This Love
- This Love / Call It What You Want (Eras Tour, Singapore)
- This Love / Ours (Eras Tour, Dublin)
- The Prophecy / This Love (Eras Tour, Indianapolis)
“Your smile, my ghost, I fell to my knees”
“This love is alive back from the dead”
Love itself performs the resurrection. Unlike the defiant LWYMMD usage, this instance is triumphant and tender, the return from the dead is redemptive rather than combative. Connects to the 1989-era treatment of love as elemental and beyond ordinary mortality.
“Clear blue water, high tide came and brought you in”
“Skies grew darker, currents swept you out again”
“Clear blue water, high tide came and brought you in”
“These hands had to let it go free and this love came back to me”
water as the lover's coming and going
“Clear blue water, high tide came and brought you in ... Skies grew darker, currents swept you out again”
“Rain came pouring down / When I was drowning, that's when I could finally breathe” — Clean
Picked up by community readers as a sister song through their shared water imagery. This Love tracks the relationship as a tide that brings the lover in and sweeps him out again, the ebb and flow of a back-and-forth; Clean turns the same water into the flood that finally carries him away for good, the drowning that lets her breathe.