The Manuscript

(EDITOR’S NOTE #1: So…I had this whole post written and ready to go before Taylor made her huge announcement this past Friday that she has officially purchased the masters for her first six albums and now owns all of her own music. Needless to say, this is a massive accomplishment and I am so incredibly happy and excited for her and the rest of the Swiftie community. So going forward (and this does not apply to this Manuscript entry but will for next week and many future ones), I am happy to include the links to both the original versions and Taylor’s Versions of songs in each post here.)

(EDITOR’S NOTE #2: I also had planned to post this Manuscript entry on here last week before time got away from me and this post ended up being longer than originally planned. Appropriately, though, this post will launch on the two-year anniversary of me seeing the Eras Tour on the first of her three nights in Chicago, which was not only by far my favorite of the three Taylor shows that I have seen, but also one of the greatest nights of live music that I have ever experienced. And, to transition into the below post, it allowed me to experience Cruel Summer live, something that I will never, ever forget.)

“This song is one that I wrote about the feeling of a summer romance, and how often times a summer romance can be layered with all these feelings of, like, pining away and sometimes even secrecy. It deals with the idea of being in a relationship where there’s some element of desperation and pain in it, where you’re yearning for something that you don’t quite have yet, it’s just right there, and you just, like, can’t reach it. So, this has some of my favorite lyrics on it, and it was so fun to write this. Jack and Annie [Clark] did the track and a lot of the instrumentation, and I did the topline in whatever language that is. A topline is all the notes and the lyrics you hear. So whatever you would sing, that is what I wrote on this. It was just so fun to write this one and I really love this one. Jack and I like to do ranting bridges. Like in ‘Out of the Woods’ where the bridge is the biggest moment of the song — we revisited that concept.”
— Taylor Swift, iHeartRadio Lover Album Release Party and Secret Session

In September 2019, just under a month after her Lover album was released, Taylor took to social media to announce that, rather than do a traditional world tour to promote Lover like she had done for all her previous albums since Fearless, she would instead embark on a 12-date tour called Lover Fest, where she would play eight European festivals followed by two two-night stadium stands in the U.S. at Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts, and SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles, dubbed Lover Fest East and Lover Fest West. In explaining her decision to do this for Lover, she said “The Lover album is open fields, sunsets, + SUMMER. I want to perform it in a way that feels authentic. I want to go to some places I haven’t been and play festivals. Where we didn’t have festivals, we made some.”

Of course, Lover Fest never happened. Once the COVID-19 pandemic began in March 2020, Taylor first made the decision to postpone it until the following year, before ultimately scrapping it altogether in February 2021. Even though logistically it could have happened in 2021, as other music festivals like Lollapalooza went forward that summer thanks to the vaccines, Taylor had moved on to different eras beyond Lover, and the double-masterpieces of Folklore and Evermore, not to mention the re-recording project that started in earnest in 2021, put her in a different artistic position than she was when Lover Fest had first been announced in the fall of 2019. But then, of course, by the fall of 2022, Taylor announced what would become the biggest tour of all time, and the rest is history.

I retell all of this because it is impossible to fully write about “Cruel Summer” without discussing why the song was initially not released as a single. As Taylor explained during her second Eras Tour show in Pittsburgh, the pandemic essentially “stopped ‘Cruel Summer’ from ever being a single,” as she would have in all likelihood released “Cruel Summer” as a single off of Lover shortly before Lover Fest’s scheduled kickoff on June 20, 2020, in Belgium. Of course, imagining an alternate universe in which this would have happened (i.e., an alternate universe with no pandemic, and therefore no Folklore, Evermore, Midnights, or Eras Tour) is nearly impossible to imagine now. Slightly easier to imagine, however, is an alternate universe in which “Cruel Summer” was the lead single off of Lover, released at the end of April 2019, becomes the song of that summer, and results in Lover becoming much more anticipated, accepted and celebrated by critics and the general public than it was when the first two singles released off of it were, to put it bluntly, mediocre to terrible (one of those two singles I will be writing about in a few weeks).

