Cars
Cars as a recurring image of vehicle-as-locus-of-agency and shared movement across Taylor's writing -- the speaker drives, rides, leaves, returns, and stages romance inside cars, trucks, and taxis from the first album through The Tortured Poets Department. The image surfaces in three distinct registers: drives as agency or chosen movement (Wildest dreams' 'drive out of the city', August's 'get in the car', Paper rings' 'I want to drive away with you', the wide early-catalogue pickup-truck romance of Tim McGraw, Mary's song, and Our song); drives as breakdown, aftermath, or return (Out of the woods' 'hit the brakes too soon', Marjorie's 'the car ride back', Ronan's 'the drive home when the blind hope turned to crying'); and cars as wealth-and-status markers used to characterise a partner or a relationship's surface (Reputation's Range Rovers and Jaguars, End game's Ghost, Vigilante shit's Benz, The Tortured Poets Department's Aston Martin). Distinct from the getaway car (vehicle of structurally-doomed escape), the train (un-authored scheduled momentum), the winding road (the path itself), and the back seat (bounded privacy-in-transit when the speaker is a passenger).
Cars carries the charge of authored mobility -- the catalogue's most flexible image for agency, shared flight, and the speaker's relation to a partner who either drives or is driven. The image's force often lies in who is at the wheel: the speaker driving (Run's 'give me the keys', Tim McGraw's pickup) reads as agency reclaimed or refused; the partner driving (You belong with me's 'driving to my house', Cornelia street's 'I say casually in the car') reads as the relationship's everyday register; the car as inherited or shared possession (the Chevy, the Jag, the Ghost) reads as the partner's character condensed into the vehicle they drive. The wealth-marker sub-register specifically uses the car-as-noun to mark the partner's surface, often with the catalogue's signature ironic distance (the lucky one's 'big black cars', cowboy like me's 'never wanted love, just a fancy car'). Where the getaway car carries doom and the back seat carries confined privacy, cars in this broad register carry the everyday possibility of going elsewhere together -- the catalogue's quietest image of freedom and the catalogue's most reliable test of whether the speaker is authoring the journey or being driven through it.
Appears in 60 songs
“Screeching tires and true love”
“I'm tellin' him to floor it through the fences”
The car represents escape and agency, flooring it through the fences is a metaphor for bursting through obstacles and social barriers. The screeching tires represent the lovers' refusal to hear the elders' objections.
“Grey overpass, Gallatin Road / In your brother's jeep”
“I'm an Aston Martin / That you steered straight into the ditch”
“Buy the car you want, buy the coat you want”
“You crashed my party and your rental car”
“Get my car door, you can think Grand Theft Auto”
“A towncar speeding, out the drive one evening”
“Just an hour 'til your car's in the driveway”
“Driving in your Benz”
“I called a taxi to take me there”
“Someone puts me in the car”
“And we drive and drive”
“This is the last time I'll drive this way again”
“I remember the drive home when the blind hope turned to crying and screaming why”
“I drive down different roads but they all lead back to you”
“Give me the keys, I'll bring the car back around”
“Get in the car”
“Your Midas touch on the Chevy door”
“What do you sing on your drive home”
“To kiss in cars and downtown bars was all we needed”
“Let's drive”
“Bad was the blood of the song in the cab”
“Pulled the car off the road to the lookout”
“I thought I saw you at the bus stop, I didn't though”
“Never wanted love, just a fancy car”
“Time flies, messy as the mud on your truck tires”
“His truck has got some brand new tires”
“I complained the whole way there The car ride back and up the stairs”
The car ride is the vehicle of mundane domestic memory, the ordinary transport to and from the swimming trip that the child complains through, not realizing these are the moments she will later wish she had savored.
“I want to drive away with you”
“He's got my heartbeat skipping down 16th Avenue / Footprints on the sidewalk / I'll drive”
“I say casually in the car”
“We can go drivin' in, on my scooter”
“Range Rovers and Jaguars”
“I'm in the Ghost like I'm whippin' a boat”
“You come and pick me up, no headlights”
“Remember when you hit the brakes too soon”
“You drove us off the road”
“In your car, windows down, I pass my street”
“Let's get out of this town, drive out of the city”
“Small talk, he drives”
“Loving him was driving a new Maserati down a dead-end street”
“And you were tossing me the car keys”
“Now it's big black cars and Riviera views”
“We walked down the block to my car and I almost brought him up”
“Call a cab, lose my number”
“Taxi cabs and busy streets”
“Watching you from the passenger side”
“You're in the car on the way to the movies”
“He puts papers in his briefcase and drives away”
“You carry me from your car up the stairs”
“I get into his car”
“There's a glow off the pavement, you walk me to the car”
“And he's got a car”
“And the white horse is gettin' in my rear-view mirror”
“I remember you drivin' to my house in the middle of the night”
“He's the song in the car / So I drive home alone”
“Just a boy in a Chevy truck”
“I hate that stupid old pickup truck you never let me drive”
“Two a.m., ridin' in your truck”
“I was ridin' shotgun with my hair undone in the front seat of his car”