“A gloriously sick waltz through Daphne du Maurier territory” —Joe Hill
“Willow” sounds enchanting on the surface, but the deeper you dig into the lyrics, the darker the song becomes. In this episode, Krys explores the song through the lens of gothic romance, tracing invisible threads to folklore, Rebecca, and Crimson Peak to uncover a story about seduction, surrender, and finally seeing someone clearly.
For anyone who enjoys deep lyrical analysis, gothic storytelling, emotional symbolism, and uncovering hidden patterns.
willow watch the video
Track 1 on folklore
Written by Taylor Swift and Aaron Dessner
Produced by Aaron Dessner
Listen to the album: https://amzn.to/43iAGLD
Referenced in this Episode
Taylor’s Favorite Book description to Stephen Colbert: https://youtu.be/ZLZt_-GU_SA?si=RR5gHKuVMngNrwbg&t=302
Apple Music interview: Taylor telling Zane Lowe about Willow: https://youtu.be/CQacWbsLbS4?si=7ThCVsLN2f9GmtrL&t=1420
W Magazine: Guillermo del Toro’s comments about Taylor: https://www.wmagazine.com/culture/guillermo-del-toro-taylor-swift-moma-film-benefit-chanel-interview
Crimson Peak, directed by Guillermo Del Toro: https://amzn.to/4tZSgPL
Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier: https://amzn.to/42OCegj
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte: https://amzn.to/4dI2kH0
Links in this post may earn a commission at no additional cost to you.
Podcast theme music from #Uppbeat (free for Creators!): https://uppbeat.io/t/soundroll/happy-feet
The Off the Record episode for this song is waiting for you. Become a Patreon supporter!
Full Deep Dive: Read the Breakdown
“A gloriously sick waltz through Daphne du Maurier territory…” might not be the first words that come to mind when describing “willow,” but by the end of this episode, they will be.
“Willow” sounds enchanted. It sways, it pulls you in gently, you can almost feel it moving in sweeping circles, and on first listen, it’s easy to hear it as a love song about destiny. But listen again, and you notice Taylor chooses words like “cut,” “stray,” “lost,” “wreck,” and even “bait-and-switch,” and suddenly this fairy tale looks a lot more like a cautionary tale.
The deeper I dug into this song, the harder it became to ignore the connection between “willow,” Rebecca,and Crimson Peak. They’re all gothic romances: mysterious men, hidden danger, romantic surrender, and heroines who don’t really understand what they’ve gotten themselves into until the relationship has already changed them.
So today, I want to talk about “willow” as a gothic waltz. A song that sounds enchanting because the narrator is enchanted, and one that feels unsettling because the lyrics keep telling us the spell she’s under is far from harmless.
WHY WILLOW HAD TO OPEN EVERMORE
Taylor uses Track 1 to tell you how to listen to her albums. “State of Grace” opens Red with an overwhelming feeling that love can completely alter the course of your life. “the 1” opens folklore by pulling us into wistful memory and a fictionalized version of reality. evermore opens with “willow,” a song that sounds warm and even charming on the surface while filled with words that reveal a darker undercurrent.
When you look at the rest of evermore, that same contradiction is everywhere. “champagne problems” turns a proposal into a disaster scene. “tolerate it” traps someone inside a relationship where devotion is met with indifference. “ivy” turns infidelity into something beautiful and almost intoxicating. Even “cowboy like me” initially feels playful and romantic, but turns out to be about a couple of con artists trying to figure out if they can trust each other.
A lot of evermore lives in a world where love and danger belong together. The kind of emotional danger where someone changes the shape of your life before you even understand who they are, or what the relationship is doing to you while you’re inside it.
That’s part of why the gothic romance connection started feeling so strong to me.
During her appearance promoting The Life of a Showgirl, Stephen Colbert asked Taylor about her favorite kind of book, and she immediately started describing gothic stories. She name-drops du Maurier’s Rebecca, then starts talking more broadly about old estates, emotionally complicated relationships, mystery, danger…
You know what? I’ll just let her tell you about it.
