Alcohol
Alcohol (wine, champagne, whiskey, beer, liquor, the named cocktail) as a recurring image across Taylor's writing of the relationship's social, ritual, and coping registers held in a single domestic substance. The image surfaces in overlapping uses across the catalogue. As setting and atmosphere it marks the bar, the dinner table, the bathtub, the rooftop, the after-party: the located moment where the relationship is being lived. As coping mechanism it marks the bottle the speaker reaches for when the relationship's pressure exceeds what she can hold sober: the fourth drink in her hand, the wine in the bathroom barricade, the spite and the beers. As ritual it marks the celebration, the toast, the rosé flowing with chosen family, the sacrament. As metaphor-of-quality it marks the priceless wine, the white-wine rush, the eyes-as-liquor. Distinct from the explicit addiction register that surfaces around smoke and substance recovery: the alcohol motif is most often the social substance that everyone is drinking, with the analytical point sitting in who is drinking, what they are drinking, and what state the speaker arrives at by the song's end.
Alcohol carries the doubled charge of social lubrication and emotional anaesthesia: the drink that brings people together is the same drink the speaker reaches for when she cannot face the relationship sober. The image's force often lies in the specific drink named (rosé as chosen-family conviviality; champagne as celebration or its failure; whiskey as bar-atmosphere or paternal-figure register; beer as informal early-rom setting; the named cocktail as character-disclosure shorthand) and in the verb attached (sipped, spilled, dropped, poured, didn't pour). The drink the speaker chooses, refuses, or shares typically marks the relationship's social register and her own composure within it.
Appears in 38 songs
“Dom Pérignon, you brought it”
The champagne represents both the celebratory expectations surrounding the proposal and the lexical ambiguity of 'buying into' the relationship, the expensive bottle mirrors the emotional investment that goes to waste.
“The burgundy on my t-shirt when you splashed your wine into me”
“Your roommate's cheap-ass screw-top rosé, that's how”
The cheap rosé functions as a marker of the relationship's insubstantiality, this is not a fine burgundy but a cheap screw-top, signalling that the relationship was fun but unserious and doomed from the start.
“I drink that brown liquor”
The brown liquor serves as a recurring image of masculine wealth and power, the rich man sitting in his dark room with mahogany furnishings, smoking a cigar and drinking whiskey. It conjures the Godfather's office and the world of deals done behind closed doors.
“Only liquor anoints you”
Liquor replaces sacred anointing oil, suggesting the wise men's judgment is drunk and profane rather than divinely guided. The anointing should be sacred, oil consecrating a chosen person, but instead it is merely alcohol, reducing the act of judgment to drunken foolishness. Uncle Jerry argues those who characterize the speaker's addressee as thoughtless for loving her are 'just drunk', 'anointed with liquor, not with the actual anointing fluid.'
“I prefer hiding in plain sight, my fourth drink in my hand”
The fourth drink marks the speaker's coping mechanism, she is self-medicating through alcohol while alone at night, using drinking as the vehicle for her confession to the reader.
“We meet up every Tuesday night for dinner and a glass of wine / She says, "That ain't my merlot on his mouth”
“August sipped away like a bottle of wine”
Wine represents the intoxicating, pleasurable nature of the summer romance, something savored that leaves you relaxed and pliant, but that is consumed and disappears.
“I knew it from the first Old Fashioned, we were cursed”
The Old Fashioned cocktail marks the moment of meeting and the beginning of the doomed relationship, the speaker knew from the first drink that the relationship was cursed. The alcohol carries a southern atmosphere that Uncle Jerry connects to the Bonnie and Clyde imagery.
“But I'll be cleanin' up bottles with you on New Year's Day”
The bottles are the unglamorous aftermath of celebration, cleaning them up is the ordinary, unromantic work of being present the morning after the party, which the speaker frames as the real promise of the relationship.
“Standing at the bar like something's funny, bubbly”
“Barricaded in the bathroom with a bottle of wine”
“Beer sticking to the floor, cheers chanted 'cause they said there was no chance”
“They have their friends over to drink nice wine”
“Into some bar called The Black Dog”
The pub/bar setting as the location where the ex is seen enjoying himself, a social space of drinking and socializing that contrasts with the speaker's isolated watching. Angela notes the dismissive tone: 'some bar like and she makes it sound like it's some lowly crappy place. Right. Just like a dive bar or like a gross little pub.'
“All the wine moms are still holdin' out, but fuck 'em, it's over”
Wine moms represent the judgmental suburban/small-town women who sit at home drinking wine and passing judgment on others' lives. Uncle Jerry notes the double meaning: 'wine can be spelled two different ways', both drinking wine and whining/complaining.
“It was one drink after another”
“I'm the wind in our free-flowing sails and the liquor in our cocktails”
“Stumble down pretend alleyways, cheap wine, make believe it's champagne / We were somewhere else, in an alleyway, drinking champagne”
“And drink my husband's wine”
Wine operates as both a literal domestic detail (drinking the husband's wine together as an act of transgressive intimacy) and potentially as a symbol of blood in the vampire reading. Uncle Jerry reads it in the vampire take: 'They drink the husband's wine. Wine is a symbol of blood... they killed the husband. They're drinking his blood.'
“Rosé flowing with your chosen family”
“Pouring out my heart to a stranger but I didn't pour the whiskey”
“I'm fine with my spite and my tears and my beers and my candles”
“Drunk as they watch my shattered edges glisten”
Alcohol as metaphor for the intoxicated delight critics and observers take in watching a celebrity break, drunk on schadenfreude rather than on a substance.
“Filled the pool with champagne and swam with the big names”
Champagne represents extravagant wealth and the freedom to spend it without consequence, what the town reads as wastefulness but what the speaker treats as joyful excess. The champagne-filled pool is simultaneously biographical fact and a transformed cliché.
“Drunk under a streetlight, I”
Intoxication operating across literal and figurative registers, drunk on alcohol, drunk on love, drunk on youth, with the ambiguity deliberately sustained.
“The wine is cold like the shoulder that I gave you in the street”
“We were in the backseat, drunk on something stronger than the drinks in the bar”
“And you know I love Springsteen, faded blue jeans, Tennessee whiskey”
“We'd still worship this love, I'd go to confession and we'd be back in business, got the wine for you”
“But you're taking shots at me like it's Patrón”
“I get drunk, but it's not enough”
Alcohol as a failed coping mechanism, the speaker drinks to numb the pain of the breakup but it doesn't work because the real problem (the absence of the partner) persists into the sober morning.
“I'm spilling wine in the bathtub, you kiss my face and we're both drunk”
“Everyone swimming in a champagne sea”
“You can make me a drink”
“Whiskey on ice, Sunset and Vine”
“Up on the roof with a schoolgirl crush, drinking beer out of plastic cups”
“You're still all over me like a wine-stained dress I can't wear anymore”
Wine as the agent of the stain, the substance that has permanently marked the dress/relationship. Carries the connotation of intoxication and excess alongside the visual of the ruined garment.
“I get drunk on jealousy”
Drunkenness on jealousy rather than alcohol, the speaker claims to be intoxicated by possessiveness, but the hosts read this as ironic. The music video reveals the jealousy is triggered by the lover texting someone else.