I Wonder: Longing and Regret in “Chloe or Sam or Sophia or Marcus”

POV: You’ve never gotten over anything ever.

It’s not unusual for a person’s name to be in the title of a Taylor Swift song, but it is unusual for there to be four of them in one. “Chloe or Sam or Sophia or Marcus” certainly intrigued me with its title, but it turns out that it’s not really about any of these people—rather, it’s a reflection on a complex past failed romantic relationship that lingers on. I touched on this song from The Tortured Poets Department in my article about Eras Tour surprise songs, but it warrants its own full lyrical analysis as a somber heartbreak ballad. Swift delves into the speaker’s point of view regarding the present, past, and future, leaving the listener to piece together details about the dissolution of the relationship. These scrambled thoughts, hopes, and disappointments reflect the speaker’s ongoing state of emotional distress as she reckons with the fact that she might never move on from this person.

Undead Memories

The song begins with a piano motif that echoes the ending of “champagne problems,” reinforcing the thematic connection between these two ballads about failed relationships. Indeed, like the final chorus of the evermore song, the opening lyrics imagine the muse with someone new: “Your hologram stumbled into my apartment / Hands in the hair of somebody in darkness / Named Chloe or Sam or Sophia or Marcus / And I just watched it happen.”¹ The image that the speaker conjures in her mind is both vivid and vague, with its active specificity but the word “hologram” signalling a degree of detachment. She inadvertently imagines the muse and this mystery person as they “stumble” into her subconscious, invading her space, much like their picture might pop up on her phone in another type of “hologram.” This ghost of a memory appears, obscured, “in darkness.” These circumstances make it unclear who the “somebody” is, and the list of names that follows indicates that the speaker’s jealousy matters much more than who the muse is with—they could be anyone, and she would feel the same. The emphasis is instead on the fact that she “just watched it happen” (despite the darkness making it difficult to see clearly) without intervening.

The speaker then mimics these first ideas with a glimpse into the muse’s perspective: “As the decade would play us for fools / And you saw my bones out with somebody new / Who seemed like he would’ve bullied you in school / And you just watched it happen.” This verse is situated in the speaker’s present: the time since the end of the relationship. There have been at least ten years of regret about the situation, with the personified “decade” taking on an active role and rendering the speaker and the muse passive “fools” who didn’t have the courage to go after what they wanted.

The speaker acknowledges that the muse has had to see her “out with somebody new” as well, but refers to herself through synecdoche as her “bones.” By reducing herself to a dead, skeletal frame, she calls back to the ghost imagery that runs throughout the song and TTPD at large, indicating that the emotional wounds from this central relationship were fatal. Despite this inability to heal, she keeps up appearances and goes out with a man she likens to a school bully—someone she wouldn’t genuinely want to be with. By calling out the muse specifically, the speaker frames this superficial dalliance as a test of sorts, goading them into coming back. Instead, just like the speaker, the muse “just watched it happen.” The structure of this first verse demonstrates that, over the years, these two people have continued to live parallel lives despite being apart.

Rip My Heart Out, Why Don’t You?

In the chorus, Swift zooms out from the situation to address its lasting effect on the speaker’s feelings: “If you wanna break my cold, cold heart / Just say, ‘I loved you the way that you were.’” The first part of this statement illustrates the speaker’s bitterness; she tells the muse how to break her heart, tempting them with it because feeling something terrible for the sake of closure would be better than her current state. Her “cold heart” has been frozen by her past, leaving little capacity for love that could be irrevocably shattered. The phrase “‘I loved you the way that you were’” would break the speaker’s heart in the present because it would either be too little too late or imply that she’s not lovable anymore.

It is the “what if” that would truly ruin her life: “If you wanna tear my world apart / Just say you’ve always wondered.” Returning to the past all these years later would disrupt and “tear [her] world apart” that she has since built. The thought of the muse still thinking about the speaker is excruciating because that would mean that they could have had a chance together and they were at fault, as opposed to the relationship not being right. The fact that the sentence is unfinished after “always wondered” leaves it open-ended, just like the idea of what could have been. 

