Latest Posts by swiftrrys - Page 2

the thing about haylor is i dont want them together i dont think they were the pinnacle of a perfect relationship i just find their dynamic and the way they write about each other SO ENDLESSLY INTERESTING. like i am a fan of the art of haylorism not shipping these two humans together as actual end game. does this make sense?

the thing about haylor is i dont want them together i dont think they were the pinnacle of a perfect relationship i just find their dynamic and the way they write about each other SO ENDLESSLY INTERESTING. like i am a fan of the art of haylorism not shipping these two humans together as actual end game. does this make sense?

The way “I heard that you’ve been out and about with some other girl, you said what you heard is true but I can’t stop thinking about you, I said I’ve been there too a few times” makes the situation sound so sexy and fun and lighthearted and Is it Over Now is like “actually, I wanted to jump off a building!”

Not justifying the dickhead guy in the slightest but this is also why calcium hated harry so much!!!! He knew about their hookups and was probably aware how much she loved harry. Also wondering if she threw herself in that relationship because that would mean she won't go backto h

oh yeah I know why calvin hated harry. and i do fully believe that a part of tayvin's publicness was aimed at harry. harry was SUPPOSED to be hurt at the bbmas. that's why she mentions it in question... cause she was trying to hurt him. showing up your ex who you have unfinished business with is a thing and taylor was playing the game. and yeah i think a part of it was to tell herself not to go back and a part of it was to tell harry it was over.

tayvin started about haylor, there is kind of no doubt in my mind. and that's why calvin hated harry so much... cause he knew that he was a tool, a means to an end. but then it got to the point where harry was no longer a threat and he had won and he was just being a dick. like blocking fans with harry icons or going through the haylor hashtag on twitter (or unfollowing people here, which i still think he was responsible for) was just being a dick. harry wasn't going to win taylor back at that point, and those fans were not pushing her to him. he was just throwing power around.

The way she loved him so much to the point where she would have been okay with being called a slut if that meant she could have him! And the way she is possessive over his couch and snarky that he is dating her clowns while wondering why he didn't say I love you

I KNOWWWWW she was so fucking in love with him and felt insane. i am thinking about her ayhtdws speech on tour. the one where she said that people deserve more than someone who can't make up their mind and say they love you. he hurt her so bad and the worst part is in all his songs after that, he didn't ever seem to notice. he speaks so frequently of his hurt. she sings of his hurt a couple times (particularly in ootw and question). but when does he ever mention hers?

it's a tragic thing in their story where she was always more aware than he was and always more emotionally intelligent.

Something something about Harry possibly realizing the gravity of their love and how it still affects her now to an extent…idk not to be a haylor haylor, but WAKE UP. The fact Taylor was willing to ridicule herself just to be together because she knew his perception of her trumped the medias’ is something so special to me

it really makes you wanna go put question on and like actually ask him the question.... did you regret it you fucking idiot?????? cause like!!!!!!! she was so in love with him and was willing to throw herself into a fire for him and he was just so oblivious to his impact!!! with red tv we heard her call his laughter a disaster... she was so taken by him immediately. this was falling in love in the cruelest way. and he had her so hard she missed him so much and then he came back and she got spooked and he just....... bowed out. he started fucking around and jerking her around and that just was how they went for 2 fucking years.

it's heartbreaking and infuriating and i'm SURE that, just like when he hear question the first time a year ago, he is kicking himself for being such a dumbass kid back then

Is it Over Now? so perfectly describes the rollercoaster and uncertainty of an on off relationship where you keep thinking “ok it’s definitely over now”!and then end up hooking up again, so clearly it wasn’t, and while each of these “was it over when..” should’ve been the moment the end was sealed and yet .. none of them were .. and you are left wondering .. is it over now? I can’t think of any song that addresses this so well it’s just perfection

i'm screaming she really was like "i cannot believe that you got to be a slut in public while IIIIII had ot be a slut in private"

I really think that they still had something going on in early 2015, but it stopped just before the calcium thing and he had to find out with the rest of the world and that's why he looked so hurt during the bbmas

oh yeah they were hooking up all the way to that party in january 2015. what happened after? we'll never know. but it was sometime between that party and his birthday that things went south. and she was trying to hurt him at the bbmas, and it worked. they acted like fresh new exes, cause they were.

Haylor makes me so sad because she wrecked him… but she did so because he never realize she was actually as in if not more in love as he was. He couldn’t see a reality where he had her heart… he idolized her, true, but he probs also still was grasping with his own fame, and his own value as a person. In what universe would someone like her, older, wiser, and so pretty and famous would be so in love with him.

Their timing was the worst.

And yet also… is that a surprise. That he didn’t got the memo? Seeing all the reactions even from some haylors after hearing the vault songs were like wow, guess she really did love him…. For years there was an agreement of how much of an impact she had on him, but not as much of the impact he had on her… and it just breaks my heart when I think about it

i know. i knew that it meant something to her, and i said that for years. but i did always think that this hit him harder because it was his first love. but the truth is it fucking smashed and destroyed her, she was fucking broken. if you hold onto someone for years, and the hope that they'll get their shit together and love you the way you need, when they don't, it's going to crush you.

and yeah, it makes sense but that doesn't make it hurt less. and it wasn't all him and his not knowing how to deal with his fame, again, she was not a strong communicator either. so they both just couldn't deal right. and it ended up hurting them both so hard and bad and fucked them up for years.

i kinda think there's something to be said there that sums up to "ouch."

this story is tragic and beautiful and sad, and also gives you whiplash and spins you around confused about where you are and what just happened. her analogy to wonderland is perfect, I think.

"say don't go" and "all you had to do was stay" and "how you get the girl" and the theme of taylor just telling him how easy it is to fix things on 1989 and they consistently fuck it up when she's writing the most obvious blueprint for him and she's so clearly communicating what she needs I LOSE MY MIND

"the truth is i can't pretend it's platonic"/"i cannot be your friend"

"it's weird cause the guy that is about and i are friends and i don't talk about my relationships hut i do my friendships"/spending the day at caleb's party together/harry yelling across the restaurant that they're friends

taylor in 1989 promo: I'M SINGLE PRINGLE

every haylor stan in 2015 : NO YOU WEREN'T

Idk if anyone’s brought this up yet but I am bowled over by

“You search the world for something else to make you feel like what we had” -> “you search in every models bed for something greater”

-> “does it feel like everything’s just like second-best after that meteor strike? and what’s that, that i heard, that you’re still with her, that’s nice, i’m sure that’s what’s suitable….”

Idk if anyone’s brought this up yet but I am bowled over by

“You search the world for something else to make you feel like what we had” -> “you search in every models bed for something greater”

-> “does it feel like everything’s just like second-best after that meteor strike? and what’s that, that i heard, that you’re still with her, that’s nice, i’m sure that’s what’s suitable….”

The way “I heard that you’ve been out and about with some other girl, you said what you heard is true but I can’t stop thinking about you, I said I’ve been there too a few times” makes the situation sound so sexy and fun and lighthearted and Is it Over Now is like “actually, I wanted to jump off a building!”

— harry styles two ghosts headers

like/reblog and credit sunfiowersgold on twitter if using!

I came across HS/TS synastry chart and found some interesting. Note that this is assuming TS' ascendant is really Scropio for the ones that include ascendant.

Venus conj mars: romantic and sexual attraction between you is almost irresistible.  The intensity of your feelings for one another is unlikely to fade over time, and you find much fulfillment in your love for each other. Even if you go your separate ways, it is likely that both of you will always remember each other for the passion you once enjoyed.

Asc square merc: This aspect creates confusion and misunderstandings. They may find it difficult to understand each other and cooperate.

Pluto square venus: Intense, and sometimes uncomfortable, attraction between these two can go either way fast. The expression “a fine line between love and hate” applies here. This connection is almost primal in nature. Sexual attraction is intense. These two will definitely need to deal with issues of possessiveness, jealousy, and volatile emotions. They arouse in one another some of their deepest insecurities, as there can be an intense fear of losing one another.

Mars conj pluto: The Mars conjunct Pluto synastry aspect can indicate burning down, destruction, and regeneration. The relationship is a very important influence in your life (for better or worse). The Plutonian obsession is very well present. It is impossible not to think of the other person, especially for the Mars person to exclude the Pluto person of their mind. 

Neptune square moon: There is a tendency to misunderstand or misread each other’s signals, so you will have to spend more time processing hurt feelings or perceived slights

Uranus square moon: This aspect can lead to a relationship that begins abruptly and is filled with exhilarating highs and unsettling lows. The intense attraction you feel towards each other may be fueled by the excitement and novelty your partner brings into your life. However, these moments of exhilaration can quickly turn into feelings of insecurity and uncertainty, as you struggle to find a balance between your need for emotional stability and the wild energy that Uranus represents.

Mars square mercury: Different points of view can turn into full-fledged arguments all too easily with this combination. Words may be sharp and destructive

Jupiter square moon:This aspect often leads to exaggerated emotions and intuitions, which stem from both individuals' own fears and insecurities.

Jupiter trine jupiter:You get on well with each other and encourage each other to improve yourself and your life

Moon trine saturn: Any Moon-Saturn aspect sign can be used for good, but it takes work. If both people are emotionally immature, then even the Moon trine Saturn synastry aspect will feel difficult and painful. If both partners are emotionally mature, then even the square aspect can feel easy. 

Pluto square sun:you have a deep and transformative effect on each other. Just like the opposition, it can be a bit of a love-hate relationship.

