The Genius of Taylor Swift’s “’Tis the Damn Seaon”
By: Tamar Benmeir
Tags: Lyrics, Music, Taylor Swift, Analysis

I’ve been listening to Taylor Swift’s new “Evermore” with two friends, and during a discussion on “’Tis the damn season” they criticized it for not feeling “whole”. Being the over-the-top person I am, I couldn’t let this criticism of what is (as of now — I’ve only listened to half of the album) my favorite song slide. So here is my intellectual and musically technical defense of “’Tis the damn season” for anyone who is interested:

TL;DR — I think the interaction between the lyrics and the music is borderline genius in conveying the duality of the bitterness of not feeling at home at home anymore in the verses, and the sweetness of forgetting reality for a weekend in the chorus.

Let’s have a look at the verses and chorus lyrically and musically.

The verses deal with bittersweet nostalgic emotions. They’re bittersweet because it’s a place that feels like “home” but isn’t anymore and a person that used to be “home” but isn’t anymore. It’s sad to think about the man she loved continuing his life without her (“If I wanted to know who you were hanging with while I was gone…”) and the places that used to be a big part of her life before she left (“I parked my car right between the Methodist and the school that used to be ours…”). Similarly, the harmonies of the verses mimic this sentiment of never quite feeling at “home”. The song itself is in F Major, and the verse uses two mechanisms to mimic the melancholy and incompleteness of the lyrics. The first is heavy use of the parallel minor scale chord — Dm, leading to a harmony we interpret as desolate. The second is that none of the chords ever lead back to F Major properly leaving us with a sense of “incompleteness”. It sort of flirts with it by using the dominant fifth chord of the scale but ends up resolving up back to the “home” key.

The chorus on the other hand is significantly more hopeful. It aims to forget about the reality of the situation, that she no longer belongs here or with him, and pretend that everything is ok for a weekend (“You can call me babe for the weekend…”). The music mimics the sentiment of returning home by finally returning us to our “home” chord — that F Major chord — for the first two lines. But just like the narrator, her ex, and we as listeners know, that feeling isn’t meant to last. This is apparent in the lyrics when she calls it the road not taken, emphasizing the awareness that this isn’t actually the path her life is on, and can’t be right now. That understanding is mirrored in the final chord progression of the chorus — which uses the 3rd step extended chord- Am7. This chord can solve back to “home”, it can lead us back to our comfort zone of that F Major chord, but instead leads us back to the dominant 3rd C Major. Away from home, just like the narrator will need to leave home in the not too distant future. Lyrically, this chord progression happens just as she’s returning to reality after the thought of the weekend. I always thought that “And it always leads to you and my hometown” was disconnected from the rest of the chorus, but it represents the return to an uncomfortable reality away from home. Just like the chords distance us from home again.