Using Metaphors to Breathe Life into Songs
As demonstrated by Taylor Swift, of course
Which sounds better for a song? “I’d be really sad if you weren’t around” or “forever winter if you go”?
The answer, in the context of songwriting, is obvious. The latter manages to be concise, poetic, and emotional, by employing a metaphor. No one thinks it would literally be winter forever if Taylor lost her friend, but we all understand how she feels.
I’ve always been a big metaphor lover, even before I became songwriter. As a kid, I wanted to be an author. I never did finish a single novel, but I started plenty, and I always made sure to liven up my prose with metaphors.
And while metaphors don’t always work in fiction, they’re the bread and butter of song lyrics. Dis Lipa isn’t literally levitating. Miley Cyrus did not crash through dry-wall as a literal wrecking ball.
Metaphors are everywhere in music of all genres. In Doechii’s hit song, denial is a river. In indie-artist Grace Power’s anxious ballad, her worries are wolves chasing her.
In Taylor Swift’s discography, metaphor is employed in practically every song. When I’m thinking (and overthinking) about some aspect of songwriting I get nerdy about, it’s always helpful to turn to her sizable catalogue.
The prevalence of metaphor is partially explained by the way they’re used. You see, not every analogy is used to do the same thing. Some songs employ metaphors to tell a story, some use them to craft vivid scenes, while some metaphors create larger-than-life characters. Most often, a metaphor is used to impart an emotion upon the listener.
To tell a compelling story
All throughout the Great War
Metaphors are a versatile tool. An analogy can confined just to one line, or take over the whole song.
For some songs, the metaphor is the driving force behind the whole thing. Using one well-thought out analogy throughout a song can breathe life into its narrative, telling a coherent compelling story.
My favorite example of this is “The Great War”.
The analogy in this song is immediately obvious: she’s comparing some kind of conflict to an all-out war.
Throughout her discography, Taylor has been known to compare relationship struggles and breakups to battles. “The battle’s in your hands now,” she sings in “The Story of Us”.
But this isn’t just a a battle, it’s the Great War.
From the get-go, the verses are stuffed with this intense imagery: “sucker-punching walls”, “tomb of silence”, “took the battle underground”.
Before we know what’s happening, we know one thing: Taylor’s fighting for her life.
She’s able to use this metaphor as both the backdrop and the driving force behind the song. It informs every line: an agreement isn’t just an agreement, it’s a “treaty”.
We start with a conflict, with tears. “I vowed not to cry anymore, if we survived the Great War”. As it escalates, the changing chorus creates a sense of devastation: “the bombs were closer” and “burning embers”.
Taylor uses this language to create an atmosphere of fear and uncertainty. We aren’t entirely sure who’s in the wrong. We don’t know if we’re fighting against or for the person she’s talking about. “You said I have to trust more freely”, but in this war-choked landscape, Taylor can’t even trust herself.
The bridge calls to mind imagery of smoke-obscured battlefields: “somewhere in the haze”. This is the breaking point of both the song and the conflict.
“Soldier down on that icy ground/looked up at me with honor and truth/broken and blue/so I called off the troops”
When the figurative smoke clears, we find ourselves on the other side of the war. Now the metaphor extends to war memorials and days of remembrance.
Throughout the song, she uses this metaphor to tell the story of a conflict that felt like nearly losing everything. She elevates it to the status of a Great War to emphasize the severity of it and the emotional toll; when it’s over, she uses the metaphor as a reminder to “never go back”.
“All that bloodshed, crimson clover/uh-huh, we’re burned for better/I vowed I would always be yours/if we survived the Great War”
To paint engrossing scenes
Driving a new Maserati down a dead end street
In English we say, “you looked cool and had a profound effect on me”. In Taylor Swift lyrics we say, “the way you move is like a full-on rainstorm, and I’m a house of cards”.
In plain English, we might say we felt giddy when our crush smiled at us. In Taylor Swift lyrics, sparks flew. In simple English we’d say, it was a great night! But to Taylor Swift? It was sparkling.
Metaphors charge phrases with new meaning, injecting them with electric energy. Would “Enchanted” be all that enchanting if the night was simple nice?
When you’re writing anything and need to describe a scene, you might unintentionally find yourself weighing your sentences down with adjectives.
You want to describe a difficult breakup, so you say fighting with him was stressful, upsetting, loud, frustrating, and pointless.
It’s a scene that should have your reader on the edge of their seat. In a song, it should conjure vivid conflict to your listener’s mind. But all those dry adjectives are just boring.
A metaphor, though, can change everything.
“Fighting with him is like trying to solve a crossword and realizing there’s no right answer”
All that struggle and fruitless conflict where no one actually wins, folded neatly into a clever analogy.
“Red” is basically just similes strung together into a song.
You could say “loving him was like falling quickly into a passionate relationship that could ultimately go nowhere”. Or you could say, “loving him was like driving a new Maserati down a dead end street”.
When you listen to “Red”, you can practically feel the wind in your hair. You can almost feel the presence of this life-changing love in the driver’s seat. You can almost hear breaks squeal as the dead end comes up too soon—and you feel the crushing disappointment as you realize this whirlwind could never last.
Metaphors are not only the most interesting way to set a scene, they tend to be the most natural way to describe something in a song. Don’t say “it was a sunny day”, say “the light of freedom on my face” (Getaway Car).
To create engaging characters
I want you to know I’m a mirrorball
Another fascinating way that Taylor Swift employs analogies is to create characters she can masquerade as for the sake of the song.
