Over the Rainbow - 2

OUT OF THE WOODS: A PR/MUTUAL BEARDING ANALYSIS

I’m going to join the unpopular opinion side of the fandom and admit that I really like “Out of the Woods.” It has a haunting passion to it, though not a romantic passion, I think. I also like the 80s synth-rock riffing, a bit reminiscent of some other music I’ve been listening to lately. And out of all the songs she’s supposedly written about Harry, this is the only one that actually feels genuine.

I admit I don’t follow her personal life that closely (other than its brief intersection with Harry), but I think there’s certainly plenty of cause to suspect that she might also be trapped in a similar closet. I’m ill and bored, so I decided to put on my “I was an English major before I decided I enjoyed buying groceries” hat and do my own line-by-line interpretation of Ms. Swift’s new song with a mutual bearding lens.

Looking at it now

It all seems so simple

These first two lines introduce the perspective of the song – she’s thinking about this experience from a distance, with new clarity. It answers the question everyone’s been asking: why are you still talking about this incredibly awkward relationship two years later, Taylor? It’s because she’s sharing a newer (possibly truer) perspective on it. This is something that should have been simple: a straightforward contract, a bit of playacting, nothing either of them hadn’t done before. Right?

We were lying on your couch

This may be a literal memory, a friendly hang-out to get to know each other before the contracts were signed. But it also pings a little bit of a casting couch, an audition of sorts.

I remember

You took a Polaroid of us

Also could be literal – Harry had his Polaroid camera then, if I’m recalling correctly, and that could have been a playful icebreaker. It also could be continuing the audition theme, taking a metaphorical snapshot of them, test film to see if they would look good together, if they would capture the public attention the way they needed to.

Then discovered

The rest of the world was black and white

But we were in screaming color

These lines set them apart from the rest of the world, which is rigid, conservative, BINARY, all the same. Screaming color… like a rainbow, perhaps?

The implied discovery makes me think maybe Taylor and Harry themselves didn’t know at first that they were both in the same closet. Maybe at first it was just a PR date, but then they realized they had a common motivation. Pure speculation, but I wonder if that might be what made Harry agree to it, in the end?

 And I remember thinking…

Are we out of the woods yet?

Are we in the clear yet?

In the clear yet, good.

So as earlybirdlouis pointed out, this is a pretty obvious closet metaphor. Are we in the clear? Are we safe? Did it work? Did we fool the world again? Is our mutual secret still hidden?

Looking at it now

Last December,

The first really obvious reference to Harry, since their relationship was at its peak publicity in December 2012, and an interesting one to choose, given how much attention and derision his “December girlfriend” habit started getting this past year. It’s like she’s giving us a little poke to remind us about that shadiness (and her own December boyfriends).

we were built to fall apart

Then fall back together

They “were built,” implying the relationship was an artificial construct. They didn’t build the relationship; someone else did. And they built it solely with the purpose of ending it—and thus perpetuating it. After all, we’ve seen Harry and Taylor “fall back together” in little waves of publicity over and over and over throughout the last two years. Their teams have certainly gotten their money’s worth out of it, from the awards shows, the cheeky articles, the album publicity, all the speculation and even the jokes. That longevity may have been planned (and contracted) from the beginning.

Your necklace hanging from my neck

 Just in case you didn’t get that it was about Harry: this song is about Harry. Harry Styles. You remember him, right?

The night we couldn’t quite forget

When we decided

To move the furniture so we could dance

Baby, like we stood a chance

 Again, could be a literal memory, but could also be symbolic of them making the choice to enter into this arrangement. Dance = performance. Like we stood a chance = like this could possibly be a real long-term relationship. It’s also just a really pretty lyric.

Two paper airplanes flying, flying…

Hey, remember that necklace again? Did we mention this song was about Harry Styles? We might not have been clear.

 But this is also a really cool metaphor. She’s drawing another parallel between them. They are made the same. A paper airplane is a lovely, scary metaphor for a young person in the entertainment industry—you can soar so high, but one errant gust of wind can bring you down and crumple you up. When you think of a young queer person in the entertainment industry, that symbolic fragility becomes even more poignant. They’re both flying high, just trying to stay on course in the face of all that could bring them down.

Remember when you hit the brakes too soon

Twenty stitches in a hospital room

 So again we have what could be (and is the most likely to be) a literal memory, and another whack upside the head to make sure there is absolutely no mistake that THIS SONG IS ABOUT HARRY STYLES because she’s made sure to remind the media about their snowmobiling accident and Harry’s injury.

This can also represent Harry hitting the brakes on their relationship, wanting to cut it short because it was hurting him.

When you started crying

Baby, I did too

This just breaks my heart, because it doesn’t even matter whether Harry was crying because of the accident or because he just didn’t want to be doing this. It’s just awful to think of him far away from the ones he loves, trapped and hurting with strangers. And she’s not tearing him down for this—she’s empathizing. Maybe she shares his feelings or maybe she just feels bad for him.

But when the sun came up

I was looking at you

To me, this line feels like she’s seeing him for the first time, or maybe recognizing the truth of the situation and how it’s hurting him. How it’s not as simple as it was supposed to be, and she has to see him as a person, not just a business partner or tool.

Remember when we couldn’t take the heat

I walked out, I said “I’m setting you free”

The culmination of the story—the early end of the contract (which according to the gossip mill was originally supposed to go through February) because neither of them can go on with it any longer. Harry can’t go on hurting his actual partner, and Taylor can’t deal with his misery. So she “sets him free.” That’s not the language of a tumultuous romance. That’s the language of someone bound to an agreement they’re desperate to get out of.

But the monsters turned out to be just trees

When the sun came up

You were looking at me.

These last few lines are a really interesting way to end the story. The implication is that the things they (or at least he) were scared of didn’t really have any power in the light of day. The monsters here could be the fears of the closet, the nightmares of being exposed, and realizing that in truth, they shouldn’t be so afraid of that after all.

Or it might be about the end of the relationship itself and any hostility there might have been between them. Perhaps she’s saying that she wasn’t the monster in this story, and Harry eventually realized that when he woke up from the nightmare and saw things more clearly.

So while the marketing is exploitative and icky as usual, the song itself could possibly be the one honest introspective statement we’ve ever gotten on the Haylor debacle.