[CLIP OF TAYLOR ON LATE NIGHT PLAYS]
That storytelling style is all over evermore. Hidden feelings, emotional ghosts, relationships that feel fated and dangerous at the same time. As the first track of the album, “willow” is giving “opening scene of a gothic romance,” where the heroine is standing at the edge of something beautiful, without realizing it conceals something much darker.
INVISIBLE STRINGS ACROSS TAYLOR’S CATALOG
Taylor loves reconnecting songs through tiny lyrical details, and “willow” has a couple of these invisible strings that had my brain lighting up like a conspiracy chat group.
The biggest one is “wreck my plans.” In “august,” she’s “canceling plans just in case you’d call,” reorganizing her life around a relationship that doesn’t belong to her.
This callback was really smart of Taylor, because even though they’re similar, in “august,” she’s choosing to rearrange her plans. In “willow,” someone is actively destroying them.
Then there’s “show me the places where the others gave you scars.” Which points us back toward “you drew stars around my scars” from “cardigan.”
Taylor is using shorthand again to set up the idea that wounds become intimacy points. Scars become a romanticized part of the relationship. Something they share.
And it’s interesting that both of those invisible strings pull us back toward folklore specifically, because “willow” already feels spiritually connected to the song “invisible string.” They have this magical, fate-driven quality to them. But in “invisible string,” Taylor says “time, mystical time, cutting me open, then healing me fine.” In “willow,” she’s “rough on the surface but you cut through like a knife.” Both songs connect love with being wounded. But in “invisible string,” the wound heals. In “willow,” the cut is part of the seduction itself.
Taylor explained “willow” in much stranger terms than people sometimes remember.
[CLIP OF TAYLOR SPEAKING WITH ZANE LOWE PLAYS]
Hearing Taylor describe the song as tactical, confusing, full of bait-and-switches and misdirection confirmed to me that I was on the right track.
VERSE 1 – OPENING THE DOORWAY: WHY WILLOW FEELS DIFFERENT ON CLOSER LISTEN
And, I may be on the right track, but this is still just my interpretation of the song. I’d genuinely love to hear your take, too, so please tag me if you share!
Part of what makes “willow” feel so “gloriously sick” is the way the song moves. It has this engaging, swaying rhythm that pulls everything in circles, almost like a folk song’s answer to a waltz. Not literally a waltz, but it creates the same feeling of being drawn into someone else’s rhythm.
Waltzes are intimate dances structured around following. One person leads, one person responds, and the dance only works if someone gives themselves over completely to the movement of the other person. This plays out in what Taylor is actually describing in the lyrics, because the narrator of “willow” spends almost the entire song being moved by someone else’s intentions without even understanding what those intentions are.
And that’s where the gothic storytelling framework comes in. Specifically, gothic romance. Stories like Rebecca and Crimson Peak, where a woman gets pulled into a relationship that feels magnetic and fated and beguiling before she can see the emotional danger that awaits. The heroines in those stories are often outsiders in some way. The narrator in Rebecca is the working-class companion of a socialite when she’s swept off her feet and engulfed in an intricate aristocratic society where she’s very much out of place.
Edith in Crimson Peak is considered unusual and rough around the edges because she’s an American woman openly pursuing writing and independence in the early 1900s when she’s swept up in a romance that brings her to her new husband’s ancestral home in England.
The lyric “rough on the surface” describes Edith well. Lovely, but unpolished, and even out of place. A heroine thrust into a world that’s not her own.
Guillermo del Toro wrote and directed the movie, and he once described Taylor as someone deeply interested in myth, fable, and the origins of fairy tales, saying her interest in those storytelling traditions runs surprisingly deep. Taylor has spoken about how much she admires his imagination and visual storytelling, and Guillermo recalled conversations with her about fairy tale and folklore traditions that became important to his own work. The more I learned about Crimson Peak, the harder it became for me to believe the similarities here are accidental.
[OPENING LINES OF WILLOW PLAY]
Even the emotional structure of the opening verse feels gothic. “I’m like the water when your ship rolled in that night” immediately puts the narrator in a reactive position. She changes shape around his arrival as he “cuts through like a knife,” which might be considered romantic until you remember that knife cuts are wounds.
