اغنية Call Me Maybe
Wan Cabiness
The Pop Song Professor project is all about helping music lovers like you to better understand the deeper meanings of popular song lyrics so that you know what your artist is saying and can enjoy your music more.
While maybe not the most notable song on Reputation, I think "Getaway Car" is one of the better written ones. It tells a clear story and uses some excellent imagery and metaphors that really make that story come to life for listeners. The music, while certainly still pop, is more stripped down than previous tracks and offers a laid back, thoughtful wistfulness as Taylor recalls past experiences.
"Getaway Car" seems to be clearly about a relationship that ends when Taylor Swift's narrator character runs away with someone else. In the story that Taylor tells, we hear about a relationship that's not going very well. Growing tired of that, Taylor's narrator decides she's had enough and wants something else. She decides to runaway in a nonconventional way and learns the hard way that it maybe wasn't the best idea.
Taylor's character sings to a new boyfriend about how everything got started. It started out as "the best of times"--they enjoyed meeting each other--but they should not have done what they did--"the worst of crimes." She "struck a match and blew your mind," which could refer to a spark that lit between them. But she wasn't serious about the relationship, and he didn't realize that, so they kept going to their own detriment.
Mixed into all of this were "ties" and "lies" that were "black" and "white" respectively, so they should have seen them, but they were blinded by their impetuous idea to runaway together. The "shades of gray candlelight" could refer to their inability to see their mistake very well and forebodes perhaps the conclusion of the story.
The pre-chorus could be about either the old boyfriend or the new one, and I tend to think it's about the old boyfriend because she mostly refers to the new guy as "you" throughout the song and saves third person references for the old boyfriend. Unfortunately for him and the old boyfriend, their relationship "fell apart." She blames him for having "poisoned the well" and acknowledges that she was "lyin' to myself" when she thought it would work. In fact, she knew it was doomed "from the first Old Fashioned"--a cocktail usually made with whiskey. The last line of the pre-chorus is a clever play on the word "shot." Not only did they "never [have] a shot," but she paints an image of the relationship being murdered by a "gunshot in the dark"--sudden and painfully.
Switching to a second person use of "you," Swift reminds her new interest about how he drove (or was) the "getaway car" from her old relationship. They may have been going fast, but they "never get far" because their relationship is built on too weak of a foundation. She doesn't want him to act like he doesn't know why things aren't working out and wants him instead to realize that the place their relationship started--a getaway car--wasn't conducive to a long-lasting, healthy relationship.
Even the "beat of your heart" was ill-foreboding for Taylor who heard "sirens" in it. The police--reality--were chasing her down, and she couldn't ignore them anymore. That's why she was "the first to leave": "No, nothing good starts in a getaway car."
Taylor dramatizes her leaving with her new boyfriend by calling it a "prison break" and describing "the light of freedom on my face." She could see where she wanted to be but wouldn't be able to reach it because her new boyfriend wasn't "thinkin'," and she "was just drinkin'," so we can assume she wasn't thinking too much either.
Apparently, the old boyfriend doesn't take to this turn of events too kindly and begins chasing them prompting Taylor to dramatically scream, "Go, go, go!" And rather than legitimizing anyone's frustrations or fixing the solution, it turns the entire scene into "a sideshow," and because "a circus ain't a love story," Taylor seems to decide she doesn't want to be part of either relationship anymore. Both she and the new boyfriend are "sorry" they tried anything at all.
In the bridge of "Getaway Car," Taylor Swift sings about her and her new boyfriend as if they were "Bonnie and Clyde"--a historic criminal couple. But she doesn't last long in this alliance and soon "switched to the other side." When she says she "turned you in," she's probably referring to admitting who her new love interest is to her old boyfriend or perhaps she gives up on being together with the new boyfriend.
But she certainly doesn't gain something from the experience, admitting that "us traitors never win." Further dramatizing the picture she's drawn, she explains her betrayal of the new boyfriend as her jumping in a private getaway car and leaving him "in a motel bar" after taking "the money in a bag" and stealing "the keys." As far as she's concerned, that "was the last time you ever saw me." She's ready to move on and leave him behind.