In “Love Story”, we understand that she’s not actually talking about the original Romeo and Juliet. But comparing herself and her forbidden love to them gives her an easy way to explain the situation. We understand from “you were Romeo, I was a scarlet letter”, that everyone is against the pairing and shes being villainized and a result. We know the stakes of their love story, because we know the stakes of Romeo and Juliet.
Once you know what to look for, you realize that Taylor creates these characters in countless songs: she’s the albatross, the mastermind, the anti-hero, and the archer.
These characters allow her to shapeshift and shine a light on a new side of herself, or of human nature in general.
“Mirrorball” is my favorite Taylor Swift song—ever—and has been since its 2020 release. In the “Long Pond Studio Sessions”, she introduces “Mirrorball” by talking about the people who lives their lives as if they are mirrorballs. She uses the metaphor to create this character that many people can relate to.
“I’ll get you out on the floor/shimmering beautiful/and when I break, it’s in a million pieces”
By stepping into this character, she’s able to shed some of our preconceived notions about her. In the context of THE Taylor Swift—Grammy-winning, album-reclaiming, record-breaking billionaire songwriter—it seems insane for her to have self-doubt.
But in “Mirrorball”, she recasts herself as almost a court jester, willing to hurt and make a fool of herself to keep entertaining us. She’s able to be brutally honest and say things like “I’ve never been a natural, all I do is try, try, try”.
The fun thing about songwriting is you don’t have to be yourself. Metaphors like these give you the freedom to step into someone else’s shoes, to play a character, to wear a mask.
To provoke pure emotion
When I was drowning, that’s when I could finally breathe
The main use for metaphors in music is simply to provoke an emotion.
Remember that first example, “Forever Winter”? Saying you’d be sad without someone in your life is relatable, sure. But when you say “forever winter if you go”, I can feel your desperation and fear as if it’s my own.
In songs like “Death By A Thousand Cuts” and “Down Bad”, Taylor uses metaphors to make us feel the way she feels. The breakup didn’t just painful, it’s a thousand little pains as everything reminds her of him. She doesn’t just feel abandoned, she feels like she just had an otherworldly experience only to be dumped back on plain old earth.
“Clean”, like “The Great War”, uses a metaphor as both the backdrop and the driving force. This one’s actually a two-for-one special: the analogy is both getting clean from addiction, and getting washed clean by a storm.
We experience how stuck she feels in her “wine-stained dress”, and the frustration of hanging on for months only for “the flowers that we’d grown together” to die of thirst.
The figurative storm brings chaos and upheaval, but after the drought, it also brings relief.
“The rain came pouring down/when I was drowning, that’s when I could finally breathe/and by morning, gone was any trace of you/I think I am finally clean”
Metaphors are at the heart of the old “show, don’t tell” adage. “Clean” wouldn’t hit as hard if Taylor didn’t demonstrate the struggle of breaking free through this tumultuous storm.
Bonus: all of the above?
If I’m dead to you, why are you at the wake?
Metaphor and similes are quite possibly the most commonly used poetic device in song lyrics. Taylor Swift certainly uses them extensively and masterfully.
In “The Great War”, metaphors tell a captivating story. In “Red”, they craft scenes we can visualize. The metaphors in songs like “Mirrorball” and “Anti-Hero” help us see Taylor in a whole new light. And in “Clean”, metaphor is the key to our heartstrings.
But the best songs do all of the above.
I’ve always felt that “My Tears Ricochet” is one of Taylor Swift’s very best songs. Part of my reasoning is its use of metaphor.
In “My Tears Ricochet”, the metaphor isn’t just a word or a phrase used to compare two things. It permeates the entire song: the lyrics, the backing vocals, the production itself.
“We gather here, we line up weeping in a sunlit room/and if I’m on fire, you’ll be made of ashes too”
This first verse sets the scene of a funeral. We quickly come to understand that we are not a mourner—we are the dead. We are haunting our own wake, singing of betrayal.
With this context, the backing vocals become ghostly wails or mourners’ cries. The production creates a backdrop of lament, rising and crashing underneath the last chorus’s “but the battleships will sink beneath the waves.
The raw emotion of the betrayed asking her murderer why they pretend to mourn is palpable. It’s an underrated, zoomed out song, but the anger and hurt takes on a life of its own.
She’s even playing a character in this one too: the ghost.
“You know I didn’t want to have to haunt you/but what a ghostly scene/you wear the same jewels that I gave you/as you bury me”
In the Long Pond sessions, Taylor talks about taking inspiration from messy divorces while writing this song: the unique pain of someone who knows you better than anyone now wishing to destroy you.
It’s a little “Wuthering Heights” in the end. In a clever nod to the concept of karma, she says, “look at how my tears ricochet”. In the Long Pond version she adds, “look at all of my tears turning into your tears”, making the meaning even clearer.
You can kill her, but she will haunt you.
“You had to kill me, but it killed you just the same/cursing my name, wishing I’d stayed/you turned into your worst fears”
I’ve always argued that there’s a hidden, more personal meaning to “My Tears Ricochet” as well, but I’ll have to save that for another post.
For now, I hope all this talk about metaphors gets your creative gears going! Once you see them, you can’t unsee them. And once you understand how to use them, you and your writing are unstoppable.
Anyway, thanks for letting me nerd out about Taylor Swift song lyrics again! For more examples of how she wields metaphor, dive into this playlist.