Vogue released the cover of its September issue yesterday featuring Taylor Swift whose new album, Lover, drops in a couple of weeks. During the interview, Taylor allowed writer Abby Aguirre to listen to a few new tracks, including the title song, “Lover”, with the lyrics: 

My heart’s been borrowed and yours has been blue
All’s well that ends well to end up with you

First of all, this is what I’ve been waiting for, lyrics like this. That’s a good lyric – and good lyrics were missing from “ME!” and “You Need to Calm Down”, the first two songs off the album. As I wrote a couple of weeks ago, the turnaround started happening with “The Archer” and now “Lover” sounds promising, as does “The Man”, another song previewed for Vogue, which Taylor explains is “a thought experiment” about what would have happened if she’d done everything the same, only instead of a woman she’d be a man. A lyric from that song goes like this:  

I’d be a fearless leader
I’d be an alpha type
When everyone believes ya…
What’s that like?

I like it. I’m excited to hear it. 

But to go back to the “borrowed” and the “blue” lyric, many of her fans are now wondering if that means… she and Joe Alwyn are engaged? Taylor has trained her fans to look for clues everywhere. She encourages them to obsess over the tiniest details, the clues she puts in the videos, and especially the words in her songs. 

She is also fastidious about what she chooses to reveal and to whom. So there’s no way she would have invited Abby Aguirre to listen to the songs, make notes about the lyrics, without expecting those details to make it into the published article. Taylor has passwords on top of passwords to her music storage. She’s not just going to shrug and be like, oh whatever, when it comes to printing her lyrics before the songs have actually be released. It had to be intentional. She let this out there for consumption, for fan consumption and analysis and speculation. 

So we’re speculating. Are Taylor and Joe engaged? Or are they already married? They spent Christmas and New Year’s in Ireland last year, at an Irish castle, and their families were with them. And New Year’s Eve, or rather “New Year’s Day”, the last track off reputation, is obviously a big deal to them. So maybe that’s when it happened, if it happened?