In what has been an ostensible “jag” of emulating Taylor Swift behavior (namely, being all “white girl whimsical” for her Halloween performance on Saturday Night Live), Gracie Abrams is now doubling down on “reanimating” Daughter from Hell, an album that was received with a “meh” reaction at best, and a “this is fucking shite” reaction at worst. The same went for Taylor Swift’s The Life of a Showgirl. But instead of Swift just “taking the win” of it somehow being the best-selling album of 2025, she chose to make The Life of a Showgirl’s glaring shortcomings all the more noticeable to fans and critics alike by releasing a deluxe edition (called The Encore, which blatantly rips off the name of JADE’s deluxe for That’s Showbiz Baby!) that brought its original rating even further down (something that everyone knows must make Swift bristle, since she’s rather known for having an obsession with being “well-received”).
Led by the Verity-centric “Patient Zero,” Swift couldn’t seem to do much to bolster the original content of the record (with “Cleveland!,” “Pink Clouding” and “Babylon” being even worse). However, Abrams appears to be giving herself more of a fighting chance with “Here You Come, There You Go,” the new “lead single” from her deluxe edition. Not just because it’s a much more upbeat/up-tempo song (therefore, far more memorable than the largely “mumblecore,” so to speak, slow jams of the standard edition). But also because Abrams has pointedly tapped two key collaborators to co-write: Amy Allen and Jim-E Stack (who produced the song as well). With the former being a bona fide hitmaker for the likes of Sabrina Carpenter and Olivia Rodrigo (to name a few), it seems as if Abrams is hedging her bets on ensuring that Daughter from Hell isn’t forgotten entirely (or, to use an “old school” phrase, relegated to the bargain bin).
As for Allen, she seems to be hedging her bets for another hit by seemingly using Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) and Big (Chris Noth) as the inspiration for this particular track. To be sure, the back and forth—caused almost entirely by Big—between these two throughout Sex and the City is what made the show last for as long as it did (so maybe that’s part of why And Just Like That… couldn’t last—they killed Big off in the first episode). And the tone was immediately set from season one, with Big being evasive for the first half of it before Carrie finally pinned him down long enough to nonverbally admit they were going to be monogamous (in the episode titled, what else, “The Monogamists”). Though, of course, before that point (especially during their first “official” date episode, “Secret Sex”), Carrie could just as easily be singing, like Abrams, “Half-believing I never met you before/That’s when you decide you want more.”
In fact, this “motif” of Big’s that started from the very beginning reaches the ultimate crescendo in the season six episode, “An American Girl in Paris (Part Une),” when, just as Carrie has effectively finished packing her bags to move to Paris with Aleksandr Petrovsky (Mikhail Baryshnikov), Big decides it’s time to drive by her apartment again and see if she might be up for another ride on the proverbial merry-go-round. When Carrie makes it clear she’s trying to be breezy and doesn’t even allow Big to make his grand confession of love to her because she’s moving to Paris with Petrovsky, he chases her down the street until she finally snaps, “You do this every time! Every time! What, do you have some kind of radar? ‘Carrie might be happy, it’s time to sweep in and shit all over it!’” Her intense reaction—which already starts to manifest from his mere presence outside her building—is the culmination of everything Carrie endured with this person, thinking that he might one day genuinely stick around.
And so, again, it seems as if Abrams (but really, probably Allen, with her songwriting prowess) was either looking directly at Carrie and Big as a model for this song (kind of like how Olivia Rodrigo looked at Miranda [Cynthia Nixon] and Steve [David Eigenberg] as a model for a line in “maggots for brains”), or had their relationship so firmly implanted in her subconscious that it came out in this form (it wouldn’t be so far-fetched considering Abrams’ erstwhile songwriting cohort, Audrey Hobert, has a song called “Sex and the City”). With the season six emotional apex between them coming to mind when Abrams sings, “Your big dramatic feelings/Funny how it happens when I’m so good, when I’m so/Securely attached…” As Carrie thought she was with Petrovsky. But, even despite her claims of being so “done” with Big after everything (something she had already mentioned way back in season three with the line, “We’re so over…we need a new word for over”), she experiences the same thing Abrams describes when she wields the metaphor, “I’m a double-knotted rope/Undo me like magic, here you come, there you go/Go spit it out, say what you’re after/Bulldozing my life until it shatters/Oh, so my well-being’s not a factor/No, it never stopped me loving you before/Now you’re wanting back in.”
Which is exactly what Big wants by the time the series finale rolled around and he was at last willing to lay it all on the line and look like a fool the way Carrie had so many times before (see: the season one episode, “Oh Come All Ye Faithful,” or the season two episode, “La Douleur Exquise!,” for some of the most prime examples). The push and pull between them being dictated by Big and his whims. Even though Carrie could “technically” be so much better off without him (not that the likes of Aidan Shaw [John Corbett], Jack Berger [Ron Livingston] or Petrovsky turned out to be any less toxic), she’s, as she says in “La Douleur Exquise!,” “…addicted to the pain—the exquisite pain—of wanting someone so unattainable.” The kind of pain that makes a girl say in a manner as emotional spectrum-shifting as the man stringing her along, “Kill it dead, make it grow/Oh, oh, oh/Here you come, right on cue/Break my heart, make it new/What the hell can I do?”
Apparently, only wait and see when the next time this toxic man will pop up again. As Carrie ends up doing in season six, despite declaring, “You cannot do this to me again! You cannot jerk me around!” But Big assures, “Carrie, listen, it is different—” Carrie, trying her best not to be fooled, counters, “Oh, it’s never different. It’s six years of never being different. But this is it, I am done” (needless to say, she ends up marrying the man).
She then goes to unpack the encounter with Miranda, Samantha (Kim Cattrall) and Charlotte (Kristin Davis), calling him “the boy who cried love.” Which is exactly the kind of boy that Abrams is up against in “Here You Come, There You Go.” And, unfortunately, even well after the era when Sex and the City was reflecting dating and relationships back to the thirty-something generation of the moment, it seems that many women still have as their kryptonite the promise—or even the dangling of the promise—of “true love.” However untrue (a.k.a. unhealthy) it might be.
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