Last week time shifted again. It was like slow motion. It was not the second week of post-daylight-savings in Europe, nor was it the fourth week of post-daylight-savings in the U.S., nor still was it the start of the sixteenth month of 2020. Instead, we were transported back to 2008, to the golden days of Love Story playing on the radio and randomly capitalized letters on CD inserts. (Remember the radio? and CD’s? I don’t either.)
It is amusing to remember that for at least a year of my life I thought I was going to be a comparative literature major. It was surely a twist of fate that I was pulled into an actual language department instead and got to meet the most inspiring professors without any of the comp lit theory that I’m sure I would have disliked. Nevertheless, today I am going to do a little bit of comparison of literature, so to speak, with my favorite of the six songs that Taylor just released “from the vault:” That’s When.
Even on a superficial level I enjoy this song better than its peers because Taylor maintains a consistent first-person point of view. Her narrator is always “I,” and her boyfriend is always “you,” except when it makes sense for these pronouns to be reversed in Keith Urban’s verse. This seems like a trivial point, but the uses of “he” and “you” are tossed around without abandon in other comparable songs. In Mr. Perfectly Fine, for example, Taylor sings, “He goes about his day/Forgets he even heard my name/Well I thought you might be different than the rest/I guess you’re all the same.” I think this is a pretty clever approach to breaking the fourth wall, as when she switches to “he” the listener becomes an intimate friend lending an ear to her romantic troubles, and when she switches to “you” she is able to more effectively accuse and confront her ex. However, I think that the personal and vivid nature of Taylor’s language on its own is already sufficient to draw us into her stories as sympathetic friends, so I do prefer her songs with pronoun consistency.
The last line of the first and second verses is, “When I can I-I-I come back?” This is significant not on its own but for its foreshadowing of Taylor’s use of the repeating-I motif after her migration to pop, especially in songs like How You Get the Girl (1989) and in cardigan (folklore). In a “Philology and Folklore” zoom seminar that I lurked on last winter, the idea was floated that the stylized “I” might have been inserted for rhetorical meaning, specifically in reference to cardigan. Although I could still see the argument that putting “I” in the spotlight signals the narrators’ willingness to be vulnerable, the fact that she has been using these wavering I’s for over a decade, even before she matured as a songwriter, suggests that it is most probably just a musical flourish that she enjoys, and a convenient one, too, since “I” is a nice single syllable and can be indistinguishable from the filler syllable “ah” if pronounced the right way, thus blending her melody with instrumentation.
Today I’m thinking about That’s When in the context of the medieval story of the young person who is led astray from the church and then eventually returns and repents and receives unconditional forgiveness. The forgiveness is normally deeply personal, delivered through some miraculous apparition of Jesus (as groom to a young woman reaffirming her vows) or of the Virgin (as bride to a young man reaffirming his vows, or as nurturer to people of any age and gender). I am particularly going to look at three entries in the Cantigas de Santa Maria, a thirteenth-century codex commissioned by Alfonso el Sabio.
In the 7th cantiga, an abbess is led astray by the devil and ends up pregnant. The local bishop comes to condemn her, but she falls into feverish prayer, promising herself once more to the Virgin, and as she briefly faints the Virgin miraculously removes the baby from her womb, and after doing a pelvic exam on her (yikes?), the bishop confirms that she is without child and that she is saved.
In the 42nd cantiga, a young man rather carelessly promises himself to the Virgin, just because he needed a place to put his promise ring while he played ball with his buddies. The statue of the Virgin was in fact listening and curls up her finger, making the man pretty scared that this was a promise he couldn’t get out of. He marries his girlfriend anyways, but on their wedding night the Virgin visits him in a dream and curses him out, so he is scared into righteousness and runs away from his bride and spends the rest of his life as a hermit monk.
In the 59th cantiga, a young nun is infected by the devil and thus wants to leave the monastery to run away with a handsome man. The morning that she wants to make her quiet exit, she kneels in front of the Virgin’s image and asked her blessing. The image begins to shed real tears, and as she starts to make her way out, the figure of Jesus on his cross comes to life and strikes her unconscious on the church floor. When she wakes, she comes to her senses and tells her sisters of the miracle that brought her back to the Virgin’s keep.
