Flying
Flying is Taylor's image for being lifted up, by excitement, escape, or a new romance, and it almost always gets tested by whatever pulls the speaker back down. It works a few ways across the catalogue: actual air travel (catching a flight in Come Back...Be Here, flying her admirers around the world in I Did Something Bad), the figurative lift of a new relationship (taking flight in Everything Has Changed, being flown to places I'd never been in I Knew You Were Trouble), and the version where the speaker realises the high is really a fall already underway (Red's flying through the free fall, gold rush's falling feels like flying 'til the bone crush). The image tends to pair going up with the threat or fact of coming down, and a song's argument often turns on whether she chooses to land, gets pulled down, or stays in the air.
Flying means freedom and danger in the same breath: height that is thrilling and precarious at once. It can be flight away from something (the getaway, the runner leaving), flight toward something (the lover, the dream), or the rush the speaker cannot separate from what it will cost her when she lands. It sits between two neighbouring images: the getaway car, which escapes along the ground, and heaven, which rises to something lasting. Flying is the most unsettled of the three: physical, chosen, and never able to hold its height for long.
Appears in 29 songs
“Sometimes it gets me, when crossing your jet stream”
Crossing the jet stream as the residue of two separate flights, Wendy and Peter who once flew together now fly in different directions, their paths occasionally intersecting as turbulence rather than as a shared journey. Operates within the Flying motif's image cluster (alongside Call It What You Want's 'fly like a jet stream') as the variant where flight is fragmented into divergent vectors that occasionally cross.
“And I didn't wanna come down We said it was just goodbye for now”
Flying represents the magical state of the Peter Pan fantasy, the high of childhood love and wonder. The speaker didn't want to come down from either the literal flight with Peter or the emotional high of the relationship. Coming down represents the inevitable grounding that accompanies growing up.
“Parachutes for the free fall of being younger”
The parachute represents the safety net of childhood, the friendship, the youthfulness, the enveloping protection that allows children to take risks in the free fall of growing up. It captures both the danger and the safety of being young.
“Spread my wings like a parachute I'm the albatross I swept in at the rescue”
The speaker spreads her wings, the great curved white wings of the albatross, as a parachute to catch and save the addressee. The flying imagery shifts from the destructive omen of the earlier choruses to the rescue figure, with Uncle Jerry connecting it to Baudelaire's L'Albatros where the bird is 'the prince of clouds.' The wings represent both literal flight imagery and the transformation from ill omen to saviour.
“But I, I was high in the sky With Pennsylvania under me”
The child on the swing imagines herself flying above the entire state, a dreamlike landscape where height equals freedom and the limitless possibilities of childhood. The whole state is under her, a child's sense of the world as immense and conquerable.
“I'm still on that trapeze”
The trapeze and tightrope as figures of the performer suspended between success and catastrophic failure, elevated, visible, and always at risk of falling. The hanging imagery connects to the mirror ball's own pendulous suspension on a single wire.
“Flying in a dream, stars by the pocketful”
Dream-flight as inhabited euphoria. The speaker describes herself as flying inside the dream the song's central conceit makes literal, pocketfuls of stars marking the abundance of a feeling the song refuses to qualify with doubt. The verb 'flying' carries both elevation and unreality at once.
“And my flight was awful, thanks for asking”
Literal aviation as small-talk grievance. The speaker delivers the most mundane sentence available about flying, a complaint about the journey, and the line lands as deflection: the song everywhere else describes a state of euphoric elevation, but the speaker greets the lover with cabin-air language instead. The everyday register of the line is the song's argument that the inner experience cannot quite be said.
“Flying in a dream, stars by the pocketful”
Dream-flight as inhabited euphoria. The speaker describes herself as flying inside the dream the song's central conceit makes literal, pocketfuls of stars marking the abundance of a feeling the song refuses to qualify with doubt. The verb 'flying' carries both elevation and unreality at once.