Pluto conjunct jupiter: This relationship challenges you to grow, transform, improve, and develop. It doesn't accept a standstill! This aspect may bring out the risk-taker or ambitious nature in one or both of you

Venus sextile pluto: tendency to be consumed by one another and by the relationship is here

Wow. I feel this explains their tf dynamic

After Taylor's whirlwind trip to Kansas City the one detail that was said that lifted my spirit was Taylor packed a candle to take with her. I remember Harry saying one time that he takes a candle with him on tour. So Haylors, it's been a long road, but our Twin Flames are still burning. I feel re-energized.

Yes they are always gonna be linked. They are both going through a healing process. They need to finish healing from the past before they can be in union.

they are so similar i can’t..

Taylor meeting the parents (the moms especially) this early on, will never not be funny to me. Blondie is out there interacting with them as if they've known each other for years lol. I kind of feel bad for them cause they also get to feel the blow of the breakup alongside their sons. Tay is a daughter-in-law material and no doubt she charms them too, leaving a long lasting effect. She's the kind of ex that the moms continue asking about years after the breakup has happened.

Oh Anon - you are spot on! She is a parent charmer for sure. And we can just imagine the “How could you let her get awaaaay?!?” conversations some of these mothers are forced to have with their broken-hearted sons as Blondie zooms away in the Getaway Car?

While we’re on the subject of notorious parent charmers? Harry Edward Styles. Look at his interactions with the senior Cordens, see how Ben Winston talks about his time with the senior Winstons, see the charm on display as H sweetly asks after then greets Hillary Whitehall in front of a panicked Jack at the 2020 Brits. Or listen to that HAIM interview I reposted the other day. Not only is he friends with the girls, he is friends with their DAD whose drumming he’d admired for years.

They’re considerate and kind, and enthusiastic supporters of these parents’ beloved children. No wonder parents are big fans.

Thanks so much for this ask!

Do you know where Taylor said she was giving up on relationships for a while? I feel like I remember that but can't find it

it was in her rolling stone cover story! (a lot of the press she did at that time is tinged with things that are saddening to revisit, but also clear on what her perspective was. the vogue 73 questions is another one):

"In fact, she suggests, she hasn’t dated at all since breaking up with One Direction singer Harry Styles more than a year and a half ago. “Like, have not gone on a date,” she says. “People are going to feel sorry for me when you write that. But it’s true.” Swift says dating is hard for her. For one thing, there’s the logistics. “Seventy percent of the time, when a guy asks me out, it’ll just be a random e-mail,” she says. Some movie star will get her address from his publicist and e-mail her cold. Usually she politely rebuffs them – but even if someone did penetrate that line of defense, building a relationship is hard. “I feel like watching my dating life has become a bit of a national pastime,” Swift says. “And I’m just not comfortable providing that kind of entertainment anymore. I don’t like seeing slide shows of guys I’ve apparently dated. I don’t like giving comedians the opportunity to make jokes about me at awards shows. I don’t like it when headlines read ‘Careful, Bro, She’ll Write a Song About You,’ because it trivializes my work. And most of all, I don’t like how all these factors add up to build the pressure so high in a new relationship that it gets snuffed out before it even has a chance to start. And so,” she says, “I just don’t date.” (That goes for hooking up as well. “I just think it’s pointless if you’re not in love,” Swift says. “And I don’t have the energy to be in love right now. So, no.”) Truth be told, Swift sounds a tiny bit jaded – which, for a “self-professed hopeless romantic,” maybe isn’t the worst thing to be. “It’s not like I’ve sworn off love,” she says. “My life is just not conducive to bringing other people into it right now. I’m very childlike and romantic about lots of things, but I’m realistic about this.” [....] it’s not bad that I’m not hopelessly in love with someone. It’s not a tragedy, and it’s not me giving up and being a spinster. Although I did get another cat.” She laughs. “I asked around: I was like, ‘Does two cats count as cats?’ But then I thought, what imaginary guy’s perspective am I thinking about this from? Someone is going to think I’m undateable for a lot of reasons before they think I’m undateable because I have two cats.”"

eta: the above still applies, but i was actually remembering her glamour magazine interview with this -

"Yeah, I do feel jaded about relationships, to be honest. I think the media has sent me a really unfair message over the past couple of years, which is that I’m not allowed to date for excitement, or fun, or new experiences or learning lessons. I’m only allowed to date if it’s for a lasting, multiple-year relationship. Otherwise I’m a, quote, ‘serial dater’. Or, quote, ‘boy crazy’. The narrative has been so wrong, every time it was the same. It’s 'Taylor spotted talking to this guy, she’s chasing him.’ They create a beginning to the story that didn’t happen most of the time, so then they have to create an ending. So they always go to the same fabricated ending that every other tabloid has used in my story, which is, 'She got too clingy’, or 'Taylor has too many emotions, she scared him away’. Which has honestly never been the reason for any of my break-ups. You know what has been the reason? The media. You take something very fragile, like trying to get to know someone, and it feels like walking out into the middle of a gladiator arena with someone you’ve just met. And all of a sudden the public and the media are allowed to say thumbs up or thumbs down. So I just don’t try it anymore."

“Yeah, I do feel jaded about relationships, to be honest. I think the media has sent me a really unfair message over the past couple of years, which is that I’m not allowed to date for excitement, or fun, or new experiences or learning lessons. I’m only allowed to date if it’s for a lasting, multiple-year relationship. Otherwise I’m a, quote, ‘serial dater’. Or, quote, ‘boy crazy’. The narrative has been so wrong, every time it was the same. It’s ‘Taylor spotted talking to this guy, she’s chasing him.’ They create a beginning to the story that didn’t happen most of the time, so then they have to create an ending. So they always go to the same fabricated ending that every other tabloid has used in my story, which is, 'She got too clingy’, or 'Taylor has too many emotions, she scared him away’. Which has honestly never been the reason for any of my break-ups. You know what has been the reason? The media. You take something very fragile, like trying to get to know someone, and it feels like walking out into the middle of a gladiator arena with someone you’ve just met. And all of a sudden the public and the media are allowed to say thumbs up or thumbs down. So I just don’t try it any more.”

— Taylor on relationships (x)

“Swift often sings of alienation and yearning. She has an unusual number of songs about being left behind. Not by the culture—though I think she worries about that, too—but by someone she cared about who couldn’t countenance the immensity of her life. In her world, love is conditional and frequently temporary. (‘You could call me ‘babe’ for the weekend,” she sings on ‘’tis the damn season,’ a line I’ve always found profoundly sad.) On the chorus of ‘The Archer,’ she sings, “Who could ever leave me, darling? / But who could stay?” Toward the end of the song, she adds a more hopeful line: “You could stay.”As she sang that “you” on Saturday, she raised an arm and pointed directly to the audience. Swift has written many songs that describe her devotion as a punishment to be endured. ‘I love you, ain’t that the worst thing you ever heard?’ she bellows on ‘Cruel Summer.’ She believes that the force of her affection will push people away. But her fans have remained. They have buoyed her; in turn, she has given them everything.”

— The New Yorker on the Eras Tour (x)

1989 is not a purely or even mostly happy album and maybe you’ll see that now. there’s a lot of yearning and a lot of truth-telling and a lot of hiding feelings and reckoning with huge life changes and growing up and moving on and crawling back and clinging onto hopes of true love when you have had your heart ripped into pieces but you cut your hair and moved to new york and maybe that’s enough.

new lorde email just dropped

reddit. com/r/TaylorSwift/comments/16igrdk/fall_out_boys_pete_wentz_on_taylor_swift_really/

"Taylor is the only artist that I’ve met or interacted with in recent times who creates exactly the art of who she is, but does it on such a mass level. So that’s breathtaking to watch from the sidelines. The way people traded bracelets, I don’t know what the beginning of it was, but you felt that everywhere. We felt that, I saw that in the crowd on our tour. I don’t know Taylor well, but I think she’s doing exactly what she wants and creating exactly the art that she wants to create. And doing that, on such a level, is really awe-inspiring to watch. It makes you want to make the biggest, weirdest version of our thing and put that out there.”

!!!

i truly do think that this is why her music speaks to her audience in the way that it does, because it's so authentically her. taylor's personality, vulnerability, emotions, perspective are all very alive in her writing and that touches people. this is interesting because i'd say that pete's writing has always been a raw, expressive reflection of himself too - and that inspired taylor, after all! - but it can be harder to see that in yourself or to recognize that genuineness when you feel more like you're pulling yourself apart. there's very much an energy that resonates in both of their work, and even though they don't personally know each other that well, the mutual professional respect and admiration is such a cool thing to see. it must be so wild and fulfilling to her to now be an inspiration to the very artists she herself found that in when she was starting out

https://youtu.be/b6w5DUzqz1g?si=DnoOWz99kkl4H-dq

I think you guys are going to enjoy this reading on Taylor’s future spouse from today. Here are my highlights:

She’ll be married in less that three years (she’ll be married before she’s 38). It’ll be around the winter or fall season.

She knows this person already, it’s one of her exes.

He makes her happy and they laugh a lot together.

They’re very similar people and have known each other for lifetimes.

He’s got an outgoing persona.

They could be a confrontational person (perhaps contrarian?)

In Taylor’s head she knows it always come back around to this person.

He is giving a lot of Aquarius energy.

Their connection is very strong.

They’re not very far off in age.

Random: he likes spaghetti (lol) and also very out of the norm foods.

They have very strong sexual tension.

Reader doesn’t think this person is American.

The relationship may be hidden for quite some time.

The number 7 is quite important.

He has dark hair and slightly tan skin.

He’s in the music industry.

They could be twin flames. Reader is “very much” getting that energy.

They have a very “will they won’t they” energy (like Ross and Rachel!)

They failed in the past but they won’t let each other go again. They want to get it right this time.

They have lived similar experiences and have a mutual understanding of each other.

Reader says their energy reminds her of “Cowboy Like Me” in that they’re both good at playing the game in their industry and they’ve both got “tricks up their sleeves.”

