Revisit part one/part two
What I found here was upward potential—no surprise there, interstitial lifting is in its major-key anatomy. But I suspect this would remain true if the sun wasn’t out, if I hadn’t come off a long train the night before, if there wasn’t a sweet note lingering in my phone, and if I hadn’t had some small but marked successes. (Otherwise, the question becomes about cyclic swings and overlaps…how so many encouraging checkpoints pile onto the same sphere of a few hours’ span).
At a granular level you could permeate “Hits Different” in a few noble ways. You could ask why, on Spotify, this new release isn’t in Swift’s current five most-streamed songs—nothing countering the gravitational force of classics stapled into themselves. Or grab at its melodic progression: four chords repeated in irregular pattern throughout its time—more evident when performed live1—and a second chord just a step-ladder for the long-lastingness of three and four.
It would be insane to note that this mimics the accident into finality that accompanies breakups and crushes; it’s perfectly engineered pop, with a chorus striking methodically at 43 seconds to catch streaming ranks. And so these are misguided directions for my comment or inquiry—I have a rutted penchant for searching for keys in other voices, as if the problem is not finding an answer but a proper mouth for it to come out of. (I have to believe it, is the thing). Why do I believe this Taylor Swift song? That’s the egg. (The chicken is the timing, but I’ve known songs to resurface, or take their time being what they need to be for you—inopportune moments solidified by greed and need alike).
Moving on has never been “easy for me to do”: if I’m stuck, it’s with a deadpan and for an egregiously long stretch. So, against itself, this track works remarkable wonders; in the face of everything that should make recognition dissuasive or upsetting it is its own hearty jelly. “Shit my friends say to get me by” nixes the very first charading line of the chorus, “Oh, my, love is a lie”. Am I more primed to believe it because she doesn’t?
“Hits Different” contains its own antithesis, suggestive of something I’m both relieved and hardened to discover and say: is crushing and breaking up all that different?
Amanda Petrusich wrote an interesting brief piece for the The New Yorker on the Eras tour.