“Never Grow Up is a song about the fact that I don’t quite know how I feel about growing up. It’s tricky. You know, growing up happens without you knowing it. Growing up is such a crazy concept because a lot of times when you’re younger you wish you were older and I look out into a crowd every night and I see a lot of girls that are my age and going through exactly the same things as I’m going through. Then I see, every once in a while I look down and I see like, a little girl who’s seven or eight. And um, I just wish I could tell her all of this. You know, there she is like, becoming who she’s gonna be and forming her thoughts and dreams and opinions and I wrote this song for those little girls.”




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To me, this is the most heartbreaking line in the entire live performance of Dear John. It’s one of those moments that unfortunately are lost in the perfection that is needed in a studio version of a song, and is even forgettable to those fortunate enough to hear Taylor Swift live. But in the sparkling, crystal-clear recording of one of Taylor’s best performances to date, we hear a tiny detail, a perfect example of why Taylor’s music is so effective in capturing emotion. That one line contains one simple word that changes the entire song. Again. She’s praying the floor won’t fall through… again. It wasn’t just one time that everything broke apart. She didn’t suffer through a relationship briefly. It happened again… and again… and again.

Taylor loved John, or at least thought she did. She was infatuated with him, as many young girls are. But he broke her, or we can guess that he did. Perhaps the saddest part of the song resides in this line, though. He didn’t just break her once. He didn’t just let her down and leave her crying the whole way home. She’s praying the floor won’t fall through… again. It might have been her fault, she did say she should have known. And she should have. But she’s also said before that she doesn’t have thick skin, and this is certainly an example of this.

She is such a strong girl, we all know that and love that about her. Even in her lowest moments, she can smile and sing and play her guitar and we suspect nothing. But this song breaks down those walls that she carefully constructed in order to preserve the innocence and the sacredness of her reputation. Taylor Swift can’t be sad. It would make her fans sad, and we can’t have that.  But in one note, Taylor whispers something. John, or who we think is John, tore her apart, and not just once. He did it again… and again… and again.

One simple note, lasting for no more than a second, represents the subtleness and the beauty of Taylor’s music. She’ll never tell us that this song is about this boy, or that she’s in a bad mood today, or that she actually feels uncomfortable when Kanye West is mentioned. But sometimes, just sometimes, Taylor lets us into her world, of interwoven heartbreak and disappointment and loneliness. She’s not always dreaming about fairytales or singing cute songs about boys. She’s waiting at the phone, crying in the car, sitting on the floor in her ex-boyfriends clothes. She’s counting the footsteps. She’s praying the floor won’t fall through. Again.