They’ve been wanting this for a long time but circumstances and miscommunication and timing have gotten in the way

They want to create together, maybe music

This relationship is very powerful and different from Taylor’s others—it consumes her. He’s always been in her heart.

Public reaction will be split, with some being very supportive and some being haters (not surprising). It won’t be a surprise, though, because they’ve been together in the past.

They always find their way back to each other.

They will be unstoppable together.

They’ll have kids. Maybe two or three.

They’ll feel very free to be themselves with each other.

They will continue to be passionate and challenge each other. Being together completes them.

i need 1989 vault tracks to give them the push to finally DO SOMETHING

IIRC didn't some tarot readings say that Haylor would get back in September? It's the middle of September already and they seem to have no contact at all and they are hanging out with other people. Is there a new Tarot prediction for when they will reconnect?

Also, the iamnearlyhome and eroda lighthouse accounts have stopped tweeting for some time now. Do you think this is because HS and TR are serious now and HS has taken a break from daydreaming about reuniting with TS?

They said Virgo season which is aug 23-sept 22. Right before this is when HS disappeared for 12 days. We don’t know if they’re in contact or not. I choose to believe they are. I don’t think things are serious with TR.

December 2012: People magazine

Writing of Red Timeline! (+Vault Songs)

Edit: now that the Vault has been unlocked, I'll edit this post to add the missing titles and delete the predictions. I'm pretty proud of myself, I guessed every song except for The Very First Night.

Please, credit me if you take info from this timeline, thanks!

Watch the video version of this timeline on my YouTube channel!

June 16, 2010: The Story Of Us is the last song Taylor writes before having a writer's block that ended 6 months later.

"There’s a kind of bad that gets so overpowering you can’t even write about it. When you feel pain that is so far past dysfunctional, that leaves you with so many emotions that you can’t filter them down to simple emotions to write about. That’s when you know you really need to get out."

Late December 2010: All Too Well is born during a Speak Now Tour rehearsal.

[Interview with Pop Dust] The lyric I’m most proud of on the album is from ‘All Too Well’: ‘And you call me up again just to break me like a promise / so casually cruel in the name of being honest.’ That was something I came up with while ranting during a soundcheck. I was just playing these chords over and over onstage and my band joined in and I went on a rant. Those were some of the lines I thought of. I was going through a really hard time then, and my band joined in playing, and one of the first things that I came up with, just, like, spat out, was ‘And you call me up again just to break me like a promise, so casually cruel in the name of being honest.’

[Taylor to Rolling Stone] "The first song that was written was All Too Well, and it was a day when I was just like a broken human walking into rehearsal just feeling terrible about what was going on in my personal life. And I walked in and I remember we had just hired David Cook… I think it was his first day meeting me, and I think I ended up just playing four chords over and over again and the band started kicking in, like Amos Heller on bass, and people started playing along with me. I think they could tell I was really going through it. And I just started singing and riffing and sort of ad-libbing this song that basically was All Too Well. And it started with ‘I walked through the door with you, the air was cold’ – like it literally just was that song, but it had probably seven extra verses. And it included the f-word, and I remember my sound guy was like ‘Hey, I burned a CD of that thing you were doing, in case you want it.’ And I was like ‘Sure!’ 

February 2011: All Too Well is reworked. This is probably the Ten Minute Version.

First week of March 2011: Taylor edits All Too Well with Liz Rose's help.

[Liz Rose to Rolling Stone] When we wrote the song, I hadn’t heard from her in awhile. She hadn’t really been writing. I was in Nashville one day, slowly moving the last bits of junk out of my garage so I could move to Dallas. […] I was in my driveway and my phone rings, and it’s Taylor saying, ‘Man, I’ve got this thing and I really need you to help me with it. Can you write today? What are you doing today?’ [I later] drove over to Taylor’s. It was the first song she wrote for that record, I think. She had a story and she wanted to say something specific. She had a lot of information. I just let her go. She already had a melody and she started singing some words, and I started writing things down, saying, ‘Ok, let’s use this, let’s use that.’ She mentioned a plaid shirt, and I wrote that down in a corner, and when we got to the end, I said, ‘Let’s put the plaid shirt in there.’ That turned into one of the best lines. […] It was the most emotional, in-depth song we’ve ever written.

March 27, 2011: While in her hotel room in Dublin, Taylor writes Better Man.

[Taylor talking about it] Transcript: The song Better Man is one that I originally wrote for the Red album. I remember I was on tour, and I wrote it alone in a hotel room. And I remember standing in front of a mirror—I think the first thing I thought of was, ‘I wish it wasn’t 4am, standing in a mirror, saying to myself, 'you know you had to do it.“ That was an actual visual from my life that ended up being the first thing I wrote, and then I expanded outward from there. And it was a song that I really thought belonged on the album and there were just too many songs I loved that I had written in that period of time, so some of them had to be left off. I think I chose All Too Well over Better Man. I think that was what happened. I was either going to put on All Too Well or Better Man, and then I left off Better Man.

[Taylor in May 2011] "I was in Madrid, and I was in my hotel room all day. And I was going through this crazy, emotional thing and I wrote a song about it and it'll probably be on the next record. I'm telling you that. I'll tell you the title afterwards."

Speculation: on March 27th, Taylor posted a picture of her guitar, saying “Writing a song all afternoon in my hotel room. Dublin, Ireland”.

This matches the Better Man origin story, but Taylor said that she wrote it in Madrid, so on March 19th. But in Madrid she was hanging out with Liz Huett, her backup singer and close friend. Liz tweeted about their Madrid afternoon during the 1989 era, so I guess that it was a memorable day for them and I don't think that Taylor holed up in her room to write a song.

May 22, 2011: During a brief interview at the Billboard Music Awards, Taylor says she’s “been constantly writing lately.”

June 11, 2011: Taylor says, during a show in Detroit, that she had written 10 songs, all of them sad.

[New Yorker Interview] "In Detroit, Swift seemed somewhat melancholy. Once in a while, I had the feeling that she was on the verge of bursting into tears. She said that she had recently decided that life is “about achieving contentment... You’re not always going to be ridiculously happy.” She had written about ten songs so far for her next album. Asked to characterize them, she said, “They’re sad? If I’m being honest.” The most recent one, she said, “is about moving on.”

I think that the songs written were: All Too Well, I Almost Do, The Moment I Knew, and Better Man.

“I Almost Do' is a song I wrote about the conflict that you feel when you want to take someone back, and you want to give it another try, but you know you can’t. And you can’t because you know it’s hurt you so deeply that you know that you couldn’t bear to go through that again. So you’re sitting there and wondering where they are and hope that they think about you and that you’re almost picking up the phone call, but you just can’t. I think I needed to write this song in order to not call that person actually. I think that writing the song was what I did instead of picking up the phone.”

June 17, 2011: [From a Lover Journal] Taylor mentions "feeling blissfully happy" especially since she wrote "those 2 songs", which she will record after flying back to Nashville after the show in Pittsburgh, PA. One of them may be State Of Grace.

[On Good Morning America] "I wrote this song about when you first fall in love with someone — the possibilities, kind of thinking about the different ways that it could go. It’s a really big sound. To me, this sounds like the feeling of falling in love in an epic way."

June 24, 2011: Taylor meets up with Lori McKenna at her house in Boston. They write I Bet You Think About Me.

[Taylor on Amazon Music] "‘I Bet You Think About Me’ is a song I wrote with Lori McKenna, who is one of my favorite singer-songwriters ever. I’d always wanted to work with her. And I wrote this with her at her house when I was playing Foxboro Stadium on the Speak Now Tour. We wanted this song to be like a comedic, tongue in cheek, funny, not caring what anyone thinks about you sort of break up song, because there are a lot of different types of heartbreak songs on Red. Some of them are very sincere, some of them are very stoic and heartbreaking and sad. We wanted this to be the moment where I was like, ‘I don’t care about anything.’ And we wanted to make people laugh with it, and we wanted it to be sort of a drinking song, and I think that that’s what it ended up being."

[Lori Mckenna Interview] “That song was about 11 years old,” she pauses before adding, “We think.” Swift happened to be in the Boston area playing two sold-out shows at Gillette Stadium not too far from McKenna’s house. On the day of the second show, she visited Mckenna, they ate lunch and then planned to write together. “She had this little nugget of a song which was ‘I Bet You Think About Me,’ she knew that was the hook.” Swift had asked her if she should lean in the folk direction (which they did) and after that, the rest flowed blissfully as McKenna recalls, “I don’t remember anything other than sitting here watching how incredible she is. She knows what she wants to say and when she says the right thing, she remembers it. She didn’t write anything down. There was no recording of the song.” McKenna was writing the lyrics on her computer but Swift never looked at her screen. “If the line is right, she knows it’s right, and she remembers what it is,” she says. Later that night, McKenna attended Swift’s show with her kids and when she was backstage, Swift played the song they had written together. “I’m like, how is this woman gonna get out there, do a completely choreographed show for 60 thousand people, and she’s singing the song that she just wrote two hours ago,” McKenna exclaims as she revisits the memory. For her to bring back something that was 10 or 11 years old and be true to a song that she had in her heart that long ago is pretty cool. It’s something that a lot of artists don’t get to do.”

[From Lori McKenna Twitter] @taylorswift13 came to my house to write 1 day before 2 sold out shows @Gillette. (My neighbors famously called police bc of the security) Still she was as sweet, human, unassuming & TALENTED as any writer who has ever been here.

June 30, 2011: [From MySpace] Lately, I've been writing a LOT. Like, all of a sudden, everything I've wanted to say, express, or just let out for the past several months has just recently become a song. I'm really excited about that. It's a freeing feeling when all of a sudden one day, you're able to verbalize exactly how you feel in a verse, chorus, verse, bridge, chorus pattern.

