Must say, having seen “All Too Well” on SNL and YouTube, that her appeal puzzles me, too. She comes across like a poseur and a drama queen on that video. She’s playing guitar as if she’s a musician (mostly first-position easy chords, C major, F, like that) and dramatically wielding it, but as she reveals by halting her strumming intermittently, it’s pretty much a prop. The backing music continues unchanged whether she’s strumming energetically or just wearing the guitar around her neck like a very big necklace. And the lyrics of the song seem revved up, exploding a brief love affair into a major betrayal. To me, it’s more of a “Too bad, I was sure it would work out” sort of occasion, not a full-blown “You took my heart and stomped on it and I’ll never ever forget it or you or how passionately I felt attached to you” situation. As I understand it was a three-month love affair she’s writing a (ten-minute!!!) song about–for me, that’s about as much time as it normally takes for me to figure out if I and my new woman are compatible, and way short of feeling anything like the degree of attachment and devotion and adoration she’s rattling on about here.
Her fans identify with her intense emotions, no doubt, but I have the feeling that the older guy she’s writing about isn’t feeling castigated or criticized as much as he’s probably thinking “Oh, you poor thing. Just wait until you’ve had a few dozen more flings, had your heart broken five or ten times, broken a couple of hearts yourself, made a few mistakes of premature overcommitment, gotten bored or disappointed by someone you thought you were in love with, and so on, and you’ll probably come to see that this was finally no big deal, just another love affair that didn’t work out like you hoped it would. Poor girl.”
Lyrically, the flood of details in this song are great, though the structure of her imagery is lacking, by which I mean she doesn’t build one detail on another for any great effect–rather, they come pouring out almost at random, as if she’s free-associating her memories, which the refrain of “I remember it all too well” supports. The memories are too fresh for her to make any sort of coherent narrative out of them–they’re intense memories, but they don’t add up to telling us what went wrong, where she misunderstood or misinterpreted what was going on, what the underlying problems in their relationships were, what she might have done (if anything) to solve a problem, what she needed from him at the time that she wasn’t getting, etc. It’s ten minutes of semi-processed thinking, at the end of which I hear a therapist asking her, “OK, let’s go over that piece by piece and figure out why you still find this affair so upsetting, all right?”
But like I say, her fans identify with the beautiful, fragile, angry young woman expressing her innermost thoughts bravely in public without any need for analytical insight. “All Too Well” seems like an anthem of a young person’s confused emotions, and maybe that’s all her fans want from her.
Of course, I’m far from her target demographic here, and the degree to which I can identify with her emotional turmoil is reminiscing about the long-gone days when I could get myself worked up into a lather railing about some lover who disappointed me and feeling nostalgic about that well of emotions-- she and her fans would no doubt tell me “Pops, you just don’t understand the hell that Taylor Swift has gone through” and no amount of arguing on my part will convince her or them that I understand it all too well.
