The Manuscript

(EDITOR’S NOTE: Once again, I’m so sorry this blog has been MIA these last four months! Yet another semester of grad school has meant that I haven’t had a lot of time to write other than for school. But now that I’m off until September, I intend to post on here every week and keep writing posts on a long lead so that it doesn’t go MIA again.)

“…I want it to sound, kind of, like, religious.”
— Taylor Swift, Taylor Swift NOW (DirectTV series): The Making of a Song

Certain Taylor songs aren’t released as singles but become fan favorites. Sometimes it’s clear why those songs weren’t released as singles. Other times it is absolutely mind-boggling why they weren’t and other far inferior songs were instead. “Don’t Blame Me,” along with another song that I will be writing about next week, are clear examples of songs that absolutely should have been released as singles instead of the songs that were.

I have had many conversations with fellow Swifties over the years about the Reputation album, and specifically (a) whether “Look What You Made Me Do” should have been the lead single, and (b) if not, what should have been the lead single instead. I believe the answer to (a) is a firm no, but that’s a post for another day. For (b), people go back and forth all the time. Many people will say “Getaway Car,” another Reputation fan favorite that I will write about here later. One of my favorite pop music columnists and partial inspiration for this blog, Stereogum’s Tom Breihan, firmly believes “Delicate” should have been the lead single. In the past, I have said “This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things” would have been a great lead single, especially because it covers the same thematic territory as “Look What You Made Me Do” but is better in just about every conceivable possible way (but, once again, that’s a post for another day).

But, if you were to ask me now, I could certainly make a strong case for “Don’t Blame Me” being an amazing lead single from Reputation, and in many ways, the Swifties themselves have already made that case by voting with their streaming choices. Looking at current Spotify streaming numbers, “Don’t Blame Me” is the most streamed song from Reputation on the service, having been streamed a total of 1,386,461,514 times since its release. That is more than 74 million more times than actual Reputation lead single and number-one hit “Look What You Made Me Do”. Clearly, “Don’t Blame Me” has become the very definition of a fan favorite, and a close look at the song makes it easy to see why.

Among many other things, the Reputation album marked the end of Taylor’s five-year close collaboration with mega-producers/songwriters Max Martin and Shellback. While I generally do not think that Taylor did her deepest and most meaningful work with them (although she did do some legitimately great pop songs with them), their songs did get better the longer they worked together, and “Don’t Blame Me” (along with the aforementioned “Delicate”) perhaps represents the pinnacle of their creative partnership. As Tom Breihan wrote in another column about Taylor, “[Max] Martin famously doesn’t put much stock in lyrics. He’ll torture language in order to make the verses fit the melodies in his head,” but by the time Taylor got to collaborating with him and Shellback on Reputation (and, really, by the time they came up with songs like “Wildest Dreams” on 1989), her language no longer needed to be tortured, and the lyrics were able to shine through brilliantly and compliment the melodies beautifully.

This is obvious from the very beginning of “Don’t Blame Me,” when the listener hears Taylor’s opening reverbed vocalization that immediately does two things: it lays bare the intensely sensual nature that underpins the whole song and most of the Reputation album, as her vocalization intentionally sounds like moaning, and it foreshadows the song’s moody and gothic tone that also has a strong gospel underpinning. That initial reverbed vocalization that intentionally sounds like moaning soon becomes a key motif that quickly morphs into sounding like the moaning of a gospel singer in addition to the moaning of a horny woman in love. And the first lyrics that Taylor sings in this song make it immediately explicit:

Don’t blame me, love made me crazy
If it doesn’t, you ain’t doin’ it right
Lord, save me, my drug is my baby
I’ll be usin’ for the rest of my life

This intro verse, which soon becomes the song’s chorus, is intentionally sung and repeated like a gospel refrain. As Taylor is eternally brilliant at doing, she brings out the feeling of intense, intoxicating love and how it can become a religious idol, especially when sex and sexual desire are introduced. While these are themes that she would dive even further into with “False God” on Lover, here she directs these sentiments not at the subject of her intense sexual desire, but at the society that shames her for romantic decisions.

And while many point out how the songs on Reputation vary from pointed statements directed at the tabloid press and individuals like Kanye West and Kim Kardashian to unabashed love songs directed at her then-boyfriend Joe Alwyn, “Don’t Blame Me” in fact serves as both a pointed statement at the media and a public declaration of love. In many ways, “Don’t Blame Me” is the song that most fully represents what the Reputation album is truly about (now really, why was this not the lead single?).

