Analyzing Taylor Swift’s Lover Prologue, Line by Line (Full Text)
Taylor has always included an album prologue that clarifies the message of her work. Over the years, this has gone from simple “thank yous” to complete essays on the theme of each album.
Her prologues are important: they help us understand her inspirations, her reasons for making each record, and sets the tone for the album and era to come.
Symbolically, the Lover Prologue moves us away from the darkness of reputation, and into the light of the “purple pink skies” of Lover.
Here’s Taylor’s Lover Prologue: what it says, what it means, and how it informs this era of her life and career.
Context: From reputation to Lover
Of all the transformations Taylor has made over the years, the metamorphosis from reputation to Lover was the most drastic, visually and thematically. While reputation was dark and angry, Lover is bright and cheerful.
Personally and in her career, Taylor was in a very different place while making these two opposite albums. In between releases, she left Big Machine records, but they still owned her first six albums.
Lover was the first album she would own outright, in a deal with her new label Republic Records.
The masters heist had just happened in June of 2019, and Lover was released two months later, in August. This means that the album was likely already finished when Scooter Braun acquired her back catalog.
But symbolically, Lover still represented freedom from the “chains” of her old label, which plays out in the album’s imagery, metaphors, and theme.
See my brief timeline of Taylor’s career here if you need a quick refresher.
The Album Booklet: The Lover Journals
Included in special editions of the album were four different “Lover journals,” each containing copies of selected pages of Taylor’s old diaries.
In her handwriting, we get to read her inner thoughts over the years, and – as we’ll explore below – her diaries were the central inspiration for the album.
Taylor Swift’s Lover Prologue: Full Text (2019)
“Foreword
When I found old diaries from my childhood and my teens, they were covered in dust. I’m not just saying that for poetic effect, they were truly dusty with pictures drawn of first day of school outfits and inspirational quotes I used to retrace over and over to get me through doubtful moments. I’d practice my autograph and tape my guitar picks to the pages. In the entries, I daydreamed on paper and mused about who might ask who to the dance or how nervous I was saying the national anthem at the local baseball game. I frequently and drastically changed my opinions on love, friends, confidence and trust. I vented, described memories in detail, jotted down new song ideas and questioned why I would ever try to shoot for a career I had such a small chance of ever attaining.
But what shocked me the most was how often I wrote down the things I loved. Writing a new song, riding in the car with my mom, the purple-pink skies of the soccer field on the walk home, the one night in middle school when none of my friends were fighting, the dazzle of opal necklaces I couldn’t afford gleaming from a department store jewelry case. I wrote about tiny details in my life in these diaries from a bygone age with such… wonderment. Intrigue. Romance. I noticed things and decided they were romantic, and so they were.
In life, we grow up and we encounter the nuanced complexities of trying to figure out who to be, how to act, or how to be happy. Like invisible smoke in the room, we wonder what kind of anxiety pushes you forward and what kind ruins your ability to find joy in your life. We constantly question our choices, our surroundings, and we beat ourselves up for our mistakes. All the while, we crave romance. We long for those rare, enchanting moments when things just fall into place. Above all else, we really, really want our lives to be filled with love.
I’ve decided that in this life, I want to be defined by the things I love – not the things I hate, the things I’m afraid of, or the things that haunt me in the middle of the night. Those things may be struggles, but they’re not my identity. I wish the same for you. May your struggles become inaudible background noise behind the loud, clear voices of those who love and appreciate you. Turn those voices up in the mix in your head. May you take notice of the things in your life that are nice and make you feel safe and maybe even find wonderment in them. May you write down your feelings and reflect on them years later, only to learn all the trials and the tribulations you thought might kill you… didn’t. I hope that someday you forget the pain ever existed. I hope that if there is a lover in your life, it’s someone who deserves you. If that’s the case, I hope you treat them with care.
This album is a love letter to love itself- all the captivating, spellbinding, maddening, devastating red, blue, gray, golden aspects of it (that’s why there are so many songs).
In honor of fever dreams, bad boys, confessions of love on a drunken night out, Christmas lights still hanging in January, guitar string scars on my hands, false gods and blind faith, memories of jumping into an icy outdoor pool, creaks in floorboards and ultraviolet morning light, finally finding a friend, and opening the curtains to see the clearest, brightest daylight after the darkest night.
We are what we love.
This is Lover.
Taylor”
-Taylor Swift, Lover Prologue
🩷 Are you The Man? Try My Lover Lyrics Quiz & Find Out! 🩷
On the Theme of Lover
“This album is a love letter to love itself- all the captivating, spellbinding, maddening, devastating red, blue, gray, golden aspects of it (that’s why there are so many songs).”
