“Enchanted” by Taylor Swift, Wednesday, January 10, 2024
In December, I was among millions to receive a kiss from Taylor Swift as she thanked her Spotify listeners for being their top artist for 2023. “Doesn’t matter which era you were listening to, I’m just very grateful to be on your Spotify Wrapped,” Taylor says and then kisses the camera. I’ve talked about Swift a lot in the four years of my blog, but my appreciation for her catalog isn’t equal in the amount of love I give to every era. In fact, it was the beginning of her prolific period starting with 2008’s Fearless that the fandom wasn’t for me, yet there was something indescribably resonant with her childish songwriting. I was in college and music was readily available. Yet, somehow, even though Swift became more of a celebrity with the follow up, 2010’s Speak Now, I had little memory of the album in real time. And by 2012’s Red, I just remember hearing the hits. During this album cycle, I moved to Korea and really stopped paying attention to pop music.
THIS NIGHT IS SPARKLIN’; DON’T YOU LET IT GO. Around 2020, I started to resonate with Speak Now. Maybe it was the storytelling. Maybe it was my unadmitted love for country cliches. Songs like “Back to December” and “Sparks Fly” reminded me about what it felt like to be a young adult, experiencing what felt like unquenchable love. Emotions felt urgent back then, like if you didn’t act on them right away, you’d be banished to a life of being an old withered undesirable. And you felt like there was only one chance because you were fated to be with that one person. Of course Taylor Swift’s current songwriting reflects a disillusionment with Fearless, Speak Now, and Red. But when I started writing my blog, getting in touch with my memories of coming out, the sappy Taylor Swift songs brought me back to the time when I felt that the emotions that I had suppressed like a good Christian had to be let out at that moment.
Perhaps one of the best examples of that prefrontal cortex development in a song is “Enchanted.”
THE LINGERING QUESTION KEPT ME UP; 2 AM WHO DO YOU LOVE? Taylor Swift proposed that her third record be titled Enchanted, but Scott Borchetta, CEO of her record label, suggested that Swift name the album something more mature. As with the music video for “Bejeweled,” Swift still has a penchant for fairy tales, even in her mature writing. The song on which Taylor wanted to base her third record, though, has a very different fairy tale mood. “Bejeweled” is a song twinged on Swift’s revenge narrative and it possibly shows the singer falling out of love, as Swift broke off her six-year relationship with Joe Alwyn during the Midnights album cycle. “Enchanted,” though, is a song about falling in love with someone who is probably unattainable. I’d need to brush up on my Cosmopolitan chronology of Swift’s dating life to begin to place this song in its context. Was this fantasy before or after John Mayer? Taylor Swift has alluded that “Enchanted” was about meeting Owl City’s Adam Young. Owl City even released a reply to the song, in which Young says, “Taylor, I was enchanted to meet you, too.” It’s funny to think about if the rumors of the infatuation were true. After Owl City’s duet with Carly Rae Jepsen, “Good Time,” the electronic pop act never returned to the pop charts. And according to Young, in 2015, he hadn’t heard from Taylor Swift after he wrote a response to “Enchanted.” Maybe it was the wrong A-D-A-M? Maybe the timing was wrong after John and Jake Gillenhaal, Calvin Harris, or someone else? Or maybe part of the magic of infatuation is gone when the feeling is mutual?
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