“And my flight was awful, thanks for asking”
Literal aviation as small-talk grievance. The speaker delivers the most mundane sentence available about flying, a complaint about the journey, and the line lands as deflection: the song everywhere else describes a state of euphoric elevation, but the speaker greets the lover with cabin-air language instead. The everyday register of the line is the song's argument that the inner experience cannot quite be said.
“I watch superman fly away”
Sets up the song's central conceit: the absent partner figured as Superman, flight as the marker of his departure. The speaker is the one who stays on the ground, watching the figure leave, the line cleanly stages the flight-as-abandonment shape that resurfaces across the catalogue whenever a partner's career or commitments make him unreachable.
“And I watch you fly around the world”
Turns the comic-book figure into the actual partner. The flying here is literal travel for work, but the analytical pull of the line is the speaker's position on the ground watching it happen, the posture the catalogue returns to whenever a partner's career or commitments outpace the speaker's reach.
“It was not an invitation, but I flew home anyway with so much left to say”
Flight as imperative without invitation. The speaker takes literal aircraft motion as the answer to an unspoken summons, the friend's death has not asked her to come, but she goes anyway. The verb sits between the journey and the impulse: the song stages the flight as a response, not a choice, with the leftover words functioning as the part the body's motion cannot finish.
“Once the flight had flown, with the wilt of the rose”
The completed past of the flight. The line refers to the elevation in its perfect tense, the flight has ended, and the speaker is documenting the wreckage. The paired image of the wilting rose extends the descent register: what once stood up is now coming down, and the song uses the closure of the verb 'flown' to mark the boundary the speaker has now crossed.
“He spends most of his flights getting pulled down by gravity”
Flight as the field on which depression operates. The line describes the partner's pattern in literal aviation terms, most of his flights are arrested by the downward force, and the song stages the speaker as the witness who can name the physics but cannot intervene. The verb's altitude only enters the line to make the gravity legible: the elevation is the precondition for the pulling-down.
“I wish I could fly, I'd pick you up and we'd go back in time”
Conditional flight as wished-for impossibility. The speaker names what she would do if flight were available to her: collect the loved one and reverse time. The line uses the verb's literal sense to stage the unreachable nature of both gestures, and the song's hinge from desire to impossibility turns on the recognition that flight is the kind of thing only fantasised about.
“Criticize the way you fly when you're soaring through the sky”
Flight as a state the critic refuses to let stand. The song addresses someone who picks apart another's manner of soaring, the verb 'fly' here carrying success and visibility, with the audacity of the line being the audacity of someone judging that altitude from the ground. A more bitter cousin to the ground-watching figure in Superman: here the watcher actively undermines what he watches.
“Come on baby with me, we're gonna fly away from here”
Imagined flight as escape from grief. The mother addresses her dead son with a verb the catalogue uses elsewhere for romantic ascent, here pressed into the service of a different leaving, the carrying-away that the song knows is impossible but cannot stop articulating. The line takes the flight-toward-the-lover register and turns it into flight-with-the-lost-child, with the away naming the only available direction.
“I don't like that falling feels like flying 'til the bone crush”
The song says the double meaning out loud. The line names it directly, what feels like rising is really dropping, and the speaker's point is that the feeling of height does not change where she lands. The 'bone crush' at the line's end is the bluntest the catalogue ever gets about what flying-as-falling arrives at.
“And you're the hero flying around, saving face”
Flight as theatrical performance. The speaker addresses the antagonist as the public hero, with 'flying around' staging his motion as gestural rather than substantive, the kind of altitude maintained for an audience. The line pairs the flight with 'saving face' to name what the elevation is for: the management of image rather than any actual height.
“Flew in all her Bitch Pack friends from the city”
Literal aircraft as the marker of social affluence. The speaker reports on a woman whose access to flight is taken for granted, the verb 'flew in' rendering the friends as objects she has summoned, the same way one might say flew in caviar. The line's class register is exactly the register of the dynasty the song is documenting: flight is what the rich do to assemble the people they want around them.