Both of these core facets of the song are apparent in the first real verse:

I’ve been breakin’ hearts a long time
And toyin’ with them older guys
Just playthings for me to use
Something happened for the first time
In the darkest little paradise
Shakin’, pacin’, I just need you

For the first half of this verse, Taylor explicitly addresses how the tabloid press and general public perceive her in a very similar way that she had done on “Blank Space.” But here, she goes even further than she had done on “Blank Space” and addresses her history of dating older men, specifically hinting at the way tabloids portrayed her then-recent relationships with older men Calvin Harris and Tom Hiddleston.

With Tom Hiddleston in particular, there was an underlying narrative in the tabloids that he was being toyed and used a plaything by Taylor, especially after photos came out of her 2016 Fourth of July party at Holiday House in Rhode Island where he was wearing an “I ♥ TS” tank top and engaging in overt PDA with her. And just like in “Blank Space,” Taylor deliberately subverts the obvious sexist double standard of the tabloid narrative and turns it on its head, casting herself as a powerful woman who is not going to let herself be used by older men, something that could also be seen as a direct reaction to how used she felt in previous age gap relationships like those with John Mayer and Jake Gyllenhaal.

As the song then moves to the second half of the verse, Max Martin’s drum machine beat kicks in and Taylor begins to switch gears toward describing her then-newfound relationship with Joe Alwyn. In mentioning their love sparking for the first time “in the darkest little paradise,” Taylor is foreshadowing the “dive bar on the East Side” that she will soon refer to in “Delicate,” the very next song on Reputation after “Don’t Blame Me.” But while that song will focus on the vulnerability of falling in love and will be explicitly addressed to Joe Alwyn, “Don’t Blame Me,” while still addressing Joe in second-person, is far more directed at those who criticize her for “serial dating” and supposedly not taking love seriously. And as the song builds toward its chorus, she leans into this even more:

For you, I would cross the line
I would waste my time
I would lose my mind
They say, “She’s gone too far this time”

Making even more clear how Joe has had a different effect on her than all the different men she has been with previously, Taylor proclaims that, rather than date him casually and briefly, she would actually cross the line and stay with him for a long time and fall headfirst in love with him. Of course, in retrospect, it is easy to see that Taylor’s relationship with Joe was different than all her previous ones, mainly because she stayed with him for six years. And one can also see how her proclamation that she would waste her time for him would be one she would come to regret following the end of their relationship, specifically in the lyric “I’m pissed off you let me give you all that youth for free” on “So Long, London.”

But by the time verse ends, she turns her attention back to what the public and tabloid press say about her, by directly quoting what she imagines their sentiment to be now that she’s fallen head over heels for Joe and is in a serious, committed, long-term relationship. Knowing how much they don’t like their narratives being contradicted or shot down, Taylor imagines that they would still try to frame her actions in a shaming way by proclaiming that “she’s gone too far this time” by falling so in love with Joe.

Immediately after this proclamation, the beat drops and Taylor launches into two passionate, gospel-tinged renditions of the song’s chorus which, coming right after her imagining the tabloids saying that “she’s gone too far this time,” serve as a direct response to their attempts to shame her for her romantic life. By telling them not to blame her for her supposed craziness, as it is the natural effect that love has on people who are truly smitten with their significant others, even questioning if the people lobbying these criticisms at her have even truly fallen in love before.

Leaning further into the gospel-tinged nature of the song’s melody, Taylor calls on the Lord to save her as her the intoxicating nature of her love has become an addiction for her that she doesn’t feel like she could ever break. While comparing the intoxicating nature of love to a drug via metaphor had obviously been a staple of pop music going back to Roxy Music’s 1970s hit “Love Is the Drug,” making it into an unapologetic proclamation repeated in a gospel-tinged way allows it to feel powerful and righteous rather than like a cheap cliché.

Once the second verse comes, Taylor turns the focus fully back to Joe:

My name is whatever you decide
And I’m just gonna call you mine
I’m insane, but I’m your baby (Your baby)
Echoes (Echoes) of your name inside my mind
Halo hiding my obsession
I once was poison ivy, but now I’m your daisy

Here, she continues and deepens her proclamation of love first by allowing Joe to call her whatever she wants, a clear sign of trust and affection. But it is the next line, when she declares that she’s only going to call him hers, that frames their relationship in the larger context of what Taylor was dealing with at this time. As Taylor described when reflecting on the period leading up to Reputation — when she disappeared from the public eye following the Kim and Kanye-led backlash against her in the summer of 2016, “I thought that moment of backlash was going to define me negatively for the rest of my life… Make no mistake — my career was taken away from me.”

