Trade Your Broken Wings for Mine

Taylor Swift and Beyonce at the 2025 Grammy’s.

At this point in Lemonade and The Tortured Poets Department, Beyonce and Swift have left their partners.

Now, these love stories go in different directions.

Show Me Your Scars

Beyonce’s husband starts to try: “Nine times out of ten I know you’re trying.” Swift’s doesn’t: “You swore that you loved me but where were the clues?”

Beyonce takes her husband back: “I know I promised that I couldn’t stay. Every promise don’t work out that way.” Swift gives up: “I died on the altar waiting for the proof.”

What’s the difference here? What does “trying” actually mean?

“We built sandcastles that washed away.” - Beyonce, Sandcastles

Beyonce sings, “show me your scars and I won't walk away.” Interestingly, scars are a metaphor in Swift’s earlier music: “show me the places where the others gave you scars” and “you drew stars around my scars.”

In both cases, scars are a metaphor for vulnerability. Will you open up or stay closed off?

Swift’s boyfriend doesn’t let her in…or in other words, he keeps her locked out: “stopped trying to drill the safe” and “years of labor, locks, and ceilings, in the shade of how he was feeling.”

“May the last one turn into flames.” - Beyonce, Freedom

Beyonce’s husband starts the album behind a closed door. Then, he opens it: “Now we're going to hold doors open for a while, now we can be open for a while.” In that place of openness, they reconnect: “go back to sleep in your favorite spot next to me.”

But it wasn’t just him. Beyonce had to be vulnerable, too. She starts the album closed off, “suicide before you see this tear fall down my eyes,” recognizes this is a problem, “skin thick, too tough,” and finally opens up, “tell these tears go and fall away.” Her vulnerability becomes her strength: “may the last one [tear] turn into flames.”

Both partners have to be vulnerable for the relationship to survive. It’s just a question of…will they open up or not.

“This happens once every few lifetimes.” - Swift, The Alchemy

Okay Ladies

Beyonce and her husband are stronger after their reconciliation: “True love breathes salvation back into me, with every tear came redemption.” Taylor goes on to date a rebound guy who’s not much better: “where you sent by someone who wanted me dead?”

But the albums aren’t over yet.

The final song on Lemonade isn’t about Beyonce and her husband reconciling. It’s about her finding strength in the black community and her female friendships: “Okay, ladies, now let’s get in formation.”

Swift ends her album with Clara Bow, a song about how the entertainment industry cycles through female performers: “only when your girlish glow flickers just so do they let you know…them’s the brakes. They don’t come gently.” Yet, here she is, closing out her 11th album.

Beyonce and Swift end the albums with songs about their larger impact—as women, or as black women, or as long-standing pillars in the music industry. I think it says a lot that in both love-story-albums, the last song is not about the love story. It’s about the women and their power. Their worlds are bigger than their love lives.

Being with men who respect this is key for them. Beyonce’s husband learns to embrace her power. Swift’s didn’t. But after that terrible rebound, she goes on to date a guy who has his own power and chooses her.

It might be with someone new, but The Tortured Poets Department gets the same ending as Lemonade (what goes on in real life, I have no idea. I’m just talking about the story within the album). Swift meets a guy who likes her power: “he jokes that it’s heroin but this time with an ‘e’”.

I think that for both women, that’s literally what it takes. Someone who wins the super bowl, but only has eyes for her: “Where's the trophy? He just comes running over to me.”