Obviously, though, we don’t live in either of those alternate universes. We live in this one, where “Cruel Summer” was mind-bogglingly not released as a single in 2019, was discovered and celebrated and beloved by the fans who first listened to the album at the end of August of that year, was correctly chosen as the first full song to be played in the Eras Tour set, went viral, was finally released as a single in the summer of 2023, went to number one on the Billboard Hot 100 in October of that year following the release of the Eras Tour movie, and is now, to this day, her longest-charting song on the Hot 100, having spent over one full year on the chart, and her most-streamed song on Spotify, with over 2.9 billion streams and counting.

But I’m getting way ahead of myself. The point is, “Cruel Summer” has become much more than a song. The whole story of its evolution from deep cut to fan favorite to arguably the biggest song of her career is an intrinsic part of what it is. But stripping all of that away, putting everything that it has become to the side, “Cruel Summer” is still a near-perfect piece of pop music-making. It is a Taylor Swift pop song that evokes the best of her songs on 1989 while still standing on its own. It echoes the precise production of her work with Max Martin and Shellback while still being very much a crowning achievement of her now-decade-long collaboration with Jack Antonoff. And, most importantly, her vulnerable lyrics still manage to shine through despite the maximalist pop production. Only one listen to the song proves this point.

From the first notes of “Cruel Summer,” it is clear that the song is melodically continuing the electropop/synth-pop sound of the Reputation album, but with much less darkness, anger, and harshness than several of that album’s songs. Using the synth, drum machine, and other electronic production tools that Jack Antonoff has become synonymous with (perhaps most prominently the vocoder that allows Taylor’s ultra-distorted “yeah” to become a key beat in the song), the song’s production immediately establishes it as pure, propulsive pop that could be blasted out of a car radio with the windows rolled down on the way to the beach.

In the context of the Lover album, it comes as the second track after the opening “I Forgot That You Existed,” which was intended as the lyrical bridge from the dark, vengeful tone of Reputation to the sunnier, sweeter tone of Lover. However, while “Cruel Summer” can and has been seen as the first song that establishes the tone of Lover, a closer look at the lyrics reveal that its story is very much rooted in the era that inspired the core of Reputation. Specifically, it is a retelling of the summer Taylor experienced in 2016 when she was facing intense backlash from the media while in the midst of a chaotic period of dating that included the end of her relationship with Calvin Harris, a whirlwind romance with Tom Hiddleston, and finally the beginning of her long-term relationship with Joe Alwyn. Not unlike the previous Manuscript entry “Don’t Blame Me,” “Cruel Summer” illustrates the power that strong feelings of love and infatuation have to drown out even the loudest and most deafening noise coming from various aspects of society. And this is abundantly clear in the opening verse:

Fever dream high in the quiet of the night
You know that I caught it (Oh yeah, you’re right, I want it)
Bad, bad boy shiny toy with a price
You know that I bought it (Oh yeah, you’re right, I want it)
Killing me slow, out the window
I’m always waiting for you to be waiting below
Devils roll the dice, angels roll their eyes
What doesn’t kill me makes me want you more

Following the aforementioned opening notes, Taylor immediately introduces the sentiment of longing as she discusses lying in bed late at night and willingly catching what she describes as a “fever dream high,” and then soon after connecting it to a male love interest she perceives as dangerous yet appealing. Obviously, the “boy”/“toy” rhyme in this verse would later be echoed in a very different context five years later on The Tortured Poets Department song “My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys,” perhaps expressing regret at longing after what appealed to her at this point in her life. But even here, the fact that she acknowledges this sort of dangerous male lover comes with a price, and yet she buys it anyway, displays a good amount of self-awareness about her tendency to fall for the wrong men, just as she had done on earlier songs like “Sparks Fly” and “Treacherous”.

