“illicit affairs” by Taylor Swift

The master of the breakup song has outdone herself. Released as the 10th track on Taylor Swift’s eight studio album, “folklore,” “illicit affairs”  defines every emotion intrinsic to a love that failed–and I am forever grateful.

On the surface, the song is about a girl entering into a forbidden love and finding herself unable to stop. However, through her lyrics, Swift takes us on a familiar journey of unrequited and unanswered love. With a delicate melody to start the song, Swift’s lyrics are set against a backdrop of classical acoustic. She sings a familiar song to her beloved, promising that “for you I would ruin myself/a million little times.”

The spark of affection “born from just one single glance” reminds us all the precarious nature of love, a familiar theme in Swift’s work. Swift defines the peak of romance and her affair when she sings the heartbreaking lines “you showed me colors you know/I can’t see with anyone else,” and “You taught me a secret language/I can’t speak with anyone else.” These lyrics, the notion of unseen colors and secret languages, are the peak of emotional entrapment and the closest I’ve ever read to describing love.

She cuts into her loving and wistful tone as she explains her affliction was a mere  “dwindling, mercurial high/A drug that only worked/The first few hundred times.” As the song falls, Swift too falls out of love and into a state of self-realization. Her emotional journey is set against twinkling and ethereal instrumentals that are sure to never overshadow her voice. Swift rehashes the details that made her fall into love. The affectionate nicknames that led to her entrapment are eviscerated as she painfully pleads “Don’t call me kid/Don’t call me baby.” Her emotional trauma manifests in her painstaking realization that her relationship has broken; “They show their truth one single time/But they lie, and they lie, and they lie.”

The tale of heartbreak and self-realization Swift tells is one no one’s immune to. She describes the most visceral of human emotions as love and hate come to a head in just a little more than three minutes. Simply put, “illicit affairs” is the most emotionally raw and relatable song of the year. What makes this song timeless, however, is the themes she explores. Feelings of lost love are invincible to the constraints of time, making “illicit affairs” a song that can be cried to even 50 years in the future. With a single song, Swift has made us all into the “godforsaken mess” she sings about.