Next up in our #Midnights lyrical analysis series is...Maroon! This deep dive will focus on Taylor's use of highly sensory imagery to both convey the complexities of an intense, raw, flawed relationship and provide a mature contrast to the themes explored in the Red Album. A 🧵: 
1) Before we start the Maroon analysis, it is important to consider where we left off with Red. The album's themes are well encapsulated in the title track, in which Taylor consistently depicts love as a a wild, high-stakes, emotionally fraught, "burning" force, built to consume.
2) Love was the rush of a high-speed Maserati, culminating in a violent crashing halt on a dead-end street. Love was the brilliant blazing color of autumn leaves, followed by a sudden demise in the dead of winter. Love was an all-consuming emotional experience.
3) Taylor conveyed the intensity of this emotional experience through the use of very vivid sensory imagery. Love was "blue like I'd never known." Love was "dark gray all alone." Love came in visual "flashbacks" and screaming auditory "echoes," "spinning 'round in my head."
4) If you really think about it, isn't that what we all treasure most about Red--the rawness of her heartbreak, in picture-perfect sensory detail? Dancing round the kitchen in the refrigerator light, headlights shining through the sleepless night, the cold air, wind in her hair?
5) In "Maroon," a title we all connected to the Red album, Taylor immediately sets up a thematic parallel with her previous work by conveying that same stark sensory imagery. In the very first lyric, we are placed in her apartment, cleaning incense off of her vinyl shelf.
6) The incense sets the mood, evoking a smoky, sensual smell. The vinyl shelf enhances this mood, adding a sense of maturity and gravitas. You can feel the early morning darkness, the warmth of the creeping rays of morning light. This is Red, but older, wiser--more adult.
7) "Because we lost track of time again." This is the first of what will be many references to the two lovers being completely engrossed in one another, so lost in the intense experience of their own love that they become disoriented to time, space, and the world around them.
8) "Laughing with my feet in your lap, like you were my closest friend." Here is where the sensory imagery begins to take a departure from the swinging highs and lows of Red. There is comfort and secure attachment here. There is trust, emotional dependence, and a sense of safety.
9) This song is not just about a love that was "faster than the wind, passionate as sin." This love was deeper and closer, a love that was also an intimate friendship: someone she laughed with, someone she "trusted like a brother," who "built a fire just to keep her warm."
10) "'How'd we end up on the floor anyway?' You say. 'Your roommate's cheap-ass screw-top rose, that's how.' I see you everyday now." Taylor doubles down on the lovers' total engrossment in one another. We imagine them on the floor entwined, unaware of when or how they got there.
11) The intense, specific details continue, and we begin to see shades of red emerge as a visual theme. We can visualize the pink of the rose. We can see the screw-top of the bottle, maybe imagine them falling over in an attempt to open it, the same way they've fallen into love.
12) I think the 'roommate' is actually Taylor herself, as it is followed by the line "I see you everyday now." They are roommates. They are the closest of friends. They are everything to each other: their love is all-encompassing. Burning red, in a different, more developed way.
13) "And I chose you, the one I was dancing with in New York, no shoes." She contrasts the loud, impersonal city with the quiet intimacy of dancing alone at home, their bare feet akin to the figurative bareness of their connection. They are open, unafraid of their naked emotion.
14) "Looked up at the sky and it was:" She looks up into the sky before she goes into the cascade of red-tinged detail in the chorus, indicating that these moments and memories ARE the sky to her. They, like the relationship, are all-encompassing, more real than the sky itself.
15) And here begins the series of intense sensory descriptions, all of which are nods to the color red. They all evoke the vivid imagery of the album Red, but Taylor deliberately uses darker, more subtle shades of red to convey the more developed, complex nuances of her feelings.
16) "The burgundy on my T-shirt when you splashed your wine into me." This is a continution of the beautiful, multi-sensory imagery set up so far. We can see the burgundy stain, hear the splash, almost taste the drink, feel the wetness of the wine soak into her clothes.
17) The red wine is a mature, adult drink, the same way burgundy is a darker, deeper color. In response to this spill, we then see the scarlet blood rushing into her cheeks, feel the warmth of the hot blush creep up her face. I see this as a metaphor for a few concepts.
18) I wonder if she is figuratively representing the first "spill" of their relationship. The first 'stain' on their previously pure connection: the first intense negative emotions that they shared, the first 'heated' argument represented by the blood rushing into her cheeks.
19) It could also be a representation of the way their emotions have washed over one another. Her partner's feelings spilling over her, leading to the blood rush of her own strong emotions, coloring her whole worldview so she only saw through the red-tinged lens of their love.
20) "The mark you saw on my collarbone." Evoking yet another dark shade of red, this mark is a physical manifestation of their love and affection, continuing to fit the mature theme. This mark also foreshadows the mixture of pain and pleasure that the relationship would bring.
21) "The rust that grew between telephones." This line has many rich, beautiful layers of meaning. This is our first sign that this relationship ended. After the breakup, their once constant, close communication falls into disuse and disrepair: rusting over, a thing of the past.
22) This line is also a callback to so many vivid scenes about telephones from Red. "Called me up again just to break me like a promise," "it takes everything in me not to call you." It adds yet another piece of visual imagery to represent estrangement and loss.
