Taylor Swift's Out of the Woods and other in-between anthems

When I was a teenager, lurching through that wonky production line of unrequited love affairs and awkward fumbles at cider-fuelled house parties, I would often end up sitting on my single bed at night, knees clutched to my chest, listening to the Smiths’ Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want. To me, an English Literature student prone to morose drama and reading way too much Larkin and F Scott Fitzgerald, it was a sort of prayer: can this one just work out? Can this actually go somewhere? “You see, the luck I’ve had, could make a good man bad,” sang Morrissey in that plaintive drawl. I would mouth the words, grimly.
I was wrenched right back to that feeling last week, when I heard Taylor Swift’s Out of the Woods, a driving electro pop paean to a fragile relationship, taken from her forthcoming album, 1989. A lot of attention has been paid to the song’s supposed connection to a fractious few months she spent with One Direction singer Harry Styles, but don’t let that distract you from its emotional weight. A beautiful, churning incantation, set delicately on that tipping point between casual fling and heartfelt romance.
Songs that truly explore this emotionally exhausting liminal zone are comparatively rare – there are plenty about unrequited lust, the first rush of love, or the pain of splitting up – but fewer talk about the moments in between, and those faltering steps toward something resembling commitment.

Into this exquisite pop sub-genre I’d put Blondie’s strident I Know But I Don’t Know, from the legendary Parallel Lines, in which Debbie Harry duets with Frank Infante, the two deadpanning through what seems to be an uncertain point in a querulous tryst: “Then I know but I don’t see/ Now I see but I don’t know/ I care but I don’t care.” There is also Stevie Nicks’ lush Outside the Rain from her debut solo album Bella Donna, which straddles both self-confidence and desperation, “Look in my eyes, touch my face; Baby there’s no one that can ever replace that – heartache. Take away that heartache.”
Lily Allen has been here too, skulking with her usual downbeat insouciance, through the twentysomething relationship quagmire on Who’d Have Known, a song about the shaky grounds of unofficial co-habitation. “Are you mine? Are you mine?” she asks, “Cos I stay here all the time.” The song ends in cautious optimism, the best you can ever hope for at this stage: “You told your friends/ They all know that we exist/ But we’re taking it slow/ Let’s just see how we go.” There’s also the Sugababes’ wilting anthem, Caught in a Moment, which is all about the moment of release, “I’m waiting on the edge. Uncut my soul.”

 

 

And there is Out of the Woods, wonderfully constructed by Swift and guitarist Jack Antonoff, where joyous memories take on the patina of nostalgic photos, before the heartbeat-like chorus, a question repeated over and over, the obsessiveness and insecurity of love in its earliest days. Are we out of the woods yet? Are we in the clear? Please, please, please let me get what I want.
At the end, there is a sense of self-awareness. The drama was somehow part of the appeal, it is consciously overblown. It sounds as if Swift is just nostalgic for that transitory phase – a stage that is fleeting, but that has to be fleeting, otherwise it would drive all involved mad. A stage that no couple forgets. It is where really great pop music lives; the very edge of happiness.
I am in my 40s now and married, but there is still something in this song that speaks to me. Because I think if you love someone, you’re always vulnerable and there is always uncertainty. So, sorry Taylor, the truth is, you’re never really out of the woods. You’re never in the clear. And that’s a good thing.