Into the Taylor-Verse: Taylor Swift's Songwriting Eras

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FOR THE SWIFTIES

Introduction

Taylor Swift’s achievements are legendary. Although all the popstars have their own crowns, she has aced every test, winning fourteen Grammy Awards, forty American Music Awards, forty Billboard Music Awards, and twenty-three MTV Video Music Awards, and was named TIME Person of the Year for 2023. She is the most famous woman in the world. But as smart and hardworking as Taylor has been to win all these accolades, break so many sales records, and keep being so interesting we can’t stop talking about her, there’s something she does that is more important and more unique to her. She writes songs that mirror people’s feelings so closely we joke that she wrote them just for us. Despite being a towering figure of fame, her music still feels intimate, like she’s speaking directly to you. Although her songwriting has matured and become even more compelling, this emotional vulnerability hasn’t changed since her debut album came out in 2006.

Long before the world knew her name, thirteen-year-old Taylor Alison Swift began her music journey on a New Jersey boardwalk in the summer of 2003. Wearing a butterfly T-shirt and an eager smile, Taylor performed a short set, including the first song she ever wrote, Lucky You. Fast-forward to more than one hundred million album sales later, and that boardwalk has become the world’s biggest stadiums. The T-shirt has been replaced with bespoke costumes, and the eagerness has been replaced with a powerful superstar aura. Little by little, Taylor curated an adult version of herself that still feels as friendly as the one in the butterfly top. She has created such an inviting universe within her songs, music videos, red carpet looks, and stage performances that die-hard fans (Swifties) spend hours at a time deciphering, studying, and trying to predict what she’ll do next. There’s a lot to discover once you step into the Taylor-Verse. It spans many horizons, from the rainy small town of Fearless to the midnight graveyard of evermore.

Starting from the early days as a small-town girl that inspired her debut album, Taylor Swift, this book explores the ins and outs of how Taylor writes her songs, one album at a time. We’ll learn about her inspirations: muses who she loved and lost, her own girlhood, real people from history, and the work of William Shakespeare, to name a few. Taylor uses memory and time like no one else, especially to shape her songs about heartbreak. She is one of the world’s greatest storytellers, using words, song structure, her personal life story, and her deep understanding of her fans to spin tales about everything from losing the love of your life to, well, shaking it off.

Taylor is not only a storyteller; she is also a mastermind. She has woven a whole web of connections between her songs and herself using the Easter eggs she plants from album to album, from important motifs in her lyrics to certain symbols and sounds, to meaningful color schemes and even hairstyles. On her tours, she leans into her innate theatricality to make her live show appear fun and effortless, although actually she’s an all-star athlete doing an energetic three-and-a-half-hour show in heels. The Eras Tour, which the fans have made their own with costumes and friendship bracelet exchanges, has become a huge cultural event. As smart and forward-thinking as Taylor is, some of the most fascinating aspects of her career came when fate rolled the dice: when the political landscape changed underneath her; when public opinion flipped overnight; the Covid-19 pandemic. Taylor has had to grow beyond her image as America’s ultimate good girl and become a more complex, resilient version of herself. Throughout the twists and turns of this journey, the Swifties have always remained dedicated, becoming integral contributors to the universe Taylor created. Taylor’s relationship with her fans is the real stuff of legend: she listens, she notices, and she thinks hard about what to offer next.

Whether you’re a brand-new fan or have been here a long time, put on your best dress and prepare to see the stars. It’s time to travel into the Taylor-Verse.

Taylor Swift grew up in a small town. Like many a born star, she couldn’t wait to get out and see the world beyond the mall and the Methodist church, the high school and the football field bleachers. Those early years have stayed with her, not just as memories of her childhood but in the first album she ever made, Taylor Swift. It’s the only one of her albums not to have its own dedicated section of the Eras Tour, although most of the songs have appeared in the section where Taylor surprises the audience with tunes not on the permanent setlist. The themes and references Taylor uses in her debut album are expressed more simply than they will be in her mature songwriting, but this is still Taylor Swift. The scenes are set and the stories told in a way that lures people in like siren songs. Taylor wears little black dresses (and jeans—they never go out of style) with cowboy boots rather than high heels, and the stories are about the evergreen topic of yearning for love. Taylor will retell the formative experiences from her debut album in different ways: the hometown boyfriend with the Chevy truck in ’tis the damn season (evermore) is straight out of Tim McGraw, while Midnight Rain (Midnights) tussles with the choice between a traditional life and the lure of fame. Taylor Swift takes us back to the summer when she made her decision.