These miracles follow a nice predictable storyline: young people have intentions to be true to their faith, and the devil tempts them with lust, but before they can completely enter into a secular marriage, a miracle draws them back to their rightful place as cloistered men and women. Taylor’s That’s When fits this mold exactly. The first and second verses tell the same story from both sides, of the young and immature Taylor character who didn’t realize the value of her relationship with the Keith character and left for some time and space. She quickly realizes that she has made a huge mistake and comes begging for forgiveness, which the Keith character grants freely. In the end the whole episode is nothing more than a testament to the strength of their relationship and the trueness of their love.
In the first verse, the Taylor character sings
You watched me go
And I knew my
Words were hard to hear
And harder to ever take back
It is natural to think back with regret and wish you could take something back, but this “knew” is set at the moment she walks away. Why was she already experiencing regret in the moment? It is because of her sense of morality and piety, awake even in the moment of sin.
In the second verse, the Keith character sings
I said, “I know”
When you said, “I did you wrong
Made mistakes
Put your through all of this”
What are these “mistakes” that the Taylor character admitted to? The song doesn’t feel the need to explain, just as how these disgraced monastic folks’ sins don’t need any explanation (it was all caused by the devil, obviously).
The chorus is the most magnificent part of this song, the purest declaration of devotion. It goes like this:
That’s when
When I wake up in the morning
That’s when
When it’s sunny or storming
Laughing
When I’m crying
And that’s when
I’ll be waiting at the front gate
That’s when
When I see your face
I’ll let you in
And baby, that’s when
Taylor has made it almost too easy for me by using “gate” instead of “door” or “porch,” as she has in her other songs, such as Stay Beautiful (Taylor Swift) and betty (folklore); Jesus’s and the Virgin’s acts of pardoning these young people, after all, open up once again the possibility of salvation and heaven for them. But the illogical ways in which she phrases these sentences also hints at her message. Specifically, the line “when it’s sunny or storming,” which is already intentionally tautological (she thought of him both when it was sunny and when it was storming), becomes “it was sunny or storming” in the post-bridge chorus, which suggests rather that the material conditions were not all-encompassing but entirely irrelevant (was it sunny or storming when she thought of him? she was so consumed by her sense of devotion that she paid the weather no mind). Obviously we know that another place that rejected worldly circumstances was the medieval monastic institution. Another curiosity of the chorus is that, in its second iteration, right after Keith’s verse, Keith sings alone for a few lines, but Taylor takes over the melody from “And that’s when I’ll be waiting at the front gate.” Why does she do this, when it’s literally Keith’s character who’s still speaking? The only explanation is that the end of the chorus is a promise that goes both ways. The Virgin will accept the Taylor character back into the convent, but She can only do so when the Taylor character has repelled the devil through prayer and made room for the Virgin within herself.
Am I just grabbing at the fray? Maybe, but might I point out that Bye Bye Baby also has a suspiciously medieval lyric in “you took me home but you just couldn’t keep me” / “you took me home/I thought you were gonna keep me.” You can’t tell me that the Taylor character here wasn’t just betrayed by a handsome young nobleman who promised marriage and then deserted her at the bottom of the social heap when he’d already had sex with her.
This week I simply sautéed some peppers that are super common in this part of Spain. Keeping true to the majority of Spanish food, I added no spices whatsoever. They are basically bell peppers but more flavorful, but they are tiny enough to be “roasted” on a normal pan, rather than directly on a gas burner, which I don’t have anyways.
Keith-As-Mother-Mary Pimientos de Padrón
Ingredients
- a pat of vegan butter
- 1 small bag pimientos de padrón
- sea salt
Directions
- Melt the vegan butter in a frying pan on high heat.
- Add washed and dried pimientos de padrón to the pan, and turn the heat down to medium.
- After 5 to 7 minutes, check if the bottom of the peppers look nicely roasted. If so, flip them over.
- Wait another 5 to 7 minutes, and flip again.
- When you are satisfied with how blackened they look (perhaps a couple more minutes), generously sprinkle on sea salt.
- Serve immediately. (They taste a little gross when they’re cold so seriously eat them right away!)
Racións 
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