July 2011: Taylor writes Starlight. Originally, the demo was more country.

This is mostly based on this Rolling Stone article where Taylor says she has read a 900-page book about the Kennedys, called The Kennedy Women. She also visited JFK's grave on August 3th, and had a Robert Kennedy quote on her arm during the August 3th show.

[Washington Post] I get a lot of style inspiration from the 1960s, so I’ll go and look at black and white pictures, and look at photos from the ‘50s and '60s, and I came across this picture of these two kids dancing at a dance. It immediately made me think of like how much fun they must have had that night. It was back in the late '40s. I ended up reading underneath that it was Ethel Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy. And they were, like, 17. So I just kind of wrote that song from that place, not really knowing how they met or anything like that.

Description of the Starlight Studio Demo: "3:37 minutes long. This demo is much rougher sounding than the released version. The verses are acoustic guitar-driven, there are less spacey sounds, and there are much louder background vocals as the song builds."

August 26, 2011: Kuk Harrell tweets that Taylor and Justin Bieber wrote a song together, called Cannon Balls.

August 31, 2011: Cannon Balls is reworked. Tom Strahle, one of Justin Bieber's collaborators talked extensively about the song in these lives. Three demos of the songs exist.

September 8, 2011: [From Lover Journal 1] Taylor writes Red on a plane on her way to Nashville. Taylor and Nathan Chapman record the demo in the evening, at the Pain in the Art Studio. A second demo exists. These demos are NOT produced with Dann Huff, unlike the album version.

[From a Lover Journal] "I was suppose to fly to LA after the show in Tacoma WA last night, but after talking to my brother on the phone and missing my mom and my town where I know my way around -- I got homesick and flew back to Nashville instead. It was a long flight but I'm so happy I chose to come home. Mostly because I wrote a song on the plane on the way home called 'Red'. I got in at 6am this morning slept til 10. [...] In the evening, I went to Nathan's studio to record. When I played Red for him, he lost it. He absolutely freaked over the lyrics. I was so happy. As we started recording it, it got more and more awesome with banjo, and this affected vocal part that runs under the chorus going "re - e - ee- e- d". I'd love to have my next album Red. Scott came over because I called him and he was still working at the office. He said the song takes it to the next level. He lost it over this song. My mom loves it too. It's so different than anything we've done. I can't even tell you how alive and worthwhile i feel when I'm writing a new song and I finish it and people like it. It's the most fulfilling feeling, like getting an A+ on your report card. Recording again tomorrow."

[VH1’s Storytellers] "This relationship that I had that was, like, the worst thing ever and the best thing ever at the same time. I was writing this song and I was thinking about correlating the colors to the different feelings I went through. You have the great part of red, like the red emotions that are daring and bold and passion and love and affection. And then you have on the other side of the spectrum, jealousy and anger and frustration and ‘you didn’t call me back’ and ‘I need space."

September 9, 2011: [From Lover Journal 1] She's in the studio to record again.

[Billboard Interview] I turned in 20 songs and I had this immediate sinking feeling, this can’t be done, this can’t be it. I think the reason I said that was because I made the record exactly the same way I made the last three. I knew I hadn’t jumped out of my comfort zone, which at the time was writing alone and working with Nathan. “Red” the song was a real turning point for “Red” the album. When I wrote that song my mind started wandering to all the places we could go. If I were to think outside the box enough, go in with different people, I could learn from and have what they do rub off on me as well as have what I do rub off on them.

[Scott Borchetta Interview] “The song [Red] was brilliant–great melody. But I told them that the way it was recorded, guys, the production just doesn’t match the song. It needs a pop sound.” So Chapman and Swift asked Borchetta if they could take another crack at it. They did and it was worse than the first pass. “And Taylor basically said, ‘All right, would you call Max [Martin]?'”

October 4, 2011: Taylor writes Sad Beautiful Tragic on her ukulele, while on her tour bus, while reminiscing about a relationship that had ended months ago.

[From Twitter] "Leaving Little Rock, headed to New Orleans. Writing a song on a moving bus."

[Billboard Interview] "‘Sad Beautiful Tragic’ is really close to my heart. I remember it was after a show and I was on the bus thinking about this relationship that ended months and months before. The feeling wasn’t sadness and anger or those things anymore. It was wistful loss. And so I just got my guitar and I hit on the fact that I was thinking in terms of rhyming; I rhymed magic with tragic, changed a few things and ended it with what a sad beautiful tragic love affair. I wanted to tell the story in terms of a cloudy recollection of what went wrong. It’s kind of the murky gray, looking back on something you can’t change or get back."

Sad Beautiful Tragic is a demo and it was recorded once.

Speculation:

The secrete message is “While you were on a train” and it might be a reference to Jake Gyllenhaal joining Mumford & Sons in late April on their Railroad Revival Tour… on a train.

October 19, 2011: "I have written 25 songs so far."

Some of these 25 songs might include: State Of Grace, Red, All Too Well, I Almost Do, Stay Stay Stay, Sad Beautiful Tragic, The Moment I Knew, Girl At Home, Better Man. All of them are solo written and produced only by Chapman, which resembles the process of Speak Now.

"The song ‘Stay Stay Stay’ is a song that I wrote based on what I’ve seen of real relationships, where it’s not perfect, there are moments where you’re just so sick of that person, you get into a stupid fight. It’s still worth it to stay in it. There’s something about it that you can’t live without. In the bridge it says, ‘I’d like to hang out with you for my whole life’ and I think that’s what probably the key to finding the one, you just want to hang out with them forever."

According to its US Copyright file, Stay Stay Stay was written in 2010.

According to a Reputation Secret Sessioner, Girl At Home is a demo.

October 21, 2011: Maya Thompson, Ronan's mother, is invited by Taylor to her concert in Glendale. She tells Maya that she has just written a song about her son Ronan.

[From Maya's blog, Rockstar Ronan] "My calmness soon turned to complete and utter frozen shock when these words came out of her mouth. 'I wrote a song for Ronan.'" Thompson added, addressing her late son, "'The tears started pouring down my cheeks as soon as I heard her say those words. But her words didn't stop there. Not only did she write a song for you, but she wanted to know if it would be alright to perform it on the nationally televised show."

November 19, 2011: Taylor writes Safe & Sound with The Civil Wars (Joy Williams & John Paul White) and T Bone Burnett at Burnett's house in LA. The Civil Wars post these two photos on Instagram:

December 2011: Taylor writes Begin Again.

‘Begin Again is a song that I wrote about getting through a breakup, and still being sad about it, and feeling a little insecure about all the things that relationship made you feel are wrong with yourself. And after months, and months, and months, having the courage to stand back up, dust yourself off, and go on that first date. And it’s about, kind of, the vulnerability involved with that, and the idea that you realize that, 'wow, this could be great.’

The song is supposedly for Will Anderson from Parachute. On November 27th, they were photographed together eight months after Taylor had broken up with Jake for good. Additionally, the white dress she wears on the single cover is the same one she wore at his birthday party on May 5, 2012.

December 13, 2011: Taylor turns 22. She's at the Blackbird Studios to record, wearing a pair of bright red shoes. She's probably recording Red and Begin Again which have the same credits.

Late December 2011: Taylor reworks Starlight. While Red and Begin Again have the same credits, Starlight has others mixers, musicians and so on. My guess is that Dann Huff was called to work on Red because Borchetta didn't like the two demos, then he worked on Begin Again, likely on the same session as Red, and shortly after on Starlight. I bet that the guitar in the Starlight Demo was played by Chapman because in the Starlight credits you see "Electric Guitar Solo - Conceived by Nathan Chapman, Played by Dann Huff", which I think confirms Huff's involvement at a later date. I think after this recording session Borchetta was satisfied and wanted to wrap up the album.

January 2012: “With Red, [Scott Borchetta] came to me in January and said, 'I think the album's finished.' This time, I said, 'No, it's not -- I need to keep writing.' At that point, she went to Chapman and told him she wanted to work with other producers, too.”

January 2012: Shortly after hiring Max Martin and Shellback, Taylor starts writing a sad piano ballad called 'Trouble', that will become I Knew You Were Trouble. She emails Max Martin about it, but they have to put the song on hold for 6 months.

January 19, 2012: Taylor meets Rory Kennedy (Conor's aunt), at the Sundance Film Festival, where a documentary about Ethel Kennedy premiered.

January 21, 2012: Taylor meets Ethel Kennedy.

“When asked how the odd-couple friendship came to be, Swift said her acquaintance with the daughter led to an introduction to the mother. “I had read up on Robert F. Kennedy and his wife, and I asked Rory if it would ever be possible for me to meet her mother. She said, ‘Here’s her number.’ Ethel was kind enough to have lunch and spend a few hours talking with me, and ever since then I’ve been so inspired by how full of life she is and the way she tells her story.’’

February 2012: [From a Lover Journal] Taylor writes Holy Ground.

“The song ‘Holy Ground’ was a song that I wrote about the feeling I got after years had gone by and I finally appreciated a past relationship for what it was, rather than being bitter about what it didn’t end up being. And I was sitting there thinking about it after I’d just seen him and I just, I was just like, “You know what, that was good.” It was, it was good, having that in my life, and I wrote the song and I immediately heard Jeff Bhasker’s production. I hadn’t ever worked with Jeff, but he has done some amazing work. I love what he’s done on Fun’s record, and I love his diversity. He’s just so talented, and so I called him and I said “I wrote this song. I really want you to work on it with me.” And I played it for him and he was like, “Let’s go! This is great!” And, and he did such an amazing job on it.”

February 2012: While Taylor is in LA promoting the Lorax, she and Pat Mohanan from the band Train team up to write Babe. This is speculation, but it's mostly based on Train's timeline for their album California 37.

