It’s still August.
It’s getting harder and harder to deny we’re reaching the end of summer but here I am denying it.
We’re in the dog days ofmer, a term I’ve never quite understood. I’ve tried to look it up but I end up getting bored and watching the trailer for Eat, Pray, Love, a movie I’ve never seen but whose commercials I will forever remember as the first time I heard the “Dog Days Are Over” by Florence + The Machine.
I feel more comfortable describing this time of year as “back to school” season. And while my rewatches of The Good Wife have me convinced I’d make a great lawyer, I’ll probably never go back to school which means I’ll spend the rest of my life chasing the high of back-to-school shopping with my mom and sisters.
Nothing quite beat the rush of going to Kohl’s and picking out new graphic tees and plaid shorts and exactly one pair of new shoes while seeing which rising pop girlie had booked the coveted Candies campaign that year. A defining fact about me is that I can’t remember where I leave my keys most days but I remember every word to “Wake Up Call,” the promotional single featured in Hayden Panettiere’s Candies campaign that now (iconically) only exists on YouTube.
Whatever you call it, it’s the end of August.
Today marks the very end of August. Which means I have exactly one more day to write about Taylor Swift’s “august” while it is technically its most relevant.
Of course, it’s relevant to me every day. I suffer from a unique and incurable disease where my mental health hinges upon listening to this specific song at least once a day… but usually more. It has held the #1 spot on my Spotify ‘On Repeat’ playlist since it came out in July 2020, as the eight song on Taylor’s surprise-released eighth album folklore.
(Stay with me — I talk a lot about Taylor Swift below. If you’re not a TS fan, don’t worry! I’ve tried to make it worth your while with many probably-too-honest stories from my life. If that’s still not enough and you’re rolling your eyes at me, I’ll catch you on the next WIP xoxo)
‘august’ has climbed up my Taylor rankings over the years, elbowing past longtime favorites like “State of Grace” and new obsessions like “The Archer” to become my #1. With every listen, and there’s been thousands at this point, I discover something new about this song. It feels like a culmination of her best tendencies: it’s the wide-eyed optimism of Fearless meets the jaded vulnerability of Reputation; the storybook lyrics of Speak Now meets the inescapable earworminess of 1989. It’s sweeping and intimate, happy and sad, a ballad and a banger. You can blast it in the car on a road trip but also cry to it in bed late at night.
So, before we look ahead to Midnights, Taylor’s just-announced tenth studio album to be released on October 21st (which you know I WILL get into) we must look back.
Before you meet me at midnight, you must first meet me behind the mall.
I present to you: the 8 best moments from Taylor Swift’s ‘august.’ I think if I call this my “magnum opus” it will justify the length of time it took me to write this, right?
Sorry and/or you’re welcome.
8. “Salt air… and the rust on your door / I never needed anything more
I couldn’t not include these opening lines. I honestly don’t even really know what salt air is but I too have never needed anything more.
Within seconds of pressing play, we’re dropped into an idyllic summer getaway. Before she can even finish the first line, I’m already hearing waves crash in the distance, I’m feeling the wind tousle my hair as I ride down the street on a retro-looking bicycle, I’m tasting a melting cone of ice cream.
I picture a coastal beach town (not unlike, say, the Outer Banks) where a couple of forbidden lovers find themselves playing house in an empty family cottage. It’s old (rust!) and small but it’s a short walk to a private beach and at least an hour from their suffocating suburb with their drab mall jobs and, for at least one of them, their real relationship.
It’s perfect, which makes it all the more devastating that it can never last.
7. “august sipped away like a bottle of wine”
Within the song’s infectious chorus, that feels somehow both new and familiar, we get the most Instagram-caption-friendly line of the song and maybe all of folklore. Transitioning from “august slipped away” into “august sipped away” on the chorus is ingenious wordplay.
Who among us hasn’t absentmindedly drank a bottle of wine and only realized it after going back for one last pour? And once you sip away the bottle, it’s done, you can’t get it back. Not to mention the killer hangover you might wake up to. Ok, you get it!!
I’m sending this on August 31st, 2022 and it’s safe to say this August really did sip away. RIP.