The Last Straw

The second verse returns to the past, in the immediate aftermath of the relationship: “You said some things that I can’t unabsorb / You turned me into an idea of sorts / You needed me, but you needed drugs more / And I couldn’t watch it happen.” The speaker touches on the conflict that broke them apart in the first place, explaining that she can’t simply forgive and forget to move on. She “can’t unabsorb” the things that the muse said, which evokes the image of these hurtful words becoming a part of the speaker that she can’t get rid of—a betrayal that will stick with her forever. By turning the speaker into an “idea,” the muse failed to distinguish between the real person and what she represented.

Looking through an autobiographical lens, Swift’s immense brand and public image could serve as obstacles to intimacy, which is an idea she has expressed throughout her discography and beyond. Swift has previously likened herself and her public persona to a drug for fans and listeners. In “The Alchemy,” she refers to herself as “heroin but this time with an ‘E,’” and in “Death By A Thousand Cuts,” the muse “gave up on me like I was a bad drug.”² By saying “you needed drugs more” than “me,” the speaker insinuates that the muse chose this idealized but deceptive version of her. At the same time, the pain of watching a loved one struggle with literal addiction is difficult. The “I couldn’t watch it happen” line is the only one in this pattern where someone is not watching, indicating here that the speaker made a deliberate decision to leave the relationship.³

Mirrorball

In the fallout of all of this, the speaker tried to distract herself with change: “I changed into goddesses, villains, and fools / Changed plans and lovers and outfits and rules / All to outrun my desertion of you / And you just watched it.” She leans on this public persona that the muse wanted as a distraction from her real problems. With the context of this verse, the “say, ‘I loved you the way that you were’” lyric is even more devastating, as a reference to the real version of the speaker that the muse seemed to dismiss. The details here can also be directly linked to Swift’s public brand, the “mirrorball” that she can constantly change “to fit in.” She dressed as a Greek “goddess" in the “Karma” music video, was labelled a liar and “fool” by Kim Kardashian and Kanye West, and leaned into the subsequent “villain” aesthetic for her reputation era. As a public figure, she can be someone for everyone: to worship, to mock, or to hate.

In the following lyric, changing “plans” could hint at the cancellation of Lover Fest (the 2020 tour that never was), “lovers” refers to her public-facing relationships, and “outfits and rules” acknowledges the ever-changing Eras Tour outfits and surprise song criteria. Ultimately, all of this “Mastermind” manipulation served as a distraction from the muse and the guilt of leaving this hope for love in the past. When it comes to Taylor Swift (the brand), people are going to see the movie of her life play out, whether they like it or not. Once again, the muse “just watched it” from afar.

Passage in Time

Coming off the end of the second chorus, the speaker does continue the “you’ve always wondered” phrase in the bridge: “If the glint in my eye traced the depths of your sigh / Down that passage in time back to the moment / I crashed into you, like so many wrecks do / Too impaired by my youth to know what to do.” This whole section is one long sentence in which the speaker hopes that the muse still thinks about her the same way she does, with wistful curiosity. The images of “glint” and “depths” indicate an urge to dig up these deeper feelings that both of them have buried. The speaker’s preoccupation with “that passage in time” in this very song tells the muse that she does, indeed, deliberate on the past in this manner.

The imagery in “crashed” and “wrecks” is reminiscent of “willow” and “evermore”: “I’m begging for you to take my hand / Wreck my plans” and “when I was shipwrecked I thought of you.” This notion of love being destructive in the context of “youth” implies a wisdom rooted in hindsight and maturity. What is still left unsaid is the idea that if this happened now, the speaker might be able to better navigate the situation so that it turns out differently. The extravagant language in this bridge, which is tonally and harmonically distinct from the rest of the song, could be intended as another indicator of the speaker’s maturity while actually pointing out her tendency to talk herself out of confronting these issues.

