On the first of many, may listens through Taylor Swift’s new album folklore, “seven” is the first song that stood out. It wasn’t just the most distinctly folky, fae production on the album, but the early mention of Pennsylvania that perked my ears, as someone who grew up not so very far from where Taylor did, in the suburbs of Philadelphia. Later I noticed Spotify’s artwork for the song was an image of the artist as a young girl wearing a Sea Isle City sweatshirt, the same South Jersey shore town where I spent every summer of my childhood, which solidified the song’s place in my heart.
Of all the whimsical stories and wistful remembrances on folklore, “seven” is the one most steeped in sepia-toned nostalgia. Swift’s voice is filled with longing for an age gone by, an era to which she no longer has access; even the little girl with braids remains faceless, lost to time. It’s an ode to reckless, barefooted girlhood, for imaginative little girls who were obsessed with Pirates of the Caribbean and A Little Princess. It’s a reflection on the deep, formative (and perhaps homoerotic, depending on your reading) friendships between young girls, the ones we carry with us like ghosts into adulthood.
But it’s also about, as so many Taylor Swift songs are, the gap between Taylor Swift the woman and “Taylor Swift” the product. At the end of her twenties, with endless accolades and over a decade in the music industry under her belt, she’s reflecting on who she was before becoming a brand. The Taylor Swift brand is as important as (maybe even more than) any other part of her mythos, and it’s one she had an active hand in crafting (“I’m sick and tired of having to pretend like I don’t mastermind my own business,” she admitted to Rolling Stone in 2019). It meant moving to Nashville and adopting an exaggerated country twang, downplaying those Pennsylvania roots; it meant hyping the fairytale heterosexual romantic narrative with a string of famous, good-looking boyfriends and a breadcrumb trail of “easter eggs.”
In “seven,” when Swift asks the listener to “Please, picture me… before I learned civility,” she is pleading with us to consider the girl before she became a product. Civility is years of media training, of coy and measured answers to invasive personal questions, of moments in your life becoming “narratives” (even the ones you never asked to be a part of, since 2009). She follows the line up with the assertion that she “used to scream ferociously/any time [she] wanted,” an image which, despite singing frequently about screaming at the sky and yelling off of cliffs, is hard to imagine from the self-possessed Swift.
The melancholy of “seven” is, again, that it represents a time to which Swift cannot return; it’s impossible to un-learn that civility that became so crucial to her brand. On “mirrorball,” the track preceding “seven,” she confesses to becoming a reflection for her audience, and for those around her (“Taylor Swift is an empty vessel onto which we project our own beliefs and assumptions about the broader world,” reads a popular reflection on the popstar titled “I Have Never Not Thought About Taylor Swift,” a sentiment to which I relate all too well – wink wink, nudge nudge.). As Taylor crafted her image and rose to fame, she became a cypher for white womanhood, a model to aspire to or vilify, depending on the season. “Taylor Swift” belongs as much to the audience as she does to the artist – perhaps even more so.
I’ve long wanted Taylor to acknowledge her true origin as a Pennsylvania native, and here, the state takes on a mythic importance within the canon of Swift locales. It’s the last place where she experienced the freedom to scream any time she wanted (and, in a queer reading of the text, perhaps to explore an innocent attraction to a female friend without observation). Swift’s family relocated to Nashville when she was just 14 with the explicit purpose of helping her pursue her music career; Pennsylvania was where she existed without expectation, before her life was dedicated completely to building the brand that would define her forever.
In the opening verse, Taylor sings: “I hit my peak at seven…feet,” about swinging above a creek. But the beat before she acknowledges the height suggests a double meaning, that the artist who would go on to conquer the world reached her peak at seven years old. It’s a heavy proposition for someone who confessed to feeling frozen at the age she became famous (16) in her documentary Miss Americana, who sang on Lover’s “The Archer”: “I never grow up, it’s getting so old.” At 30, Swift has released a song -- and a record -- mourning the purity and clarity of adolescence (“I knew everything when I was young”), and despite knowing she can never get it back, it seems she’s still longing for it, like Gatsby and the green light (or Peter chasing Wendy). After all, when it comes to adulthood, are there still beautiful things?
For those of us who view our childhoods through rose colored glasses, these sentiments are heartachingly relatable. For Taylor Swift, of course, it’s one of the best songs of her career.