Taylor Swift's "gold rush" Is For The Delusional Romantics
A blog post
One of my New Year's Resolutions is to worry less about love. By that, I mean the hopeless romantic achy nausea pit in your stomach that comes with unrequited love. The love that comes in a dream and feels so real that you feel robbed when you wake up. The people you casually follow on Instagram and think you could probably love forever and create a happy life with. This delusional, unrequited, imaginary love/ desire can sometimes feel more damaging than actual relationships. This has led me to develop an unhealthy connection with the song “gold rush” by Taylor Swift. The song appears on Evermore (2021), and stands out with its poetic songwriting and whimsy themes of longing.
The first lyrics of the song hit like a bullet train: “Gleaming, twinkling/ Eyes like sinking/ Ships on waters/ So inviting, I almost jump in.” Swift compares the admired person to a sinking ship, that’s “so inviting” she almost climbs aboard, knowing the ship (the admired) is going down anyways. She knows they won’t ever be available (at least to her), but she can’t help a crush. Way to humble yourself and us, Taylor.
The chorus continues, painting a portrait of this unattainable love, “'Cause I don't like a gold rush, gold rush/ I don't like anticipating my face in a red flush/ I don't like that anyone would die to feel your touch.” Pretty self explanatory here: the admired takes the role of a personified “gold rush”, they are the gold (as hinted to in the first lines “gleaming, twinking…”), and the phenomena they cause (through their beauty, charisma, what have you) is a gold rush.
The music swells, allowing us to dream with Taylor through the lines “What must it be like/ To grow up that beautiful? / With your hair falling into place like dominos”. This is so relatable. I often find myself comparing myself to the people I like. This line reminds me of when you’re stalking someone you like on social media and you see photos of them in like high school at prom or something and they look like someone who would have never talked to you when you were that age. Maybe it’s just me, but the emphasis on the disconnect of the admired and the admirer feels like the most relatable part of the song.
It’s when you can’t stop from dreaming about them. Taylor continues the fantasy in “I see me padding 'cross your wooden floors / With my Eagles t-shirt hanging from the door/ At dinner parties / I call you out on your contrarian shit / And the coastal town / We wandered 'round had never / Seen a love as pure as it / And then it fades into the gray of my day old tea / 'Cause you know it could never be” GIRL- whoa. The magic of this comes from simple, relatable dreams. Mornings spent around the house together, walking around a new place with them. Taylor writes the process of falling for someone you invented in your head so well, as it totally starts with thoughts like “...[they] had never seen a love as pure as it”. We are ripped out of this fantasy rather quickly though.
The illusion fades in the second and final verse... “My mind turns your life into folklore/ I can't dare to dream about you anymore/ At dinner parties, I won't call you out on your contrarian shit/ And the coastal town we never found will never see a love as pure as it/ 'Cause it fades into the gray of my day-old tea/'Cause it will never be.” This shows the speaker attempting to pull themselves out of the metaphoric title “rush”. They acknowledge the problem isn’t the gold (the admired person), but the way the speaker thinks of them (seen in “My mind turns your life into folklore…”).
This song is so good. If you are not a fan of Taylor’s but are interested in getting into her music more, please start with Evermore (2021) or Folklore (2020). These albums, as proven by “gold rush”, show expert songwriting on a whole new level. Happy new year!