Taylor Swift is interesting for Swiftian historians who want to learn her origin story, but it’s also an astounding songwriting achievement in its own right. Taylor was just sixteen years old when her self-titled debut album came out. Like most teenagers, she paid close attention to the people around her, and her earliest stories were set in a world that looked very much like her hometown of Wyomissing, Pennsylvania (population 11,127 circa July 2022), or Hendersonville, where she went to high school (population 62,896 circa July 2022). By the time Taylor Swift was released, Taylor was a rising star in the world-famous music scene in Nashville (population 683,622 circa July 2022), a place known for respecting songwriting talent. Taylor had secured a record deal for songwriting at the ripe age of fourteen¹

and would never forget that it was her ability to tell stories and conjure up an imaginative world that helped her become a star. Her second most useful skill was her immense drive, which helped when she went on a radio tour, traveling the country introducing herself to producers, the people who decide which songs get radio play. Giving a great performance in front of a handful of grown-ups in a conference room isn’t easy for any artist, but Taylor had a natural confidence that helped these important industry players warm to her, especially when she just kept coming back and treating them to new songs and another hour in her polite, smiling company.²

They might have been standing in a conference room in downtown Nashville, but Taylor’s music took them to an altogether different place.

On her debut album, Taylor takes us to an idyllic small town near a lake, where people drive pickup trucks and first love could potentially last forever—if the other person would just treat you right. The opening lines of the official first Taylor Swift song, Tim McGraw, spirit us away to a starry night in Georgia. Your crush is gazing into your eyes and telling you how beautiful they are. Who wouldn’t want to go to that place and never come back? Taylor creates a paradise of back roads and porches, safe and cozy, just like our earliest romantic daydreams. If this sounds like a hug of a song, Taylor thought so too. During her first tour, she would go into the crowd halfway through Tim McGraw to hug her fans and thank them for coming, before jumping back onstage to seamlessly finish singing about the poignancy of first love. The song is also a mission statement for the Taylor Swift songwriting process: she can write flowery comparisons just like any (tortured) poet, but she’ll put a twist on them. The boy she likes compares her blue eyes to twinkling stars, just like Romeo does to Juliet in their famous balcony scene. But instead of indulging him, Taylor cuts him off, playfully calling him out for feeding her a line. Even though her debut album idealizes first romances and what could be, Taylor isn’t going to fill her track list with songs bursting with grand, overblown metaphors about love. Instead, she will build a universe from the concrete, meaningful details that she remembers from her own experiences, from the little black dress she wears to dance with the boy in Tim McGraw to that scarf she’ll later leave behind at someone’s sister’s house.

Taylor creates a paradise of back roads and porches, safe and cozy, just like our earliest romantic daydreams.

As first songs go, Tim McGraw is a perfect scene-setter for the themes of the album, and the entire career to come. It’s about a real adolescent experience, but it’s also about Taylor’s bigger dream: to be recognized for her music. The song is full of metaphors that show Taylor yearns to be seen and heard for her lyrical talent. She doesn’t just say that the moon and stars shine, she says they shine like a spotlight. She doesn’t just say listen to me, she says one day you’ll hear her on the radio. In fact, the word radio crops up on four of the songs on Taylor Swift, showing where Taylor’s thoughts were leading. This choice of words reveals where she was at in her life. We’ll discover throughout this book that Taylor’s words have deep personal meaning to her, and also reveal her journey through life—Taylor was a teenager when she wrote Taylor Swift, so it’s natural that the word girl features in five songs on the album; that was Taylor’s world. Over time, the way she uses the word girl will change dramatically, particularly in her career-long struggle over the good girl versus the bad girl. Here, though, being a girl isn’t complicated. If you’re a girl, you’re exactly where you’re supposed to be by the logic of Taylor Swift—by the lake, with your crush, under the moonlight. The subtle genius of her word choice in Tim McGraw is that you don’t have to want an actual spotlight to share in Taylor’s yearning for it: we just want to feel special. The bright lights of fame are still to come for Taylor. Instead, this album is lit by the stars sprinkled throughout the lyrics. For now, she’s a teenage girl, writing songs on her bedroom floor and hoping someone will like them.