But the next line in this verse is even more key to showing her growing self-awareness and maturity. In deliberately describing herself waiting for her love interest to be waiting for her below her window, she is consciously alluding to the Romeo and Juliet imagery of “Love Story” from a much different perspective. Rather than recreating the iconic balcony scene again, she comes from a place of pure desperate longing, her desire for the object of her affection to become the Romeo of “Love Story” not being fulfilled and it killing her slowly inside.

Going even further into this feeling, she evokes the classic imagery of the angel and devil on someone’s shoulders, with the devil encouraging impulsivity and risk-taking that could result in serious harm while the angel encourages safety and wisdom. But by referring to these two sides as “rolling the dice” and “rolling their eyes,” Taylor allows the listener to grasp how these two sides could feel in a moment of intense frustration and longing. Ultimately, she concludes that jumping in and taking the risk with this romance won’t ultimately kill her, and knowing that this won’t kill her only makes her want him romantically and sexually that much more.

The chorus then immediately follows, and takes this song to new heights almost instantly:

And it’s new, the shape of your body
It’s blue, the feeling I got and it’s, ooh, whoa-oh
It’s a cruel summer
It’s cool, that’s what I tell ’em
No rules in breakable heaven but, ooh, whoa-oh
It’s a cruel summer with you

Much like on Taylor’s best pop choruses, she transports the listener to a euphoric high, supposedly capturing the feeling of being deep in infatuation. However, while the production of the chorus may sound euphoric (as well as the inclusion of “ooh, whoa-ohs” reminiscent of the so-called “millennial whoop” omnipresent in the “recession pop” of the late 2000s and early 2010s), this particular chorus is painting a lyrical picture of pure emotional chaos. In the first two lines, Taylor goes from gushing over the shape of her love interest’s body and how thrillingly “new” it is for her, to describing her current feeling as “blue,” the song’s first even-noticeable hint at her general mental state in the summer of 2016, and how the constant vacillation between romantic infatuation in her personal life and the disintegration of her public image creates the perfect toxic combination for a “cruel summer.”

Going even further into her emotional state, she paints another contrast between how she presents herself in public settings and how she is really feeling. While she may tell friends or others in her life that she and her romantic situation are “cool,” she really knows how deeply chaotic and fragile the situation actually is. In fact, the very next line displays a keen self-awareness of this, as she refers to this relationship and infatuation as a “breakable heaven” with “no rules”. Despite how much her love and infatuation for this man may feel like heaven, she knows that it could end and shatter in a second. And the fact that there are no rules in this mental and emotional space allows for both freedom and chaos, a dichotomy that embodies the cruel summer she is spending pining after this man.

Following this chorus, the song dips back down into its normal pulse from the first verse as Taylor continues to flesh out the picture of her cruel summer of 2016:

Hang your head low in the glow of the vending machine
I’m not dying (Oh yeah, you’re right, I want it)
Say that we’ll just screw it up in these trying times
We’re not trying (Oh yeah, you’re right, I want it)
So cut the headlights, summer’s a knife
I’m always waiting for you just to cut to the bone
Devils roll the dice, angels roll their eyes
And if I bleed, you’ll be the last to know

Once again painting a lyrical picture of her love interest and contrasting it against her own intense personal feelings, Taylor constructs an image that is both classical and modern. In describing him as hanging his head low against a glowing backdrop, Taylor at first seems to be alluding to the classic American picture of a buff cowboy hanging his head low while the glow of the sunset shines behind him. But then, to describe the glow as coming from a vending machine adds a strong connotation of urban modernity that tracks heavily with the New York City imagery present on other Lover tracks as well as other song that describe this same period in her life such as “Delicate” (and even going back to 1989’s “Welcome to New York”). However, by immediately following this lyrical image with a declaration of her “not dying,” Taylor reframes the image to be one of discouragement, where his brooding nature in hanging his head low was symbolic of something else that killed her but instead made her want him more.

