patrick

I’ve always said that the world is a different place for the heartbroken. It moves on a different axis, at a different speed. Time skips backwards and forwards fleetingly. The heartbroken might go through thousands of micro-emotions a day trying to figure out how to get through it without picking up the phone to hear that old familiar voice. In the land of heartbreak, moments of strength, independence, and devil-may-care rebellion are intricately woven together with grief, paralyzing vulnerability and hopelessness. Imagining your future might always take you on a detour back to the past. And this is all to say, that the next album I’ll be releasing is my version of Red.

Musically and lyrically, Red resembled a heartbroken person. It was all over the place, a fractured mosaic of feelings that somehow all fit together in the end. Happy, free, confused, lonely, devastated, euphoric, wild, and tortured by memories past. Like trying on pieces of a new life, I went into the studio and experimented with different sounds and collaborators. And I’m not sure if it was pouring my thoughts into this album, hearing thousands of your voices sing the lyrics back to me in passionate solidarity, or if it was simply time, but something was healed along the way.

Sometimes you need to talk it over (over and over and over) for it to ever really be… over. Like your friend who calls you in the middle of the night going on and on about their ex, I just couldn’t stop writing. This will be the first time you hear all 30 songs that were meant to go on Red. And hey, one of them is even ten minutes long.

Red (Taylor’s Version) will be out November 19.

FIVE YEARS AGO ON APRIL 23, 2016  — BEYONCÉ RELEASED “LEMONADE”

If this what you truly want, I can wear her skin… over mine. Her hair, over mine. Her hands as gloves. Her teeth as confetti. Her scalp, a cap. Her sternum, my bedazzled cane. We can pose for a photograph - all three of us, immortalized. You and your perfect girl.

I don’t know when love became elusive. What I know is no one I know has it. My father’s arms around my mother’s neck. Fruit too ripe to eat. I think of lovers as trees… growing to and from one another, searching for the same light.

Why can’t you see me? Why can’t you see me? Why can’t you see me? 

Everyone else can.