I Look in People's Windows
- I Look in People's Windows / Snow on the Beach (Eras Tour, Madrid)
Contains perhaps the most direct statement of the counterfactual register in Taylor's catalogue: 'I'm addicted to if-only.' The speaker peers into others' domestic lives and imagines alternative existences, a sustained meditation on roads not taken and lives unlived.
“Northbound, I got carried away as you boarded your train south, south, south, south, south, south”
“They have their friends over to drink nice wine”
“Searching faces on the street as you boarded your train”
“I attend Christmas parties from outside”
fixed on what is out of reach
“I'm addicted to the 'if only'”
“'Cause I haven't moved in years” — the lakes
Community readers fold the lakes into a longer thread about being held in place by longing. The speaker who has not moved in years sits alongside the later confession of being addicted to the "if only", both fixed by an attachment to a life just out of reach.
intrusion suffered and intrusion performed
Community readers pair the song with I Look in People's Windows as the same album's inversion: here the speaker suffers the public's intrusive appetite for the details of her ending; there she is the one peering into other people's lives. Intrusion is despised when received and performed all the same, the two songs holding the theme from opposite sides of the glass.
paper held down and paper carried off
“A feather taken by the wind”
“I'm just a paperweight in shades of greige” — The Prophecy
Community readers set the paperweight against I Look in People's Windows on the same album, where the speaker is "a feather taken by the wind": one image is dead weight pinning paper down, the other is weightlessness blown wherever the air takes it. Two ways of describing the same loss of will, too heavy to move or too light to resist, the paper either trapped under glass or gone on the breeze.