So for Taylor to tell Joe “I’m just gonna call you mine” is to emphasize how important it is to her to have something to call her own at a time when she felt like her own career was no longer hers. Further framing their relationship against the broader sociocultural context, Taylor emphasizes the perception among certain members of the public that she is insane, but how that is okay with her as long as she has her own identity as Joe’s lover, even repeating the words “Your baby” to recognize this new identity that supersedes any other the world can impose on her.

Diving further still into her newfound infatuation, Taylor discusses how this infatuation impacts her functioning in everyday life, with even Joe’s name taking up so much space in her mind that it seems to echo through it (side-note: the way in which she repeats the word “Echoes” here is a fantastic touch that once again shows her sense of humor as well as her brilliance). She even references the act she has to put on with certain people by making a reference to a “halo,” which makes perfect sense as, even as popular as Taylor was in 2016-17, being a young woman in the music industry meant that she still had to put on this angelic façade when interacting with music industry executives and other important people. And so this “halo” that Taylor mentions here serves to mask a lot of things, one of which is her obsession with Joe, once again showing how deep and intense it is.

And by the time the verse ends, Taylor drops a brilliant double-metaphor line: in order to describe how her identity went from being poisonous following the Kanye/Kim debacle to being beautiful following the start of their romance, Taylor describes being poison ivy until she became Joe’s daisy. And while it seems to be one obvious metaphor on the surface, it could also be heard as a reference to her feeling like the Batman comic book villain Poison Ivy before she became Joe’s Daisy Buchanan, referring of course to the female lead character in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.

Of course, anyone who has read The Great Gatsby knows how much Daisy Buchanan is treated like garbage by both Jay Gatsby himself and especially her husband Tom Buchanan. The idea of being treated like an upper-class flapper was certainly something that appealed to Taylor and is a metaphor she was of course happy to embrace, even hearing how she draws out the word “Daisy” while singing at the top of her vocal range (and side-note: her ex-boyfriend Tom Hiddleston notably played Great Gatsby author F. Scott Fitzgerald in Woody Allen’s terrific 2011 film Midnight in Paris, a film that Taylor would later allude to in another song).

As the song then builds to its second chorus, Taylor describes how her infatuation for Joe can also give to a sort of desperation:

And baby, for you, I would fall from grace
Just to touch your face
If you walk away, I’d beg you on my knees to stay

Once again playing into the religious imagery of the chorus, Taylor describes the lengths she would go to be with her lover and physically feel his presence. In this case, she would willingly fall out of the grace of God and into a state of eternal damnation just to touch the face of her lover, something that indicates the desperation she feels when she is not physically with him. And in a lyric that, like the earlier “I would waste my time” lyric, can be seen in retrospect as foreshadowing her description of she and Joe’s eventual breakup in “So Long, London,” Taylor says she would beg Joe on her knees to stay if he ever left her. So while the song remains an unapologetic proclamation of love and infatuation, it also does not shy away from the way in which these things can easily give way to a self-destructive desperation that is ultimately unhealthy.

Following another beat drop and two more passionate, gospel-tinged renditions of the song’s chorus, the song then seamlessly transitions into the bridge where Taylor dives further into the song’s drug metaphor:

I get so high, oh
Every time you’re, every time you’re lovin’ me
You’re lovin’ me
Trip of my life, oh
Every time you’re, every time you’re touchin’ me
You’re touchin’ me

Following a brief subtle acknowledgment of the desperation that comes from intense infatuation, Taylor goes back to basking in the high she gets from being loved by Joe and how his touch can produce an effect on her equivalent to an acid trip. And even though there is always a comedown from the high or the trip, she knows that, at least for now, she can keep coming back to him for the effect he provides and that’s ultimately enough for her.

But, of course, the most popular and celebrated part of “Don’t Blame Me” comes when the production briefly dies down and it is only keyboards and Taylor’s reverbed moaning providing the music as Taylor once again sings, “Every time you’re, every time you’re lovin’ me,” only for the song to go silent for a split-second before Taylor’s double-tracked vocals come up and give a triumphant “Oh, Lord save me / My drug is my baby / I’ll be usin’ for the rest of my life,” and then Taylor belts out “Usin’ for the rest of my life! / Oh-whoah-oh-oh!”

