Read time: About 20 minutes

Real talk: The title of this essay is *not* clickbait.

If you’re new around here, welcome. As you may have guessed from the name of this blog, Taylor Swift is, in my opinion, the greatest songwriter to have ever lived. 

And it’s through the many years, the many songs, the many blog posts that I’ve determined that she is the master of the bridge. I could not consider anyone – not even some of the songwriting legends in history – ever coming close to her ability.

But then I heard The Secret of Us (TSoU) by Gracie Abrams. And I stopped and wondered: Is it possible that Gracie Abrams is actually the master of the bridge?

Before we get too far ahead of ourselves, let’s take a step back. Gracie Abrams emphatically, effusively praises Taylor Swift at every chance she gets. Even on topics that have nothing to do with her. Like revolutionaries that have come before, Taylor serves as a beacon of possibility. And Gracie Abrams stands squarely on Taylor’s shoulders. What’s so exciting to me is that Gracie is, shall we say, fearless when it comes to taking risks with her songwriting, in a way Taylor has successfully done across her canon.

You can even see the way Gracie picks up on the concept of unconventional song structure Taylor has long played with, on the opening track of TSoU, “Felt Good About You.” Take a close look: The song doesn’t have a bridge. It doesn’t even have a chorus, if you define a chorus as it’s commonly known as including the same chords, same words – including the song title, in many instances – as a way to underscore the core theme of a song. Rather, her song has what I call a “chordsus”; that is, the repetition of a chord progression at the point of the song where a chorus would typically exist yet the lyrics differ each time.

You may recall this unusual experience is one we know, well, all too well. Because Taylor did it on “All Too Well,” off Red, going back more than a decade.

In Gracie’s song, each time you get to “felt good about you,” the surrounding words incrementally evolve, adding texture to the picture she’s carefully unveiling across the song.

We go from:

I felt good about you ’til I didn’t
Crossed lines, past lives, clear vision

To:

Felt good about you ’til I didn’t
Fell hard then I lost your interest

On “All Too Well,” we have:

Wind in my hair, I was there
I remember it all too well

And then:

Down the stairs, I was there
I remember it all too well, yeah

The parallels are noteworthy. Seeing their approach is like watching Michelangelo methodically chip away at a slab of marble as the sculpture of David emerges. 

And Gracie uses another Taylor-esque twist in her song. From the beginning, as bounding guitar lines fill your ears, the entire song structure feels flipped, like you’re walking into a fun house. The song opens with what the listener may perceive to be the chorus (a true “chordsus” in reality) and then you get what you might believe is the “first verse,” creating a uniquely off-kilter experience. 

Even with these glimpses alone, it’s evident both songwriters are skilled in the way of innovation. But for them, the bridge is the shining star of their songs. In fact, it’s the emotional axis of truth that the entire song revolves around.

Buckle up, buddy. You’re in for a ride.

What’s a bridge anyway?

Like the bridges you encounter on roadways you travel, a bridge in a song acts as a connector between where you came from (verse and chorus) and where you’re going (chorus and outro). In songs, writers often see it as a transition point, reinforcing the themes and sounds they’ve established elsewhere in the song.

You might have a song in the key of C, which uses the chords C, G, and A minor throughout the verses and chorus. In the bridge, the writer may sonically evolve within the key, introducing an E minor or D, to remain consistent with the overall sound of the song, while adding a bit of flair.

For many songwriters, you can think of the bridge as shades of the verse and chorus. So you may have the verse and chorus in a rich purple, while the bridge shows up in a soft lavender, complementary to what’s before and after it. 

What’s a good example of a typical bridge? Let’s take a song you’ve probably heard, from songwriters considered among the best to ever live: “With a Little Help from My Friends” by the Beatles (songwriters John Lennon and Paul McCartney).

The theme of the song is that, no matter whether you “sing out of key,” you’ve got a friend who can help you along in life. This theme is continuous from the first verse of the song through the chorus and into the bridge. Musically, the verse and chorus stick to E, B, F sharp minor, D, and A. When you get to the bridge, to demonstrate the transitional point of the song, they introduce C sharp minor and F sharp, offering a clue to the listener that they’ve entered the bridge. The lyrics repeat, in a call and answer format: “Do you need anybody? / I want somebody to love.”

