The Curious Story of Taylor Swift’s ‘Champagne Problems’

By Oliver Tearle

Interpreting a Taylor Swift song by way of the strict verse form known as the villanelle may seem like an eccentric and unpromising undertaking. But bear with me, because it is through doing so that we can seek to understand precisely what that phrase, ‘Champagne Problems’, means in the song of that name (from the 2020 album Evermore).

And besides, when noted literary critic and Shakespeare biographer Sir Jonathan Bate has called Swift a real poet and even her detractors (such as Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys) acknowledge that her lyrics are pretty good, there may be worse ways of understanding the meaning of a Taylor Swift track than through the medium of poetry.

But the best Taylor Swift songs often have a ‘story’, so let’s briefly set the scene for this one. The singer’s boyfriend has proposed to her; surrounded by their friends and relations at a family event (at which champagne was drunk), he got down on one knee and asked her to marry him, proposing using his mother’s engagement ring. But she said no because she wasn’t ready for marriage. Or wasn’t ready for marriage to him, at least.

When I say ‘singer’ here, I am, of course, using the term much as we use the term ‘speaker’ for the ‘voice’ in a poem, where that speaker of the words and the poet who wrote those words are often not one and the same person. And we have little reason for thinking this song – unlike, say, ‘All Too Well’ or ‘Marjorie’ – is a song directly rooted in Swift’s personal life. Now that’s cleared up …

Yes, the villanelle. This verse form essentially involves repeating two key lines of poetry – what we might call ‘refrains’ – at regular intervals throughout the poem. The latter of these two refrains then concludes the poem. One of the best-known examples in the English language is Dylan Thomas’s ‘Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night’, although personally I’d opt for either W. H. Auden’s ‘If I Could Tell You’ or Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘One Art’ as the finest example of this taut and demanding verse form.

Anyway, the key thing is that these refrains should be repeated throughout the poem, but should take on a slightly different meaning or inflection each time they are repeated. Bishop takes some liberties with her villanelle (which I’ve linked to above), because she actually changes the wording of the second phrase each time it returns in the poem, but this only underscores the fact that there should be a change, and a phrase we thought we knew at the beginning of the poem gradually becomes unstuck, taking on new meanings and shimmering with new facets.

Being the poetry-steeped sod that I am, I immediately thought of the villanelle with its repeated phrases when I heard Taylor Swift’s ‘Champagne Problems’. For in the song, that two-word phrase starts out grounded in a literal reality and then becomes increasingly abstract, figurative, and poetic as the song proceeds. These two words form the emotional core of the song and reflect the changing moods and attitudes the singer is conveying (both her own and other people’s).

So when the title makes one of its first appearances in the song, it is immediately after the singer’s reference to dropping her erstwhile lover’s heart of ‘glass’, and thus his heart is reduced, by association, to something as delicate and flimsy as a champagne flute.

In the second verse we learn that the unlucky boyfriend told his family that he planned to propose to the singer in this very public way, and his sister bought Dom Perignon champagne specially for the occasion. He brought the champers along to the event, but although the bubbly should have been raised in celebration to the happy couple, the singer – through rejecting him – killed the mood somewhat, to put it mildly.

Then, following the ‘sceptics’ in the town who weren’t sure the couple’s relationship would stay the course anyway, we learn that they used the phrase ‘champagne problems’ to refer to the iniquity of their associate being rebuffed by his girlfriend in front of an audience.

Next, the ‘champagne problems’ become the singer’s: taken aback by her beau’s question, she was unable to provide a reason for saying ‘no’ to him. Faced with champagne – the universal symbol for good news and high-class revelry – she finds herself lost for words, knowing her rejection is at odds with the happy mood the drink is there to provide and symbolise.

The song ends, of course, with the singer hypothesising some future state for her would-be husband, who will one day recreate this scene with the right girl for him, someone who won’t reject him; and thus his ‘champagne problems’ will be a distant memory.

So, far from referring to ‘first-world problems’ (as we might expect), the phrase ‘champagne problems’ here alludes to the fact that the celebratory mood summoned by the champagne is at odds with the singer’s response (she cannot marry him, even though she’ll ruin the mood by saying no in front of everyone).

But the phrase glimmers and sparkles and fizzes a little differently as the song progresses, going from pure heartbreak, to social embarrassment (how do you say no in a situation like that without coming across as the party-pooper?), to hopeful heart-mending in the final stage of the song.

The other thing that’s lyrically noteworthy about ‘Champagne Problems’ is the casting of the narrative into the second-person: here we don’t have the crestfallen jilted lover lamenting their lost love, but the one who broke another’s heart addressing the jilted lover. But she refuses to apologise: another feature which prevents the song from tipping over from sentimentality into downright mawkishness.

There’s another reason I find it hard to find the song too upsetting. Men who make public marriage proposals are asking for trouble. Fancy putting someone on the spot in front of your nearest and dearest and asking them one of the most important questions of your lives when there’s a chance they’ll reject you?

No. Marriage proposals, like most romantic things couples get up together, should be confined firmly behind closed doors – or else, if they must be made public spectacle, uploaded to the dark and grubby recesses of the internet for strangers to pleasure themselves to, or with, or at. Like Philip Larkin when he was once confronted by his secretary (who’d just discovered his stash of jazz mags in his office drawer), I’m not sure which preposition is correct.