It’s Happening Again: Death and Performance in “How Did It End?”

Tell your tall tales until they’re the truth.

Nov 21, 2024

Taylor Swift is well known for her storytelling ability and her myriad of devastating breakup songs. A number of tracks on The Tortured Poets Department explore the endings of relationships, but one stands out as unique in its self-referential nature: “How Did It End?” It mourns the end of a relationship as if it were a death while the speaker reckons with her struggle to understand what went wrong amid social scrutiny. Although the challenges of going through personal struggles as a celebrity are quite unique, Swift extrapolates these feelings into a more universal context of how gossip and invasions of privacy can affect anyone.

Intrinsically Incurable

In the first verse, the speaker offers some context for the situation and what went wrong: “We hereby conduct this post mortem / He was a hothouse flower to my outdoorsman.” The formal language of the opening line establishes the speaker’s impersonal and distant tone. She introduces the song as a “post mortem,” another term for an autopsy, as she embarks on an examination to determine the cause of death of the relationship, as if it were a corpse. The speaker further seeks to maintain control of this narrative—which will quickly snowball out into the world—as she uses the word “conduct” to initiate the discussion. Through the metaphor of the “hothouse flower” and “outdoorsman,” she creates a complete contrast between herself and her partner. By comparing her partner to a “hothouse flower,” she deems him sheltered, fragile, and susceptible to damage and decay, all while growing and thriving in a protected environment under artificial circumstances. Conversely, as the “outdoorsman,” she takes on the more traditionally masculine and active role with a brave willingness to be exposed to the perils of the outside world. In the context of Swift’s fame, this refers to the fact that her life is always available for public scrutiny, which can make a relationship difficult if the other party would prefer an unattainable level of privacy.

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The speaker thinks of the relationship in extreme inevitabilities: “Our maladies were such we could not cure them / And so a touch that was my birthright became foreign.” She previously believed they were destined for each other—that her partner’s “touch” was her “birthright”—but the nature of their relationship changed and began to feel “foreign” on account of illness. The “maladies” Swift refers to correspond to the song being a “post mortem,” and also call back to lyrics from “You’re Losing Me”: “We thought a cure would come through in time, now, I fear it won’t” and “My face was gray, but you wouldn’t admit that we were sick.” In all of these examples, the intrinsic incurable illness was a harbinger of the end of the relationship. The plural in “[o]ur maladies” particularly suggests that the two people had issues both individually and together, and their condition worsened beyond the point of no return.

Open Invitation

In the chorus, the speaker directly addresses the listeners again: “Come one, come all, it’s happening again / The empathetic hunger descends.” She uses this formal and somewhat antiquated phrase in a sarcastic open invitation to the general public to witness her heartbreak. She frames it as something that is “happening,” as if it is an event beyond the world’s control that people have come to expect. Their “empathetic hunger” is a contradiction in itself; people might claim to care about the speaker’s wellbeing, but they are mostly just yearning for something to gossip about. The word “descends” also carries such a powerful negative connotation that renders whatever empathy there might be irrelevant.

The following section is surprisingly not in quotation marks in Swift’s lyric video, although the content implies that it is being said to the speaker: “We’ll tell no one except all of our friends / We must know / How did it end?” These people feel entitled to the details about the relationship because they were shown parts of it in the past. The speaker also lightheartedly recognizes that their promise to “tell no one” is meaningless, since gossip spreads like wildfire. Their urgent need to know what happened is seemingly softened by their euphemistic phrasing in asking about the death of the relationship, but their actions carry more significance than their words. The alternative interpretation of this part of the chorus is that it is still the speaker’s perspective, saying that only her close circle can be trusted to hear the full story. As will become more explicit in later iterations of the chorus, she is still asking herself how it ended as she searches for an understandable answer.

