Tonight I Can Write (The Saddest Lines)

“It was rare, I was there I remember it all too well”

In the Red prologue Taylor names Neruda's line "Love is so short, forgetting is so long" as one that stayed with her. Community listeners hear the whole of All Too Well as that line dramatised: a brief love set against a remembering the speaker cannot put down, the song's refrain insisting on what she still holds long after it ended. The acknowledged influence sits behind the song's governing tension between how short the love was and how long the memory of it runs.