[Pat Monahan interview] “”When [Pat] told Taylor that he wanted to collaborate with her on a song for Train's next album, she asked him to write a song with her for her album, Red. "It's a song called 'Babe,'" continues Pat. "So it's her song; I was just lucky enough to be a part of it with her, and I'm gonna ask the same of her in the future. She's very talented, she's a no-nonsense young kid. I'm not going through different relationships and breakups and all the stuff that young people do, so her perspective is very fresh," he says. "And I think that that's what I admire the most [about her].”

February 2012: This is rampant speculation but Espionage, who co-wrote The Very First Night, know Pat Monahan very well, since they wrote a few songs for Train, including their then-latest single Drive By. So I think that it's possible that The Very First Night was also written in February.

[Taylor on Amazon Music] “'The Very First Night' is a song that I made with a production group called Espionage, and they're so cool, so talented. This is actually the first time anybody gets to hear the work we did together because this didn't end up on the album, even though I loved it so much and told myself that someday it would come out. It's a song about a common theme on the RED album, which is reminiscing. Reminiscing about something that's over now, and reminiscing about the good times, and how powerful memories can be.”

February 15, 2012: During an interview with ExtraTV, Taylor says that she has written around 30 songs.

March 2, 2012: [From a Lover Journal] Taylor writes Nothing New. While still in Australia, she also writes The Lucky One. They have similar themes and were allegedly inspired by Joni Mitchell and Kim Wilde.

“The song 'Nothing New' is a song that I wrote when I was 22 and tour. I was on the New Zealand/Australia leg of a tour, I wrote a little bit in each of those places. It was during a phase of my career when I was on my fourth album, and even though I was only 22 I just felt like old news, I really did. I think that new artists don't realize that when they put out their first or second album that they're in this shiny, new phase where everything you do is interesting and exciting to people. And it's only when you get to the moment after your breakthrough where you realize that you're gonna have to figure out some other shade of yourself to show people. Because people are not responding the same way they did when you were brand new. And I think I was writing from that place, even though I was a very young person in terms of years. Being on my fourth album I felt like, 'Is anybody still interested? Are they even excited by what I do anymore? What happens to me after they're not anymore? What do I do then?' Because you get so attached to the idea of novelty.”

“The ‘Lucky One’ is a song I wrote while I was in Australia.  It kind of talks about some of my fears through telling the story of other people that I was inspired by.  More than their stories being told, I’m pretty much singing about what I’m scared of in that song, ending up kind of caught up in this whole thing and lonely and feeling misunderstood and feeling like when people think you’re lucky that you’re really not.  It kind of expresses my greatest fear of having this not end up being fun anymore, having it end up being a scary place. Some people get there, some people end up there. It’s a story song and it’s something I’m really proud of because it kind of goes to a place that I’m terrified of. [...] There’s the microscope that’s always on you. The camera flashes, the fear that something you say will be taken the wrong way and you’ll let your fans down. You’re scared of a lot of things for a lot of the time, but the trade-off of being able to get on a big stage and sing your songs — it’s worth it.”

April 12, 2012: Taylor has a writing session in LA with Dan Wilson. The first song they write is Treacherous. Taylor posts a picture on Instagram with the caption "Recording for the next album. So happy."

They are at Dan Wilson's house, recording the demo for Treacherous, the only song where Taylor has a guitar credit.

[From Taste Of Country] “I wrote ‘Treacherous’ with Dan Wilson, and we came up with a way to say, you know, ‘This is dangerous and I realize that I might get hurt if I go through with this, if I move forward with you. But… but I want to.’ You know? It’s like that kind of conflicted feeling of it being a risk every time you fall in love — especially with certain types of people. [Laughs] That was a song that I’m really proud of, because it’s got this bridge that sounds like a second chorus. It’s got all these big vocals, and it’s kind of the intensity of that moment when you’re deciding to let yourself fall in love with someone.”

[From a Dan Wilson Interview] “With Taylor, we had been kind of circling around, very much aware of each other’s work for a while. We figured out these two days to work together and she came to my studio super excited and said, “I had an idea in the car.” And she sang me the first three or four lines of it and said, “I want to call it ‘Treacherous’ and maybe the chorus can go like this.” And we were writing the song in 10 minutes and she was just so full of excitement.”

The drums are credited to Wilson in the Treacherous Demo, not to Aaron Sterling like in the final version.

April 13, 2012: Taylor and Dan Wilson write and Come Back... Be Here.

[Red Release Party] “It’s a song I wrote about this guy that I met. You know, you meet someone and then they just kinda happen to go away and it’s, like, long distance all of a sudden. And you’re, like, ‘b-b-but, but, come back, be here!’ So it’s a song that I wrote about having distance separate you, which is something I face constantly.”

A description of Come Back... Be Here Studio Demo (not in circulation): "3:55 minutes long. A gorgeous bare-bones studio demo with drums, acoustic guitar, and Taylor's rough vocals with a few pretty harmonies added." I bet this demo was recorded like the Treacherous one, just Taylor and Dan.

April 23, 2012: Taylor meets Max Martin and Shellback. The first song they write is Message In A Bottle. Before starting the session, a friend of an ex walks in the studio asking if Taylor and his friend were getting back together. Taylor goes on a rant about how she'll never get back together with her ex.

Taylor also tweets: "Sitting in my kitchen. Listening to music. Don't want to go to bed. Was in the studio tonight. Writing tomorrow. Should go to bed. Ok I will."

“'Message In A Bottle' is such a fun song! It is so catchy and the melody is really contagious. Max Martin, Shellback and I...that was the first song we ever wrote together. We went on to write songs like 'We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together,' 'I Knew You Were Trouble.' and '22' and we felt like those songs really represented what we were doing on RED. We kept saying that somewhere down the line we'd put out 'Message In A Bottle' because we loved it so much and this is the first opportunity that we have to show it to the world. We're all really excited about it!”

Speculation:

"It is not confirmed but the friend of the ex seems to be Adam Levine from Maroon 5, a very old friend of Jake. Maroon 5 were in the same studio in LA (Conway Studios) to wrap up their album Overexposed.

April 24, 2012: Taylor, Max Martin and Shellback write We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together.

“I came in and they played a track that they had made in preparation for this. And I wrote something over the track. And then I think after that, I was telling them a story about what I was going through. And then I started just kind of singing, ‘We are never ever ever’…and Max was like, ‘That's great! We're writing that. Like we've got to write that!’ And then Johan was like, ‘And we-eee could be like little kids on a playground!’ And that was the first time that I realized these people think in a way that is so mystical and magical, and the way that you could hear a hook that's not really musical notes. It's a sound, or these kind of pop wizards. I remember being so challenged by writing with them.”

“It’s a definitive portrait of how I felt when I finally stopped caring what my ex thought of me. He made me feel like I wasn’t as good or as relevant as these hipster bands he listened to… So I made a song that I knew would absolutely drive him crazy when he heard it on the radio. Not only would it hopefully be played a lot, so that he’d have to hear it, but it’s the opposite of the kind of music that he was trying to make me feel inferior to.”

[Max Martin Interview] “Me and Johan [Shellback] had our first date with her at Conway Studios. I was a little nervous, you know, the good kind of nervous. Maroon 5 was recording in the studio next door. This guy shows up, a friend of theirs. We literally haven't started the session yet. The guy says, "I heard the Taylor Swift's here. I gotta say hello". I was like, "Really?" and the guy says, "I totally know her, it's fine, we're friends". He walks in and it turns out that he didn't know her. And I started sweating cause I was vouching for that guy. He started talking about some ex-boyfriend of hers. It was really messy. He leaves and I apologize, but she was super cool, no problem at all. Then I asked what that was all about and she told me the story about this guy that she was dating. I can't remember exactly what she said, but she said, "One thing's for sure, we are never ever getting back together", and I said, "That's pretty harsh". She said, "No no, we are never ever ever getting back together". And we're laughing about it, saying, "That sounds like a song title". Then we started on something else [Message In A Bottle]. The next day, she said, "I thought about what you said", and she played us this idea that became 'We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together'. I was so mad at that guy who ruined our session, but it turned into love, cause it never would've happened if he hadn't walked in.”

May 15, 2012: Taylor meets Ed Sheeran for the first time, after his concert in Phoenix, Arizona, at the Ritz Hotel: they write Run, their first song ever.

"I met up with him at one of his shows and we wrote some songs that day."

[Taylor to Amazon Music] “The song ‘Run’ is really special to me because it marks the first song that I ever wrote with Ed Sheeran and it kind of also marks the first day of our friendship. He’s been someone who has been so important in my life, like just one of my closest friends, he’s always been there for me. It’s a song about the escapism of falling in love and how you don’t really care what anyone else says when you feel this way – you just wanna run away with someone. And all the little secrets that you establish with this person, this secret world you create together.”

[Ed Sheeran Interview] “We wrote 'Run' and then we wrote 'Everything Has Changed' maybe like a week later. And I remember always thinking, 'Well, 'Run' is the one that’s gonna make the album.' It was always my favorite. But 'Everything Has Changed' just ended up sounding better because we produced them differently or whatever. So 'Run' has just been there for years and years. I’ve never really wanted to nudge Taylor about it – because it’s her song. But I’ve always been secretly hoping that one day she’d be like, 'Hey, this song was cool!' And so we recorded that and it’s really great! I’m so happy it’s seeing the light of day.”

They both tweet about Run:

May 17, 2012: Taylor has lunch with Mark Foster from Foster The People in Beverly Hills, CA. They write Forever Winter.

[Mark Foster Interview] “We wrote a song that day. It’s a really cool song. We kind of just went into it casually and something really cool came out of it. We’ll see what happens with it. She’s been writing a lot for her next record.”