You think, A pleasing tune, I like the message. I’m satisfied with this song. This approach is used in the vast majority of songs. Given its prevalence, it’s obviously working.

But, in most instances, the bridge doesn’t grab you by the collar and stun you into listening closely. That’s the experience, rather, in the worlds of Taylor Swift and Gracie Abrams.

It’s like that moment in an increasingly vulnerable conversation with your friend, where she asks, “But is that what you really want?” You pause. You contemplate whether to take the road you’ve been tracking for the past 15 minutes – one of pleasantries and funny stories about your kids and their teachers, the kind of up-here stuff that has little emotional weight – but you choose the other path as the warm, unmistakable tidal wave of emotions grips your gut. The path toward your actual truth, the unvarnished, vulnerable, interior, messy one you’ve been hiding all this time until this very moment when you rip off the Band-Aid that covered your wounds and say, as tears wash up into your eyes, “This is the truth. This is me.” 

You surface what’s under the surface. That’s what the bridge is for Taylor Swift and Gracie Abrams. Taking the color analogy from above, while the verses and chorus may be purple, for them, the bridge is burning red.

They both typically signal to you that it’s coming, this big reveal. If you listen carefully, there’s clues. The instruments used may change (or vanish), the tempo adjusts. And then they lay it on you – the actual point of this song you’ve been listening to for about two minutes now. And you experience a kind of whiplash – a whoa-is-this-what-this-is-about-after-all revelation that forces you to listen hard to that last turn of the chorus, the outro, then feverishly skip back to the beginning of the song to listen to it all over again, now with this informed lens of what it really means.

I can’t say it enough but This. Is. Not. Common. Most songwriters use the bridge in the most literal sense of the word – the moment the song crosses from beginning to end. It’s like the suturing tissue all over your body, connecting muscle to tendon, a means to an end in creating movement. For Taylor and Gracie, it is much more than a passageway; it is the entire song.

So let’s dig into Taylor Swift, the reigning master of the bridge, and determine together whether Gracie Abrams has what it takes to dethrone her.

The master’s tools

One of the most notable hallmarks of Taylor Swift’s canon is her fascination with language. She loves how it sounds, enjoys plays on words, and brings a poet’s imagination to her work. I often joke about how I attribute many American idioms to Taylor Swift (such as “you play stupid games, you win stupid prizes”). Who can blame me, when such profound meaning cast in earworm language is completely at home throughout her canon? 

I thought about how to tell this story to you, this one of Taylor Swift and the bridge. Which song would I choose when there’s so many good candidates? I landed on “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?” from The Tortured Poets Department. This song is the lighthouse that guides every other song on the album (through the second half, I might add).

The song begins on an eerie note, with her voice dryly eking out from what feels like an abyss, and the experience of female rage (“The Musical”) builds across the song. At its core, “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?” conveys the unrelatable experience Taylor has had at the pinnacle of fame, caught among the experience of celebrity, her own intentions, and the machinations of the music industry. (For a deep dive into TTPD, including this song, come back to this one later.)

As you listen, you may wonder, What is happening here? This feels scary when you get to the first turn of the chorus:

… So I leap from the gallows and I levitate down your street
Crash the party like a record scratch as I scream
“Who’s afraid of little old me?”
You should be

Rolling through the first few minutes of the song, the instrumentals feel nearly spare, creating a backdrop of beat without a ton of flourish, and complementary to her disaffected delivery of lyrics. It is, in short, a curious mood.

But then the song breaks down as you approach the bridge – a tell-tale clue something is about to happen. The instruments stop but for a few quiet piano chords. And then silence. You feel you’ve been dropped in the middle of a vast, empty field when she sings “So tell me everything is not about me,” and as she crosses into the next line, expressed with hushed urgency – “But what if it is?” – an explosion of sound rises up. 

