Swiftly To Lent

Driving long distances requires pop music. NPR can be sleep inducing, and silence can make a minute seem like an hour. But the relentless beat of pop music and hook line lyrics stop the droopy eye syndrome immediately.

But I know nothing about the music of the moment. Less about Taylor Swift beyond her heroic disdain of the Music System. So in the fourth hour between visiting sites, I heard a poem, then an anthem to her own, often disappointing, humanity.

It’s soon Lent, when our humanity and its meaning becomes the focus of 40 days. In the glib, cynical, mercenary world of Pop Music is a human voice, singing the words we all feel:

“ I’ll stare directly at the sun but never in the mirror

It must be exhausting always rooting for the anti-hero”

It is time to stare in the mirror and see the God who made us in the reflection. Seeing through the mess we make of our perspective is the essence of how we live our glib, cynical, and mercenary lives. Until Jesus looks back at us when we see what what is impossible to understand.

Taylor Swift

I have this thing where I get older but just never wiser
Midnights become my afternoons
When my depression works the graveyard shift
All of the people I’ve ghosted stand there in the room

I should not be left to my own devices
They come with prices and vices
I end up in crisis (tale as old as time)
I wake up screaming from dreaming
One day I’ll watch as you’re leaving
‘Cause you got tired of my scheming
(For the last time)

It’s me, hi, I’m the problem, it’s me
At tea time, everybody agrees
I’ll stare directly at the sun but never in the mirror
It must be exhausting always rooting for the anti-hero

Sometimes I feel like everybody is a sexy baby
And I’m a monster on the hill
Too big to hang out, slowly lurching toward your favorite city
Pierced through the heart, but never killed

Did you hear my covert narcissism I disguise as altruism
Like some kind of congressman? (Tale as old as time)
I wake up screaming from dreaming
One day I’ll watch as you’re leaving
And life will lose all its meaning
(For the last time)

I have this dream my daughter in-law kills me for the money
She thinks I left them in the will
The family gathers ’round and reads it and then someone screams out
“She’s laughing up at us from hell”

I’ll stare directly at the sun but never in the mirror
It must be exhausting always rooting for the anti-hero

Source: LyricFind

Songwriters: Jack Michael Antonoff / Taylor Alison Swift

Anti-Hero lyrics © Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, Universal Music Publishing Group