6. “‘Cause you were never mine… never mine / but do you remember?”
It’s no secret that Taylor remembers things all too well. Wink, nudge, etc.
And of course she does! I’ve started to write about my life more this year (evidenced by the very email you are reading, which, thank you!) and I’ve accepted that being a writer is really being a chronic rememberer.
I’ve also accepted that memory is deeply subjective and biased. I’m the protagonist of all the stories in my head. Things that can feel BIG (like keep-me-awake-in-the-middle-of-the-night, write-about-for-too-long-in-my-newsletter BIG) to me can be so tiny to other people.
“august” is a song about memory but, until this line in the outro, it’s a first-person recounting of the protagonist’s memory. By flipping it here, we’re weaponizing the memories against the other person in them. It’s a pointed question but also a desperate plea, seeking confirmation that we weren’t alone in the way we felt.
I think one of the worst things you can do after a breakup is to think about how your ex is thinking about the relationship, especially if they’re the one who ended things. Are they writing this off as some big mistake? Am I the villain in their story? But what about all the good times we had, were those all fake? But but but – do you remember?
5. “To live for the hope of it all / cancel plans just in case you’d call / and say ‘meet me behind the mall’”
To have a crush is to suffer. The experience of having a crush is one of the worst things that could possibly happen to a human being. It alters the chemistry of our brain, forcing us to say and do and feel things that feel completely out of line with our normal, rational selves. I have a Bachelors of Science from New York University (in something called “Media, Culture, and Communication” but that’s beside the point) so I say this with certainty.
Look no further than the lyrics in question. We’re canceling plans just in case he calls. Just in case!!! I want to laugh and simultaneously crawl out of my skin thinking of the times I’ve done something like this. Justifying flaking on a friend by saying something to myself like “Well I think he said last week that he might be free on Sunday so I bet if I text him casually on Sunday night acting like I also happen to be around and doing nothing he’ll want to see me.” The mind games that you play with yourself!
If you haven’t been a bad friend because of a crush… well, I simply don’t believe you.
So we cancel our plans and where do we end up? Behind the mall! We’re so hung up on someone that we can only meet in secret, decidedly unglamorous places where no one will see us.
And of course with every last-minute phone call and behind-the-mall rendezvous, we’re living for the hope of it all. The hope that he actually likes us, the hope that this time isn’t the last, and the hope that making out in the cramped backseat of his car in the mall parking lot will one day turn into actually going into the mall together. Maybe a dinner at the Cheesecake Factory or P.F Changs or, you know what, even just a soft pretzel at Auntie Annies! If only.
I think I’ve seen this film before, and I didn’t like the ending.
4. The vocal ad lib after the second chorus AKA “cause you were never mine (ahhhhhhh-AHHH)”
This is the moment when “august” becomes a banger.
For the first two verses and choruses, we have a great but fairly standard song about an ill-fated summer love. It isn’t until Taylor does this little yell that we realize there’s so much more about to happen. This is when ‘august’ gets BIG, the type of big that will inevitably fill Gillette Stadium.
To call a three-second note “transformative” is dramatic and delusional but luckily that’s exactly what I am! This is precisely when Taylor goes from telling us “I can see us lost in the memory” to actually getting lost in the memory and it launches us into the monster second half of this song which elevates the proceedings immensely. Queen of showing not telling!!!
3. “So much for summer love and saying ‘us’ / ‘cause you weren’t miiiiiiiine to lose”
So much of this song feels cinematic and the cinema in question here is a mid-aughts romantic comedy. Vocally, you can hear the drama as the line crescendos with soaring vocals on miiiiiiiine just as a swell of strings hit. And I can picture a heartbroken, teary-eyed Hilary Duff saying to Chad Michael Murray before she storms off into the rain: “so much for summer love!”
It works so well because summer love in the Justin Timberlake-ian sense or a Grease-ian sense of the phrase is a no-strings-attached fling. You have the literal interpretation of “so much for us being in love this summer” and then this one, which is almost worse, of “so much for this summer fling being just a fling, because now my heart’s broken.”