23) Taking the analogy even further: rust is what forms when iron meets the air and oxidizes. Taylor brilliantly describes the clashing of their intense emotions as a corrosive chemical reaction, a conflict which eroded their intimate connection by destroying their communication.
24) Rust is also a shade of red: a burnt-out, faded version of the color. Although they no longer speak, their telephone lines of connection to each other destroyed and rusted over, they are permanently left with that rust: the faded reminders of their once-vivid relationship.
25) "The lips I used to call home, so scarlet, it was maroon." Once again, Taylor uses the scarlet color of her partner's lips to evoke yet another shade of red, yet another nuance of their relationship. This time, it is the scarlet of their physical passion for each other.
26) It is also entirely possible that she means "so scarlet it was maroon" as one continuous phrase: the relationship was so passionate and intense (scarlet) that it became maroon: a darker, more morose color. The intensity of their connection became the cause of their downfall.
27) Either way, Maroon is a perfect, encompassing symbol for the color of their relationship. Not only is it one of the best examples of a visually darker, older, more mature version of Red, but its double meaning as a verb also describes the very essence of the relationship.
28) To be marooned is to be abandoned, with no hope of escape. The loss of that intimacy has left her feeling completely isolated, left only with the faded memories of the burning red connection: the painful mark, the rusted telephone, the memory of lips she no longer calls home.
29) "When the silence came we were shaking, blind, and hazy." The 'silence' here is in stark contrast to the intense sensory imagery that was previously used to describe their love: it is a symbol for their love lost. And without that engrossing love, they too are also lost.
30) Now we see the consequences of living so purely in each other's orbit, lost to the larger world around them. Without that all-consuming love to anchor them anymore, they are left completely senseless. They are unsteady (shaking), their vision is impaired (blind and hazy).
31) "How the hell did we lose sight of us again?" Their infatuation with one another had not only blinded them to the world around them--it had blinded them to the reality of their own relationship. They were too zeroed in on their connection, losing sight of the bigger picture.
32) "Sobbing with your head in your hands, ain't that the way shit always ends?" Their relationship has unraveled, emotionally and physically. They are no longer intertwined, her feet in his lap--his head is in his own hands as he struggles with the weight of his emotion alone.
33) When she asks whether this is how things always end, I don't think she means just the sadness itself. I think she means the unraveling, using this lyrical parallel purposefully. It 'always ends' when you lose the close connection: when you emotionally isolate from each other.
34) "You were standing hollow-eyed in the hallway:" Apart from the beautiful assonance here, Taylor underscores how empty (hollow) they are without that all-absorbing love--no longer in a home they share, but in a hallway between their old life together and their new lives alone.
35) "Carnations you had thought were roses, that's us." This further red-shaded comparison works on multiple levels. First, carnations are short-lived, beautiful but temporary. Her partner had mistaken their intense, brief love for something more enduring, like a deep red rose.
36) Second, carnations specifically symbol "fascination," which is exactly what this love was. Fascinating, enthralling, sparking a passion that led them to be lost in one another. But fascination is often a "fragile little flame that can burn out," unlike enduring, true love.
37) "I feel you no matter what." She uses 'feel,' here: not 'miss,' not 'love,' not 'want.' Their love was entirely about the intense FEELING, which is exactly why she has chosen to represent it with such stunning multi-sensory imagery. She wants to convey the way the love FELT.
38) "The rubies that I gave up." Rubies, of course, are a valuable red gem, adding yet further red imagery to describe the love she has lost. But even deeper: rubies symbolize passion, vitality, and vigor, and are created in conditions of intense heat under the Earth's surface.
39) Rubies, quite aside from being yet another shade of red to add to the many complex shades of their relationship, also perfectly symbolize the nature of the love itself. And here, Taylor recognizes the value of that love, which she reveals she was the one to give up.
40) "I wake with your memory over me, that's a real fucking legacy to leave." Estranged from her old love, Taylor still finds herself consumed by their memory. The memory has power enough to hover over her, the same way the entire sky appeared maroon during the relationship.
41) The repetition of the vivid chorus emphasizes that this love continues to consume her, long after the telephones have rusted. Every memory, from the painful marks to the splashed fabric, is (borrowing from 1989) "all over me, like a wine-stained dress I can't wear anymore."
42) To conclude, Maroon is a natural continuation of Red. Maroon is a song about the peaks and perils of passionate, engrossing love. Maroon is about a love that touches you so deeply that you remember every last detail "all too well." But Maroon is also about something more.
43) Maroon is about the integral core of yourself that you share in a truly intimate emotional relationship. Maroon is about the rubies that you give up--the utterly invaluable pieces of yourself that can only be created when you truly give yourself over to loving someone deeply.
44) And lastly, Maroon is the aftermath of the crumbling of the connection that became your "sky." Maroon is the desolation of being abandoned without what used to be your guiding light. Maroon is the cold, isolated island you are lost on until it is time to finally begin again.
Links to prior #MidnightsTS analyses here!
WCS:
WCS:
https://twitter.com/tweetsricochet/status/1586755830875131906?t=mJZ8D9oy19F9PSA6JzrU8g&s=19
And The Great War:
https://twitter.com/tweetsricochet/status/1584265378204565505?t=mJZ8D9oy19F9PSA6JzrU8g&s=19
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