M first put on music for the baby when he was tiny and new, and the days were still dark. I have never thought to do it, still don’t; I struggle to understand songs and melodies as things that could hold a practical purpose. That the reverberations and melodies could stop a baby grizzling. But M is the kind of person who, when I met him, had one Spotify playlist. It was called “Songs” and contained no more than four of them. To play music seemed as much of a punt as swaying your body or making the noise of air passing over a train.

Sunday morning after we’d not slept much and he asks me for a song request. I suggest Taylor Swift, describing the pastel cover of the album he should choose, and then the song with the same name.

It had been a while since I’d heard it, that snap and crackle of the high hat, the steady walk of the bassline. I often forget so much of what I’ll written - there have been times when I’ve Googled something only to find I’ve written the article that answers it - but I have a perfect memory of writing the review of ‘Lover’. Late summer, 2019. I was in love and it made me sentimental. More, though, it made me happy for Taylor Swift: I was enough of a fan to relish her love songs, to understand that she had entered a new phase of her relationship to a blue-eyed British actor. I was enough of a fan to entertain the marriage rumours that swirled around Twitter.

It’s a good song. It’s aged better than I suspect I gave it credit for at the time, hastily banging out a four-star review on the bus, and then then train, into work, August sun milkily rearing above the Thames. In what could so easily be a gimmick for other artists Swift sticks a riff on a wedding ceremony in the middle of the song, the couple exchanging guitar string scars and dirty jokes in return for lifelong commitment. Set against a swaying 3/4-time time signature (weirdly rare in a pop song, although Billie Eilish is fond of it, and some of the best ones share it - see also Mazzy Star’s ‘Fade Into You’), ‘Lover’ manages to conjure the world-building that can happen inside a relationship. Swift is very good at making something huge from a seeming nothing: there’s that lyric from New Year’s Day about clearing up bottles on January 1, and for me it’s a possibly perfect image of weary forgiveness after a drunken squabble.

On Sunday morning, as I was singing along to ‘Lover’ to the baby (“We can leave the Christmas lights up til January / This is our place, we make the rules”) I was struck by how sad I felt for the loss of a relationship I never knew anything about. I feel cast adrift from the news these days - it comes to me largely by accident - but I did hear about Swift “dating” Matty Healy, The 1975 frontman. People are always interested in who Swift is going out with, because she’s a pop star, and she used to be very public about these things and now she is less so, and she has always left us breadcrumbs to follow in her music. But I realised that she must have been through a break-up, and I was sorry for the love she had lost, the one that encouraged her to write at least two albums of love songs. The one that, in Lover, she declared “All's well that ends well to end up with you” while sharing the rank vulnerability that it might not, actually. Can I go where you go? Can we always be this close / forever and ever?

I thought about what it must be to perform that on stage. It’s not a novel thought - artists have often spoken about what it is to squeeze a decades-old hit into an encore - but somehow it hit me in a keen new way. She’s on tour this summer, rattling through all of her love songs. Is it possible to sing them without thinking of who inspired them? Swift and I were born months apart. I heard that song when I was in the midst of a summer of weddings, and in the twilights between the ceremonies and the dinners and the dances, ripe with champagne and sentiment, M and I would sometimes talk about getting married. It is funny, I suppose, to be struck by a song that acts as a portal to feeling rather than a moment in life.

I sing ‘Lover’ to the baby as we walk up the stairs, as I try to wind him down for his nap. It’s become a kind of lullaby. I sing it into his tiny ears, feeling his downy hair against my lips. I know I can’t go where he goes, that we won’t be this close forever. But for a moment I can pretend.