This is then followed by him reminding her of the “trying times” surrounding them in this summer and how any effort to build a lasting relationship when her public image is the lowest it has ever been would be a lost cause. However, Taylor immediately responds that they are not really trying, showing a desperation to make this work however they can regardless of the broader situation around them. In many ways, this echoes her own repeated words on the aforementioned “Delicate,” where she acknowledges that having a serious relationship is not for the best at a time when her “reputation’s never been worse,” and the fact that he would even be interested in one with her shows that he must like her for who she actually is. 

From there follows the lyrics that most blatantly illustrate the secretive, painful summer romance at the song’s heart. First, by calling on her love interest to “cut the headlights,” Taylor establishes that this romance will be conducted in secrecy without ever drawing attention to itself from the general public (of course, the secrecy in which she and Joe Alwyn conducted their years-long romance would ultimately become one of her regrets about that relationship). Then, she begins an extended metaphor that describes the pain of both the summer and moving forward with this relationship in the midst of it.

By describing this summer as a “knife” and how she is waiting for her love interest to “cut to the bone,” she inherently implies that, even as she is pining for him and willing to go forward with this secret romance, there is still a sense of fear where she does not yet trust him to protect her but is instead always suspicious of whether or not he will betray her in the same way that others had that summer. After once again referring to the first verse’s imagery of the angels and devils on her shoulders (rolling their eyes and rolling the dice, respectively), she confirms her general distrust in her love interest by saying that if she bleeds as the result of him cutting to the bone with the summer that she sees as a knife, he will be the last to know. Even as she pines for him and longs for a romantic connection, she still holds her emotional restraint hard, and this dichotomy further illuminates her chaotic emotional state during this cruel summer.

Following another repeat of the chorus, Taylor then transitions to the song’s bridge, one that has quickly gone down as not only one of her greatest, but one of the greatest of all time (more will be discussed on the legacy of this particular bridge later):

I’m drunk in the back of the car
And I cry like a baby coming home from the bar, oh
Said, “I’m fine,” but it wasn’t true
I don’t wanna keep secrets just to keep you
And I snuck in through the garden gate
Every night that summer just to seal my fate, oh
And I scream, for whatever it’s worth
“I love you, ain’t that the worst thing you ever heard?”
He looks up, grinning like a devil

While most of the rest of “Cruel Summer” focused specifically on individual moments and feelings, here “Cruel Summer” actually illustrates a fully-fleshed-out scene in cinematic terms beneath the surface of this ranting bridge. Here, we see Taylor sitting in the back of a car driven by her chauffeur, presumably after an all-night bender, crying hysterically due to the pain of having to keep her romance a secret amid everything else going on in her life at that point. Here, we can picture her chauffeur asking her what’s wrong, and her responding “I’m fine” between her sobs even though she clearly isn’t. And then the song breaks into its angry cheerleader-style chant when the lyrics take the listener inside Taylor’s psyche as she declares that she does not want to keep secrets from the people in her life or the public just to keep him as her secret summer-fling lover. Just like all of Taylor’s best pop songs, this line functions simultaneously as a cry of pain in the midst of overwhelming pressure as well as a fun, cathartic windows-down chant-along moment.

As the bridge builds to its own catharsis, Taylor describes what happens after her chauffeur drops her off, presumably at her love interest’s home, and she sneaks into the back of his residence to have another hookup with him and seal her fate of being hopelessly in love with him. And in full acknowledgment of where her public reputation stands at that moment, and trying to get full and unambiguous confirmation that he understands what he is signing up for by entering into this serious romance with her, she screams the climactic line of the bridge (and the song as a whole) in hopes for a serious, straight answer. But rather than tell the listener exactly how he responded, she simply states, in one of the best moments of vocal delivery in any of her songs, that he looked up at her, “grinning like a devil.” Once again alluding to the “devils rolled the dice, angels rolled their eyes,” albeit more subtly, Taylor indicates that, in this moment, he fully agreed to this romance with her despite the risk and cost, and together, they will continue to roll the dice and embark on this secret, painful summer romance, one that Taylor continues to illustrate the nature of through one last rendition of its chorus and bridge each before concluding the song the same way that it started.

