invisible string
- SuperStar / invisible string (Eras Tour, Gelsenkirchen)
“Bold was the waitress on our three-year trip getting lunch down by the Lakes”
“You ate at my favorite spot for dinner”
“Time, wondrous time gave me the blues and then purple-pink skies”
“Teal was the color of your shirt when you were sixteen at the yogurt shop”
“Bad was the blood of the song in the cab”
fragile line / thread
“one single thread of gold tied me to you”
“I'm still on that tightrope” — mirrorball
YouTube comment by @Donnie-e6m on the mirrorball YouTube episode reads the hanging / fragile-thread register across three songs. In Invisible String the thread is a love-line: the single gold strand that has always connected the speaker to the other person, fragile in its singularity but sustaining. In mirrorball the same figure is the performer's wire: the tightrope on which the whole performance hangs. Two songs in the same album rotate the same image through different emotional registers.
the string knotted under the ribs
“I had a feeling so peculiar, this pain wouldn't be for evermore”
“My ribs get the feeling she did” — Peter
Community readers connect the rib in Peter to invisible string: both lean on Jane Eyre's image of a cord knotted under the ribs between two people. In invisible string that thread is fate's benign tie; in Peter the same anatomy registers the thread's betrayal, the goddess of timing felt, through the ribs, to have lied.
the sky's colour as mood
“Time, wondrous time gave me the blues and then purple-pink skies”
“The sky is opalite” — Opalite
A YouTube comment by @EstherWhitsett reads the sky's colour as a running barometer of mood across Taylor's writing, moving from blue through grey to purple-pink and on to opalite. invisible string's 'the blues and then purple-pink skies' marks the turn from sadness toward healing, and Opalite's iridescent sky lands as the newest shade in that catalogue, the colour the sky takes as feeling shifts again.