Music: Sad, Beautiful, Tragic

Taylor Swift writes a lot of sad songs. The word “sad” is pretty well used, I suppose, but what if I used the word heartbreaking ?

What if I asked you to name a Taylor Swift song that literally has left you curled up in a fetal position on your bedroom floor with tears streaming down your face? You’d probably say Last Kiss, or Dear John or All Too Well.

Personally I have spent many nights on my own bedroom floor listening to Breathe on repeat in the complete darkness in my pjs with a duvet wrapped around myself while rain falls down at my windows. Nights like those, where I don’t want to talk to anyone, and just turn off my phone, are the most perfect for Taylor Swift songs.

What defines a sad song? – quiet and slow and melancholy – but then again you’d call Forever and Always a pretty sad song, too, wouldn’t you? And not just because of the piano version, but because of lines like back up, baby back up, did you forget everything, because those lines hit home, in whatever way they do, for you. That’s what makes a Taylor Swift song sad, the lyrics.

The name of a person flutters through your mind when you hear a lyric like 'and you come away with a great little story of a mess of a dreamer with the nerve to adore you' and a memory passes in front of your eyes when Taylor sings 'you call me up again just to break me like a promise, so casually cruel in the name of being honest.'Taylor’s best sad songs have a tendency to reach a climax – in Dear John she howls that she’s shining like fireworks over his sad empty town. In All Too Well she wonders, angrily over a noise of guitars, if she asked for too much. In Last Kiss she comes pretty close to tears as she explores what’s left of a relationship that she never thought would end. In Cold As You she’s accusatory, screaming out you 'never did give a damn thing, honey.'All of these are moments that you scream-cry through alone lips yncing in your bedroom at 2am, that have you thinking no song has ever made me cry this hard until another Taylor Swift song with the next album has you saying the same thing. But once again, it’s the lyrics that really get you. What happens when you get a song that has no “chill inducing” climax? When happens when you can’t scream-cry along? What happens when Taylor doesn’t accuse anyone of anything, doesn’t howl, doesn’t get angry? From the beginning, the first five seconds of Sad Beautiful Tragic, with the ringing, the sound of forgetting, and the thumping of a train car blazing down the tracks, all the way to the end, the sudden drop off and silence, giving a feeling of being left behind altogether by a train that you can only see in the distance, there is no climax. There are no accusations. There is only a dismal sort of hollowness. The  plucking of the ukulele, marking each and every downfall of the relationship.  It’s almost like you can feel her giving up. 'We had a beautiful magic love there, but now it’s just…sad'. Tragic. Beautiful enough to want to get it back, and tragic enough that you just can’t. It ends, just like that with no warning, no happiness, it ends.