mildest dreams

"Wildest Dreams" is Taylor Swift's Lana Del Rey moment on 1989. (I almost just wrote "Lita Ford moment". I want to hear Ms. Swift's Lita Ford moment.) At first listen, lyrically, it seems to be a bog-standard "Think of me when our affair is over" kind of thing.

Chorus:

Say you'll remember me
Standing in a nice dress, staring at the sunset, babe
Red lips and rosy cheeks
Say you'll see me again even if it's just in your wildest dreams

And then I realized the last verse begins:

You see me in hindsight

Tangled up with you all night

Burnin' it down

So it's not that the narrator wants her lover to remember her. She knows he's gonna remember her. Fucking. And she's telling him to remember her with her clothes on and her makeup unmussed (red lips and rosy cheeks,) on her feet, looking away from him. It's the cri de coeur of a control freak who obsessively curates a virginal persona. Which I understand does describe Ms. Swift; although, to be fair, considering the way the media wants to report on female musical artists, it's hard to blame her.

And the name is hilarious. No one's wildest dreams are of someone else standing around looking at a sunset, no matter how much The One That Got Away or whatever. I don't know if any of this is on purpose or not. But it makes me like the song a lot more!