Then she admits she can’t read him clearly. If this were an “open-shut case,” she would know what she was looking at, but she doesn’t. And before the verse is even over, she’s already “lost in your current like a priceless wine,” swept away by someone whose expression she’s unable to interpret.
But that’s gothic romance storytelling for you. A heroine enters the orbit of someone magnetic, mysterious, and emotionally intoxicating. Warning signs are there from the beginning, but because we’re hearing the story from inside the enchantment, the danger is wrapped in a poetic sort of beauty.
CHORUS 1 – SEDUCTION IN DISGUISE
[FIRST 2 LINES OF CHORUS PLAYS]
These lines in the chorus describe a circular reference that sort of mimics the movement of a waltz, twirling us around with this dizzying, illogical turn of phrase.
Words are supposed to make things clearer. If someone explains themselves, you should know more, not less. But here, every time he speaks, she feels more confused. His words pull her further into uncertainty.
That’s very much in keeping with a gothic story. The man at the center of the story is magnetic, but unreadable. Rochester in Jane Eyre, Maxim in Rebecca, Thomas in Crimson Peak, they are all some version of this character. They draw the heroine in while withholding something crucial. And by the time she realizes how much she doesn’t know, she’s already emotionally involved. That’s the exact headspace “willow” is in. The narrator is moving deeper into fascination and away from everything she knew before.
Then, “wherever you stray, I follow,” and “stray” is such a loaded word. Straying means leaving the path. Moving away from where you’re supposed to be. In a romantic context, it can also imply infidelity, or at least emotional unreliability. She’s saying, “even when you go somewhere dangerous, I’ll still follow you.”
Here again we can think of this like a waltz. It’s not technically a waltz, but it keeps giving us the emotional sensation of one person being led by another. He strays. She follows. He moves. She adjusts. He remains unclear. She tries to get closer. That’s how gothic romances work, especially in the early seduction phase. The heroine is not dragged kicking and screaming. She is led there charmingly. Which is what makes it dangerous.
[LAST 2 LINES OF CHORUS PLAY]
“I’m begging for you to take my hand” makes the imbalance even clearer. Taking someone’s hand can be romantic, but begging for it is different. Begging means she is reaching from a position without any authority. She wants that connection badly enough to ask for it from a place of need. And in the context of this song, where his words confuse her and his movement keeps pulling her off course, begging sounds like surrender.
Then we get “wreck my plans,” echoing “cancel my plans” from “august,” another song Taylor built around instability, longing, and waiting on someone who’s emotionally inconsistent.
The wording is harsher here, though. In “august,” she’s willing to rearrange her plans, and she has the agency to do so. In “willow,” they’ll be wrecked. But by pairing it with “that’s my man,” the romance and the damage are intertwined.
This is destabilization dressed up like destiny. Confusion cloaked as charm. Intoxication interpreted as invitation. Destruction disguised as proof of devotion. And the song keeps moving in that circular, swaying way, like the narrator is being drawn through a dance she may not be allowed to leave.
VERSE 2 – “LIFE WAS A WILLOW”: BENDING, YIELDING, MOURNFUL
[FIRST 2 LINES OF VERSE 2 PLAY]
“Life was a willow and it bent right to your wind” is the line where the song finally gives us its central image, and Taylor makes a very specific choice here. It’s not her life that bent. Life itself bent. The universe bending at his command.
Willow trees are beautiful. And that image of a willow bending is beautiful, but it is not neutral. When a willow bends, it yields. It moves according to the force around it. It can look graceful while it’s doing that, but the movement is still being caused by something outside itself. So, when Taylor says life bent to “your wind,” she’s describing this man as an invisible force.
Wind has incredible power, but you can’t see it. You see what it does. You see the branches move. You see the surface of the water shift. You see the world responding to something, but what it’s responding to? Wind? That’s something you can’t see, hold, prevent, or contain.