“The song 'Forever Winter' is about being in a moment in your life where you love someone, or someone is such a good friend of yours, or you feel really close to someone, and you realize all at once that they've been struggling for a very long time. And you feel so guilty that you didn't see it sooner, and you wish you would've checked in on them more. That person means so much to you, but you didn't necessarily pick up on the signs that maybe they weren't okay. So, that's 'Forever Winter'.”

May 18, 2012: Aaron Sterling tweets that he had just finished playing drums in Treacherous and Come Back... Be Here.

In November 2012, Dan Wilson confirms that the songs were recorded a few weeks after being written.

May 27, 2012: Taylor and Ed write Everything Has Changed.

Original lyrics: "All I feel in my stomach is butterflies for a Gemini / who’d never tell a lie / The beautiful kind saying “This feels right" / Making me feel like falling for a Gemini / This feels right / Making me feel like I just want to know you better, grow old together, hold you forever / When you caught my eye / The look said you’d missed me all this time / Meet me there tonight / So I can know that it’s not all in my mind."

[MTV News] "We, for real, were sitting on my trampoline in my backyard 'cause we had been writing a song and I was like, ‘Hey, I just got a trampoline. You want to see it?’ And so, he brought the guitar for some reason. We ended up writing an entire song out there. For portions of the song, we were bouncing around, ‘cause it’s a trampoline and it’s fun, and the combined maturity level of both of us is 8 years."

[Ed Sheeran Interview] "She pretty much had the verse, bridge and chorus done but we argued about that one chord. She didn’t like that but I forced it upon her!"

May 28, 2012: Taylor and Ed arrive in Santa Monica, CA. They start recording Everything Has Changed and Run at Ruby Red Productions with Butch Walker and Jake Sinclair.

May 29, 2012: Gary Lightbody joins Taylor in the studio thanks to Ed. The two of them plus Jacknife Lee write and record The Last Time in less than 9 hours, produced by Lee in his studio in Topanga, CA. The album version is the very first attempt. Gary will also provide background vocals for Everything Has Changed.

[Taylor to NPR] The idea was based on this experience I had with someone who was kind of this unreliable guy. You never know when he’s going to leave, you never know when he’s going to come back, but he always does come back. My visual for this song is, there’s a guy on his knees sitting on the ground outside of a door. And on the other side of the door is his girlfriend, who he keeps on leaving — and he keeps coming back to her, but then he leaves again. He’s saying, ‘This is the last time I’m going to do this to you.’ And she’s saying, ‘This is the last time I’m asking you this: Don’t do this again.’ And she’s wondering whether to let him in, and he just wants her to give him another chance, but she doesn’t know if he’s going to break her heart again. It’s a really fragile emotion you’re dealing with when you want to love someone, but you don’t know if it’s smart to.

[Gary Lightbody to Rolling Stone] It was so fast. She works really fast. She’s extraordinary. We actually did that song, wrote it and recorded it in a day. And that was the version of it on the record, which is very rare. Normally you write and record something with somebody and then down the line they’ll record it, if you’re lucky. With her, the whole thing was done in nine hours. I hope we can do it again sometime!

[Jacknife Lee Interview] “We met through Gary’s [Lightbody] friendship with Ed Sheeran. Taylor was a fan of Ed’s. They were on tour I think. Taylor came to Topanga. Body guards, big black car. We wrote a song in a couple of hours and sang it sitting on the sofa. She had a handheld microphone. Then we had pasta for dinner and hung around with my kids. She left and I finished the song off. Owen Pallett [Arcade Fire/Final Fantasy] did some strings very quickly. It was out of my field of expertise and interest, but I was intrigued and my girls were thrilled. Taylor was nice and very professional. She knew what she wanted and there was no fucking about.”

May 30, 2012: While working on The Last Time, Taylor called Harry Styles to ask him to write a few bombastic songs with her, as requested by the label, as Jacknife Lee revealed.

[Jacknife Lee Interview] “She was seeing Harry Styles at the time, so he came to Topanga on her recommendation. She wrote a few songs with him, and it was the same thing – quick. But this time it was more directed by the management and label. They were after something specific. I wanted more acoustic and gentle, almost Americana, and they wanted bombast. They got what they wanted, and that was the extent of my foray into teen-pop territory. It was fun.”

The date is not confirmed but it's the only week in which Harry was free (1D were on tour).

June 1, 2012: [From a Lover Journal] After the Walmart Shareholders Concert held in Arkansas, Taylor returns to LA and while on the plane she writes 22, which she brings to a writing session with Max Martin and Shellback.

[Interview with Ryan Seacrest] I wrote that about my friends, like finally I’ve got this amazing group of girlfriends and we tell each other everything, we’re together all the time. And I think that was kind of the marker of me being 22, like having all these friends and there’s all these question marks in your life, but the one thing that you have is that you have each other.

«For me, being 22 has been my favorite year of my life. I like all the possibilities of how you're still learning, but you know enough. You still know nothing, but you know that you know nothing. You're old enough to start planning your life, but you're young enough to know there are so many unanswered questions. That brings about a carefree feeling that is sort of based on indecision and fear and a the same time letting lose. Being 22 has taught me so much.»

"'22' is a song I wrote about exactly how I was feeling when I was 22 years old; I felt happy, free, confused, and lonely at the same time, which I think is the way a lot of 22-year-olds feel, you know? We all feel that way all the time. So I brought this song to Max Martin and Shellback, and I had written in on a plane ride and they loved the idea. And it just happened really fast! They were like, 'Oh my God, we get exactly where you wanna go with this.' I just wanted the most infectuous chorus and I feel it really does that."

The song originally had a different bridge that can be seen in the handwritten lyrics:

Sometimes it hits me / We’re moving quickly / Toward something hazy / A future I can’t see / Let’s break the old rules / While we’re still 22 / You look like bad news / I gotta have you

June 2, 2012: [From a Lover Journal] Taylor brings the chorus of I Knew You Were Trouble to Max Martin e Shellback. Both 22 and I Knew You Were Trouble are recorded during this week.

[MTV Interview] «It’s about knowing the second you see someone like, ‘Oh, this is going to be interesting. It’s going to be dangerous, but look at me going in there anyway.' I think that for me, it was the first time I ever kind of noticed that in myself, like when you are curious about something you know might be bad for you, but you know that you are going to go for it anyway because if you don’t, you’ll have greater regrets about not seeing where that would go.»

[Taylor to Amazon Music] «'I Knew You Were Trouble.' is a song that I think really made me expand my horizon of what kind of music I wanted to make, and what kind of music I was allowed to make. At this point in my career I was a completely straight forward country artist that sort of toyed around with pop melodies every once in a while. But when I had gotten this idea, I brought it to Shellback and Max Martin. It was a piano ballad and I thought it was just gonna be a really sad, down tempo song. And I remember Shellback going, 'What if we do like a dubstep bass drop?' And I was like, 'Um, yeah! Let's do that.' It was one of the most shocking moments that we had in the studio, making RED. I think the whole time we were making the song we were all like, 'Can we really do this?' And I love moments like that! Because that means you're pushing boundaries, you're going for it. I've learned that since. I felt that when I was making folklore like, 'Am I allowed to make an alternative album?' You just gotta listen to that feeling sometimes.»

[Taylor to Rolling Stone] «I remember bringing in this slow, sad thing that I had written, called ‘I Knew You Were Trouble.’ I had originally called it ‘Trouble’. I was like, ‘I don't know if we could have some kind of intense bass drop or something, like dubstep is really awesome…’ And they were just like, ‘Yes, absolutely!’ And then Shellback was like, ‘In the verse, let's do this really frantic drum beat.’ And it just was something I would never have thought of; to make the beat of the verse really up-tempo, and then make the intensity drop off the chorus, and then have it build back up, and then have a production explosion at the end of the chorus. It was so thrilling! I couldn't believe the song started where it started and then their added ideas with production. They ended up seeping into my brain and I started thinking the way that I would hope they would think. I would write a verse and Max would be like, ‘This is this many syllables, can you shorten it and make it more succinct, but convey the same message?’ And I would just go off into a corner and I felt like I had like this amazing assignment. So the challenge of it was so thrilling for me.

Somewhere around July 2012: Taylor records State Of Grace Acoustic.

[Taylor to Yahoo!] This one wasn't a demo, but a careful afterthought. When I wanted to do an alternate version of it for the Target bonus tracks, Nathan (Chapman) and I went back into the studio and we did just a completely acoustic version of it. It's really sweet and slowed down and it completely changes the song.

Somewhere during the writing process: Unknown Song with Ryan Adams, Unknown Song with T-Pain (I can't find the source), Unknown Song written in New Zealand (mid-March 2012, mentioned by herself on Amazon Music).

Other Songs: Both Of Us, Safe & Sound, Eyes Open, they were all written and recorded in 2011. None of them were meant for Red.

End of the writing process: "The singer also revealed that she wrote "30 to 35?" songs for the album and but whittled it down to 16 tracks."

Writing Of 1989 Timeline

1989 changed Taylor's career forever. If Red had just sprinkles of pop sounds, 1989 was marketed as a pure pop album from the get-go.

While many fans and critics kind of expected that, it seems like:

Taylor didn't have a clear direction from the start (except for the cohesiveness): “I wanted it to be a sonically cohesive album, and it ended up really being the first I’ve done since Fearless. I also wanted the songs to sound exactly how the emotions felt. I know that’s pretty vague, so I really didn’t know where it was going to go, but I knew that I wanted to work with the collaborators I had such crazy electricity with on Red, like Max Martin. I wanted to do some things that sounded nothing like what we had done before.”

She knew that she didn't want another Red: “When people say that they like one of my albums, like when people told me that Red was their favorite album I'd done, I didn't take that as, 'So, I should make that again'. I took that as, 'Great, awsome, now I wanna make them like this new album just as much if not more than the last album.' But I want them to like it for different reasons.”