Taylor says that the central theme of the album is love itself, and all the secondary emotions that come with it. But what does this really mean?
It means that Lover is a concept album, of sorts. Combined with her inclusion of journal entries that all describe things she loves, each song on Lover is an ode to the loves of Taylor’s life…sort of.
What are the things she loves? Some are obvious: romantic lovers and butterflies in Lover, The Archer, Paper Rings, Cornelia Street, London Boy, and Daylight. Her mom in Soon You’ll Get Better. Moving on and moving up in I Forgot That You Existed.
But what is there to love in The Man, Miss Americana and The Heartbreak Prince, and You Need to Calm Down? Possibly camaraderie, the journey to success, or the necessary struggle, which is also part of love when you really dissect it.
But I’d argue the most central “love” of the album is herself: her tenacity, all she’s accomplished despite the odds, her ability to maintain trust in love despite her past heartbreaks, and her ever-attentive, ever-observant, and ever-creative nature.
Clawing her way out of the metaphoric “grave” in reputation, Lover narrates her climb back to the top, and celebrates all she’s gained, while reflecting on hard lessons.
On The “Why” of Lover
“Above all else, we really, really want our lives to be filled with love….
We are what we love.”
-Taylor Swift, Lover Prologue
Taylor expands on the central theme of the album by adding “we are what we love.” So if Taylor is what she loves – the subject of every song on the album – what is she?
Like every song in her catalog, she’s never just one thing. She contains multitudes. As she tells us in Me!, she’s “like a rainbow with all of the colors.”
She’s resilient (I Forgot That You Existed), she’s fallible and full of self-doubt (False God, The Archer), she’s passionate (Lover, Cruel Summer), and she stands up for what she believes in (Miss Americana, You Need to Calm Down, and The Man).
I believe her intent with this album was to make her fans appreciate the love in their lives, by exploring what she really loves. But this is also the central motivation for the album: asking herself what is really important to her.
Lover takes a step back after being mired in anger and revenge in reputation, assesses the situation, and decides where she wants to go from here. She decides she wants to love, be loved, and share love, which is a sunny – if difficult – path to follow.
On Romance
“I wrote about tiny details in my life in these diaries from a bygone age with such… wonderment. Intrigue. Romance. I noticed things and decided they were romantic, and so they were.”
-Taylor Swift, Lover Prologue
We can see that romance for Taylor isn’t only contained within her love life. She also sees romance in the everyday world around her, in “Writing a new song, riding in the car with my mom, the purple-pink skies of the soccer field on the walk home.”
What she’s doing here is playing with the dual meanings of romance itself. In the first definition, it’s the excitement of an intimate relationship. But the second definition is the excitement and mystery of a thing or event, like the “romance” of riding a train at night.
She’s not just describing romantic longing in the album; she’s describing the romance of experiencing the world around her. This plays out in the album’s imagery, which takes center stage in many of the tracks.
While the larger themes are love and the romance of being alive, the allure of many of the best tracks lies in Taylor’s use of imagery. From the creaks in the floor of Cornelia Street, to the paper cuts of Death by a Thousand Cuts, she’s describing the small moments with “wonderment” and “intrigue,” painting romantic scenes of even the most painful losses.
On Her Legacy
“I’ve decided that in this life, I want to be defined by the things I love – not the things I hate, the things I’m afraid of, or the things that haunt me in the middle of the night. Those things may be struggles, but they’re not my identity.”
-Taylor Swift, Lover Prologue
Taylor proclaims that she doesn’t want her identity defined by her struggles. Coming into Lover from reputation, we can see this shift visually, moving from black and white to rainbows of color.
Thematically, Lover shifts the focus from revenge – which was such a large part of reputation – to acceptance and love. She doesn’t want to be remembered as a vengeful and bitter artist: she doesn’t want to be forever painted as the girl who disappeared.
She’d rather live in the light, play with color both literally and metaphorically, and explore happier themes. But not all of Lover is bright and happy. There are still struggles and hardships within the lines, because as much as she’d like to be remembered as loving and joyful, she’s still living a real, complex life.
On Regret & Rumination
“In life, we grow up and we encounter the nuanced complexities of trying to figure out who to be, how to act, or how to be happy. Like invisible smoke in the room, we wonder what kind of anxiety pushes you forward and what kind ruins your ability to find joy in your life. We constantly question our choices, our surroundings, and we beat ourselves up for our mistakes.”
-Taylor Swift, Lover Prologue
We can’t have love without struggle, and that’s the central conflict of life (and of Lover). Now that the storm of reputation has passed, and she has her career back on track, Taylor focuses on how to maintain course.