Which fits the relationship she’s been describing. He arrives, and she changes shape around him. He speaks, and she knows less. He strays, and she follows. Now life itself bends at his movement. The deeper we get into the song, the more our heroine resembles someone like Edith Cushing, Jane Eyre, or the narrator of Rebecca.
Willows carry centuries of symbolic sadness with them: mourning, abandoned love, tragic women, and grief. Even Ophelia’s death in Hamlet is tied to willow imagery.
Taylor chose something flexible, downward, mournful, and very responsive to movement. That choice deepens the feeling of the song even if you don’t consciously know the symbolism while you’re listening.
“Head on the pillow, I could feel you sneakin’ in” sends the enchantment inward. It could be someone entering your thoughts when you’re trying to sleep. Romantic obsession. Dreaming. That half-asleep space where longing gets louder. But “sneakin’ in” implies intrusion. Getting in without being invited.
So, the movement of the verse is subtle, and eerie. First life bends to his wind, then he’s sneaking into her mind. The unstoppable force outside becomes a presence inside her thoughts. That’s how enchantment works in these stories. It feels like attraction. Like longing. Sometimes it feels like lying awake with someone in your head, unaware of how much of your life is starting to bend around them.
It’s worth mentioning that this line, “sneakin’ in” could also mean that he’s meant to be with her, but slipped away and is trying to return, unnoticed. This interpretation adds to the intrigue and fits the gothic narrative, too, in the mystery of his whereabouts when he’s supposed to be sleeping next to her. Just one more thing she doesn’t know about him as she continues to shape her life around what little she knows about his.
“MYTHICAL THING”: GOTHIC ROMANCE AND CRIMSON PEAK
[REMAINING LINES OF VERSE 2 PLAY]
Then Taylor says, “as if you were a mythical thing,” and suddenly he is no longer just a man. He’s been elevated into something legendary. Something almost unreal. And in a gothic romance, the danger is usually that he becomes larger than life before she can see him clearly.
This is one of the places where Crimson Peak becomes impossible for me to ignore. I’m not saying “willow” is a retelling of Crimson Peak…I don’t think Taylor sat down and wrote a plot summary in song form. But I do think the influence is strong.
Crimson Peak is a gothic romance about a woman pulled toward a man who feels mysterious, elegant, and dangerous all at once. He is charming but distant. And before Edith knows what she’s gotten into, she’s tied herself to him, deeply attached.
In “willow,” she is describing someone who feels fabled, not grounded and knowable. She calls him a mythical thing. An object. And then she labels him “a trophy or a champion ring,” turning him into something to win. To possess. That is a strange way to describe love, but it makes sense if what she’s really describing is fixation. She’s not simply drawn to him. She has value because of him.
Which is a device in gothic storytelling, too. In Rebecca, Maxim is not just a man to the narrator. He is an entrance into another world. A house, a name, a status symbol, a mystery, and ultimately a life she doesn’t know how to inhabit. In Jane Eyre, Rochester is not simply a romantic interest. He is the complicated, brooding center of a house full of secrets. And in Crimson Peak, Thomas Sharpe is both the love story and the threshold into danger. This man is the invitation. He is the warning sign. He is the house key and the lock on the door.
The waltz scene in Crimson Peak feels especially important here. Thomas is meant to be courting someone else, but he chooses Edith. His sister plays piano while he leads Edith through the waltz, a dance she doesn’t know. It’s seduction through movement. He’s leading her through something beautiful, graceful, and physically honest, and that is how she is drawn in.
That’s why the waltz idea still lingers for “willow,” even though the song is not a waltz. The emotion is still there: being led, being pulled, being taught the rhythm of someone else’s world before you know the cost of entering it. “Wherever you stray, I follow” already told us that. Now, with “mythical thing,” “trophy,” and “champion ring,” the attraction becomes even more heightened. He has become the prize, the thing worth bending for.
And then Taylor says she’d “cheat to win.” She would break her own rules to have him. Make herself the other woman, as she’s hinted at in words like “stray” and “sneakin’ in.” But even beyond the possibility of cheating, the line tells us her judgment has shifted. Whatever her normal boundaries are, this man has her imagining herself leaping right over them.
