𓆙

i believe they are stock footage with text overlay? iirc i’ve seen people find the footage for the 1 and betty on shutterstock. so in terms of raw footage, that’ll be pulling from a ton of different artists. as for who’s picking the videos and putting text over them, i have no clue. i could see it being being contract work, maybe there’s someone on the payroll for graphics (i’m really only lightly familiar with 13 management), i could also see taylor choosing some of the videos like a pinterest board, your guess is as good as mine

probably recorded october/november 2013, when she was in the studio with max martin and shellback ironing out what she wanted the album to sound like (i like to call it the cynical period; she likely records bad blood, blank space, new romantics, wildest dreams, and wonderland in that two month period). writings a bit more up in the air— looking at quotes from 2013 about her writing process, she probably had voice recordings or notes of them written sometime in june-september 2013 but didn’t finish more than a verse/chorus until she got into the studio, but she’s never really talked about her process for those two songs). we also have some handwritten lyrics for them, those pictures and sourcing for everything i just said is all in the 1989 timeline that’s in my pinned. if you’re interested in those two songs specifically, i’d recommend starting with the interview quotes in sep 2013

oh, a million tiny ways— @haylortmls on twitter reloaded this massive old timeline of every interaction or possible reference they’ve made for each other, and while some of it’s definitely superfluous, she talked multiple times during the 1989 press tour about being friends with him (off the top of my head in her 2014 rolling stone article), they definitely went to a ton of afterparties and hung out with each other at them (likely including one at her house), they were always getting photographed in a line of people but then they’d post it cropping the other persons side off, he was at the 1975 concert were kissgate happened and possibly there the day she cut her hair, there’s this video of him wolf whistling during one of her acceptance speeches for an award, just a lot of public interactions. i think the last time we saw them hang out was in january 2015, at a mutual friends birthday party, but by god he looked devestated when she was cuddling with calvin at the at the 2015 billboard awards in may.

it’s also possible there’s just stuff that happened that we don’t know about, but yeah it’s also very possible she’s flubbing the numbers or wrote it earlier or some combination of the above— and while we’re talking about it, “6 weeks of breathing clean air” also doesn’t really line up with anybody, but it’s closest to matty

few things

1. at the time taylor was promoting the original red, she was still actively trying to move on from the events described on it, and thus didn’t want to get into the depth of suffering she was still experiencing. she was also reticent to label the album as a breakup album, probably because of her reputation at the time. in 2021, taylor had gained enough distance to be able to talk about the sadness without fear of bursting into tears during an interview, and also the perspective to label the emotions and experiences she had gone through— she talked about it being a death of her childhood, something that took her years to move on from, and an experience that fundamentally changed the way she saw the world. she’s also just more respected, so when she labeled things she had gone through as gaslighting or a predatory age gap, people believed her. all that leads to people listening to red with a different mindset, and picking up on different things

2. jake became the face of a cultural backlash against older men dating technically legal but still very young women. he experienced a ton of media and fan attention, and after months of fans going over their relationship and the contours of it and all the implications etc etc etc, you start thinking about him a lot more

3. harry starts being talked about as somewhat of a rebound from jake, partially because of the focus on jake described above, partially as a backlash against haylors. like, pre-1989 tv, i remember having to go to bat for how important that relationship was to her. “i dream about jumping off of very tall somethings” put somewhat of a squash to it, but the idea that harry broke her heart had really lost stock in late 2022

4. she wrote style within a fortnight of writing clean, and then harry and taylor continued to float around each other for another year. which is not clean behavior

aesthetically, i love fortnight. i don’t really like the trend of artists making like, one music video for an entire album, and then the music video focuses more on telling the albums story than the songs, but i can’t deny that the fortnight music video is fucking gorgeous. also this is breaking the rules, but i really love the lover lyric video

we don’t know clean is about jake! in fact, that theory is relatively recent— i started seeing it gain traction around red tv, and from what i’ve seen, it’s not very widespread outside of tumblr. harry was the default assumption at the time, and i think still the most popular muse

as far as little details in the song go, there’s not a super obvious answer? we don’t know exactly when her and jake stopped hooking up, but there did seem to be a pretty definitive break in early 2011, and after that she writes breakup songs for the rest of the year. that doesn’t mean they couldn’t have been hooking up for a long time afterwards— taylor left an industry party early (in tears, depending on what reports you believe) after seeing him in 2014. however, the 10 months detail doesn’t really line up with harry either— they had their biggest breakup in january of 2013, 13 months before clean was written, and as far as the public knows weren’t talking to each other until later in the year. so the ten months detail is strange. i wanna say there’s also some haziness about whether or not jake was in london at the time, but i haven’t really looked into that.

that being said, harry’s claimed it for himself. he referenced it in his song olivia (the best one direction song): “this isn’t the stain of red wine, i’m bleeding, love.”

yeah. i mean, i guess there’s a chance it’s metaphorical, but it seems like a legit detail to me