______________________________________________________________________________

As mentioned earlier, “Cruel Summer” was first introduced to the world as an album cut from Lover in August 2019. Leading up to the release of Lover, Taylor had released four singles to promote the album: “ME!,” her bubblegum-pop collaboration with Brendon Urie at the point in time when Panic! At the Disco had fully become his own solo project, “You Need to Calm Down,” her failed attempt at a pro-LGBTQ anthem, “The Archer,” the album’s Track Five that has become embraced by fans, and “Lover,” the genuinely beautiful title track that still stands as one of her greatest love songs.

While “Lover” being released a week before the album of the same name helped to generate some more positive discourse leading up to its release, it was not until the album itself dropped that everyone discovered what they were missing by “Cruel Summer” having been passed up a single in favor of “ME!” and “You Need to Calm Down”. While those songs certainly succeeded at getting attention drawn to (a) the album’s generally sunny disposition and (b) Taylor’s increasing outspokenness regarding certain sociopolitical issues, their lesser quality relative to so many of her other songs led to the Lover rollout being somewhat muted compared to all of her previous ones. 

But once Lover was released and people finally got to hear “Cruel Summer,” it was immediately embraced by critics and fans alike. At the time, The Ringer’s Justin Sayles called it “Swift’s most infectious song since that run of singles from 1989,” while Mikael Wood from the Los Angeles Times named it the best song on Lover (and, both hilariously and appropriately, “ME!” was named the worst song). By the end of 2019, both Rolling Stone and Billboard named it one of the best songs of that year. At the same time, people called into question how a song that sounded like such a slam-dunk hit would be passed over as a single in favor of “ME!” and “You Need to Calm Down”. One Reddit user summed it up succinctly at the time: “Why 👏 wasn’t 👏 this 👏 a 👏 SINGLE 👏.” More than eighteen months later, Nora Princiotti and Nathan Hubbard on the Every Single Album podcast lamented this decision as both short-sighted and confusing.

Meanwhile, the song continued to grow in esteem among Swifties and other musicians. In April 2020, one month into the COVID-19 pandemic that, as mentioned earlier, killed the planned Lover Fest and initial “Cruel Summer” single plans, then-Disney Channel star Olivia Rodrigo, less than a year away from her own major pop breakthrough, performed a solo piano cover of “Cruel Summer” as a part of MTV’s Alone Together jam session. The cover is legitimately beautiful, and Taylor herself praised it in a post on her Instagram Story.

Of course, not even a year later, Olivia would release her second single “Deja Vu,” which contains a bridge that many immediately compared to the bridge of “Cruel Summer,” in that it contains a very similar melodic structure and chanty lyrics (I immediately caught the similarities on my first listen to “Deja Vu”). Three months after that song’s release, Olivia gave Taylor, Jack Antonoff, and St. Vincent co-songwriting credits on “Deja Vu” without an explanation.

Of course, this sort of thing has become commonplace in the post-“Blurred Lines” pop music landscape where any even unconscious interpolation of a prior existing song leads to deals where musicians are given co-songwriting credits on other musicians’ songs. However, in the years since Olivia gave Taylor, et al. co-songwriting credits on “Deja Vu,” she seems to have turned on Taylor despite previously claiming to be the biggest Swiftie in the whole world. While she denied having beef with anyone in a Rolling Stone interview leading up to the release of her second album Guts, she had been given multiple opportunities to reaffirm her Swiftie bona fides and deliberately chose not to each time, despite multiple sources speculating that certain songs like “The Grudge” were stealth diss tracks aimed at Taylor.

The whole Taylor/Olivia drama surrounding “Cruel Summer” and “Deja Vu” only increased the legend of “Cruel Summer” being the perfect pop hit that got away. However, Taylor seemed to be moving on from the Lover era as the double-shot of Folklore and Evermore, plus the media hype that greeted Red (Taylor’s Version) and “All Too Well (10-Minute Version)” and then Midnights a year later, and “Cruel Summer” was no longer at the top of most people’s minds.

