Taylor Swift released her highly-anticipated seventh studio album, Lover, on Friday, August 23. Lyrically, the 18-track record is reminiscent of her earlier albums, like Speak Now (2010) and Fearless (2008). Sonically, however, it’s more on par with Red (2012) or 1989 (2014). It’s arguably her most varied work to date—some of the songs are pure pop while others are more soulful and subdued. There’s even a glorious return to country. In short, there’s something for everyone.
There is one consistent through-line on Lover, though: Swift’s love for…well, love. The album is wildly romantic and thematically seems to track the timeline of a relationship, from its early stages to finally realizing the situation is serious. Knowing Swift’s previous music history, it’s safe to assume—or at least theorize—that Lover is about the progression of her relationship with British actor Joe Alwyn.
Swift is notoriously private about this—and there’s nothing on Lover that mentions him directly (save for the aptly-titled track “London Boy”). But half the fun of being a Taylor Swift fan is coming up with theories, and this is mine: In my opinion, Lover is her way of telling us how the Joe Alwyn relationship came to be. My evidence lies in this track-by-track review below.
Swift doesn’t start Lover with a love song, but rather a track where she proclaims all the people who once brought her down are no longer an issue. She mentions no one specifically, but it’s safe to assume she could be talking about her ex-boyfriends, Calvin Harris, who she dated before meeting Alwyn. It’s clear from Reputation things did not end on good terms with Harris, but Swift seems to have moved past the drama on “I Forgot You Existed.”
“How many days did I spend thinking about how you did me wrong?” she sings. “[I] lived in the shade you were throwing ’til all of my sunshine was gone.” In the chorus she proudly declares, “I forgot that you existed, and I thought that it would kill me, but it didn’t” before later saying, “I would’ve stuck around for ya, would’ve fought the whole town… [I] would’ve been there front row, even if nobody came to your show.” (Harris is a DJ.)
The gist of this song? Swift has shed the snakeskin from her Reputation era and is open to new possibilities.
Enter track two: “Cruel Summer,” which documents the flirty, occasionally tumultuous early stages of a relationship. “It’s new, the shape of your body. It’s blue, the feeling I’ve got,” Swift sings. In a separate section she says, “It’s cool, that’s what I tell him. No rules…We say we’ll just screw it up. In these trying times, we’re not trying.”
To me, this sounds like Alwyn and Swift’s earliest stage: a period where maybe they kept what was going on from friends and family. “I don’t want to keep secrets just to keep you,” she sings. And sometimes, this type of dynamic can cause drama: “Summer’s a knife,” Swift sings at one point.
But that stage ends quickly. By “Lover,” it seems Swift and Alwyn have become a full-on couple. In “Cruel Summer,” she sang about having “no rules” with a partner; now she says, “This is our place, we make the rules. “
“Have I known you 20 seconds or 20 years?” she sings later on. “Can I go where you go? Can we always be this close?…I’ve loved you three summers. Now honey, I want ’em all.”
We deviate from a love story, slightly, on “The Man.” Here, Tay muses about how her career and reputation would have played out in the press if she were a man. “Every conquest I made would make me more of a boss to you,” she sings. “I’d be just like Leo in Saint Tropez.” (Some subtle Leonardo DiCaprio shade for ya!)
