Spirits
Spirits, ghosts and demons let Taylor treat feelings and relationships as supernatural presences, things that linger after they should be gone or need driving out. In ivy the spirit is the soul that outlasts the body, meeting the lover "where the spirit meets the bones". In The Black Dog it turns sinister, a relationship she needs a priest to "exorcise" like a demon. In my tears ricochet she becomes the haunting herself, a presence the antagonist can't shake even after her death. And in So Long London the end of the relationship is spectral rather than emotional, "the spirit was gone", something essential having quietly departed. The shared idea is that what's over isn't really gone, it stays on as a presence.
Spirits give Taylor a language for things that persist past their natural end, a love that should be finished but won't leave, a self that haunts someone who wronged her, a relationship whose essence drains away before the people do. Casting feeling as a ghost or a demon raises the stakes from psychology to the supernatural, something to be exorcised or escaped rather than simply felt. The recurring note is incomplete death, the presence that lingers in the absence.
Appears in 4 songs
“And hire a priest to come and exorcise my demons Even if I die screaming”
The demon/spirit imagery operates on multiple levels, the black dog itself is a demon spirit from folklore, and the speaker needs an exorcism to rid herself of the man/the depression/the black dog. Uncle Jerry reads the exorcism as connected to the Malleus Maleficarum tradition of torturing witches to drive out their black dog spirit.
“I'd meet you where the spirit meets the bones”
The spirit represents the soul or inner life that persists beyond death, where the spirit meets the bones is the place where the immaterial self encounters the physical remains, i.e., a grave. Uncle Jerry connects this to Miller Williams' poem 'Compassion' ('you do not know what wars are going on down where the spirit meets the bone') and to Lucinda Williams' album title, arguing the line is likely borrowed or an homage.
“The spirit was gone, we would never come to”
The death of the relationship rendered in explicitly spectral terms, not emotional withdrawal but the departure of something essential and immaterial. The spirit is what animated the love; its absence haunts the shell of what remains.
“And you can aim for my heart, go for blood But you would still miss me in your bones”
The speaker persists as a spirit presence in the antagonist's very skeleton, not merely a memory but a bodily haunting he cannot escape.