Amid countless rumours about her impending wedding to Travis Kelce and reports that she’s filed to trademark her voice and likeness to protect against AI misuse, Taylor Swift has done an interview this week talking about what she’s known best for — her songwriting.
The Grammy-winning pop superstar was featured in The New York Times Magazine as one of the 30 Greatest Living American Songwriters (well deserved), and unpacked the stories behind some of her biggest hits.
From her “most slept-on” album and the controversial “Our Song” lyric change, to finally squashing the longstanding rumour about “All Too Well (10 Minute Version)”, here are the biggest revelations from the 30-minute interview.
She lost the original recording of “All Too Well (10 Minute Version)”
“All Too Well” quickly became one of the most beloved songs in Taylor Swift’s catalogue upon its release in 2012, thanks to its slow-burning power ballad instrumental and brutally honest lyrics that make you want to scream into a pillow.
So, naturally, when it was hinted in interviews that the song was originally “10, 12 or 15 minutes long”, fans demanded that a longer version be released. Their wish was finally granted in 2021 when Taylor released an unabridged “10 Minute Version” as part of her re-recorded album Red (Taylor’s Version), but some fans were suss on whether the newly released track was actually the original version.
Well, Taylor reflected on the song during her recent interview and confessed that she had to “piece together” lyrics because she had lost the original recording that inspired it.
“I was going back through diaries and finding little fragments of it, and I didn’t have the old thing anymore,” she said.
“So, I was looking through safes trying to find the CD, but I had to go back and piece together lyrics and stuff. But that was the most extensive restoration process I’ve ever done on a song. I don’t think I’ll ever experience anything like that again.”
She called out a ‘weird’ fan habit
Let’s be honest, most Taylor Swift fans have been guilty of trying to decipher which of her romantic interests inspired her songs. From whether “Dear John” was actually about John Mayer to whether it was Jake Gyllenhaal’s sister Maggie’s house that she left her scarf at in “All Too Well”, Swifties love to piece together clues like they’re solving a murder.
While Taylor herself famously loves an Easter egg, she admitted that there are “corners of [her] fanbase that are going to take things to a really extreme place”.
“There’s people who are going to try to like, do detective work, figure out the details — who is that about? What is this?” she shared. “When it gets a little bit weird for me is when people act like it’s sort of like a paternity test. Like, ‘This song’s about this person.’ Because I’m like, ‘That dude didn’t write the song. I did.’”
She shut down Jack Antonoff feud rumours
There has been plenty of speculation recently that Taylor and her longtime collaborator Jack Antonoff had fallen out after he wasn’t involved in her latest album, The Life of a Showgirl. Well, Taylor officially put those rumours to bed when discussing the pair’s songwriting process.
“Jack Antonoff is a collaborator of mine and one of my best friends,” she said.
She also talked about how she and Jack love to write what she calls a “rant bridge”, as heard in “Out of the Woods”, “Is It Over Now?” and “Cruel Summer”.
“It’s basically like stream of consciousness, endless pouring-out of emotion, intrusive thoughts, blended with metaphor, with discussion, with shouting,” she explained. “You want this rant bridge to feel the most intense of what that feeling is that you’re trying to establish over the course of the song, and you want it to be kind of a crescendo.”
She admitted she’s a ‘massive’ Sombr fan
While Taylor used to regularly shout out artists she was a fan of on social media, her music recommendations are few and far between nowadays. During the interview, however, she shouted out Sombr and admitted she was a “massive fan” of the “12 to 12” singer’s songwriting.
“His lyrics are so intensely confessional. ‘I don’t want another man’s child to have the eyes of the girl I can’t forget.’ Are you kidding me?” she said, referencing his song “undressed”.
She went on to say that having a male artist be so diaristic is “really good for the cause of women to be able to say stuff”.
“If there’s any way we can make confessional songwriting a little bit more of something that isn’t like, people take that as you were being messy. You have to be fair to everyone then,” she added.
She revealed her most slept-on album
I recently sat down with a friend and ranked all of Taylor Swift’s albums (something I encourage everyone to do at least once) and concluded that reputation is my personal favourite. Clearly, this isn’t the case for everyone, as Taylor acknowledged that her sixth album — which came out in 2017 amidst controversies that tarnished her public image — is probably her most “slept-on” release.