“Remember how I'd fly to you?”
Past-tense devotional flight. The speaker recalls a phase of crossing distance, by aircraft and by emotional commitment, to reach the loved one. The verb 'fly' lands here as both the action and its evidence, and the song's nostalgic frame turns the recall into an open question: was the flight the proof of love the speaker took it for, or just the work she was doing alone? The line carries both readings.
“So I fly 'em all around the world and I let them think they saved me”
Aviation as means of manipulation. The speaker takes literal control of the flying, the men are passengers, she is the operator, and the line reverses the more common figure in which the speaker is the one carried. The agency here is hers, and the song's argument is that the flying she does for them is itself part of what she is doing back to them.
“We were flyin', but we'd never get far”
Flight named as motion that cannot sustain itself. The pair are in literal motion, the car, the escape, but the verb 'flying' applies to them only inside the bubble of the moment. The song's argument lands on the contradiction the line states: flight was what they were doing, but the doing did not have the conditions to last. The ground was always going to catch them.
“Two paper airplanes flying, flying, flying”
Paper-airplane flight as the figure for a fragile relationship. The repetition of 'flying' staves off the descent the line's own materials (paper, the open air) have already made inevitable. The song's whole argument turns on the gap between the verb and the substance: paper does not fly for long, and the speaker is using the present continuous to hold off what comes next.
“Flew me to places I'd never been”
Literal travel by him, figurative elevation by her. The line records what the partner did for her, physically transported her to new places, and the verb sits between literal aviation and the broader register of being-shown-the-world that the song treats as both the gift of the relationship and the trap. The travel and the elevation are the same single action; the song's reckoning is whether the speaker confuses one for the other.
“The beautiful kind, making up for lost time, taking flight, making me feel like”
The lift of recognition. The speaker names the moment of being changed by another person as flight beginning, the verb's upward motion standing in for the realisation itself. The phrase isolates the action between two states, the song using its mid-line break to leave the speaker suspended at the moment of ascent.
“One last kiss, then catch your flight”
The flight as the agent of separation. The line marks the boundary of the encounter, the kiss is final because the aircraft is waiting, and the verb 'catch' renders the partner's complicity in his own departure: he is not taken, he goes to it. The literal aviation does the work the song's longing won't say outright.
“Loving him is like trying to change your mind once you're already flying through the free fall”
Flying as what falling actually feels like. The line folds the two motions together, the upward word pinned to downward physics, so the relationship becomes the moment the speaker sees that the lift and the crash are one move. The simile says it plainly: this kind of love reads as flight only because the fall has not finished yet.
“I was a flight risk with a fear of falling”
The speaker names herself in the language of flight. 'Flight risk' is the phrase for someone who cannot stay, and the 'fear of falling' is the suspicion that what looks like rising is really a fall not yet caught up with. It is the earliest the catalogue states that double meaning outright, 'fly' carrying both the lift and the drop it postpones.
“And then you're on your very first date and he's got a car and you're feeling like flying”
First-date intoxication as flight. The speaker is fifteen and the feeling lifts her, being seen by a boy with a car registers as ascent. The song's later perspective lets the line carry both the rush and the eventual recognition that the rush was readable in advance.
“Maybe I'm just a girl on a mission, but I'm ready to fly”
An early sketch of the flying figure that recurs across the catalogue, uninflected aspiration, with no fall to test it. The speaker is fifteen years old and her own direction is upward; the verb 'fly' carries her readiness without yet carrying any of the doubt or descent that later songs bring to it.
“Don't wanna fly if you're still on the ground”
Flight made conditional on the partner's position. The speaker refuses ascent that would leave him behind, the ground here is the loved one's location rather than her own defeat. An early inversion of the figure: more common across the catalogue is flight toward the lover, but here the speaker would rather forfeit altitude than gain it alone.