My Life In 35 Songs, Track 32: “evermore” by Taylor Swift

Hey December, guess I’m feeling unmoored; can’t remember what I used to fight for

In competitive running, they call it hitting the wall: the moment near the end of a race, usually a long, arduous one, where all the fight goes out of you. Your legs feel like lead, your heart is hammering on overdrive, your lungs are screaming at you to stop, and your mind is sounding every alarm bell it knows how to hit, all in a desperate attempt to override any motivation, goals, or positive self-talk you have left. Suddenly, everything inside of you is screaming the same word at maximum volume: quit, quit, QUIT.

When Taylor Swift released evermore, her second surprise album of 2020, on Friday the 13th of that December, I felt like a man who had hit the wall – not in my ability to run a race, but in my ability to weather a particularly fraught chapter in human history. When the sun rose that morning, it marked nine months to the day since the year’s other Friday the 13th – the March day when the world had turned upside down in the face of the incoming COVID-19 pandemic. And, for my part, I wasn’t sure if I could take any more months.

Writing about evermore on my favorite albums of 2020 list (it came in at number 3), I wrote that it “dropped on a chilly December Friday that just so happened to be the end of one of the worst weeks of my life.” At the time, I did not elaborate. I felt like everyone’s lives were in disarray, and I thought the sentiment would be more relatable if I didn’t tell my full story of why Taylor Swift’s saddest album came to mean so much to me as 2020 drew to its (merciful) conclusion. After all, who couldn’t relate to feeling down about a Christmas season where the very things that make the holidays special – namely, the warmth of togetherness with family and friends – were going to be all but impossible?

Five years later, I’m ready to share what happened that week, and that year, and how it tore my family apart, changed my entire life, and reframed my whole damn worldview. And I’m ready to tell that story because every time I listen to evermore, particularly the beautifully, exhaustedly sad title track, I can’t help but flash back to where I was the first time I heard it.

“…And that’s if it even is a virus! I’m not convinced.”

My stepdad (or the man I used to refer to as such) said those words to me in April or May of 2020. At the time, I didn’t think much of them. It was an offhand remark, during a random dog walk in the woods, from a guy who had a history of buying into conspiracy theories. If the government pushed a narrative, my stepdad was probably convinced they were lying to the American public for some reason or other. I figured “Oh, of course he’d have some sort of alternative theory about the COVID-19 pandemic.”

I didn’t know at the time that his words would not only prove to be the death of my relationship with him, but ultimately the thing that caused him to forsake our entire family – my mom included – and embrace a life of lonely paranoia.

From a young age, I have had a distrust of male role models and authority figures. My biological father walked away from our family when I was young. Throughout my childhood, he’d come to visit occasionally, but those visits always tended to end unhappily. He’d stick me in daycare for the afternoon when we were supposed to spend the day together, or he’d needle away at my brother – who, being five-plus years older than me, felt the sting of dad’s betrayal more than I ever did – until he ruined the visit. One time, my dad wanted to get on the road earlier than he’d initially planned, which meant he brought me back to my house an hour or two sooner than agreed upon with my mom. With no one home and the house locked, he used a ladder to climb through my bedroom window, open the front door, and leave me there all alone. My dad literally committed a felony rather than spend more time with me. This was my experience with father figures.

My stepdad was different. My mom met him when I was four years old, through the personal ads section of the local newspaper. She took me on her first date with him, a picnic at the beach on a gorgeous summer day. While they got to know one another, I dug holes in the sand, too young to understand what was happening right next to me. The two fell in love quickly, and by that November, they were saying their vows and tying the knot.

Stories of stepparents in movies and books rarely seem to be positive, but my stepdad proved to be good-natured and kind – game to take on the challenges of marrying into a family with three kids who were 10 years old and under. It could have been a tricky situation, especially given the fact that there were some definite daddy issues lingering from my biological father’s exit. But he navigated it all with aplomb, bonding with each of us in turn – especially my older brother – and showing my mom the love and respect she deserved. Just like that, it felt like our family had been made whole.

That feeling would last through my entire childhood, for the duration of my adolescence, across my college years, and into adulthood. I never saw my biological father much throughout those years, but it didn’t matter. My stepdad was there to read me bedtime stories, or to teach me how to play chess, or to take me out for pepperoni-and-bacon pizza when my mom and my siblings were out of town. He taught me how to drive a car, joined me for long runs as I was just finding my footing in that department, and introduced me to some of the bands and artists that would become foundational to my music taste. He helped pay for my college education, and was always there to help if I ran out of gas or got my car stuck in a snowbank. He was, in every sense, a dad.