Following this prelude to the bridge, we land in the most intense aural experience of the song as the true bridge begins, with quickening backbeat, harmonized vocals, and increase layering of sounds:

I wanna snarl and show you just how disturbed this has made me

You wouldn’t last an hour in the asylum where they raised me

So all you kids can sneak into my house with all the cobwebs

I’m always drunk on my own tears, isn’t that what they all said?

That I’ll sue you if you step on my lawn

That I’m fearsome and I’m wretched and I’m wrong

Put narcotics into all of my songs

And that’s why you’re still singing along

And here is the raw, unvarnished truth of the song: This endless hamster wheel she’s been on – among the industry overlords, the hoi polloi, and whatever it is she actually wants – is wearing thin. It’s also unlike anything you, the listener, who is not a billionaire superstar on a prophetic trajectory such as hers, have ever experienced (“You wouldn’t last an hour in the asylum where they raised me”). She bitterly calls out the court of public opinion and media who cannot be quenched, ceaselessly citing yet another reason for her success that isn’t her talent alone (“Put narcotics into all of my songs / And that’s why you’re still singing along”). It is in this bridge, where she’s most directly addressing the emotional verve and message behind the track, that the listener understands the point of the entire song.

Following the emotional experience of the bridge, she turns back to the chorus and then the outro, whose meaning is clarified by the vulnerable explanation she’s provided in the bridge:

… You caged me and then you called me crazy
I am what I am ’cause you trained me
So who’s afraid of me?
Who’s afraid of little old me?
Who’s afraid of little old me?

Saying, essentially: look what you made me do. As a listener, you then have empathy for her, even if you now understand you can never understand. 

Yes, this is brilliant, and you and I both have chills running down our spines examining what Taylor can do in just one bridge. I can assure you, we still haven’t answered the question posed by this essay’s title. Let’s take a closer look at what Gracie does with the bridge.

The element of aural surprise 

You’re going along listening to a song, the exquisite melody woven through deft use of sounds and vocals. Suddenly, you take an unexpected turn. The tempo transforms from fast to slow or the inverse, and new instruments you hadn’t heard before take center stage. You wonder, Have I skipped to the next track on this album? But you haven’t. You’re intrigued. You listen closer. 

This is the Gracie Abrams aural surprise, thoroughly common across TSoU. You see it on tracks like “I Love You, I’m Sorry,” where she sprints into double-time as you enter the bridge, pushing out more words than you thought could be possible within ever-multiplying sixteenth notes, commanding your attention and ultimately empathy.

The best representation of the Gracie Abrams aural surprise is “Free Now.”

The song opens with her voice alone, then a low-key snare drum and intermittent bass come in. From the first few verses and chordsus (since this is another one where the chords repeat at the “chorus” but the words don’t), you get the impression that she’s even-handedly come to terms with her painful decision to end her relationship with a partner who’s had an affair.

She even demonstrates empathy for her ex-lover at the start of the second verse: “And I hope you know I don’t think / You’re a bad guy, that you’re damaged.” You hear this and think, How nice if unusual that she’s so kind to this person who wronged her.

And then the song changes and you, like her, are cracked wide open. 

That snare drum that served as a metronome evaporates and is taken over by a quickly pulsing bass drum, forming synergies with a bass guitar pulsing in time with the drum. You sense a growing intensity building as her breathy, quick-paced singing comes in to share her raw vulnerability in this experience:

It’s a pain that I caught you at a bad time
It’s a shame that I memorized your outline
You were straight up with me, you were so kind
But I knew what you knew, honey, great minds
It was harsh ’cause I lost what I wanted
I was brave when I kissed you in London
We’re collateral here, man, we got hit
Hope you find somewhere safe for your baggage
Every page that I wrote, you were on it
Feel you deep in my bones, you’re the current
And I showed no restraint, it was something
I was scared until you made me love it

You see, for the first time, how hurt she actually is, how hard this is for her, how vulnerable she had been – “I was brave when I kissed you in London” – and how all-consuming the relationship was (“Every page that I wrote, you were on it”). None of this was evident until now, and she uses the aural surprise to get you to perk up and pay attention to the most important part of the whole song. To finally see her.

