Melodic Construction in Right Where You Left Me, Taylor Swift’s Canonical 19th Best Song
originally published july. 27th, 2021
Right Where You Left Me, by Taylor Alison Swift, off the deluxe version of her ninth studio album “evermore”, is a very good song. Her 19th best, in fact, in my most recent ranking. And there are countless reasons, ranging from big picture things like the subject matter and structure, to a million tiny details of wordplay, imagery, production and arrangement choices, etc (special shout out to the banjo roll in the first verse that is both cool on its own, and also the first hint of “Oh this song will literally always be developing and throwing new things into the mix, huh!”)
But the thing I can’t stop thinking about is how this song functions as a grab bag example of how some of Taylor’s common tricks for melody construction work, and how they can have (perhaps, if you’re insane and read too much into it like me) an impact on the emotional experience of a song. Worth over 3,000 words? Probably not! Oh well!!!!!!
Also, is this just gonna be an evermore newsletter now? Who can say!!!!
The first common Taylor trick I see is repeating a melodic phrase while the chords change underneath. There’s a term for this! I used to know it but don't anymore!! I refuse to google!!!
For example, you can see this in Blank Space, where the verse starts with a melodic phrase for “Nice to meet you, where you been, I can show you incredible things” over top of an F major chord, then continues with the same phrase for “Magic, madness, heaven, sin, saw you there and I thought” (though with a slight tweak at the end), this time over a D minor chord.
Same thing happens in the chorus, with a phrase for “This is gonna be forever/or it’s gonna go down in flames” repeated almost identically on “You can tell me when it’s over/if the high was worth the pain” over the same F major/D minor chord progression as the verse.
Part of why I love this is aesthetic preference, it just sounds cool, &c. Part of why I love this is pop savviness: repetition is a key element of making a song memorable and often popular (this paper, as well as this video based on this analysis focus on lyrical repetition more so than melodic repetition, but given repeating lyrics in pop almost always fall on repeating melodic phrases, I don’t think it’s a stretch so say it probably holds true for melody also (and/or, spicy take, maybe melodic repetition is partly the driver for what’s being measured as a love of lyrical repetition??))
(Side note, here’s where Taylor’s lyrics fall in the mix (left is less repetitive, right is more), as well as her songs themselves. Blank Space interestingly actually kinda in the middle! Should I have used Out Of The Woods for this? Maybe!)
((Side side note, I love Bo Burnham, but Repeat Stuff bores me. It’s kinda unusually facile for Bo, even without it being a criticism I like, lol, fundamentally disagree with!!))
If repetition is valuable to pop memorability, to compose melodies that don’t just repeat across sections (ex: a chorus or verse that shows up multiple times throughout the song), but repeat within sections is a great move. But just repeating phrases ad infinitum could theoretically get boring, even if you’re not in the Bo-Burnham end of the bell curve, so often, including the Blank Space example, she repeats the melody while changing the chords underneath. Not only does this give some movement, keep things from getting too stale, it has the effect of harmonically recontextualizing the melody we’d heard before. In the Blank Space case (say that ten times fast) what was an extremely simple and straight-ahead melody of essentially singing the the root note of F over the root chord of F becomes, by virtue of moving to a D minor chord, a melody based around the minor third note instead of the root. (I think, don’t correct me if I got the interval wrong.) The melody is the same, but its context has reframed it, and slightly darkened it by making it minor.
And in some songs, this is the move she makes all the way through: see Out Of The Woods, where the same melodic phrase (which is actually just 2 notes) is repeated more or less as is across all four chords of the chorus. It’s the farthest right in the repetition analysis for a reason.
But for Blank Space, as well as dozens of her other songs, she pulls a different move: she starts by establishing a phrase over the first chord (more often than not the root chord), then repeats it once or twice under a new chord in the progression, then ends the section with a new melody for the last half or last quarter of the section.
For Blank Space, looking at the chorus (though the same general approach is used in the verse) we have the phrase for “So it’s gonna be forever or it’s gonna go down in flames” over the F major chord. That’s repeated for “You can tell me when it’s over if the high was worth the pain” over the D minor. Then something new for “Got a long list of ex lovers, they’ll tell you I’m insane” over a G minor. Then that is more or less repeated for “Cause you know I love the players but you love the game” over B flat major.
The structure repeats for the second half of the chorus, though this time with another new melody for “But I’ve got a blank space baby *sexy pen click noise* I’ll write your name” over the B flat major.
