Music Monday: Snow on the Beach by Taylor Swift

It’s actually Sunday as I write this first Music Monday in a long time. Outside the snow falls gently, remaining white on my car but turning the pavement wet. It’s not the right conditions to remain on the ground, but winter is coming and I have a puffer coat from Torrid to try on. (It’s cute and a long style, perfect to protect my legs from bitter winter winds.)

Taylor Swift came out with a new album, “Midnights” and an upcoming tour. I listened to the album as soon as it came out, a list of songs now analyzed for their biographical elements, unlike her last two albums. She admitted they back to the biographical style and I don’t begrudge her for it. Sometimes her songs are like the personal essays I read by women writers. If a man talks about his personal life in prose, it’s brave, an exercise in vulnerability. A woman looks like a whiner or her work is not considered part of the conversation about personal essays/memoirs. Sure, there’s Joan Didion, but she is usually in the discussion as if to fulfill the ‘chick’ quota of the conversation.

Essays aside, I love Swift’s ballads. ‘Lover’ from the album of the same name, had this dreamy happiness to it. Snow on the Beach has the same one but hones in on the first moments of falling in love. It was the feeling I got from it, a story in my head of two people falling in love in a place like Gimli in the winter.

This scene feels like what I once saw on a screen
I searched “aurora borealis green”
I’ve never seen someone lit from within

Snow on the Beach, Taylor Swift

The new track now crackec my Repeat playlist on Spotify, those songs I play over and over again in my headphones. It reamins to be seen if it moves up my personal chart, but the vision of two people falling in love on a Gimli beach has the making of a short story.

Much like falling in love, I step back into writing carefully, seeing where it will take me.