I Should Have Asked You How To Be
I know better, but I still feel you all around
I want justice for track 13 on Taylor Swift’s 2020 album evermore - marjorie is criminally underrated. To be fair, evermore is one of her most emotionally dense albums, tackling perspectives outside of what TS has typically written about and from vantage points of fictional characters. The concept around the album was to write about alternative worlds, struggles, and characters that were entirely (or, at least mostly) fictional from TS as the narrator. In the context of the latest TS news that she is undertaking her first major motion picture in a directorial debut, it makes a lot of sense that she would experiment writing in external perspectives on two albums. Those albums went onto be some of her most commercially successful work, with folklore heralding her third Album of the Year grammy.
Marjorie is a song about Swift’s grandmother, Marjorie Finlay, who was an opera singer herself and partially inspired Swift’s music career. One thing I love about all of the songs in evermore is that for the most part, they take their time entering into the allotted dreamscape that Swift has chosen for that particular story. Marjorie invites us in with slow piano but more staccato strings and synths. It’s very heady and allows Swift to very slowly build the concept through the verses.
The start of both verses invites some wisdom, which I’ve always interpreted as life lessons Swift has internalized from the namesake of the song, whether literally or through observation. Aspects like, “never be so polite you forget your power” feel inherently feminine, calling out the reality that women feel expected to be soft, friendly, and delicate in their demeanor. There’s also advice that feels very grandmotherly to me, like “never be so clever you forget to be kind.”
There are aspects of this song that cut like a knife to my heart. My maternal grandmother had a pool in her backyard that was always ice cold — long limbs and frozen swims, you’d always go passed where our feet would touch. But the part that absolutely kills me is: and I’d complain the whole way there, the car ride back and up the stairs. I should have asked you questions; I should have asked you how to be. As the youngest grandchild on both sides of my family, I’d never understood until it was far too late how truly fleeting my time with the elders of my family would be. I don’t have adult memories with my grandparents because most of them passed before I really became a whole person capable of understanding how short our time is. Or, unfortunately, other factors of life kept us apart, like distance and wellbeing. As a kid, I didn’t understand the significance of spending time with family that I only saw a couple times a year.
As an adult, you hold on so tightly to the few memories you do have with them. I particularly empathize with the feeling Swift evokes of hanging onto the littlest things that those people left behind, looking for any sort of connection or sign to the generations that came before you — Asked you to write it down for me, should’ve kept every grocery store receipt, cause every scrap of you would be taken from me. Humans have a deep yearning to understand where it is we came from, to see ourselves in history, and to find tethers to the past.
My paternal grandmother passed in the summer of 2021, not long after this song came out. She, too, was a singer, and that was something she and I shared. The last chorus of this song is introduced with “and if I didn’t know better, I’d think you were singing to me now” and beautifully features Marjorie herself singing in the background vocals, which producer Aaron Dessner pulled from an old record of hers. After my grandmother’s funeral, I couldn’t help but put this song on during the long drive home. I played it on repeat the entire ride and couldn’t bring myself to change the song.
Swift captures something universal in this song - the feeling of time moving too quickly, not knowing what you have until it’s gone, and how the older we get the more we wish we had answers from those who have done it all already. There’s a natural human instinct that yearns to understand everything about who we are, including who came before us and built the ground level of our lives. In Marjorie, you physically hear it in the layers that simultaneously move faster, ever forward towards something unknown. And yet, in the vocals of her grandmother and in the smooth sweeps of the melody line, Swift reminds us in marjorie that what died didn’t stay dead.