Angela & Uncle Jerry analyze New Year's Day, the closing track of Reputation, exploring its extended metaphor of New Year's Eve-to-New Year's Day as a conceit for the passage of life and the promissory nature of enduring love.
Key Insights
Angela & Uncle Jerry identify the entire song as a conceit — an extended metaphor using the transition from New Year's Eve to New Year's Day as metaphorical for transitions in life and relationships. Uncle Jerry reads the song as containing resolutions, with the speaker resolving the continuance of the relationship on a day traditionally associated with making resolutions. The line 'I want your midnights' is read as carrying dual meaning: wanting the partner in his depressive moments and wanting the celebratory kiss at midnight. Angela connects this to the partner's documented struggles with mental health and her use of blue imagery across the catalogue to reference him. Uncle Jerry notes the three hand squeezes as a verbal image mirrored in the refrain's three repetitions of 'Hold on to the memories,' and connects the back-of-the-taxi setting to John Donne's theme of love kept private.
Literary Analysis
Uncle Jerry frames the poem as a conceit built on the New Year's Eve/New Year's Day metaphor extended throughout. He identifies quatrain structure with approximate AABB rhyme. He discusses the imagery of glitter, candle wax, and Polaroids as both literal post-party details and metaphorical images, glitter as celebratory joy fallen to mess, candle wax as burned-out celebration, Polaroids as memory-capturing devices that prefigure the 'hold on to the memories' refrain. He connects the three hand squeezes to the threefold repetition of the refrain, reading it as a verbal enactment of the squeeze. He invokes John Donne's 'A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning' on the theme of love that need not be made public. He discusses great last lines from Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities and Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, connecting both to Taylor's catalogue, the Dickens line to Getaway Car's opening and the Hemingway line to a folklore lyric ('isn't it just so pretty to think'). He notes the song is structurally redundant as a poem but that the musical performance redeems it, particularly the overlapping of the bridge and refrain in the outro, which cannot be achieved on the page. He critiques the stacking of clichés ('toast of the town,' 'strike out and crawling home') as less deft than Taylor's usual twisted-cliché approach. Angela identifies cross-album title references, 'forevermore' pointing to evermore and 'midnights' to the Midnights album.
Concepts Explored
Literary Devices
References
Literary Quotes Referenced
'Tis a far
far better thing I do now than I have ever done before. There's a far better resting place I go to now than I have ever known before.' — Charles Dickens
A Tale of Two Cities. 'Isn't it pretty to think so?' — Ernest Hemingway
The Sun Also Rises. 'It was the best of times
it was the worst of times' — Charles Dickens
A Tale of Two Cities (referenced via Getaway Car's twist). 'Abel was I ere I saw Elba' — palindromatic line about Napoleon.
People & Figures Mentioned
Connections Across the Work
Shared themes appear across the archive
Motifs traced in this song
Recommended Reading
Nine Princes in Amber; When Harry Met Sally; The Sun Also Rises; A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning
In the Archive
In the archive:
New Year's DayView song →3 themes traced
11 motifs traced
16 literary devices explored
5 literary references noted