He became such a dad that I came to think of him as permanent. My real dad had left, but I never in a million years would have thought that my stepdad would. He loved my mom too much; he loved us kids too much. The night before I got married, at my rehearsal dinner, I got up and gave a tearful speech, thanking every person in the room for the roles they’d played in my life. “Phil,” I said to my stepdad, choking up just saying his name. “I don’t care what biology says; you are my father.”

Maybe more than anything else I ever said to him, those words haunt me now – not because I didn’t mean them, nor because I wish I could take them back, but because thinking back on them casts in such stark relief how much our relationship changed…how much he changed. Thinking about those words, remembering how much love and emotion I felt in my heart when I said them, knowing how genuinely I meant them – that all makes it so surreal to fast-forward to now and see what became of that bond. Phil isn’t my father anymore; he’s not even my step dad. He’s just a guy I knew – someone who was a part of my life for 25 years and then decided to walk out of it.

I’ve thought often over the past five years about how I should have seen the warning signs. Phil was a staunch libertarian who hated the government and scoffed at the idea that any politician could honestly have good intentions at heart. He talked often about the so-called “deep state” and about how the government goons wanted to take “control” of our lives. He championed personal freedoms and liberties to a fault. He raved about how Twitter made it possible for him to curate his own news feed and avoid all the “crap” he didn’t like about scrolling through legitimate news sites. He bought into conspiracy theories about 9/11, the moon landing, the JFK assassination, and mass shootings. Looking back, what happened to him seems so predictable. All the seeds were there for him to distrust the official narrative, for him to assume the government had ill intentions, for him to view every COVID precaution as an infringement of his personal liberties.

But it’s sometimes hard to see what’s happening right in front of your own eyes, and that was my experience with Phil. I knew he was drifting, that he felt a certain way about the pandemic and the way it was handled. But I think I was in denial about just how deep those feelings – or the rabbit holes they led him to – went. Maybe I thought he’d eventually see reason. Maybe I thought the pandemic scares would subside soon enough that I wouldn’t ever have to reckon with his denial. Maybe I just thought that he loved my mom, and me, and my siblings enough to set aside these apparent differences we had and still maintain cordial relationships. After all, we had a lot of things that we shared together – not least the fact that we’d walked through those tumultuous, coming-of-age years together.

Looking back, it’s hard for me to pinpoint the exact moment that I lost Phil. The last truly “normal” time I remember with him was in August of 2020, at a pool party hosted by my brother and sister-in-law. I knew, by then, how he felt about lockdowns and masks and social distancing, but things still felt normal enough that we could (mutually) forget about those elephants in the room for a few hours. But a few weeks later, when my wife and I would invite Phil and my mom over for dinner, he’d seem distant and cold, and by the time autumn rolled around, he would barely speak to me at all. He wanted me to see things the way he did, and when I refused, he withdrew.

If I had to point to one moment when I knew all was lost, it would be October of that year when my grandma – my mom’s mother, a wonderful matriarch who Phil had always loved and respected so palpably – passed away. The aunts and uncles and cousins on my mom’s side had always been so close, and we knew right away that a little thing like a global pandemic wasn’t going to stop us from celebrating the life of such a remarkable woman. We also knew that we weren’t going to be stupid about it, and that precautions – social distancing, masks, and outdoor gatherings, among them – were going to be part of the mix for grandma’s funeral. Phil, disgusted with these measures and worried he might speak out of turn at the event, chose not to attend.

We had passed the point of no return.

The holidays that year were hard. My parents had always strived to cultivate a feeling of complete magic in our house growing up, and even after I stopped believing in Santa Claus and flying reindeer, the magic of the holidays persisted for me. Once college and jobs and moves to other states get in the way, families don’t get to be all together very often anymore, but Christmas was always one of the few times where we all made it home.

I cherished that time together deeply, and I never got tired of our holiday traditions: the outing to pick the perfect giant Christmas tree; decorating said tree with all our boxes full of childhood ornaments; the Christmas Eve trek to the local Chinese food restaurant for all-you-can-eat sushi; reading the same Christmas stories to one another before turning in for bed on Christmas Eve night; watching the same beloved holiday movies for the millionth time, and laughing at all the usual spots; cooking brunch together on Christmas Day; opening gifts around the tree; gathering at the dinner table to enjoy the feast Phil had prepared, toasting with wine and beer and scotch.

