Scent
Scent is perfume, cologne, incense and the smell of a person or a place. It is a trace that stays on clothes, in rooms and in the air after its source has gone, and other people can pick it up without being told anything. Taylor uses it in two ways. A smell can keep someone present after they have left (the scarf in All Too Well, the burnt-out incense in Maroon). It can bring a moment back (the rain on the pavement in Last Kiss) or refuse to leave (the holidays that hang on like a perfume in 'tis the damn season). A smell can also give someone away (the perfume the speaker cannot wear in illicit affairs, the suspicion that arrives as a smell in no body, no crime). In the folklore prologue she describes a cardigan that still bears 'the scent of loss' twenty years later.
Scent is presence that outlasts the person. It can hold someone in a place after they have gone, and it can bring a memory back whole. It can also give someone away, because it tells other people what nobody has said.
Appears in 7 songs
“But you keep my old scarf from that very first week 'Cause it reminds you of innocence and it smells like me”
The scarf matters because it still carries her smell. He keeps it for that reason, so her scent is the part of her that stayed in his house after she left.
“Leave the perfume on the shelf That you picked out just for him So you leave no trace behind”
The perfume is the speaker's identity made physical through scent. Leaving it behind means she cannot be herself in the affair; she must be scentless, traceless, invisible. The personal detail of having chosen it specifically for him makes the suppression more painful.
“The holidays linger like bad perfume You can run, but only so far”
The holidays are compared to a perfume that has outstayed its welcome. The visit home hangs in the air the way a scent stays in a room, and the next line admits she can only get so far from it.
“When the morning came We were cleaning incense off your vinyl shelf”
The morning after is told through the smell of the night before. The incense has burned out but it is still in the room.
“Her husband's actin' different and it smells like infidelity”
The suspicion arrives as a smell. Nothing has been proved yet, and the song reaches for the idea of smelling that something is wrong before it lists the evidence. In illicit affairs a perfume is what would give an affair away, and here the same idea is told from outside the affair.
“And when I felt like I was an old cardigan Under someone's bed”
In the folklore prologue Taylor describes a cardigan that still bears 'the scent of loss' twenty years later. The refrain's old cardigan is read alongside that image of loss lingering on a garment.
“I do recall now, the smell of the rain Fresh on the pavement, I ran off the plane”
She remembers the night through the smell of rain on the pavement. The smell is what brings the memory back, before anything he said or did.