I’M BREEZY!!!!!

and saying “I’ll be your SUMMER sun forever” is just so !!!!!!! because like. obviously the sun is around every day but she’s saying: no, for you that’s not enough. for you I will make sure to be the brightest light possible. it doesn’t matter that it’s only there a quarter of the time in nature, if it’s for you I will make sure you never go a day without it

like he’s up at all hours because he’s depressed or drunk but she’s up at all hours because how is she supposed to sleep knowing he can’t

“if I was standing there in your apartment / I’d take that bomb in your head and disarm it” is the most creative rhyme I’ve ever heard and also hits me in the gut every single time especially combined with “I’d say I love you even at your darkest / and please don’t go” just the desperation boiled down to a few words

also super interesting seeing which concepts she was thinking a lot about when writing any album. like 3 of the vault tracks mention flying and one is to talk about people tearing her down (“criticize the way you fly when you’re soaring through the sky”), one is about someone else not being able to reach happiness (“he spends most of his flights getting pulled down by gravity”) and one is about wishing you could go back to the past (“I wish I could fly, I’d pick you up and we’d go back in time”). so obviously all different concepts, just interesting, similar to all the nature and death motifs on folklore.

“how long will it be cute? all this crying in my room? when you can’t blame it on my youth and roll your eyes with affection” hits so hard when you see that all the criticism about “writing about her exes” ramped up when she got to her early 20s. there was of course mockery before but nothing compared to the vitriol during the red era and “shouldn’t she be over this by now?” I think it also relates to what she said a couple years ago about how as she got older people started viewing her as a threat because they saw her as a woman, not a child

also the connection between the lucky one and nothing new is just so well written. how in the bridge of nothing new she’s crying for two reasons: 1) because she’s realizing she’ll be replaced by this young girl who was inspired by her and 2) because she can’t save this young girl from going through the exact same thing. in the lucky one, you see her inspired by this older woman who’s reached the heights of fame, and finally, in the bridge, realize exactly why her inspiration chose to leave the life she worked so hard for. in nothing new, she’s seeing another young woman who she believes is about to follow the exact same path that doesn’t really hold as much glamour as she thinks and there’s nothing she can do to stop it.

also it’s just so descriptive how in the first verse of forever winter he’s up at 3 AM pacing and she’s begging him to stay but in the next verse he’s up even later and using substances to cope and she realizes how much scarier that is and that’s why she’s screaming instead. just shows the sickening fear that gets worse and worse when someone you love is struggling with mental illness

just realized that while forever winter and nothing new obviously aren’t about the same thing, the first song can be read as kind of a response to the second. first of all, in nothing new, she’s getting drunk and depressed in the middle of the night, exactly like the guy in nothing new when she calls to check on him. there’s also “how did I go from growing up to breaking down?” to “all this time I didn’t know you were breaking down.” and then there’s “too young to know it gets better” tying into “what will become of me once I’ve lost my novelty?” and lastly, in nothing new, she keeps asking if she’ll still be wanted and “I wonder if they’ll miss me once they drive me out” and in forever winter, the answer is of course she would — “I’d fall to pieces on my floor if you weren’t around” again, very clearly about different things, just interesting how the writing about her fear of her career being ended ties into the writing about her loved one going through a really hard time

overpass graffiti is just so!!!!!!!!! “there are times when I can feel your ghost just when I am almost letting you go” sums up when you know that someone has you in a chokehold and you’ll never fully be over them!!! “you were the first, full stop” he doesn’t even bother qualifying which first she was because she was ALL of them!!!! “you will never be lost on me” is him saying “I will always understand you” which is just the height of romance and literally every lyric in this song has me like 🥺 love that will never leave 🥺 there were times when I forget the lows and think the highs were all that we’d ever known 🥺 THE CARDS WERE STACKED AGAINST US BOTH 🥺🥺🥺

I’ve always loved the ambiguity in the title lyric of babe, how she’s both saying that it’s the last time she’ll ever call him on the phone and the last time she’ll ever address him as babe and I just realized that Maisie does that same thing in psycho — 1) she can’t believe that he STILL calls her psycho even after he’s got a new girlfriend and 2) she can’t believe he still calls her, period, and he’s psycho for doing it

also i love that the sequence in happiness is “past the blood and bruise / past the curses and cries / beyond the terror in the nightfall ... there is happiness” but then later in the song she says “across our great divide ... there is happiness”. it’s like she’s learning her own lesson throughout the song of not dwelling on every little thing in the breakup and instead just looking across it to the future.