You come to learn that she might not think so highly of him after all, discussing the hurtful decisions he’s made and whatever else is going on with him as “baggage.” That up-here stuff – the things you tell shared friends about a love gone wrong – up front in the song is far away now. Yet she demonstrates how self-actualized she is, landing on: Taking this risk in showing myself to someone taught me to take risks, and I can feel good about this (“And I showed no restraint, it was something / I was scared until you made me love it”).

While she has you on your heels, she changes the song again, taking you through a juiced-up outro a la Taylor Swift on “august” (which has no bridge, btw). She punctuates her point of personal growth made in the bridge at the end of the song: “Never been less empty, all I feel is free now.”

Harnessing her vocal ability

You’ve listened to Good Riddance, the Gracie Abrams album before this one, and think the breathy thing is a little much. I encourage you to see it as a point for evolution and consider “Difficult,” a standout from the album, as a model she may have used as inspiration for TSoU.

Because it is that breathy singing approach that creates an altogether unparalleled experience across much of TSoU, and especially in her central illustrations of her rare empath ability as shown in the bridge of her songs.

Take “Risk” in which you yourself cannot catch your breath from the opening lines of the song. Words come at you so quickly you can barely keep up but come around to realize she’s singing about a crush she fantasizes about pursuing. Relatable stuff.

The chorus goes:

God, I’m actually invested
Haven’t even met him
Watch this be the wrong thing
Classic

Who among us hasn’t been there? You’re charmed by the warm familiarity of an unrequited crush and the reflective and witty way she sings about it.

Coming off the second turn of the chorus, upbeat no doubt, you’re flung head first into the bridge. I’ve listened to this passage probably 50 times and it’s hard to discern whether she ever takes a breath, singing more quickly now than even that first verse that had you flat on your back.

[… 1:48 in the song where I hear a breath]

I’m gonna bend ’til I break and
You’ll be my favorite mistake
I wish you could hold me here, shakin’
You’re the risk, I’m gonna take it
Why aren’t you here in my bedroom?
Hopelessly boring without you
Too soon to tell you “I love you”
Too soon to tell you “I love you”

[2:08 when she audibly takes another]

That charming self-knowledge that drew you in for the first minute plus has devolved into the messy emotional experience you can relate to even more. It is her ability to manage her breathing that she can sing at this pace, but consider what got her here: The lyrics themselves. You were 20-something once and longed for a person of romantic intrigue, who put on a “face” to your friends about it. You, too, thought about the what ifs should something come to pass – and what’s at stake: “You’re the risk, I’m gonna take it.” You also know that it could appear completely crazy to tell this person, someone who may not know much about you at all, that you love them, yet you fantasize about doing so, just like she does (“Why aren’t you here in my bedroom? / Hopelessly boring with you / Too soon to tell you ‘I love you’”). 

So you started the song being with her, feeling like you can see where she’s coming from, and when you got to the bridge, you exclaimed: I feel seen.

She takes a similar approach on “Cool” and “That’s So True,” among others on TSoU.

The ability she has to match her unique vocal ability to the songwriting itself reminds me of, you guessed it, Taylor Swift. In her work since Lover (when she first broke free from Big Machine), her songs have fallen into that lower range where the quality of her voice sounds best. (See what I’m talking about in my review of Speak Now (Taylor’s Version).)

The greatest bridge that ever was?: “us”

I have to wonder whether Taylor Swift and Gracie Abrams know that they are the greatest writers of the bridge. How else do you explain that they partnered to write “us”? The song is, in a word, profound.

Before we dig in, I encourage you to watch this live performance of Taylor Swift and Gracie Abrams singing “us” on The Eras Tour. The textured harmonies throughout this performance transcend the experience of listening to the produced track on TSoU, in my humble opinion. 