There is a third verse after the bridge that addresses a potential future: “So if I sell my apartment / And you have some kids with an internet starlet / Will that make your memory fade from this scarlet maroon / Like it never happened?” The speaker wonders if moving on with their lives would ever rid them of these feelings in the long run. Swift’s explicit reference to “Maroon” provides some more context: “I chose you / The one I was dancing with / In New York” and “The lips I used to call home, so scarlet, it was maroon.” In light of this connection, the speaker selling her apartment would mean cutting ties with New York, a city that holds significance across Swift’s discography.⁴ Notably, the word “maroon” breaks the AAAB rhyme scheme in this third verse by extending past the rhyming word (“apartment” / “starlet” / “scarlet”), emphasizing that their love broke boundaries and rules. In phrasing this section as a question, Swift pokes fun at the suggestion of this relationship fading from memory as absurd. Meanwhile, “Maroon” is currently the second-most-played surprise song on the Eras Tour, ensuring its presence and longevity in the zeitgeist of Swift’s eras.

What Ifs

Still, the speaker wonders if she could get by in a world where this relationship was off the table for good: “Could it be enough to just float in your orbit? / Can we watch our phantoms like watching wild horses? / Cooler in theory, but not if you force it to be / It just didn’t happen.” The “float in your orbit” image is reminiscent of “Down Bad,” with the implication that gravity⁵ keeps the speaker tethered to the muse, even if at a distance.⁶ She contemplates the idea of existing in each other’s lives on the periphery of each other’s social circles and in a constant state of transition. The speaker acknowledges that, at this point, rekindling the relationship would not be feasible or realistic given the circumstances. The versions of the speaker and the muse that might have ended up together have become “phantoms” instead, ghosts of what could have been that they can now watch without dealing with larger consequences. By comparing these “phantoms” through simile to “wild horses,” Swift deems them beautiful but untameable—a phenomenon that cannot be “force[d]” to conform to societal constraints or normative expectations. This powerful, reckless, transgressive love story “just didn’t happen.”

The final chorus contains some small but crucial changes: “So if you wanna break my cold, cold heart / Say you loved me.” The simplicity of “you loved me” strips away the conditions from the standard chorus. Here, the emphasis is not on who the speaker was back then, but is instead on the muse making this declaration at all. The implication, therefore, is that these words were never spoken at the time, so if the muse really did love the speaker, this revelation would break her heart now. The past tense on its own also emphasizes its singularity—they don’t love her anymore. The speaker finishes and extends the open-endedness of the chorus: “Say you’ll always wonder / ‘Cause I wonder / Will I always / Will I always wonder?” Whereas previous iterations of this phrasing have been in the present perfect, this ending shifts to the future tense. For the speaker, the thought that the muse might also be experiencing these feelings is what stops her from moving on and keeps her enveloped in her pain.

In fact, she not only “wonder[s]” about what could have been, but also wonders if she will “always wonder.” The conclusion of this song leaves the speaker in a state of perpetual sadness and indecision on account of the past, present, and future blurring together.⁷ Even if she has the wisdom and perspective to change her situation after all these years, she might not actually want to, since that would mean letting the muse go.

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1. "champagne problems": "She'll patch up your tapestry that I shred."

2. A great tangential example is in "Who's Afraid of Little Old Me?": "Put narcotics into all of my songs."

3. This lines up with the narrative of "champagne  problems" as well.

4. In "False God," the speaker even identifies herself with the city: "I'm New York City / I still do it for you, babe." Leaving New York for good therefore suggests a personal change.

5. This concept echoes "Dancing With Our Hands Tied": "Oh, 'cause it's gravity / Oh, keeping you with me."

6. The situation evokes the feeling articulated in "Last Kiss": "I'll watch your life in pictures like I used to watch you sleep."

7. The lack of closure is thematically similar to "right where you left me": "You left me no choice but to stay here forever."