Paris
Mash-ups & Live Pairings
- Begin Again / Paris (Eras Tour, Paris)
“Privacy sign on the door and on my page”
The door hung with a privacy sign as a refusal of the outside world. Sealing the threshold against scrutiny, the couple turns the closed door into the boundary that keeps their imagined city to themselves.
“I'm so in love that I might stop breathing, drew a map on your bedroom ceiling”
The bedroom ceiling as the canvas the lovers map their private world onto. Drawing an imagined Paris above them, the couple turns the room's own surfaces into the elsewhere they would rather inhabit, the bedroom sealing them inside a shared invention while the news of the world is left outside the door.
“Stumble down pretend alleyways, cheap wine, make believe it's champagne / We were somewhere else, in an alleyway, drinking champagne”
The cheap wine reframed as champagne by the pretend Paris, the drink doing the imagining the geography also does. The line stages a couple constructing the romance out of what is to hand, and the wine is both the literal drink in the alleyway and the figure for the upgrade the speaker is consciously performing on it. By the second instance the make-believe has resolved: it is champagne now, because the couple have agreed it is.
“Stumbled through pretend alleyways”
Stumbled through pretend alleyways as the speaker's invented escape geography. The line marks the relationship's whole register as imagined, the alleyways are pretend, the city is staged, the speaker is play-acting a romance somewhere other than where she is. The off-the-main-route image fits the off-the-real-world frame of the song.
cheap stand-in mistaken for the real thing
“Cheap wine, make-believe it's champagne”
“Your roommate's cheap-ass screw-top rosé, that's how” — Maroon
Community readers connect Maroon's pattern of cheap things standing in for real ones (the screw-top rosé, the vinyl masquerading as something finer, the carnations mistaken for roses) to the same move elsewhere in the catalogue. Paris makes the substitution explicit ("cheap wine, make-believe it's champagne"), and False God sanctifies it ("even if it's a false god, we'd still worship this love"). In each, an inferior thing is knowingly dressed up as the genuine article, which is exactly the retrospective verdict Maroon delivers on its own relationship.