‘the last great american dynasty’, ‘The Lucky One’ and ‘Starlight’ are all magnificent examples of story telling.
I mentioned it briefly in my earlier post, but Taylor does this thing where she flawlessly grounds the stories she tells and is able to connect it with the audience despite these three songs being about a type of splendor and wealth many of us could never really know. But regardless the songs tell stories of women who deal with and in wealth and splendor. And in all three songs we know and can infer who the story is about (Bethel Kennedy for Starlight, Norma Jean and other older famous women for The Lucky one and Rebekah Harkness for TLGAD)
But she does something even cooler with these songs. She grounds the stories in reality. In Starlight she does this by telling the story from the first person
I met Bobby on the boardwalk summer of '45/Picked me up late one night out the window/We were seventeen and crazy running wild, wild
We know that the song can’t be about Taylor simply based on the fact that she wasn’t 17 in 1945, but we still recognize and become connect to the song.
But in a special move she changes her story telling for ‘The Lucky One’
’They say you bought a bunch of land somewhere/Chose the Rose Garden over Madison Square/And it took some time, but I understand it now/‘Cause now my name is up in lights/But I think you got it right
And then she does it again for ‘the last great american dynasty’
Holiday House sat quietly on that beach/Free of women with madness, their men and bad habits/And then it was bought by me/Who knows, if I never showed up, what could've been/There goes the loudest woman this town has ever seen/I had a marvelous time ruining everything
She tells these songs from a third person point of view like she is a passive observer but then she pivots and inserts herself in the song. She effectively grounds the songs to reality and alters the meaning because by inserting herself she makes the connection that she is like these women, these characters. Their lives were real and then the story becomes real again. The best thing about stories and folklore is the human ability to see themselves in the tales.