She was worried about the change of direction of her music: “I worry about everything. Some days I wake up in a mind-set of, like, ‘Okay, it’s been a good run.’ By afternoon, I could have a change of mood and feel like anything is possible and I can’t wait to make this kind of music I’ve never made before. And then by evening, I could be terrified of the whole thing again. And then at night, I’ll write a song before bed.”

October 17, 2012: [From a Lover Journal] Taylor writes This Love in LA. This will be the last song produced by Nathan Chapman and the only one recorded in Nashville.

“The last time I wrote a poem that ended up being a song, I was writing in my journal and I was writing about something that had happened in my life – it was about a year ago – and I just wrote this really really short poem. It said, 'This love is good /this love is bad / this love is alive back from the dead / these hands had to let it go free / and this love came back to me.' And I just wrote it down, closed the book and put it back on my night stand […] All of a sudden in my head I just started hearing this melody happen, and then I realized that it was going to be a song.”

Handwritten lyrics:

November 18, 2012: Taylor meets Jack Antonoff and his band, fun., for the first time in Frankfurt, Germany, while at the MTV Europe Music Awards. They bond over 80s music.

January 4, 2013: Taylor is seen in a boat without Harry Styles, ready to return to LA from the Virgin Islands.

She will wear the same dress in the Out Of The Woods music video (and also in Look What You Made Me Do)

January 10, 2013: Taylor tweets "Back in the studio. Uh oh...". She will confirm that the song was All You Had To Do Was Stay on October 27, 2014 on Tumblr.

Candids here;

“There’s a song on my album called 'All You Had To Do Was Stay.' I was having this dream, that was actually one of those embarrassing dreams, where you’re mortified in the dream, you’re like humiliated. In the dream, my ex had come to the door to beg for me to talk to him or whatever, and I opened up the door and I went to go say, 'Hi,' or 'What are you doing here?' or something — something normal — but all that came out was this high-pitched singing that said, 'Stay!' It was almost operatic. So I wrote this song, and I used that sound in the song. Weird, right? I woke up from the dream, saying the weird part into my phone, figuring I had to include it in something because it was just too strange not to. In pop, it’s fun to play around with little weird noises like that.”

January 11, 2013: Taylor is seen again at Conway Studios, likely to continue working on All You Had To Do Was Stay.

January 15, 2013: Taylor posts a picture of herself in the studio, with the caption "Somewhere in LA". She'll later reveal that she was writing How You Get The Girl.

“The song ‘How You Get The Girl’ is a song that I wrote about how you get the girl back if you ruined the relationship somehow and she won’t talk to you anymore. Like, if you broke up with her and left her on her own for six months and then you realize you miss her. All the steps you have to do to edge your way back into her life, because she’s probably pretty mad at you. So it’s kind of a tutorial. If you follow the directions in the song, chances are things will work out. Or you may get a restraining order.”

March 6, 2013: Taylor is seen going to a studio in LA.

March 23, 2013: Taylor posts a picture of herself playing guitar, which might mean that she was working on a new song: "Pre show. Columbia, South Carolina". This could be either Wonderland, New Romantics or a vault song.

May 27, 2013: While in Rhode Island for the Memorial Day weekend, Jack plays Taylor an instrumental track that will later become I Wish You Would.

In 2014, Lena Dunham posted this photo of Jack and Taylor. She didn't say they were recording I Wish You Would but Jack's studio is credited only on this song:

“'I Wish You Would’ is a song that I wrote with Jack Antonoff and it was the first song we ever worked on together. I think, for this song, we wanted to create a sort of John Hughes movie visual with pining and, you know, one person’s over here and misses the other person but is too prideful and won’t say it. Meanwhile this other person is here and missing the same person; they’re missing each other but not saying it. And I had this happen in my life and so I wanted to kind of narrate it in a very cinematic way where it’s like you’re seeing two scenes play out and then in the bridge you’re seeing the final scene, where it resolves itself. So it says, 'It’s a crooked love in a straight line down, makes you wanna run and hide but it makes you turn right back around.’ It kind of is like that dramatic love that’s never really quite where it needs to be and that tension it creates.”

[Voice Memo Intro Transcript] “This is another way I’ve written songs recently. This is a song I did with Jack Antonoff, and Jack is one of my friends and so were hanging out and he pulled out his phone and goes ‘I made this amazing track the other day. It’s so cool, I love these guitar sounds.’ And he played it for me and immediately I could hear this finished song in my head, and I just said ‘Please, please let me have that. Let me play with it, send it to me.’ And so he sent it to me and I was on tour and this was me playing the track on my laptop recording me singing the vocal into my phone and it ended up being a song called 'I Wish You Would', because Jack wrote back and said ‘I love that’. So this is another way of writing, it’s writing to track.”

[Secret Sessions] “Taylor said that she wrote ‘I Wish You Would’ a couple of months after her and Harry Styles broke up, and they decided to become friends again and she said this was the first time she had become friends with an ex, to the point where they were comfortable enough to talk about why the relationship didn’t work out. She said he told her about how, after they broke up, he bought a house literally one road adjacent to hers. Every day he would drive home, and accidentally turn into her street, and he told her how he just wanted to stop at her house and see her, but he never did. She said this song is about while he was in the car making the decision to get out the car and see her, she was sitting in her bedroom, wishing he would make the move and go back to her and just pitch up at her house. She compared it to a classic John Hughes movie where both parties want the same thing but neither has the guts to say anything. Honestly, she spoke so fondly of that relationship.” [this is from a secret sessioner and therefore it should be taken with a grain of salt]

Between May 28 and June 2, 2013: Taylor writes I Wish You Would. After this set of shows, she'll settle in Rhode Island basically all summer, so it's possible that she went to Jack's studio in New York by car without being seen and especially photographed, cause I couldn't find any pictures with the same outfit. Conway Studios are also credited but it's possible that she recorded background vocals there. Taylor was in LA in late August.

June 7, 2013: During an interview at the CMA Music Festival, Taylor confirms that she has started writing her next album.

[Transcript] “[The new album] is starting, all the anxiety is starting and when the anxiety starts, then the writing happens right afterward usually. I like to write for about two years before I'm finished with an album because at this point I kind of know that whenever I read in the first year is going to get away, because I'm going to like it but it's going to sound a little bit like the last project I had, and the second year usually ends up sounding like the next project. So I think at this point I feel like staying the same is the easy way to go but it's not the way that I want to go creatively. I think you need to challenge yourself, I think you need to change up your influences, I think you need to be inspired by different things that you've been inspired by before. It's harder to call people you don't know, it's harder to think of topics you haven't covered and think of new ways to say old emotions that everyone feels. I think one of the things that I'm happiest with in the last year is the acceptance level in country music for me experimenting and for me trying to evolve and challenge myself musically because I think it's never felt better to be on that stadium stage performing knowing that and so welcoming of change.”

July 13, 2013: After a show in New Jersey, Taylor has an interview with Rolling Stone, where she says that she has been writing a lot.

“The floodgates just opened the last couple weeks,” she says of the songwriting process. “I’m getting to that point where I’m irritating to be around because I’ll be with you for half the conversation and then the second half of the conversation I’m clearly editing the second verse of whatever I’m writing in my head. I really loved collaborating: you work with a lot of different people and you find the people you have this dream connection with in the studio. I know those people and I know the ones I want to go back to. But I also have a really long list of the people I admire and I would really love to go and contact. So that’s kind of where that is. I think that the idea of having a different approach to every single one of my albums is so exciting to me. I never want to make the same record twice. Why do it? What’s the point? It’s so overwhelming that when you’re starting a project there are such endless possibilities if you’re willing to evolve and experiment. If you’re willing to become a different version of yourself, you can really go anywhere with it. And that’s kind of where I am. The kind of the laboratory experimental stage of really catching onto a new thing that I’m liking.”

Somewhere around June and early September 2013: Taylor and Jack write Sweeter Than Fiction. No credits are available but we know that it's the second song on which Taylor and Jack worked, so that places it before I Wish You Would and Out Of The Woods.

September 15, 2013: Jack completes the instrumental track that will later become Out Of The Woods, after his show was cancelled.

[Jack Antonoff] “When I did the track for Out of the Woods, which is a Taylor song that I'm really proud of, there was some issue at a venue and our show was canceled that night and I didn't have my stuff, I had left it on the bus, so I only had these old samples on what was on my laptop, and caught up that 'oh oh'' thing, and I only had one drum kit on there, and these dumb little things sometimes turn into a great song.”

Somewhere around September and October 2013: Taylor writes Out Of The Woods.

Voice memo here;

[Jack Antonoff] Although Antonoff and Swift shared studio time for some of their other 1989 songs while working throughout 2014, “Out of the Woods” was completed as a long-distance collaboration. “She’s very natural -— when she gets an idea, it just happens very quickly. I would send her these tracks, and when an idea would happen, we’d be 5,000 miles apart or whatever, but she would start emailing me these voice notes like crazy and it would just be happening so quickly that there’d be this excitement. There’s a frantic feeling in the song,” he says. “What’s interesting about ‘Out of the Woods’ is that it doesn’t really let up. It starts with a pretty big anthemic vocal sample that’s me, and then there’s a drum sample that kicks in that’s kind of huge, and then you don’t really know how you’re going to get any bigger, but then the chorus hits and it just explodes even larger. And then the bridge hits, and it gets even more huge.“When I was working on the track, I was thinking a lot about My Morning Jacket,” Antonoff continues, “and how everything they do, every sound is louder than the last, and somehow it feels like everything is just f—ing massive. And that’s the feeling that I went for. It started out big, and then I think the obvious move would have been to do a down chorus, but the idea was to keep pushing.” Antonoff is excited to share the rest of his work with Swift on 1989, but he views “Out of the Woods” as a highlight on the project. “This song means a great deal to me. On a production level, on a writing level, Taylor’s lyrics and her melodies — there’s something very important about this song.”