COVID meant losing that kind of Christmas, and I never got it back. I’ll spare you all the details, because it is a long, messy, frustrating tale, but Phil really never came back to us. It would be another year – and another tense Christmas – before things broke entirely between him and me, or him and my mom, or him and my siblings. But eventually, everything came to a head, and my relationship with him was over. I haven’t spoken more than a few words to him in the past four years, and I can’t see a scenario where we’d mend fences. It’s been long enough that I’ve adjusted to the new normal of not having him in my life. But it still feels weird around the holidays, when we gather as a family without him there. And while we can make the same dinners, and watch the same movies, and act out the same traditions, I know deep down that it’ll never quite be Christmas without him.

The bummer Christmas anthem of 2020 for me was “evermore,” a Taylor Swift song so sad and forlorn it almost makes you forget how many times she’s made big euphoric pop songs. “Gray November, I’ve been down since July,” Taylor sings at the top of the song. Later, it’s “Hey December, guess I’m feeling unmoored/Can’t remember what I used to fight for.” For me, those lines captured precisely that “hitting the wall” feeling I mentioned before, and how it was consuming me as the holidays approached. Earlier that year, with folklore, Taylor had captured the feeling of the summer that never quite was – a season where it looked and smelled and felt like summer, in all the usual ways, but where all that season’s inherent celebration and abandon and joy was missing. With evermore, she delivered the logical counterpart, a chilly set of holiday songs to soundtrack everyone’s dismal quarantine Christmas. Together, they were and are the definitive artistic statements of the pandemic era, and they meant the world to me.

With time, I think I’ve come to view folklore as the stronger of the two albums. In the moment, though, evermore felt like just about the most vital album I’d ever heard. When I wrote about my favorite albums that year, I wrote that “I never thought I’d need music again like I did in 2020.” Going into that year, the dawn of a brand-new decade, I wondered whether my days of connecting to music in the fiercely primal way – in the fashion I’ve discussed at length throughout this series – was over. I figured most of my big, life-changing milestones were in the rearview, and that my need to lean on music like it was oxygen was a thing of the past, too. The COVID-19 years reversed that trend, and music proved to be an extraordinarily useful thing to hold on to as the world spun out of control.

I especially felt that as things with my stepdad deteriorated, and evermore, which arrived at the end of the week where I realized that my relationship with Phil was beyond saving, was right at the eye of the storm. I remember listening to that album first thing in the morning on December 13, just snuggling under the covers with my cat and letting the music wash over me.

Over and over again, the songs pummeled me with their vivid memories, their bone-deep regrets, their aching sadness. I heard the “I’m staying at my parents’ house” line in “‘tis the damn season” and couldn’t help but connect it back to happier holiday seasons of the past. I heard the key line from “happiness” – “There’ll be happiness after you/But there was happiness because of you” – and got a lump in my throat thinking about how it felt watching a person who had been a part of so many core memories drift toward the door. I couldn’t ever make it through “majorie” without crying, because the portrait of loss and mourning felt like exactly what I was feeling in the wake of my grandma’s death: “I should’ve asked you questions/I should’ve asked you how to be/Asked you to write it down for me/Should’ve kept every grocery store receipt/’Cause every scrap of you would be taken from me.” What a crushingly sad string of lyrics about the regrets you feel when your time with someone runs out, and you realize all the opportunities you’ll never have with them.

Coming to the end of that album and hearing “evermore” always felt good in the way that it sometimes feels good to cry, because that song seems to accept every scrap of sadness and defeat I was feeling in the moment. “I had a feeling so peculiar/That this pain would be for evermore” Taylor sang in the chorus, and I agreed with her. After such a bad year, I couldn’t quite imagine the world getting brighter again. And even if it did, I couldn’t grasp how I’d ever find “normal” again, now that my family’s foundation was cracked, and Phil and I couldn’t talk anymore, and my grandma was dead, and so much of the pre-2020 way of life seemed to be dust on the wind.

That’s the funny thing about “evermore,” though, because at the very end of the song, Taylor changes the words. Now, it’s “I had a feeling so peculiar/This pain wouldn’t be for evermore.” Right there in that final moment, the sun breaks through the clouds, offering a little bit of hope. A fresh start.