Not Our Fault

In the second verse, the speaker provides further explanations of what went wrong with her partner: “We were blind to unforeseen circumstances / We learned the right steps to different dances.” The redundancy in being “blind” to something “unforeseen” emphasizes the speaker’s shock when it didn’t work out. Dancing together is a symbol that Swift has used throughout her discography as an expression of love, though in this example it represents discordance. The speaker believed she and her partner knew the “right steps,” but their approaches to each other were fundamentally “different.” She continues to externalize their issues: “And fell victim to interlopers’ glances / Lost the game of chance, what are the chances?” The speaker now blames external judgement and attention for contributing to the problems in the relationship. By referring to their lives as a “game of chance,” she pardons both her partner and herself from any wrongdoing. Her rhetorical question here bolsters the notion that the song is taking place in a public forum as she aspires to neutrality in the mourning of the relationship.

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There is an extension of the second verse that suddenly shifts focus back to the public consumption of the news: “Soon they’ll go home to their husbands / Smug cause they know they can trust him / Then feverishly calling their cousins.” The gossipers go to their immediate contacts, perhaps with the initial intent to keep the information in a close circle, but then “feverishly” report beyond that smaller community. With this adverb, Swift implies that these people are also ill or unwell in their obsession with the relationship. At the same time, the words “[s]mug” and “trust” attribute them with a sense of superiority on account of their own apparently successful marriages.

Everybody Talks

The second chorus has completely new lyrics that pivot back to the voice of gossip: “Guess who we ran into at the shops? / Walking in circles like she was lost / Didn’t you hear? They called it all off.” These questions become rhetorical as whoever is speaking is about to relay their answers. The fact that this whole conversation is being envisioned by the song’s speaker demonstrates her expectation that people will be talking about the situation with very little respect for the parties involved. She then imagines the response: “One gasp and then / How did it end?” The “gasp” is the epitome of the situation’s heightened drama and gossip. Even the structure of the song adds to this feeling since these new lyrics circle back to the titular unanswered question.

In the bridge, the speaker dramatizes the situation again: “Say it once again with feeling / How the death rattle breathing / Silenced as the soul was leaving.” In this first lyric, she uses theatrical terminology to lean into her position of sarcastic defeat as she addresses the listener, and what follows is the most extravagant manner of relaying that the relationship ended. A “death rattle” signifies the final gasping breaths of a dying person, so this turning to silence “as the soul was leaving” renders the death simultaneously physical and spiritual. The speaker then addresses her own feelings: “The deflation of our dreaming / Leaving me bereft and reeling.” She characterizes the breakup as a “deflation” or collapse as opposed to an explosive conflict—a loss of the air needed to keep them alive in their aspirations for the future together. The speaker is still there as she experiences these intense feelings of grief, “bereft and reeling” back where it all started: “My beloved ghost and me / Sitting in a tree / D-Y-I-N-G.” This melancholic melody delivers a play on the “K-I-S-S-I-N-G” nursery rhyme, its darkness recognizing a loss of childlike innocence in the relationship. The fact that the muse is already a “beloved ghost” as their connection dies illustrates that the speaker held on longer to her feelings of love and was reluctant to leave.1

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Following this admission at the end of the bridge, Swift sings a broken down version of the chorus: “It’s happening again / How did it end? / I can’t pretend like I understand.” In this iteration, the speaker is more vulnerable and defeated, as she is now the one asking what went wrong. Despite the song being so grand and performative, this is the moment of truth in which she “can’t pretend” to “understand.” She then repeats the first chorus, changing only one lyric at the end: “But I still don’t know / How did it end?” By ending the song on the question, Swift leaves it unanswered, stripping back the formal and distant language in favor of a simple confession. Despite all the gossip and storytelling, no one will ever know the truth, since even the people involved can’t comprehend it. Ultimately, the public narrative becomes the narrative as the speaker desperately seeks out answers. Her partner has become a ghost for whom she speaks, and the only responses she receives are from those who have no idea what they’re talking about.

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