Although the sound of Taylor Swift is organic, played on guitars and live drums, the story of how we came to know this record is a curiously digital one. A new technology came along at exactly the right time for someone who wanted to connect to others who felt like she did: social media. It’s hard to imagine a time before it, but Taylor and social media were young together. Like any teenager at the time, she posted updates about her life, though her posts quickly evolved from her days at school to life on the tour bus, complete with period-accurate straightened hair and heavy-handed eyeliner (the YouTube makeup tutorial was yet to be invented). The stars aligned for Taylor to start her songwriting career at a time when culture was becoming less formal and glamorous, and starting to seek out more relatable stars. As well as shaking the hand of every producer in Nashville, Taylor hand-built her empire, girl by girl, via social media and in person. A fan named Holly Armstrong spoke to a podcast focusing on Taylor’s earlier music, The Swift Legacy, in 2021.³

She described how she watched Taylor play on a sandy boardwalk in Florida when she was twelve years old, and Taylor was thirteen. Taylor’s set included a pre–Taylor Swift song called Lucky You and a cover of a song by country legend Patsy Cline. Afterward, Holly lined up with three other people to speak to this cool new singer. She and Taylor spoke about ordinary things, like their favorite color (purple) and their tops (Holly’s said American Girl and Taylor’s had a pink butterfly). By the end of their short chat, Holly felt like she’d made a friend and had been turned into a committed fan: I don’t think Taylor even really thought she was going to be as big as she is. You just don’t think like that. You make the ‘friend’ connection with somebody and they play guitar, they do music, cool, I want to listen to their music. Holly was just one of the girls who Taylor turned her spotlight on, and who told their friends about this album of songs all about girls like them. They called up the radio station, on a landline phone, and requested her songs. And, using the new technology that had just recently become available, they went online (cue dial-up tone, because it’s 2003) and commented on Taylor’s MySpace, hoping she’d respond.

In the run-up to the release of Taylor Swift, methods of being a popstar were vastly different from today. When you saw your favorite singer, it was usually on TV or the front of a magazine, where they’d had the benefit of full glam; the interview was tempered by publicists and cut back by editors. In fact, a lot of gatekeepers stood between celebrities and fans, including the ones who ran the record industry and chose which lucky people would get a record deal. Navigating this forest of adult pressures is a lot to ask of a sixteen-year-old girl. Going from there being no such thing as social media to the existence of a site like MySpace was a giant leap in technology that Taylor was exactly the right age and disposition to take advantage of. Sarah Carson, writing in the New Statesman in 2021, looked back on the fervent days of her pre-Fearless Taylor Swift fandom, describing the appeal of a singer who wrote the swooniest music, set in a semi-mythical America, but also posted on the internet like a normal girl. One of Taylor’s posts read: I sit in class and write notes to my equally psychotic redheaded best friend.⁴

MySpace Taylor even occasionally swore, something Albums Taylor wouldn’t do until she snapped on reputation, showing that Taylor used social media just like every other girl at the time, testing the boundaries of how she expressed herself and letting her fans in on who she was when the grown-ups weren’t around. Sarah wrote: The music itself was only half the appeal […] The other half was—and, for many fans, still is—the quest to understand her. We looked for hidden meanings in her lyrics, decoded the secret messages she hid in liner notes, and crafted in-jokes and fan theories.⁵

These secret messages, whether they are actually in code or just left somewhere that only some people will notice them, have become an important way that Taylor speaks to her fans. She’s created a perfect tension: between her inviting lyrics and warm personality, you feel like you know her as a person, but she sprinkles puzzles and mysteries throughout her work to engage your natural human urge to decode and decipher.

Taylor found her place in the world inside country music, but many of her early fans weren’t exactly followers of a genre