I won’t make assumptions about why you switched your homeroom
Morally gray skateboarders and the co-creative process: why Taylor Swift is a master of story
Hey storytellers,
There are so many ways to engage your audience in a story. I tend to talk a lot about “words on the page” (whether virtual or paper), because that’s what I focus on in my own work.
But let’s take a little detour today and talk about song.
“Betty,” a classic guitar-and-harmonica ballad about a tortured teenage love triangle, has turned out to be one of the most-discussed songs off Taylor Swift’s latest album, folklore (which just passed one million sales this week!). Fans, music bloggers, and journalists have speculated about the identity of the song’s protagonists, scouring the lyrics for symbolism and hints of whether one character may––as in much of Swift’s body of work––be a proxy for the singer herself.
I love to listen to music podcasts, and on both the New York Times Popcast and Rolling Stone’s Music Now, discussion around the surprise album––dropped during early pandemic days-–turned to “Betty,” specifically. Hosts noted how the track shows Swift’s storytelling prowess. It’s one of the key ways she makes fans care so much about the characters who appear in her songs.
Storytelling is nothing new in music, and certainly not in country music. The genre has long had a tradition of presenting down-on-their-luck folks in situations the audience can relate to, or empathize with, or laugh about. You lost your girl and your dog? Well, damn. Let’s have a whiskey.
Swift, in particular, is a master of specificity, bringing her characters alive through the details of their day-to-day existence. She makes us care about these teens: their mistakes, their desires, their dreams.
Let’s take a look at how she sets the scene in the opening few measures.
Betty, I won’t make assumptions / about why you switched your homeroom / but I think it’s ’cause of me.
Here, we get a specific place, two specific characters (the speaker and Betty), and immediate conflict between them. We know they’re in school, and we know they’re teens. This in media res opening throws us straight into whatever’s going on between them. Right away, we want to know more.
Betty, one time I was riding on my skateboard / when I passed your house / it’s like I couldn’t breathe.
These additional details tell us more about the speaker and where they fit in this narrative world. We’re adding this texture to our understanding of them when––bam, vulnerability! It’s only the second full sentence of the song, but this character is letting us in. “It’s like I couldn’t breathe,” they say, and...well, we all know how that feels. We feel for them because they’ve opened up to us.
You heard the rumors from Inez / You can’t believe a word she says most times / but this time it was true. / The worst thing that I ever did / was what I did to you.
Upping the stakes! It’s not just conflict about homeroom. It’s a lot more complicated than that. What I love here is how Swift models subtext. The narrator doesn’t say directly what happened with Inez. But we get it. And in “getting it” without overtly being told, we become part of what Kindra Hall calls “the co-creative process” that takes place between the storyteller and their audience. The result: now we’re even more interested in finding out what happens next.
If I showed up at your party / would you have me, would you want me?
There we have it––a goal! Despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that this narrator is a *bit* of a morally gray figure, we’re invested. We know what they want, and we know the struggle they’re going to have to face to get it.
These opening lines are remarkably efficient at setting up the song with the characters, setting, conflict, and desire line that will make it all work. And because of this, we so want to know what Betty’s gonna answer.
No spoilers here. If you don’t know the ending already, you’ll just have to listen. :)
Happy storytelling,
Erin
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