Taylor’s second prophecy proved to be the true one. Like anything else, the pandemic did pass, and we carried on. The pain, in other words, didn’t last forever. On the contrary, many joyful days came after that, few more so than the mid-June day in 2023 when me and my wife and two of our friends made the road trip from Traverse City, Michigan to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to join up with my sister and brother-in-law for a evening at Taylor Swift’s world-conquering Eras Tour. It was the kind of night that, in the thick of the pandemic, I would have sworn I’d never experience again. A massive, crowded stadium filled with the loudest cheers and the loudest sing-alongs I’d ever heard? I couldn’t have imagined getting to do that kind of thing again during my lowest moments in 2020, when I wondered whether I’d ever even see a concert again. (Let’s ignore, for a second, that the one time I ever contracted COVID-19 was at this particular show. Insert facepalm emoji.)

The next day, talking about our favorite eras and moments from the show, everyone had different answers: my sister loved seeing the 10-minute version of “All Too Well” live; my wife loved the euphoric, hit-filled 1989 set; my friend Andrew (not a Swiftie in the slightest) was blown away by the darkness and bombast of the Reputation songs.

Me, though? The parts of the show I loved most were the ones that most Taylor fans had approached with the most skepticism. I’d heard so much leading up to the show about how the folklore and evermore songs, while perfect for the solitude of 2020 quarantine life, didn’t necessarily measure up as stadium-filling anthems. When it came time to actually experience the Eras Tour, though, it was the folklore and evermore sections that left me speechless. How was it possible that “‘tis the damn season” made an open-air stadium on a summer evening feel like a downbeat Christmas? Or that “marjorie” could hit that hard before the sun even went down? And why was it that I found myself with tears in my eyes during the folklore set, my mind drifting to my estranged stepfather when every other soul in that stadium was locked on the woman on stage? “And I can go anywhere I want/Anywhere I want, just not home.” “I knew you, leaving like a father, running like water.” “Back when I was living for the hope of it all.” Every line seemed to stir up something from the worst year of my life that I hadn’t quite dealt with yet.

Taylor didn’t play “evermore” that night, but she didn’t need to. All those folklore and evermore songs, it turned out, were way more of an emotional trigger for me than I ever would have thought. It didn’t matter that being in a stadium on a summer night surrounded by tens of thousands of people screaming Taylor Swift songs was the most “world gone back to normal” thing I’d done since 2019. That night, hearing those songs, I felt like I was right back in the midst of those trying 2020 times.

During my teenage years, one of the first things that made me realize I wanted to be a music writer was a website called RuinedMusic.com. For the few years that that website lived, people would submit incredibly vulnerable essays about why they could no longer listen to songs they had once loved. The reasons were exactly what you’d figure: devastating breakups, deaths of loved ones, fallings-out with friends, various other assorted traumas. Reading those essays probably did more to shape my music writing persona – the “be as honest as you can possibly bear to be” part – than I even know. But the funny thing is that I never had my own “ruined music,” at least not in the way that website defined it. I’ve referred to myself in the past as a “musical masochist,” in that I go back to songs that hurt to listen to because I like reconvening with those former versions of myself. If you’ve read this entire series, you probably know that already.

“evermore” might be the closest thing I have to truly “ruined music.” I love that song, dearly. I also can’t listen to it without way, way more baggage than I want to contend with on a daily basis. As if the global pandemic and the beyond-repair relationship with my stepdad weren’t enough, “evermore” was also the song that my wife and I listened to in the car on the way home after we saw her grandpa face-to-face for the last time. I could probably be forgiven if I lunged for the skip button every time this song came on for the rest of my life.

But I don’t do that, and it’s not because I’m a glutton for musical punishment. Rather, I’ll always let “evermore” play because it’s a reminder, to me, of resilience. The week I first heard this song, I would have sworn the world was about to end. I was, as I stated long ago in this (very lengthy) essay, “hitting the wall.” So much bad had happened in my life over the course of 2020 that I could hardly imagine there ever being anything good again. Looking back, though, I can see a lot clearer, and one thing I see is that the person I was after the COVID-19 pandemic is a version of myself I like a whole lot more than the person I was before it. Before, I took things for granted: my family, my friends, my health, my lifestyle.

After, I never took those things for granted again.

Because now, I knew what it felt like to lose them.

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