The Escape Fantasy Collection

A series of Taylor Swift Lyric Analysis Essays

Taylor Swift Collections

I’ve prepared some short posts for over the summer/Christmas break, exploring connected themes in Taylor Swift song lyrics. This is a fun little project for me, and I hope will be entertaining for you!

Escape Fantasy Collection

Follow the link to a lyric video for each song. I’d recommend listening to each before reading if you’re not familiar with them already. Alternatively, have a read and see if it sparks your interest to check out some of the songs!

Timeless -

I Hate It Here -

Starlight -

Love Story -

This collection focuses on songs where Taylor is singing about daydreams, fantastical escapes from reality or is imagining herself in the past. These songs feature literary and historical references as places Taylor’s imagination takes her when she needs to pretend to be elsewhere.

Taylor, like many writers, is occasionally using her craft as a form of escape from the mundane, stressful or painful parts of her day-to-day life. Even Taylor Swift sometimes like to fantasise about what it would be like to be someone else.

I'll save all my romanticism for my inner life and I'll get lost on purpose

Particularly when life gets challenging, it’s easy to want to disappear and ‘get lost’ in our fantasies where things are more straightforward. Where people meant to be together always find each other, where goodness and gentleness prevails, and nights of magical starlight last forever.

These are songs I particularly relate to, as someone who has always used books, especially historical fiction, as an escape from ‘real life.’ Not that I have always necessarily wanted or needed to escape my life – but more than it’s nice to take a break, and venture somewhere else, even if it’s only in my mind.

I read about it in a book when I was a precocious child

As a child I did escape hard situations by diving into fantasy – like many children I pictured myself as another Queen of Narnia, or heroine in a fantasy land, or princess in the past. Taylor does this in Timeless, escaping to a fantasy of being a war bride, and a princess off in a foreign land of the past. You might think this is an unhelpful way to deal with real problems, but from my experience as a kid and a teacher of kids, I’ve found the opposite. Imagination and storytelling are a great way for kids to work through basic problems in their lives and test out problem solving solutions in a contained and hypothetical way.

We’ve all had imagined conversations where we are far wittier and clearer in our meaning than we ever are in real life. What is a normal processing strategy for adults can be key in helping children practice and develop those skills in a safe setting.

and in my fantasies I rise above it
And way up there, I actually love it

But of course, at the end of each song, just as at the end of each daydream, both Taylor and us must return to our real lives. In I Hate It Here Taylor acknowledges the rose-tinted glasses we view other lives, times and places through. It’s easy to picture ourselves in a ballgown running to Romeo, but the real ending of Shakespeare’s play is far darker than Taylor’s reimagined narrative in the song.

Nostalgia is a mind's trick
If I'd been there, I'd hate it
It was freezing in the palace

Escape is a coping method, whether it is through stories, history, daydreams or songwriting. It’s a valid and helpful coping mechanism, but eventually we must wake up. All we can ask, or hope for, is that our time away can help us see the reality of our situation more clearly, and face both the good and bad with more courage.

Don't you see the starlight, starlight
Don't you dream impossible things

In the lyrics of Starlight, Taylor is acknowledging that most of the things she and her imaginary love are dreaming of are crazy and impossible – but that the very act of dreaming helps her see the stars shine brighter, and picture a more adventurous, exciting world.

Whether the characters of these songs are pretending to be a duchess, or dreaming of the simplicity of a life well lived, both are tools to imagine a better future. And as I’ve learnt time and time again, the first step towards building a better life is imagining and picturing what could be possible – even if it means picturing the impossible sometimes as well.

I'm gonna love you when our hair is turnin' gray
We'll have a cardboard box of photos of the life we've made
And you'll say, "Oh my, we really were timeless"

Taylor equally romanticizes the out of reach and dramatic – such as in Love Story, where she sings that I'll be waiting, all there's left to do is run – and the ordinary and possible – two lovers laughing on the porch of their first house. She shows that the key to making life an adventure is to treat it all as an adventure – even the most mundane of moments.

I’ve see the difference embracing even the ordinary as the potential of adventure can make. I feel very lucky that even though my life is quite ordinary and boring, it still feels like an adventure. And if I occasionally escape into a book or a Taylor Swift song for a moment of fantasy, it only grounds me further back into the reality of my life.

Is there a Taylor Swift fan in your life? Please share this with them!