oh you thought ivy was a beautiful love song? well what if it wasn’t. what if the ivy slowly suffocated you. no matter how much you loved it. and what if you had no choice but to break free. and you miss getting to lay there covered in all that ivy and love but you also wish you’d never let a single root take place at all. What Then.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Taylor played The Outside tonight in Tokyo. She wrote it exactly 20 years ago in February 2004.
“I wrote another one called The Outside - - - It’s about being left out in the cold and being well - - - an outsider. I don’t know if it’ll go anywhere, but it made me feel better.”
Hidden message for The Outside in Taylor Swift (2006) album booklet: You are not alone.
In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Swift said:
It’s about what I was going through at the time. I was a complete outcast at school and never fit in, never felt like I belonged. A lot of times back then when I was 12 or 13, I would write songs about relationships, when I wasn’t in relationships, because I would look at other people and try to observe what they were going through. But in the case of ”The Outside,” I was writing exactly what I saw. I was writing from pain. And I’ve always felt so lucky, because I’ve never needed an escape like drinking or drugs or anything like that to escape from the bad days. Music has always been that escape for me.
She also said of the song:
This is one of the first songs I ever wrote, and it talks about the very reason I ever started to write songs. It was when I was twelve years old, and a complete outcast at school. I was a lot different than all the other kids, and I never really knew why. I was taller, and sang country music at karaoke bars and festivals on weekends while other girls went to sleepovers. Some days I woke up not knowing if anyone was going to talk to me that day. I think every person comes to a point in their life when you have a long string of bad days. You can choose to let it drag you down, or you can find ways to rise above it. I came to the conclusion that even though people hadn't always been there for me, music had. It's strange to think how different my life would be right now if I had been one of the cool kids.
I’m sure i’m not the first to say this but taylor pairing a song about her imagining her worst fears about her career crumbling & disappointing everyone with a song about how it actually felt for that to happen & feeling frozen at the age she thought was the peak of her success actually makes me physically ill
As it seems our Chairman has become increasingly more comfortable with surprise song mashups and she has burned all the files in the surprise song rule book, she will now be causing chaos x4 every night of The Eras Tour. Good luck to us all.