I think this has a few effects on the audience. Like with the shifting chords idea, it keeps it in a sweet spot between being repetitive but not boring; Out Of The Woods, despite how much I like it, probably strays way closer to the boring side of the line than it should. But more interestingly to me, if repetition is important for memory and to establish in some sense the “rules” of the song, the baseline, deviation from that established baseline brings things into focus. I’m sure there’s pop-neuroscience I could find somewhere to “prove” it, but I hope intuitively that experience rings true: it’s the things that are different and break the mold that stand out the most. And to do that, you need both halves: you need to establish a baseline before you can deviate from it.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the Taylor pattern, in those songs linked above, almost always has the deviation as the last phrase or phrases of the chorus, because those are also where she most often places the central emotional idea or central image of her song (“I hope you think of me”, “Cause you were never mine”, etc.) So they’re the moments where it makes sense to pull focus by any trick you can find.
In fact, they’re often title lines! Of just the linked examples, this is the case for Cruel Summer, Forever & Always, and You Belong With Me, and doubly true for Blank Space: remember in this case she repeats the overall chorus twice, so she has, I suppose, her A melody for the first two lines (“This is gonna be forever…”), then a B melody that repeats for the next two (“Gotta a long list of ex lovers…”), goes back to the A for the first two lines of the second half of the chorus, then does one version of the B melody and a whole new C melody for the final “I’ve got a blank space baby…” line.
She does the move twice! Once in establishing the A -> B shift, and then once again for establishing AABB -> AABC, and I don’t believe it’s a coincidence that the pattern break within a pattern break is drawing focus to the title line that explains the entire conceit of the song.
Right Where You Left Me does this constantly.
In the first verse, we repeat the “Friends break up, friends get married” phrase (AA), then shift into a modification for “Trends change, rumors fly through new skies” (B) and, again, new phrase for the title line of “I’m right where you left me” (C.) Overall, first verse is AABC.
First pre-chorus, we have a phrase of “Help, I’m still at the restaurant” that repeats twice, but then the second half of that phrase itself repeats: “Cross-legged in the dim light” becomes the same notes used for “They say what a sad sight”, before a new phrase is used for the long, drawn-out “I.” I’ll leave the ABC diagramming as an exercise to the reader, because idk how lol!
This doesn’t draw attention to a specific lyrical theme like in the verse, I think (not least because the big new melody is on her just singing “I” more or less as a vocalization, not on real words.) But it does give me an impression of a sort of fractal quality to Taylor-the-character’s thoughts in this section. She’s in a ruminating mood for the whole song, but here she’s fully placing herself back into the scene of the moment she was left, and spiraling around various details in a way that fits with the idea of narrowing down on a small part of of the melody and repeating it until the only thing that can break you out of that is the almost wordless wail that we get from the ascending “I” phrase.
Second pre-chorus actually does more of the Out Of The Woods move, essentially repeating the same phrase save for a few minor tweaks that may be a result of trying to fit the scansion of the lyrics more than anything: “I stood there, dust collected on my” repeats over the changing chords more or less as-is. We still get the benefit of the movement and recontextualization of the melody by the changing harmony (this is also the first major part of the song where there’s an actual background vocal harmony) but we don’t get the same pattern-break focus we get elsewhere. This though, I think is fine, it’s a pre-chorus after all, and not meant to be the main attraction.
And it happens yet again in the second verse, this time with a whole different melody than the first verse: she constructs an A section out of “Did you ever hear about the girl who got frozen”, repeats that, then does a B section that repeats three times on “She’s still twenty-three” / “Inside her fantasy” / “How it was supposed to be”, then repeats the AABBB again for the second half. In this case there’s actually more repetition after the pattern break than there was before.
Interestingly, the chorus does not really pull this trick…… and I wonder if it’s why I find myself so much more drawn to the verses and pre-choruses than I am the actual ostensible hook of the song? May also be that I just love low-voice Taylor though.
(Side note, observation stolen from someone writing in to a Holy Swift episode, but this is a Taylor trick (I mean, not that Taylor invented it, but) that Olivia Rodrigo also uses to really great effect throughout Sour, literally from the first verse of Drivers License and off to the races from there.)
The other major melodic construction trick in the song that I adore is actually really similar in concept to the first one: establish a pattern or expectation of sorts, then break it for thematic effect. In this case though it’s about the rhythm within individual bars of phrases, and specifically cases where Taylor establishes a rhythm full of either syncopated or quick-running eighth notes, then ends the phrase by hammering a melody onto evenly spaced quarter notes.
As an example, in the first verse, “Friends change, rumors fly through new skies” jitters all over the place. And then she follows that with an extremely straight ahead, consistent, on-beat line for “I’m right where you left me”
Just like the earlier case, this has the effect of foregrounding and emphasizing the “right where you left me” line, both in it being different from what came before, and I think in the fact that it’s so straight-ahead, simple, and on-beat. It’s drawing the ear into saying “this is important. This is your solid ground.” And again, no coincidence that it’s happening on a title line. In fact, the same trick of quarter-note-melody for the title line shows up all over the place across her discography, but as an example take the chorus of “You Belong With Me”: we have a chorus phrase full of eighth notes and back-and-forth rhythms, that pulls the hammer down to hit “Cant you see”, particularly the big vocal run on “see”, and then again, even more importantly, on “me.”
