I’ve always felt perpetually unlucky.
Then, during the first week of my freshman year, my friend set up an appointment with an astrologer as a late birthday present.
“Luck will favor you,” she told me as I was tucked away in the corners of a Raoul lounge. Until 2024, she said, everything I wanted would come to be.
In “The Lucky One,” Taylor Swift sings “they tell you that you’re lucky but you’re so confused / You don’t feel pretty, you just feel used.”
The first time I listened to “Red,” I didn’t like it. But this lyric stuck with me, so when “Red (Taylor’s Version)” came out, as a devout Swiftie, I had high hopes. As usual, she didn’t disappoint.
“Red” is about nostalgia for dreaming. For the bliss of hoping you’ll get lucky and accomplish your goals before you have to live with their realities. I’ve also been told I’m lucky, but I never really believed it. “Red” captures the nostalgia of remembering the blissful times you’ll never be able to relive.
When “Red (Taylor’s Version)” came out, the vault songs embodied the nostalgia of remembering who you used to be. When you’re a first-year, you can dream about anything. You can tell people you’re going to be a lawyer, an acrobat or a chess player, and everything feels within reach. By the time you’re a senior, everything feels boxed in, and the vault songs capture that desperation. “The Very First Night” and “Message in a Bottle” embody nostalgia at its core, a callback to sitting at McDonough Field during Best in Show and becoming enamored with Raas-garba dance for the first time. But “Nothing New” refutes that wistfulness, noting “How can a person know everything at 18 and nothing at 22?” The vault songs don’t just build off the original album; they are a whisper of looking back at songs you loved as a child in the eyes of an adult.
Courtesy of Republic Records.
The originals are a haunting relic of melodies you crooned as a child before you face the reality of their words. The most evident example is “Everything Has Changed,” in which Taylor recounts a single moment of meeting someone and feeling the world shift. “Begin Again” is an ode to fresh starts, and “Starlight” is the dream of a magical night dancing the night away. I can’t help but reminisce about seeing the world with fresh eyes. Dancing at Garba or Diwali for the first time my first year and thinking there was nothing that would ever feel so electrifying.
There are diversions, of course. “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” brings out the stick-it-to-the-man attitude in all of us. “Girl at Home” and “Babe” are dual sides of cheating and heartbreak. “I Bet You Think About Me” gives us all the comfort that those who have wronged us, even those that despise us, will never really be able to escape us.
Taylor Swift describes “Red” as her “true breakup” album. She said that compared to all her other albums, “Red” embodied “pure, absolute, to the core, heartbreak.” For me, it represents the heartbreak of never getting to do things for the first time again. My last first day of school, my last print issue of The Emory Wheel, my last time dancing at Diwali. It’s not 2024 yet, but I’m wondering if my luck is starting to run out.
Dreaming about life has always come easy to me. Living those dreams is something I’m still trying to figure out.
Brammhi Balarajan (23C) is from Las Vegas, majoring in political science and English and creative writing. She is the Editor-in-Chief of The Emory Wheel. Previously, her column "Brammhi's Ballot" won first place nationally with the Society of Professional Journalists. She has also interned with the Georgia Voice.