The outro seems to apply to the leaving of both boyfriends. Of course, it could just be the continuation of the story as she leaves the second boyfriend, but she doesn't make it clear either way. Even still, the lyrics apply to both situations. She's unhappy with her decisions, and wishes she didn't have to deal with the consequences of these relationships, so she just leaves.
I don't have anything deeply philosophical to say about "Getaway Car," but I want to say that I truly appreciate Taylor's honesty and vulnerability here. I think those are the two chief virtues of songwriters in the 2010's, and I think they're the ones audiences most want to hear. Taylor's not afraid to bare her soul, admit her mistakes, and acknowledge the difficult situations she's put herself in through her own decisions. In a way, she's taking responsibility for her actions, and I think that's a powerful action to model for her younger listeners.
Hi! I'm a university writing center director who teaches literature classes and loves helping others to understand the deeper meanings of their favorite songs. I'm married to my beautiful wife April and love Twenty One Pilots, Mumford & Sons, Kishi Bashi, and so many others!
"Send In the Clowns" is a song written by Stephen Sondheim for the 1973 musical A Little Night Music, an adaptation of Ingmar Bergman's 1955 film Smiles of a Summer Night. It is a ballad from Act Two, in which the character Desire reflects on the ironies and disappointments of her life. Among other things, she looks back on an affair years earlier with the lawyer Fredrik, who was deeply in love with her, but whose marriage proposals she had rejected. Meeting him after so long, she realizes she is in love with him and finally ready to marry him, but now it is he who rejects her: He is in an unconsummated marriage with a much younger woman. Desire proposes marriage to rescue him from this situation, but he declines, citing his dedication to his bride. Reacting to his rejection, Desire sings this song. The song is later reprised as a coda after Fredrik's young wife runs away with his son, and Fredrik is finally free to accept Desire's offer.[1]
Sondheim wrote the song specifically for Glynis Johns, who originated the role of Desire on Broadway. The song is structured with four verses and a bridge, and uses a complex compound meter. It became Sondheim's most popular song after Frank Sinatra recorded it in 1973 and Judy Collins' version charted in 1975 and 1977. Subsequently, numerous other artists recorded the song, and it has become a standard.
I get a lot of letters over the years asking what the title means and what the song's about; I never thought it would be in any way esoteric. I wanted to use theatrical imagery in the song, because she's an actress, but it's not supposed to be a circus [...] [I]t's a theater reference meaning "if the show isn't going well, let's send in the clowns"; in other words, "let's do the jokes." I always want to know, when I'm writing a song, what the end is going to be, so "Send in the Clowns" didn't settle in until I got the notion, "Don't bother, they're here", which means that "We are the fools."[2]
As I think of it now, the song could have been called "Send in the Fools". I knew I was writing a song in which Desire is saying, "aren't we foolish" or "aren't we fools?" Well, a synonym for fools is clowns, but "Send in the Fools" doesn't have the same ring to it.[3]
Judi Dench, who performed the role of Desire in London, commented on the context of the song during an interview with Alan Titchmarsh. The play is "a dark play about people who, at the beginning, are with wrong partners and in the end it is hopefully going to become right, and she (Desire) mistimes her life in a way and realizes when she re-meets the man she had an affair with and had a child by (though he does not know that), that she loves him and he is the man she wants."[4]
Some years before the play begins, Desire was a young, attractive actress, whose passions were the theater and romance. She lived her life dramatically, flitting from man to man. Fredrik was one of her many lovers and fell deeply in love with Desire, but she declined to marry him. The play implies that when they parted Desire may have been pregnant with his child.
A few months before the play begins, Fredrik married a beautiful young woman who at 18 years old was much younger than he. In Act One, Fredrik meets Desire again, and is introduced to her daughter, a precocious adolescent suggestively named Fredrika. Fredrik explains to Desire that he is now married to a young woman he loves very much, but that she is still a virgin, continuing to refuse to have sex with him. Desire and Fredrik then make love.
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