Even from the first few notes of “us,” you can see the fingerprints of Taylor Swift and Gracie Abrams all over it. The song opens with elegant, urgent guitar strumming and in comes the low, breathy expression of Gracie Abrams’ voice, with a delicate layer of Taylor Swift’s harmony touching down at just the right moment. The aural aesthetic of the song is one to behold, drawing from their respective sensibilities of precision and sound.

It’s about a relationship that was covert and perhaps even brief yet left a profound impact on the protagonist (the female partner). The lyrics form a rich tapestry of the songwriters’ respective awesome talents. Literary phrases and imagery – such as using the high-intellect phrase “Babylon lovers” to reinforce the secret, untold-to-the-world nature of the relationship – are aligned with Taylor Swift’s touch. You might recall the opening lines of “I Hate It Here” from TTPD, alluding to T.S. Eliot, as one literary luminary who fits the bill: “Quick, quick / Tell me something awful / Like you are a poet trapped inside the body of a finance guy.” At the same time, you’ve got introspective, empath-first, well-metered lyrics elsewhere in the song that feel like Gracie Abrams, such as: “And if history’s clear, someone always ends up in ruins / And what seemed like fate becomes ‘What the hell was I doin’?’”

In the first few verses and turns of the chorus, you get the sense the protagonist is simply reflecting on the relationship, openly wondering, “Do you miss us, us / Wonder if you regret the secret / of us, us.” You revel in the symphonic harmonies and enchanting experience of intertwining musical melodies and feel delighted, if not transcendent. You may be thinking, It sounds like this relationship was profoundly affecting and the protagonist wishes the world knew more about it.

But then you step into a manhole where you thought your foot would plant on concrete, complete darkness taking over your field of vision. Slamming drum beats – a sound you hadn’t heard at all in the past two minutes – keep a staccato rhythm, a volte-face from the melodious sounds you had just been basking in. In come both voices, now singing closely together, the delightful twisting harmonies that formed angel wings just 10 seconds ago are nowhere to be seen. You wonder, Is this still the same song?

It’s the bridge and you have arrived. A true Gracie Abrams aural surprise if there ever was one. And you get the real story of the “secret of us.”

That night you were talkin’
False prophets and profits
They make in the margins
Of poetry sonnets
You never read up on it
Shame, could’ve learned something
Robert Bly on my nightstand
Gifts from you, how ironic
The curse or a miracle, hearse or an oracle
You’re incomparable, fuck
It was chemical
You (you) plus (plus) me (me) was

[Seamless transition into the chorus with: Us, us, us]

You now realize the need for the secret of us came from a less-than-ideal place. Where you felt a touch of wistfulness about the “what if” of this hidden relationship has been replaced with seeing up close its interior world. Just as Gracie Abrams does elsewhere in her work, there’s a sardonic tone to recounting the underbelly of what this person was about and why they restricted their love from being publicly known: “False prophets and profits / They make in the margins / Of poetry sonnets / You never read up on it.”

You hear the name Robert Bly and quickly search for this person on Google, amidst slop that has taken over the internet, to piece together that he’s one of those men’s rights people we’re lately hearing so much about. And you see that this person – “Gifts from you, how ironic” – is not the gilded, glistening “Babylon lover” you thought they were, but rather a potentially toxic person the protagonist was drawn to like moth to a flame (“The curse or a miracle, hears or an oracle / You’re incomparable, fuck / It was chemical.”) 

At the end of the bridge, you’re left with a new understanding of this relationship, now layered with these neat little details obscured in the first few minutes of the song then laid bare in the bridge. In this way, Taylor Swift and Gracie Abrams help you travel through now-undisguised emotional dimensions you hadn’t considered existed, and you race back to the beginning to scour for clues that this relationship they’re singing about isn’t all you thought it was. 

It was the bridge that told you the story of the song.

*

After all this, can you confidently answer the question posed by this essay’s title? For me personally, what I know to be true is that Taylor Swift and Gracie Abrams are the two greatest living songwriters. They’ve taken this completely pedestrian feature of a song – unadulterated in the history of songwriting – and elevated it to its own art form. I can’t wait to see what they do next.