Emerson Pieper, staff writer

Taylor Swift has built a career out of taking messy relationships and turning them into songs that make you feel like you have been handed a page from someone’s diary. “Patient Zero” has the setup for one of those songs. Swift is speaking to the woman who came after her, warning her about a man whose charm eventually revealed something much uglier underneath. Instead, I found myself mostly thinking that the song was trying too hard to be more clever than it actually is.

I can agree that the central idea is good. Swift calls herself “patient zero,” turning the relationship into an illness that she experienced first. Which makes sense in a way; some people struggle to admit things because they really love the person. The man initially seems charming and exciting, but eventually the relationship becomes something the other woman cannot easily escape.

The song repeatedly returns to this idea through references to toxins, sickness and fever. It is easy to understand what Swift is getting at, but that is also where the metaphor starts to lose me. Once the comparison has been made, the song keeps explaining it instead of doing anything else with it.

The same problem shows in the way Swift describes the man. We are told that he is manipulative, obsessed with attention, and more interested in how people perceive him than in the people themselves. There are some genuinely interesting ideas here, especially when Swift suggests that he enjoys being loved because it makes him look more important. She even suggests that some of his success comes from using the attention surrounding his partners to build his own image.

That is so much more interesting to me than simply calling him toxic. Unfortunately, Swift does not really let the idea breathe. She explains his behavior, explains what it means, and then explains what the narrator has learned from it. There is not much left for the listener to piece together.

The narrator herself is probably the strongest part of the song. She is not jealous of the new woman or trying to win the man back. She has always walked away, and now she recognizes the same pattern happening to someone else. When she describes herself as someone who lost his “games” but ultimately won, I think the point is that leaving was her victory and she does not need him anymore. I just wish the song trusted the idea more. There is something compelling about a woman looking at someone else and saying, “I know what is happening to you because it happened to me.” 

I do not think Swift is a bad songwriter, and I do not think every song needs to sound like her older work for me to enjoy it, but “Patient Zero” (the whole album, honestly) feels like an example of what has been bothering me about her newer music. I can see the ideas underneath them if I sit down and actually pick apart the lyrics, but I do not think the execution is good. There is a difference between having something to say and making me want to listen to you say it. “Patient Zero” has something to say; I just do not want to hear it again.