Want To Stay Up-To-Date
With PEDESTRIAN?
Get today’s best stories in your inbox every afternoon.
“I loved the reputation album. I was like, ‘You guys say what you want. I know what I did, I love it, like, go with God, sorry. Like, you can come around if you want. It’s okay if you don’t’,” she said. “And then six or seven years later, people are like, ‘Oh my god, like, ‘…Ready For It?’ People slept on that song.”
She added that she “wanted to headbang [herself] through a wall” when she wrote the bass-heavy track, as well as “Getaway Car” — which is arguably one of the best in her discography.
She wrote “Love Story” when she was mad at her parents
Similar to how she felt about “…Ready For It”, Taylor admitted that she didn’t care what anyone thought about her song “Love Story” when it was released because she loved it so much.
She shared that she wrote the country pop banger at 17 in her bedroom when she was mad at her parents, Andrea and Scott Swift, because “they wouldn’t let [her] go on a date with a guy who was too old”.
“This is why you need to discipline your kids, because they might write songs… that go number one,” she remarked.
Look, “Love Story” only peaked at number four on the Billboard Hot 100 in the US (ridiculous, I know), but still, she’s got a point.
She changed the lyrics to “Our Song”
Taylor spoke about “Our Song” as an example of how she often loves to include a plot twist at the end of her songs, and also revealed why she changed one of her most polarising lyrics.
You see, in the song she sings: “When we’re on the phone, and you talk real slow / ‘Cause it’s late, and your mama don’t know.”
Over the years, many Swifties have questioned why she used the word “slow” instead of “low”, which would’ve made more sense in the context, and Taylor said it all came down to an unspoken rule of her songwriting.
“I don’t like to have a word end with the same letter that the next word starts with,” she said. “It was supposed to be, ‘When you’re on the phone, and you talk real low,’ but I was like, I don’t like the ‘real low’. So it turned into, ‘When you talk real slow’. Certain words just fly for me.”
Well, there you go!
She felt “completely washed up” at 22
Throughout the interview, Taylor got real about how the public’s perception of her has influenced her songwriting over the years, including how “Blank Space” and “Anti-Hero” wouldn’t exist if she weren’t criticised for her relationships and “every aspect of [her] personality”.
She also said that she wrote her song “Nothing New”, which was released on Red (Taylor’s Version) in 2021 as a feature with Phoebe Bridgers, alone in a hotel room at 22 when she felt “completely washed up”.
“It sounds ridiculous, but at 22 years old, I felt completely washed up,” she confessed. “I felt like maybe the only thing that made me special was that I was this, like, ‘teen phenom’, whatever I was looked at as.”
The heartbreaking track includes lyrics like, ‘How can a person know everything at 18, but nothing at 22’, which she said was inspired by the sudden backlash she received after the success of her second album, Fearless.
“It really turned the tables on my perception of like, love can be quickly handed to you and then taken away, and it’s this kind of strange thing with fame, and that was the first time I ever grappled with that,” she remarked.
She wrote “Elizabeth Taylor” after a drive with Travis
In addition to unpacking some of her older tracks, including how “New Year’s Day” and “Mirrorball” came to be, Taylor spoke about how her latest single “Elizabeth Taylor” is an example of when a song “comes as if from nowhere”.
She explained that she was inspired to write her ode to the Hollywood starlet during a car ride with her fiancée Travis.
“I go on and on, explaining to Travis why I love Elizabeth Taylor so much. ‘She fought for artists’ rights. She was exploited in so many ways, and yet she kept her humanity, she kept her humour, she kept her passion for life,’ and I was just going on and on,” she recalled.
“And like, her eyes were violet. Some people said they were blue, some people said they were violet, I think they were violet’. And we arrive, we get home, he gets out of the car, and I’m just in my head. I’m like, this intrusive melody of like, ‘I’d cry my eyes violet, Elizabeth Taylor,’ and I’m just like, scrambling to open my record app on my phone.”
Oh, what I would give to have access to the voice memos app on Taylor’s phone.
BRB, gonna spend the rest of the day listening to Taylor’s incredible discography (justice for reputation!).