She admits that she doesn’t have all the answers. But she is questioning how much of the external noise to listen to, and how much of it she just needs to ignore so she doesn’t lose the “ability to find joy.”
She’ll always question her choices, but – at least for now – she’s able to see the light, even in the darkest night.
On Growth & Change
“I frequently and drastically changed my opinions on love, friends, confidence and trust. I vented, described memories in detail, jotted down new song ideas and questioned why I would ever try to shoot for a career I had such a small chance of ever attaining.”
-Taylor Swift, Lover Prologue
Taylor admits that growth – and her growth as an artist – was never a straight trajectory. There was backtracking, ruminating, changes of plans and changes of opinion. This is reflected in her constant reinvention of herself, and of her music.
Though she may not be as mercurial in her Lover era as she was in her teenage years, we can see these highs and lows reflected in the album itself. In the title track, she asks to spend her life with her lover. But in Death by a Thousand Cuts, being in love is akin to torture.
In I Forgot That You Existed, she’s moved on and conquered her (external) demons. But in The Man, she asks if this conflict would have even happened if she weren’t female.
She’s still changing all the time, fluctuating between confident and contemplative, romantic to ruminating, and confused to content. Isn’t that exactly what being human – and being in love – is like?
To Her Reader
“May your struggles become inaudible background noise behind the loud, clear voices of those who love and appreciate you. Turn those voices up in the mix in your head. May you take notice of the things in your life that are nice and make you feel safe and maybe even find wonderment in them.”
-Taylor Swift, Lover Prologue
Taylor almost always includes a “dear reader” message in her prologues that ties into the theme of the album. In the Speak Now Prologue, she said “I don’t think you should wait. I think you should speak now,” encouraging her fans to speak up.
In the reputation prologue, she said: “Let me say it again, louder for those in the back…We think we know someone, but the truth is that we only know the version of them they have chosen to show us.”
But here, she steers away from that forceful tone, gently encouraging her readers to look on the bright side. Pay attention to the “clear voices of those who love and appreciate you,” she says, instead of getting stuck in your struggles.
Symbolically, Taylor is taking her own advice moving from reputation to Lover. reputation listened to the hateful voices, and she got crushed under the weight of the noise.
But Lover quiets those voices into “inaudible background noise,” and notices “the things in your life that are nice and make you feel safe.” She hopes her reader can do the same.
🩷 Are you The Man? Try My Lover Lyrics Quiz & Find Out! 🩷
On the Imagery of the Album
“In honor of fever dreams, bad boys, confessions of love on a drunken night out, Christmas lights still hanging in January, guitar string scars on my hands, false gods and blind faith, memories of jumping into an icy outdoor pool, creaks in floorboards and ultraviolet morning light, finally finding a friend, and opening the curtains to see the clearest, brightest daylight after the darkest night.”
-Taylor Swift, Lover Prologue
Taylor runs through a list of the most potent imagery on the album, taking us line by line through some of her favorite lyrical paintings.
“Fever dreams” and “bad boys” references Cruel Summer. “Guitar string scars” references the title track. “False gods” and “blind faith” is, of course, referencing False God.
But it’s her intro to this imagery that’s the most important: “in honor of.” Thematically and symbolically, the imagery of Lover reflects the newfound freedom of noticing romance in the everyday world.
Gone are the cages of reputation, and taking their place are purple-pink skies and Christmas lights. With Lover. She’s no longer bogged down in the darkness. She honors her past – even the dark, painful parts – and steps into the light.
“Like a rainbow with all of the colors,” she accepts the full spectrum of the human condition, and chooses to focus on the bright tones, instead of the pitch black night.
Lover Prologue: Final Thoughts
If I could condense the message of Lover into one sentence, it would be: ‘try to stay positive, even when life feels stacked against you’. This is not just an album about things Taylor loves: it’s about the things she has to endure, while trying to keep a sunny disposition.
I would also say, ‘don’t read the Lover prologue – or try to understand the album – unless you understand the reputation era.’ Context is just as important as content.
Taylor’s explosion of rainbows and glitter hearts doesn’t make sense, until you realize that she’s re-emerging from a place of bars, cages, and pitch black ink. This is an album that’s “trying to figure out who to be, how to act, or how to be happy.”
She’s not totally there yet, but she’s trying, and she encourages us to keep trying.
🩷 Are you The Man? Try My Lover Lyrics Quiz & Find Out! 🩷
More Album Prologues
- Debut Album Prologue
- Fearless & Fearless TV Prologues
- Speak Now & Speak Now TV Prologues
- Red & Red TV Prologues
- 1989 & 1989 TV Prologues
- reputation Prologue
Lyrical Analysis of Every Song on Lover
