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ENTERTAINMENT THE END OF AN ERA
from The Reveille 4-20-23
by Reveille
Taylor Swift’s best songs about Joe Alwyn after their break up
BY MADISON HEYDARI & OLIVIA TOMLINSON @madisonheydari & @OliviaMersade
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Taylor Swift and actor Joe Alwyn reportedly split after six years together, according to Entertainment Tonight. This news was heartbreaking to many Swifties, especially since Swift’s songs about Alwyn inspired some of her best and most vulnerable masterpieces on her past few albums.
In honor of the end of the Alwyn era, here are some of our favorite songs about Joe Alwyn.
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This song has always carried this heavy feeling. In her lyrics, Swift sings about the reality of fame and how her relationships suffer.
She deals with vicious tabloid rumors and paparazzi or even fans taking pictures of her while she’s out. She acknowledges that her partner will have to deal with these things too.
When she sings, “the devil’s in the details, but you got a friend in me,” she’s saying it may seem simple at large, but her fame and lifestyle are actually complicated and troublesome, but she’ll be there for him through it all.
She asks Alwyn in the chorus if their love would be enough even if they couldn’t have that sense of normalcy that they both want.
This song is about the journey to meeting Alwyn, and even though they lived two separate lives, she sings about this force, or an invisible string, that pulled them closer and closer together their whole lives.
She sings about how her song “Bad Blood” played in Alwyn’s cab the first time he went to Los Angeles and how he ate at her favorite restaurant. It’s a captivating song of little details about their separate lives coming together and how they were always destined to meet.
Sometimes we tie our memories to the places where we made them. That’s what Cornelia Street in NYC is for Swift. It’s also the street where she was renting an apartment around the time she started dating Alwyn.
The lyrics take you through the early stages of her relationship in the NYC apartment, where she lived when she started falling in love with Alwyn.
The saddest part about the song is that she sings, “I hope I never lose you, hope it never ends / I’d never walk Cornelia Street again.” She says that losing him would leave her so heartbroken that she wouldn’t be able to return to Cornelia Street again because of the memories tied to it.
“Lavender Haze” was a phrase used in the 1950s to describe being in love, and when Swift learned that she was immediately inspired.
Again, she writes about how fame affects her life and relationships. She sings about the weird rumors her and Alwyn have faced when she sings, “All they keep asking me is if I’m gonna be your bride / the only kinda girl they see is a one-night or a wife.”
She says that even though the media was talking about her, Alwyn wasn’t paying much attention to it.
This song is about ignoring all the fake stuff about their relationship to protect what is real and to stay in the “lavender haze.”
This song was written during a time in Swift’s life when she was falling in love with someone, while her reputation was falling apart.
Alwyn’s appearance is a big theme in this song. In most paparazzi pictures of Swift and Alwyn, he can be seen wearing his staple outfit, “dark jeans and Nikes,” which was mentioned in “Delicate.”
Fans can assume his bright, blue eyes also shocked Taylor when she sings “Oh damn, never seen that color blue.”
Also from “reputation,” this song refers to Swift’s past lovers as well as her new ones. Swift claims she is his “American queen,” which references Alwyn’s English roots. She also hints at her ex-boyfriends, Calvin Harris and Tom Hiddleston, not treating her as well as Alwyn when she sings about their vehicles: “Cause all the boys and their expensive cars / With their Range Rovers and their Jaguars / Never took me quite where you do.”
Her commitment to Alwyn is seen throughout the entire “Lover” album, but especially in “Paper Rings.”
In the line “I like shiny things, but I’d marry you with paper rings,” Swift is explaining her crave for marriage with Alwyn is so strong that wearing a paper ring is okay with her.
Swift even claims this song is the heart of Lover.
Swift’s need for an escape from the media and spending time with her “muse” has shown fans why they kept their relationship private.
In the line, “I don’t belong, and my beloved, neither do you” she sings about their time away from the public eye, unlike most of her past relationships. Keeping these spheres of her life separate, “with no one to tweet it” made their relationship even more special.
This love letter to Alwyn was a way to explain to the Swifties that the couple’s alone time made their relationship stronger and was beneficial to their mental health.