The Lakes

**the lakes** is the seventeenth track on Taylor Swift's eighth album, Folklore. It is part of "folklore: the escapism chapter" and is the only bonus track on the album.

## Lyrics

Is it romantic how all my elegies eulogize me?

I'm not cut out for all these cynical clones

These hunters with cell phones

Take me to the lakes where all the poets went to die

I don't belong, and my beloved, neither do you

Those Windermere peaks look like a perfect place to cry

I'm setting off, but not without my muse

What should be over burrowed under my skin

In heart-stopping waves of hurt

I've come too far to watch some namedropping sleaze

Tell me what are my words worth

Take me to the lakes where all the poets went to die

I don't belong, and my beloved, neither do you

Those Windermere peaks look like a perfect place to cry

I'm setting off, but not without my muse

I want auroras and sad prose

I want to watch wisteria grow right over my bare feet

'Cause I haven't moved in years

And I want you right here

A red rose grew up out of ice frozen ground

With no one around to tweet it

While I bathe in cliffside pools

With my calamitous love and insurmountable grief

Take me to the lakes where all the poets went to die

I don't belong, and my beloved, neither do you

Those Windermere peaks look like a perfect place to cry

I'm setting off, but not without my muse

No, not without you

## Commentary

* "On one of my favorite songs on [Swift’s] folklore, ‘The Lakes,’ there was this big orchestral version, and Taylor was like, ‘Eh, make it small.’ I had gotten lost in the string arrangements and all this stuff, and I took everything out. I was just like, ‘Oh, my God!’ We were not together because that record was made [remotely], but I remember being in the studio alone like, ‘Holy s--t, this is so perfect." -Jack Antonoff, in a 2021 interview with *Billboard*
* "I think “the lakes” sort of sounds like a testament of what I’ve wanted to escape from and where I saw myself escaping. We’d gone to the Lake District in England a couple years ago — In the 19th century, you had a lot of poets, like William Wordsworth and John Keats would spend a lot of time there. There was a poet district, these artists moved there were kind of heckled for it and made fun of for it as being these eccentrics and these kind of odd artists who decided that they just wanted to live there. I remember when we went, I thought, “Man, I could see this. You live in a cottage and you’ve got wisteria growing up the outside of it. Of course they escaped like that, of course they would do that.” And they had their own community of other artists who had done the same thing. In my career, since I was probably about 20, written about this sort of cottage backup plan that I have. “the lakes” is really talking a lot about relating to people who, hundreds of years ago, had the same exit plan and did it. I went to William Wordsworth’s grave, just sat there and I was like, “Wow, you went and did it, you just did it. You just went away and you kept writing, but you didn’t subscribe to the things that were killing you.” And that’s really the overarching thing that I felt when I was writing *folklore* is, I may not be able to go to the Lakes right now, or to go anywhere, but I’m going there in my head, and this escape plan is working. I thought [this song] would be the perfect way to slot the last puzzle piece in, right when people least expected it. Because “hoax” as the ending song for the record, I thought was interesting for a couple weeks, but then I wanted to actually come in with the real last song of the record, which is “the lakes”, that’s kind of the overarching theme of the whole album, of trying to escape, having something you wanna protect, trying to protect your own sanity, and saying, “Look, they did this hundreds of years ago. I’m not the first person who’s felt this way, they did this.”" -Taylor Swift, in *folklore: long pond studio sessions*

## References

1. ↑ Billboard July 2021 interview https://www.billboard.com/music/pop/jack-antonoff-producers-now-digital-cover-interview-9603256/