The uncapitalized “betty” is arguably the best song on folklore along with “invisible string.” That is a statement both meaningless and trivial. It is perhaps more substantial to note that it sits at the center of the record, despite coming rather late on what was once Side Two. The album as a whole in more tightly interwoven than most reviews have noted: someone named “Betty” appears here and there, for example, and the scene of cheating returns throughout: the adult versions are “illicit affairs” (the other best song) and “mad woman” and maybe more (some of the songs I stopped listening to before I knew what they were about, I still haven’t listened to the Bon Iver song). The narrative of “betty” completes the album’s “teenage love triangle” after “cardigan” and “august.”
In short, characters and themes recur over the full set of songs, explored at different ages and circumstances. That’s why it’s folklore: the legends of a few heroes, told and retold, inserted into and overwriting other tales, endlessly recast, endlessly repeated. That’s the record.
Taylor Swift is 30. The song “15” is now half a lifetime ago and so is high school — the place of Swift’s emergence and still her home county. That’s what it means to say “betty” is at center of the record: set in high school, it falls at the midpoint of both the Taylor Swift story and the morphology of the folktale, and its characters and concerns radiate out across the record. It is the song, finally, 50 minutes in, that draws the record into itself and provides it an internal coherence of reference and contact.
But what is so striking is the way that, for all the internal references and contact points, it creates the album’s coherence in part via external reference and contact, happening in parallel. By now we are entirely familiar with the satisfactions of the song that embeds titles or lyrics from other pop songs, often thematizing this activity and its own nostalgia. This is not quite what happens in “betty.” Instead there are variations on phrases from other songs, carefully arranged at a “did she or didn’t she mean it” pitch…but clear enough, I think. “The only thing I want to do” she sings in the last prechorus, the song’s turn after after James the narrator has had their own turn. And we are suspect we might be catching the hint of a certain long tradition, maybe we are thinking of Shalamar or Heart or Adina Howard, and Swift makes sure we hear it when the next line continues so it is “The only thing I want to do / is make” — and there it is, we are inarguably hearing “the only thing I want to do is make sweet love to you,” and the entire pop history, gentle or crass, of “sweet love,” except Swift turns out to be singing something else, “…is make it up to you,” a change of just two words, a handful of letters, and the song collapses in on itself, right there at the peak, a total substitution of apology for sex. If Swift were not a trillionaire and supposed mean girl people would be writing about how this substitution is a map of tenderness and model of care but we are far beyond that.
If this is the moment in the song and on the album when things go right — even if we don’t know for sure that Betty will accept this apology — the moment when it all goes wrong happens a couple minutes earlier. You can tell because she sings “Betty, I know where it all went wrong.” And because it is a pop singer singing the most pop of all the album’s songs and the one that has allowed Taylor’s triumphantly low-key return to country radio playlists — that moment is inevitably during a pop song: “Your favorite song was playing” when James sees Betty dance with some boy, which will become James’s self-justification for fooling around with someone else all summer, being abstractly and thus somehow perfectly untrue in the hyperintense drama of adolescence.
So: what song is it? Maybe it is Tim McGraw. Or “Tim McGraw.” We don’t know. Taylor is too canny for that, and “betty” is too much about organizing the whole of folklore to shout out a song from elsewhere. Sort of. “Your favorite song was playing…” she sings, and because with Swift’s writing, the continuation, the enjambment, is everything, she goes on, “from the far side of the” — and surely no one misses the decisive citation of the most durably popular rock album in history (and thus necessarily the great competition for Taylor Swift, industry titan).
Who know which track? Who knows if it is cued to the opening of Wizard of Oz? Who knows why Taylor Swift, born in 1989, would at this exact moment point every arrow in her quiver at an album from 1973, that year at the peak and center of the American century, of the national folklore, maybe she knows where it all went wrong.
But it turns. That is the nature of the song, it turns, and here she says “Your favorite song was playing / from the far side of the gym.” It’s a deflationary move, entirely Swiftian, insisting on the high school particulars, slightly grungy but told in ultragloss, and the overdubbing of the suggested Pink Floyd title and the actual Taylor Swift phrase seems just right, isn’t that the thing about high school’s hyperintensity, that if your crush is on the far side of the gym that might as well be the dark side of the moon, farther even? This is the world and the excess of feeling that the song conjures, reaching out to the pop charts and the solar system beyond the song’s confines, even as it turns back on itself to consolidate the album’s far-flung details, remind us that they are all still in play, still alive, and sure enough that fucking sweater comes back at the very end, much better than when it first appeared on the album’s first single 45 minutes earlier because now it appears in the song just once, barely sneaking in during the song’s outro, only a few seconds left, “still in your cardigan,” and it rhymes with “kissing in your car again” like it always should have, a perfect rhyme, it makes things whole, and that is the song, it makes the record whole, makes all the songs into the many stories that are always also one story and isn’t that the history of pop music, the Billboard charts as folklore, as the infinite coming-of-age story, the romance, the cheating story, endlessly recast, endlessly repeated, somehow new just this one more time?