It reminds me of the summer after my senior year of high school – which I feel is universally acknowledged as a pivotal summer in one’s development, no? – when I very briefly dated a guy I met when he made my burrito at Chipotle. (I had my first and maybe only meet-cute at age 18 – what a waste!)
By “dated” I mean we really just got ice cream and hooked up in the back of his SUV in various parking garages but still. I knew it couldn’t go anywhere and we never pretended it would but I still felt devastated when summer ended and we went our separate ways. It was always going to go this way: we had met all of five times and he was moving to Europe for college (Europe! Of course I liked him!); but he was cute and he was nice to me and he wrote bad poetry on Tumblr so it was never going to be easy to just move on.
Now that I think about it, I definitely remember crying about it while in the passenger seat of my co-worker’s car as we went through a car wash.
So much for summer love, huh?
2. “Back when we were still changing for the better / wanting was enough, for me it was enough”
Am I still changing for the better? Is wanting enough?
I recently turned twenty-five, an age which, while objectively still young, subjectively feels adult in a way that I don’t love. This despite the fact that I spent most of being 24 desperately wanting to be 25 because, let’s face it, you can only be 24 for so long before it becomes excruciatingly, unbearably embarrassing. I can’t elaborate on that but you get it.
I used to think I’d have it all figured out at the big age of 25. But all I’ve figured out is that the magic of youth is thinking that there will ever be an age when you have it all figured out. You will never fully figure it out but you will learn, unfortunately, that wanting almost always isn’t enough.
I learned the hard way. I stayed in the city the summer after my freshman year and I proceeded to implode my entire friend group (a term used generously here to refer to a group of people tenuously tied together by a shared employer and a shared commitment to pretending blacking out on pinot grigio was not only normal but fun) by hooking up with one friend whom another friend had a huge crush on. I wanted it and wasn’t that enough? But I spent about a week completely in love before realizing I was in love with the secret sexy scandal of it all and actually quite bored with the guy. I then spent the rest of summer lying to my friends about hooking up with him and lying to him about liking him and, surprise surprise, it all spectacularly blew up in my face at the end of summer when it got so hot outside that everyone couldn’t help but sweat out their secrets. This is a poetic way of saying that we were caught with matching hickeys, a word I wish I was not typing. People cried and said horrible things about me and I had to accept that they were so horrible because they were true. Wanting wasn’t enough.
And yes, all that happened in August.
1. “Remember when I pulled up and said ‘get in the car’/ and then CANCEL MY PLANS JUST IN CASE YOU’D CALL”
Three minutes into “august” and we’ve already gotten anything we could have needed. We’ve gone from good to great to excellent and now it’s time to wind things down and hit the road. And then…
And then we get the best moment of the entire song. As the outro repeats, we suddenly hear the instrumentation drop out the first half of the line only to come roaring back on the second half. It sounds as if someone turns down the volume only to turn it up again, this time all the way up.
I mean, for starters, it just sounds so cool. It’s huge and cathartic and few things in life are more satisfying than screaming the lyrics out the window as you drive. On the live version recorded for the ‘long pond sessions’ you can actually hear Taylor smile when she sings this line.
It also mimics what’s happening lyrically in the song: just when you think you’ve gotten over it, the memories come flooding back. August ends and summer’s over… but then there’s that scorchingly hot day in September.
It’s not over yet. As former Swift nemesis Katy Perry once sang on her criminally underrated song “Never Really Over” – justbecauseitsoverdoesntmeanitsreallyover.
I spent many days, weeks, and months after my first breakup wondering if I’d ever get over it. I’d declare myself officially over it and then continue to think about it, cry about it, dwell on it, replay everything I decided I had done wrong, wonder if anyone will ever love me again, draft alternatively angry and pleading text messages I knew I’d never send, and get mad at myself for not being over it.
It was devastating to learn that “getting over it” doesn’t just magically happen on its own and that it takes much so much longer than you want it to.
But in time, I learned that the heat eventually does die down, seasons eventually change (East Coast privilege), and we eventually keep the memories of august at bay.
Until then, just meet me behind the mall.
THANKS FOR READING.
I had so much fun writing this and if you had even 1/1000th the amount of fun reading it I’ll be so glad.
Thank you x 10000 + see you soon XOXO