Joe Hill’s description of Crimson Peak became a bit of a North star for me here. I used his words to open this episode. He called Crimson Peak “a gloriously sick waltz through Daphne du Maurier territory,” and once I approached “willow” through that lens, so many things fell into place. Daphne du Maurier territory is exactly this kind of emotional landscape: old, possibly haunted houses, mysterious men, women who enter relationships without first obtaining a full history, and romance that feels beautiful until the cracks start to show.
And “willow” is moving through that same territory emotionally. “I want him even though I don’t understand him. I want him even though he intoxicates me. I want him even though I might become someone I don’t recognize.” This verse is a turning point. The attraction has crossed from enchantment into entrapment. He has become mythic. A prize. And she would abandon her morality just to keep his attention.
CHORUS 2 – DEVOTION BECOMING ERASURE
The second chorus comes back bigger, with Taylor adding two lines that push the emotional stakes way past simple attraction.
[LINES 4+5 OF SECOND CHORUS PLAY]
“My train could take you home” is interesting because “home” in Taylor’s world is safety. Belonging. Emotional recognition. The place where you stop wandering. So, when she says her train could take him home, she’s positioning herself as the path to the place he belongs. And in a song full of straying and following and confusion, she’s also saying she can be the way back.
Which sounds so romantic. But “anywhere else is hollow” changes that. Anything that doesn’t include him is empty. So now the relationship is not just something she wants. It is what gives the world substance. Anywhere else, anything else, any version of life without him loses meaning.
The whole emotional map of the song is reorganizing around him. He defines what is real. Our heroine is consumed by him. Erased.
Now the circular dance of the song feels more like a trap than a dream. The chorus repeats, and each time it comes back, the language feels less spontaneous and more like deja vu. He strays. She follows. She begs. She offers a way home. She says everything else is emptiness. The steps keep repeating, but what it costs her keeps growing.
That kind of devotion is dangerous. Of course the heroine wants to follow the mysterious man and believes she is the person he belongs with. Of course everything outside the spell feels futile. But that is how she gets consumed. Little by little. Step by step. Until there’s nothing of her left.
THE BRIDGE – SURVIVAL AND THE “90S TREND” DOUBLE MEANING
After reminding us that his influence shaped all of existence, threatening to erase her entirely, the narrator sounds, for the first time, like she’s pushing back against the force that’s been consuming her. Up to this point, every image in “willow” has involved bending, following, surrendering, or compromising herself for someone else. But here, suddenly, she starts talking about survival.
[BRIDGE PLAYS]
“They count me out time and time again” looks outside the relationship for the first time. There are other people now. Witnesses. Doubters. People underestimating her ability to endure what she’s been through. “Count me out” assumes you’re finished, weak and defeated.
She counters that with: “I come back stronger than a ‘90s trend.” A line that feels playful and modern, almost out of place in this gothic landscape.
But whether you’re talking about the 1990s and their overplucked eyebrows, slip dresses, lace camisoles, and gothic fashion, or the 1890s with their corsets, cameo jewelry, velvet, and ghost photography, a case can be made for either century, and both represent a return to form.
Our heroine is starting to wake up. She recognizes that she has been diminished, underestimated, nearly erased by this relationship. And instead of continuing to surrender, she shifts into survival mode. The woman who comes back stronger.
That’s another thing gothic romances often do. The heroine enters the story uncertain, overwhelmed by the unfamiliar world she’s thrust into. But surviving it changes her. Jane Eyre leaves Thornfield and eventually returns on different footing. Edith conquers Crimson Peak, having fought for her survival. Even the nameless narrator of Rebecca, despite everything she loses of herself inside Maxim’s world, is empowered by the act of deciding to stand by him once she learns about his past.
The bridge is an awakening. An awareness that she has been disappearing into someone else. And for the first time in the song, she’s starting to see him clearly.
VERSE 3 – “AN OPEN-SHUT CASE”: A DELAYED AWAKENING
In the final verse, something has shifted. The narrator is still inside this relationship, but she no longer sounds swept away by it.
