If you aren’t a Swifty, I bet you are wondering how these Taylor Swift songs that were picked to represent the homecoming themes actually relate to these themes. The song selected for Tuesday September 26, 2023 is Back to December, and the theme is Christmas Spirit. Wednesday September 27, 2023’s selected song is Style, and the theme is Your Favorite Decade. The song picked for Thursday September 28, 2023 is Tim McGraw following the theme Western Day. Lastly, for Friday September 29, 2023 the song is Miss Americana & the Heartbreak Prince with the theme of USA or Color Wars among the classes.
Back to December is a song from Taylor Swift’s Speak Now album. The lyrics to this song discuss the regret of leaving a relationship, and how she is constantly thinking about the ending of the relationship. She is apologizing for taking the relationship for granted, and talks about how she would fix their situation if it was up to her. December is the month of which Christmas is in which relates to the homecoming theme of a Christmas Spirit Day.
Style is on Taylor Swift’s 1989 album that has also been rerecorded into a Taylor’s Version and will be released with the rest of 1989 (Taylor’s Version) album on October 27, 2023. This song specifically describes an unstable relationship between two people, however they never end the relationship because they, “never go out of style”. This phrase refers to them not changing their ways even though their relationship isn’t healthy. This song relates to the theme Decades Day considering the fact that each decade has its own sense of “style”.
Tim McGraw is the very first song listed in Taylor Swift’s very first released album, Taylor Swift (her debut album), in 2006. She wrote this song to reflect on her feelings of her high school senior boyfriend leaving for college. She accepted the fact that they were soon to be broken up due to long distance, and in the song she hopes that her boyfriend will be reminded of her by the songs they would dance to which happened to be songs written by Tim McGraw. The homecoming theme of Western Day relates to this song considering that Tim McGraw is a country american singer and songwriter.
Miss Americana & the Heartbreak Prince is a part of Taylor Swift’s seventh album, Lover. She uses a high school setting to represent the crazy world of politics. In the beginning of this song she describes her naive state of mind that involves, “marching band playing,” and “waving homecoming queens”. She then continues, “American glory faded before me”. These lyrics describe how she came to the realization of how politics work, and how this country is actually run. She goes on to talk about the division between parties by saying, “my team is losing battered and bruising. I see the high fives between the bad guys.” Throughout the song she has the theme of no one wins in the game of politics. The USA theme day relates to Miss Americana & the Heartbreak Prince with the understanding that this song is about America.
Our Student Council was creative when correlating these themes with these Taylor Swift songs. Although making these homecoming themes based on a general Taylor Swift theme, by making these songs relate to something everyone can enjoy, even those that are not Taylor Swift fans are able to participate in this year’s homecoming themes.