The verse is not the only place this happens, it also shows up in both pre-choruses. For the first, it’s a little subtler, but there’s the flighty rhythm comes through a bit on the quick run of eighth notes for “Still at the” before landing hard on “Res-tau-rant”, and same later for “you could hear a” / “hair pin drop”, “when I felt the” / “moment stop.” It’s not as dramatic as the verse version, both in that the flightiness is short and non-syncopated, and the quarter notes aren’t used on the literal title of the song but rather on the key images of the scene, but I still think it’s effective. Arguably even more so in the second iteration of the first pre-chorus (lol this song is a mess, it rules) where the quarter notes are also used on emotional cores of the experience: “one you want”, “met someone.”
The second pre-chorus does it in a sort of reverse, starting with the quarter notes of “I stayed there” before moving into flightier eighth notes of “Dust collected on my” and then restarting the melodic phrase (even if it’s in the middle of the lyrical phrase) and completing the sentence with those starting quarter notes again on “Pinned up hair.” And same with the first pre-chorus, here it’s more using the grounding quarter notes to focus on the major images/actions: “I sat there”, “pinned-up hair”, “find somewhere”, “sat and stared.” I do wonder if the real thing the quarter notes add to this section is helping to highlight and foreground the rhyme of the section, which may be useful given the rhyme is not happening at the end of each line, but in the middle. So having the solid quarter notes draw focus might help ground things in a section that could otherwise feel unmoored.
(Again, note that this trick isn’t really used in the actual chorus! Pre-choruses: 2, real chorus: 0!)
If there’s three different examples of a similar tool in one song, it’s interesting to look at what each does differently than the other, and we already hit on a few things (verse is most extreme shift between flighty and solid, first pre-chorus focuses on key images to set the scene, second pre-chorus is (potentially) more about backing up the rhyme than anything else.) But the neatest thing to me is that all three have different shapes to their melodic run for the quarter note bit.
In the verse, “I’m right where you left me” descends all the way down, each note going lower down the scale than the one before it. Second pre-chorus (“I sat there”) is all ascending. And the first pre-chorus is in the middle, doing a down-and-up run (“Res-tau-rant”, with the third note hopping back up in between the first and second.)
And I think this makes a ton of sense for their placement and purposes in the song! In reverse order, the second pre-chorus is just that: a pre-chorus. It’s the thing that’s immediately leading into what’s supposed to be the hook and main idea of the song, so it’s taking an ascending approach drawing you up the (metaphorical) staircase.
First pre-chorus is not just an in-between time structurally in the song, it’s also as mentioned before a place of deep rumination, of flashing back and forth between past and present, a place where a foregrounded line that’s the melodic equivalent of two-steps-forward, one-step-back makes perfect sense and reinforces what the lyrics and the structure are working towards.
And the verse, it’s a title line! And, again, to use the You Belong With Me example, when Taylor ends a phrase on a title line and ends it with this sort of emphasized quarter note melody, it’s often a descending line. It gives a sureness of purpose, a sort of finality that isn’t there if the line is ascending or back-and-forth. Now interestingly, I think she usually pulls this move in choruses, where that kind of definitive finality makes sense as the line is often meant to be the main concluding thought the song is working towards, while here it’s happening in the first verse of a song that is to put it mildly, a journey.
Your mileage may vary, but to me it works in the sense that the lyrics of the first verse are, at first blush, deeply impersonal and Taylor-the-character spouting platitudes about how the world works and time moves on and that’s the natural order of things. But then in comes this strong, final, stable, descending line saying “But!” Saying “That’s all well and good for everyone else, that is not the story we are telling here tonight.” So I think its definitiveness is weaponized not to wrap up the idea of the song the way it would in a chorus, but to reverse what the second pre-chorus does. This is Taylor leading you down the staircase into the messy world of the song, a world that is much darker, much more fixed in time, and much more personal and specific (almost painfully so in some of its laser-focused imagery) than any of the platitudes you hear her saying at first.
Do I think all of this is painstakingly intentional? Honestly, it wouldn’t surprise me. Taylor-the-artist is known as a meticulous craftsperson, and she’s been doing this game for a long time. That said, could I also believe a narrative that these are intuitive to her, it’s her grasp of these kinds of tricks that give her the leg up needed to become Taylor Swift™? Totally. And neither are value judgments, or at least aren’t for me: I don’t view craft vs intuitive talent as conflicting, or something where one needs to be valorized or defended against the other. In either case, the net effect is a fantastic song that pulls out all of the stops and triples down on them, which absolutely rules!!
PS: Som-Mai, this would very much something I would send to you to get your thoughts on before posting, but also you are the (as of writing) literal only subscriber to this, so lol