[FIRST 2 LINES OF VERSE 3 PLAYS]
She’s giving him instructions instead of simply reacting to his movement. Earlier, he strayed and she followed. Life itself bent under his power. He snuck into her dreams. But now she is the one setting the terms. I’ll meet you after dark. But you need to wait for my signal.
And of course, that wording indicates secrecy. Signals in darkness. Meeting somewhere hidden. It all fits the gothic atmosphere, but it also highlights that this is not broad daylight romance. This is something partial, private, and probably complicated. It’s a relationship that cannot exist in the open.
Then she invites him to open up to her, showing her how others hurt him, where they “gave you scars.” She wants to understand him. She wants access to him. In gothic romance, this is a classic move for the heroine. The mysterious man has wounds. The heroine sees the pain underneath the danger. She starts to believe that if she can understand the wound, maybe she can understand the man.
That shows up in Jane Eyre. It shows up in Rebecca. It absolutely shows up in Crimson Peak, where Thomas is not only dangerous, but damaged. That is part of what makes him compelling. He is someone whose hurt and charm exist alongside the harm he causes. And “willow” gives us that same emotional complication. She is inviting him to confide in her, “show me where you were hurt.”
[REMAINING LINES OF VERSE 3 PLAY]
But it seems he is not who she thought he was and “now this is an open-shut case.” Back in the first verse, she said she “never would’ve known” how he felt from his expression. He was unreadable to her then. His face was inscrutable. But now, after stepping out from under the spell, she can finally see him. He has been unmasked.
She finally understands everything and has to acknowledge his skill in deceiving her. A bait-and-switch is deception. You are offered one thing and given another. You are drawn in under one set of expectations, and the truth is revealed after you’re already invested. But she calls it “a work of art.” She sees his manipulation but appreciates the skill in his performance.
Like any gothic romance, recognition arrives almost too late, and the newfound knowledge alters her. There is no going back to who she was before him. But as she looks back to the beginning, she sees she could have known his nature from the very first moment they met.
FINAL CHORUS & OUTRO – “THAT’S MY MAN”: THE SPELL IS BROKEN
In the final chorus and outro, Taylor gradually drops her voice down a whole octave. She sounds progressively more grounded, less airy and spellbound. More wary. Same words, but a changed woman singing them.
[FINAL CHORUS LINES IN LOWER OCTAVE PLAY]
Earlier in the song, “that’s my man” sounded almost hypnotic. Romantic. Claimed without question. But after the bridge and final verse, she is no longer speaking from inside pure enchantment. She sees him clearly now. The secrecy. The emotional inconsistency. The manipulation. All the half-truths and disappearing acts. And the bait-and-switches.
The spell has been broken.
But gothic romances aren’t always about the heroine leaving love behind. Often, they include her learning the truth and choosing with open eyes, to stay. Jane Eyre returns to Rochester after finally understanding him. The narrator of Rebecca decides to stay once she learns the reality of Maxim and Rebecca’s marriage. Edith survives Crimson Peak precisely because she follows her heart and Thomas follows his.
The final chorus of “willow” no longer sounds like a woman losing herself. It sounds like a woman reclaiming herself.
And in reclaiming herself, you might hear her still choosing the relationship. No longer blindly following him through the dark. Understanding the cost now. Understanding who he is. And when she says, “that’s my man,” it’s her choice.
On the other hand, you might hear her choosing herself and abandoning the relationship. The words now tinged with longing and sarcasm. Saying “that’s my man” as a barb instead of a balm. Taking jabs at herself and how she allowed herself to be deceived.
Either way, the meaning shifts with the tone in her voice away from someone under the control of someone else and into someone moving under their own power.
Earlier in the song, the repeated chorus felt circular, dizzying, consuming, and like she was trapped inside the dance. But by the outro, the repetition feels steadier. Intentional. Like someone retelling the story to herself with full awareness of what it meant and what it cost.
That doesn’t make the relationship healthy. Or safe. Or uncomplicated. Gothic romances rarely are. But our heroine survives the haunted house with her eyes opened now. Wiser because of it. Forever changed.