This moment, while not adding anything new to the song’s meaning, ultimately serves as the perfect blend of Max Martin-style mega-pop and gospel that propels this song to be a standout in both the Reputation track listing and Taylor’s discography. And it also propels the song as a self-contained unit to a triumphant, righteous conclusion that allows to function perfectly as a defiant statement to the media and an unapologetic declaration of love.

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Upon the release of Reputation in November 2017, “Don’t Blame Me,” in stark contrast to the beloved status it has now, was a prototypical deep cut. While it only took a couple of years for even a deeply unserious trifle of a deep cut like “London Boy” to automatically chart on the Billboard Hot 100 by nature of being on a highly-anticipated Taylor Swift album that Swifties stream all the way through multiple times, “Don’t Blame Me” did not chart on the Hot 100 (or any other chart for the matter) and, as mentioned earlier, was never released as a single.

However, knowing how special the song was despite its lack of commercial success on its own, Taylor turned it into a centerpiece of her 2018 Reputation Stadium Tour, always performing it as the last band song of the main set before the encores, extending the song to five minutes and adding an intense rock element to it. This performance from the October 6, 2018 show in Houston, filmed for posterity and featured in the Reputation Stadium Tour film that was on Netflix until a year-and-a-half ago, captures it well:

Following the end of the Reputation era and the beginning of a more than four-year period in which Taylor was unable to perform live, fan love and appreciation for “Don’t Blame Me” and Reputation only continued to grow. By 2019 and 2020, op-eds in places like Billboard and Esquire even began arguing that Reputation was Taylor’s best album (my Swiftie girlfriend Andrea agrees with their shared sentiment). But then, in May 2022, “Don’t Blame Me,” just like “Wildest Dreams” and “Enchanted” had in late 2021, went randomly viral on TikTok.

As reported at the time, the song’s 15-second TikTok remix “focus[ed] on the lyrics ‘oh lord save me, my drug is my baby, I’ll be using for the rest of my life,’ [was] commonly laid over romantic scenes from movies and TV shows, such as Season 2 of Bridgerton and the animated film Tangled.” The renewed attention to “Don’t Blame Me,” and the subsequent knockoff effect on streaming numbers, resulted in May 16, 2022, being the song’s biggest streaming day ever on Spotify, where it earned 739,000 streams four years after its release, and ended up charting for the first time internationally, even charting in the Top 100 of the UK’s Official Singles Chart (although, oddly enough, still not on the Billboard Hot 100 in America).

Taylor, of course, saw all of this happening, and when she finally launched the Eras Tour just under a year later, she quickly made “Don’t Blame Me” one of the four core songs featured every night in the Reputation set. And just like the TikTok trend did, the nightly performances of “Don’t Blame Me,” streamed for the world to see on TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, and other sites, continued to draw attention and acclaim for the song.

In particular, the moment in the bridge when the song goes quiet right before the breakdown happens and Taylor belts out the high note became a moment where fans all yelled out “Take Me to Church!” every night (an appropriate chant, considering how many critics and fans have compared “Don’t Blame Me” to the Hozier song “Take Me to Church”). And then, the transition from “Don’t Blame Me” to the last song in the Reputation set, “Look What You Made Me Do,” likewise became one of the most celebrated moments in the show, as it encapsulated the defiance of the Reputation era in a way that felt invigorating and epic, especially in a stadium setting:

Since the end of the Eras Tour, “Don’t Blame Me” has continued to chart in various countries around the world, peaking in the top 20 in Norway, Singapore, and Australia, and even becoming certified platinum four times over in Australia. And as I said at the top, the song has been streamed over a billion times on Spotify despite never once appearing on the Hot 100, and Rolling Stone further confirmed that the song’s current stream count is more than double what it was at the start of the Eras Tour.

Of course, the reality hanging over all of this for Swifties (and Taylor herself) is that “Don’t Blame Me” is not a song she owns the recording of thanks to the 2019 sale of her masters to Scooter Braun (and Braun’s later sale of them to Shamrock Holdings). But one can rest assured that whenever Taylor feels ready to announce the release of Reputation (Taylor’s Version), it will be a significant cultural event, one that surpasses the release of the original Reputation, and “Don’t Blame Me” will continue to rise in even higher esteem among Swifties and the general music listening public as “Don’t Blame Me (Taylor’s Version)”.