Drugs
Real drugs, named or shown plainly, rather than love described as a drug. Across the catalogue Taylor uses recreational and illegal substances to draw a character, set a scene, or mark a relationship coming apart. Often the habit belongs to someone else, a partner whose using is the problem: the man doing lines in Vigilante Shit, the one who tries to buy pills from a friend of a friend and then sinks into stoned oblivion in The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived, the lover whose need for drugs finally ends things in Chloe or Sam or Sophia or Marcus. Sometimes it is simply the texture of a place or a crowd, friends who smell like weed in Florida!!!, a stranger whose opinion is waved off because he was high in Bejeweled, the rush of dopamine racing through someone's brain in I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can). It sits next to three images the catalogue keeps separate: Alcohol for drinking, Smoke for cigarettes and the haze they leave, and Love as addiction for the times love itself is treated as the drug. This one is the literal substance, on the table or in the bloodstream.
Bringing in real drugs is usually a way of showing damage without spelling it out. When the habit is the other person's, it marks them as trouble and the speaker as the one left watching, unable to compete with what they would rather have. When it is the mood of a scene, it signals a world that is loose, reckless, a little out of control, the comedown never far off. The imagery clusters in the later writing, where the glamour and the wreckage of fame sit side by side, so a passing line about getting high often carries the weight of a life that has tipped past pleasure into something harder to manage. Held apart from the love-as-drug idea, it keeps that metaphor clean while giving the actual substances, and the people lost to them, a place of their own.
Appears in 6 songs
“You needed me, but you needed drugs more and I couldn't watch it happen”
Drugs are the thing that ends it, the partner needing them more than her until she can no longer watch, the substance made the rival she finally loses to.
“You tried to buy some pills from a friend of friends of mine ... sank in stoned oblivion”
Drugs sketch the man across the whole song, trying to buy pills off a friend of a friend and then sinking in public into stoned oblivion, his habit part of what makes him the smallest man she describes.
“And my friends all smell like weed or little babies”
Weed is just the smell of the company she keeps, drug use dropped in as the ordinary texture of the crowd she is running to.
“The dopamine races through his brain on a six-lane Texas highway”
His high is pictured from the inside, dopamine racing down a six-lane highway through his brain, the chemistry of getting wasted blown up into wide, reckless imagery.
“While he was doing lines and crossing all of mine”
The man is caught doing lines of cocaine, the phrase doubling as crossing the lines he should not, his drug use folded into the portrait of someone who broke every rule.
“Some guy said my aura's moonstone just 'cause he was high”
A stranger's flattering read on her is dismissed on the grounds that he was high, the drug used to wave off an opinion not worth taking seriously.