That would all change the minute Taylor announced her plan to embark on a tour, her first in five years, that would be “a journey through all of my musical eras of my career.” Especially with it being an all-stadium tour, Swifties immediately knew that the big songs from Lover in general, and “Cruel Summer” in particular, needed to have a special place in the show. In an episode of Every Single Album shortly after the announcement of the tour, Nora and Nathan both predicted “Cruel Summer” would have a prominent place in the set, although of course they and many others (myself included) did not predict that the set would be anywhere near the length that it turned out to be.

Of course, when the Eras Tour officially kicked off in Glendale, Arizona on March 17, 2023, in Glendale, Arizona, “Cruel Summer” was right there as the first full song played in the show. Once fans were able to see it performed big and loud in stadiums filled with tens of thousands of screaming and singing-along fans, it immediately juiced the song’s streaming numbers in ways that hadn’t been seen since August 2019. As the tour moved on and “Cruel Summer” continued to be streamed in massive numbers, it charted the Billboard Hot 100 for the first time since its initial release in 2019, and certain pop radio stations began to follow suit in playing it, which led to Republic Records, in an unprecedented move, to promote the song as a proper single while they were already fully promoting the Midnights track “Karma” as a single (to remind everyone: “Karma” at that point had just gotten a big-time remix with Ice Spice and a splashy video). And yet, a nearly four-year-old album cut was threatening to dethrone Taylor and Republic’s plans for the Ice Spice remix of “Karma” to be their contender for 2023 Song of the Summer.

And yet, while “Cruel Summer” reached the top 10 on the Hot 100 by July that summer, it initially seemed like it might not reach number one, especially as that was a summer when country music was utterly dominating the charts thanks to Morgan Wallen’s smash hit “Last Night” and Luke Combs’ cover of Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car”. However, as the Eras Tour reached a fever pitch in August when Taylor played six sold-out shows at SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles, and would soon announce a concert film recorded at the L.A. stand, “Cruel Summer” proved to have tremendous staying power on the chart.

By the time the Eras Tour movie was released in theaters in October, Taylor and many chart-watchers saw that “Cruel Summer” was still lingering around the top three of Hot 100, only blocked from the top spot by songs like Doja Cat’s “Paint the Town Red” and SZA’s “Snooze”. And so Taylor, like any enterprising pop music artist, released a streaming compilation called The Cruelest Summer featuring the song, a live recording from the Eras Tour movie, and a remix by LP Giobbi, supposedly “for old time’s sake” but really to juice the song’s streaming numbers and get it over the hump to number one.

And, of course, she did get it to number one, in what was the culmination of one of the most remarkable stories in pop music history. And not only did “Cruel Summer” hit number one on the Hot 100, it stayed there for four weeks, only interrupted by another Taylor song, the 1989 Vault track “Is It Over Now?” Even after “Cruel Summer” fell from number one, it showed remarkable resiliency on the radio and streaming, being the number one song on Billboard’s Adult Pop Airplay chart for 23 weeks and the number one song across all radio formats for 12 weeks. And by May 2024, “Cruel Summer” officially became Taylor’s longest charting hit song, having charted on the Billboard Hot 100 for 54 total weeks, more than a whole calendar year. Even today, “Cruel Summer” remains Taylor’s most streamed song on Spotify. A song that she initially passed over as a single is now arguably the biggest and most successful song in her catalog.

Of course, just like the previous Manuscript entry “Don’t Blame Me,” the belated success of “Cruel Summer” would not have been possible without the Eras Tour. So, appropriately, I will leave you all with the now-iconic performance of “Cruel Summer” as captured in the Eras Tour movie, one that set the tone for the evening every single night of the tour and remains a remarkable opener (well, after the chorus of “Miss Americana and the Heartbreak Prince,” of course). While it would be interesting to travel to an alternate universe where this opened every night of Lover Fest, the universe we are in, in which the Eras Tour happened and this song was performed in stadiums all over the world rather than European festivals and four total shows in the United States, is pretty freaking awesome.