Labyrinth

Part One: Distrust and Despair

‘Labyrinth’ is the 10th track of Midnights, the 10th studio album by Taylor Swift. ‘Labyrinth’ is often interpreted as a song that talks about the experience of falling in love with someone right after going through a breakup.

The structure of the song is rather simple: from a lyrical standpoint, Taylor establishes a parity between feelings of loss from a failed relationship and feelings of distrust for falling in love with someone so quickly afterward. Taylor bounces back and forth between these feelings, such as in the lines

‘I’ll be getting over you my whole life’
‘Lost in the labyrinth of my mind’

where she expresses that she has not fully recovered from the heartbreak and that she still grieves her past relationship to some degree. Taylor finds herself confused in this situation, ‘lost’ in her own mind by having feelings for someone while simultaneously feeling unable to move on. Taylor finds herself skeptical of her feelings toward someone new:

‘You know how scared I am of elevators,
never trust it if it rises fast, it can’t last’

In these lines not only does she express distrust, but also gives an insight into how Taylor views this new love interest, confessing a predisposition of not trusting this new relationship because it is going too fast.

Throughout the song, Taylor continues to express both these feelings of despair for her past relationship and distrust for what’s to come in her new love interest. However, the chorus of the song poses a very interesting resolution to this parity of feelings. In the chorus, Taylor sings:

‘Uh oh, I’m falling in love

Oh no, I’m falling in love again
Oh, I’m falling in love‘

These lines convey a very powerful realization. In the first line, Taylor uses the phrase ‘Uh oh’, a phrase commonly used by people when they’ve realized they have made a mistake or have done something wrong. In this line, Taylor expresses her view of this new love as something wrong – a mistake, an error that should not have happened.

The second line uses the phrase ‘Oh no’, a phrase that Taylor has carefully chosen to convey the denial that she is falling in love once again.

Finally, the third line uses a short version of the previous phrase, with just an ‘Oh’ before repeating to herself again that she is falling in love. This third phrase can be interpreted as Taylor accepting or fully realizing she has fallen in love.

In some way, Taylor has gone through a simplified version of the famous ‘five stages of grief’. One could argue she has gone through ‘denial and ‘acceptance’ in the second and third phrases respectively, while the first phrase could be interpreted as some sort of ‘anger’, realizing she has made what she perceives as a mistake.

In the end, the chorus serves as a moment of resolution to her feelings of distrust and despair, paving the way to accepting her newfound feelings for someone else. This chorus repeats itself over and over in the last moments of the song through the use of a vocoder very similar to the one heard in ‘Dear Reader’, the last song of the same album this song resides in.

While the vocoders themselves do not reveal any new information, their similarity to the ones heard in ‘Dear Reader’ sets up an interesting relationship between the songs and an additional interpretation to be made.

Part Two: Two Sides of the Same Coin

Understanding ‘Dear Reader’ is crucial to understanding the relationship between these two songs. For this same reason, I strongly suggest the reader of this interpretation dive into my previous interpretation of ‘Dear Reader’ to fully understand the context. Nevertheless, I shall quickly summarize its main points for this particular interpretation.

In ‘Dear Reader’ Taylor attempts to share advice with the listener, who she refers to as the ‘dear reader’ throughout the song. However, Taylor quickly contradicts herself as she advises the listener to not trust her words, for her immense feelings of loss, loneliness, and heartbreak have led her to feel self-doubt and distrust for herself.

At the end of the song, Taylor urges the listener to find another role model, as she finds herself unable to guide others in her current emotional state.

With that being said, let’s start things off by analyzing the structure of both ‘Dear Reader’ and ‘Labyrinth’. First, both songs have a very similar structure, in the sense that both have two verses, two choruses, and an outro with vocoders.

Both songs deal with feelings of heartbreak and distrust but with some differences. In ‘Dear Reader’ Taylor expresses distrust for herself, whereas in ‘Labyrinth’ Taylor expresses distrust for her new relationship. Additionally, both songs have an emotional resolution for Taylor: in the former, Taylor finds herself unable to find relief in her emotional turmoil and ends the song urging the listener not to trust her and not to look up to her anymore. In the latter, Taylor finds a resolution and embraces her feelings of newfound love.

This last part is especially clear during the ending of both songs, as in ‘Dear Reader’ uses the vocoders to confess her resignation and urging the listeners to stop looking up to her. Similarly, in ‘Labyrinth’ Taylor uses these vocoders to repeat over and over her realization and acceptance of falling once again.

In some way, it’s almost as if these two songs are opposite sides of the same coin: ‘Dear Reader’ talks about a Taylor unable to overcome her feelings of depression, loss, heartbreak, and distrust that ultimately end up in complete resignation, whereas in ‘Labyrinth’, Taylor embraces her feelings of new love despite still feeling at loss for her previous relationship.

Furthermore, we can construct the following interpretation: both ‘Dear Reader’ and ‘Labyrinth’ talk about the same situation at different stages.

Part Three: Anxiety Taylor

Taylor’s decision to use vocoders at the end of both songs is rather interesting. Whether it’s deliberate or a mere artistic coincidence is unknown. However, this decision allows us to link both songs together and construct an additional interpretation: both these songs refer to the same experience of heartbreak at different stages.

‘Dear Reader‘ showcases Taylor going through pain, heartbreak, depression, and self-doubt caused by her breakup. The lyrics of ‘Labyrinth’ can be interpreted as Taylor reminiscing these exact moments at a later point in the future. The first lines of the song

‘It only hurts this much right now,

was what I was thinking of the whole time’

can be interpreted as a Taylor looking back in time to the moment when the pain was at its peak. With this interpretation, we transform the previous interpretation of ‘Labyrinth’ as a heartbreak and love song into a song in which Taylor recounts the events described in ‘Dear Reader’. Other lines of ‘Labyrinth’, such as

‘Breathe in, breathe through, breath deep, breath out,
I’ll be gettin’ over you my whole life’

can be interpreted as Taylor reliving moments of anxiety while going through the initial heartbreak and as a confession of how Taylor hasn’t been able to get over her past love interest.

Furthermore, the chorus now takes a new meaning: a remembrance of the time she realized she had fallen in love and not of a resolution of her feelings of despair and distrust as previously mentioned.

This new interpretation of the chorus becomes stronger when the vocoders come in during the ending of the song. As stated in my previous interpretation of ‘Dear Reader’, Taylor has used vocoders before to express anxiety, such as in the song ‘Out of the Woods’, the 4th track of Taylor’s 5th album, 1989. We can interpret this artistic decision as deliberate, and I will refer to this as ‘Anxiety Taylor’.

During the ending of ‘Labyrinth’, ‘Anxiety Taylor’ repeats the chorus of the song over and over. This decision to have ‘Anxiety Taylor’ repeat the chorus until the end of the song strengthens the idea that both ‘Labyrinth’ and ‘Dear Reader’ are connected in some way. ‘Labyrinth‘ might be Taylor’s moment of self-reflection on her past relationship looking at it from the future.

What we can interpret from the ending is simple: ‘Anxiety Taylor‘ is a metaphor for herself having an anxiety attack while reminiscing about the time she realized she had fallen in love. It’s a rather common thing to feel anxiety and grief when remembering things that we once held dear but are now gone, such as past relationships – and it might be possible Taylor is going exactly through that: anxiety caused by the remembrance of her lost love.

It might be possible that both songs are connected in some way, and it might also be possible that they are not. Still, we cannot deny that Taylor’s evocative songwriting and her deliberate stylistic choices are a masterful display of her force as an artist and as a storyteller, where we are left to decide for ourselves the true meaning of these songs.