[Jack Antonoff] “After 'I Wish You Would' and 'Sweeter Than Fiction', we did 'Out Of The Woods'. So it was the third thing we worked on together, and probably the easiest. I sent her the track for it, and she sent back a voice note with the verse and chorus in what felt like five seconds. And it was just perfect. It's eerie how similar it is to what the final product is.”

“It kind of conjured up all these feelings of anxiety I had in a relationship where everybody was watching, everybody was commenting on it. You’re constantly just feeling like, ‘Are we out of the woods yet? What’s the next thing gonna be? What’s the next hurdle we’re gonna have to jump over?’ It was interesting to write about a relationship where you’re just honestly like, ‘This is probably not gonna last, but how long is it gonna last?’ Those fragile relationships... It doesn’t mean they’re not supposed to happen. The whole time we were having happy memories, or crazy memories, or ridiculously anxious times, in my head it was just like, ‘Are we okay yet? Are we there yet? Are we out of this yet?’”

“That line is in there because it's not only the actual, literal narration of what happened in a particular relationship I was in, it's also a metaphor. 'Hit the brakes too soon' could mean the literal sense of, we got in an accident and we had to deal with the aftermath. But also, the relationship ended sooner than it should've because there was a lot of fear involved. And that song touches on a huge sense of anxiety that was, kind of, coursing through that particular relationship, because we really felt the heat of every single person in the media thinking they could draw up the narrative of what we were going through and debate and speculate. I don't think it's ever going to be easy for me to find love and block out all those screaming voices.”

October 21, 2013: Sweeter Than Fiction is released. Big Machine was originally not on board with the release since they wanted a dormant period between album releases.

Late 2013: Taylor writes Bad Blood, after Katy Perry announces her Prismatic World Tour.

“For years, I was never sure if we were friends or not. She would come up to me at awards shows and say something and walk away, and I would think, ‘Are we friends,or did she just give me the harshest insult of my life?’ Then last year, the other star crossed a line. She did something so horrible. I was like, ‘Oh, we’re just straight-up enemies.’ And it wasn’t even about a guy! It had to do with business. She basically tried to sabotage an entire arena tour. She tried to hire a bunch of people out from under me. And I’m surprisingly non-confrontational – you would not believe how much I hate conflict. So now I have to avoid her. It’s awkward, and I don’t like it.”

“That was about losing a friend... But then people cryptically tweet about what you meant. I never said anything that would point a finger in the specific direction of one specific person, and I can sleep at night knowing that. I knew the song would be assigned to a person, and the easiest mark was someone who I didn’t want to be labeled with this song. It was not a song about heartbreak. It was about the loss of friendship.”

October 20 to 22, 2013: Taylor is in Cape Town (South Africa) shooting The Giver. One of the members of the cast is Alexsander Skarsgård. He is said to have inspired Wildest Dreams (or at least he's the most popular theory, as far as I know), because the music video is set in Africa and it features Clint Eastwood's son Scott as love interest, just like Alexsander is actor Stellan Skarsgård's son, but we don't actually know more about the song.

“I think the way I used to approach relationships was very idealistic. I used to go into them thinking, ‘Maybe this is the one – we’ll get married and have a family, this could be forever’. Whereas now I go in thinking, ‘How long do we have on the clock – before something comes along and puts a wrench in it, or your publicist calls and says this isn’t a good idea?’”

Note: Selena Gomez was present when Taylor wrote this song.

November 19, 2013: Taylor records Blank Space. This is based on the wall behind her on an Instagram post from this day, the credits, and the behind the scenes clip.

Voice memo here;

Behind the Scenes here;

“Every few years, the media finds something they unanimously agree is annoying about me. 2012-2013 they thought I was dating too much, because I dated two people in a year and a half. ‘Oh, a serial dater. She only writes songs to get emotional revenge on guys. She’s a man-hater, don’t let her near your boyfriend.’ It was kind of excessive and at first it was hurtful, but then I found a little bit of comedy in it. This character is so interesting, though. If you read these gossip sites, they describe how I am so opposite to my actual life: I’m clingy, and I’m awful, and I throw fits, and there’s drama. An emotionally fragile, unpredictable mess. I painted a whole picture of this character. She lives in a mansion with marble floors, she wears Dolce & Gabbana around the house, and she wears animal print unironically. So I created this whole character and I had fun doing it.”

November 21, 2013: While at the American Music Awards, Taylor tells Billboard that she has around seven or eight songs ready.

[Transcript] “We got a lot already,” says Swift. “There are probably seven or eight songs that I know I want on the record. It’s really ahead of schedule for me. I’m just stoked because it’s already evolved into a new sound, and that’s all I wanted. And I would have taken two years to make that happen, but it just kind of happened naturally, so that’s all I could really ask for.”

2013: Taylor writes New Romantics and Wonderland. Not much is known about these songs, except that they were both written in 2013.

[About New Romantics] “People will say, 'Let me set you up with someone', and I’m just sitting there saying, ‘That’s not what I’m doing. I’m not lonely. I’m not looking.’ They just don’t get it. I’ve learned that just because someone is cute and wants to date you, that’s not a reason to sacrifice your independence and allow everyone to say whatever they want about you. I’m not doing that anymore. It’d take someone really special for me to undergo the circumstances I have to go through to experience a date. I don’t know how I would ever have another person in my world trying to have a relationship with me, or a family.”

January 6, 2014: Taylor decides to look for a house in New York.

[Lover Journal] LA. So I've decided I want to look at places in New York. I know I went through this phase months ago, but it has to mean something that i've circled back to it, right? You know what they say, if you love something let it go and if it comes back... blah blah blah. so I'm leaving the day after tomorrow. Dating is awful. Love is fiction/ a myth. I'm over it all.

January 21, 2014: Taylor sends Ryan Tedder the I Know Places Voice Memo.

January 22, 2014: [From the 1989 Booklet] Taylor and Ryan finish and record I Know Places.

“I had this idea of like, when you’re in love, along the lines of 'Out of the Woods’, it’s very precious, it’s fragile. As soon as the world gets ahold of it, whether it’s your friends or people around town hear about it... it’s kind of like the first thing people want to do when they hear that people are in love is just kind of try to ruin it. I kind of was in a place where I was like, ‘No one is gonna sign up for this. There are just too many cameras pointed at me. There are too many ridiculous elaborations on my life. It’s just not ever gonna work.‘ But I decided to write a love song, just kind of like, ‘What would I say if I met someone really awesome and they were like, hey, I’m worried about all this attention you get?’ So I wrote this song called ‘I Know Places’ about, ‘Hey, I know places we can hide. We could outrun them.’ I’m so happy that it sounds like the urgency that it sings.”

January 23, 2014: Taylor and Ryan Tedder write Welcome To New York. Ryan produces a demo in three hours. This demo is the one included in the album.

“I wanted to start 1989 with this song because New York has been an important landscape and location for the story of my life in the last couple of years. I dreamt and obsessed over moving to New York, and then I did it. The inspiration that I found in that city is hard to describe and to compare to any other force of inspiration I’ve ever experienced in my life. It’s an electric city.”

[Ryan Tedder] “I thought we were going to walk in and start something from scratch because that's what I was used to. Then she calls me and says, 'Is it cool if I already have an idea?' I said, 'Sure.' She said, 'I have this song, I'm obsessed with New York and I just moved there, I want to write an ode to New York because no one's done it in a long time.' And then she sent me a voice memo. She's like, 'I want it to sound like the 1980s.' So the next day I brought in a Juno-106, which is a very 1980s keyboard, and I literally programmed that entire song right in front of her. It was very much on the fly, and that song was done in about three hours. And I did the rest of the production I think later that week.”

Handwritten lyrics:

January 26, 2014: Night of the 56th Grammy Awards. Taylor delivers a legendary performance of All Too Well, but loses the Album Of The Year Award to Random Access Memory by Daft Punk. This will prompt Taylor to make a "sonically cohesive" pop album.

[Lover Journal] January 25th. LA. It's the middle of the night and I was at the Clive Davis Party tonight which means... the Grammys are tomorrow. Never have I felt so good about our chances. Never have I wanted something as badly as I want to hear them say 'Red' is the Album of the Year.

“It was the night of the Grammys this year. I remember going home and playing a lot of the new music I had recorded for some of my backup singers and one of my best friends. We were all sitting in the kitchen and I was playing them all this music, and they were just saying, ‘You know, this is very eighties. It’s very clear to us that this is so eighties.’ We were just talking and talking about how it’s kind of a rebirth in a new genre, how that’s a big, bold step. Kind of starting a part of your career over. When they left that night, I just had this very clear moment of, ‘It’s gotta be called 1989.’”

“I woke up one morning at 4 a.m. and I decided the album is called 1989. I’ve been making ‘80s synth pop, I’m just gonna do that. I’m calling it a pop record. I’m not listening to anyone at my label. I’m starting tomorrow. I liked the idea of collaborating. But with 1989 I decided to narrow down the list. It wasn’t going to be 10 producers, it was going to be a very small team of four or five people I always wanted to work with, or loved working with. And Max Martin and I were going to oversee it, and we were going to make a sonically cohesive record again.”

January 2014: Taylor writes You Are In Love. This is actually speculation but it's based on (1) Taylor going to NY in early January and (2) Jack Antonoff confirming that it was the fourth song they did and (3) it's the only Antonoff-produced song that is copyrighted in 2014. Based on the credits, I'm pretty sure that Taylor and Jack worked on the song separately, with Jack recording the instrumental at the Jungle City Studios in NY (which is a studio that Jack used in 2014 to record Bleachers' first album Strange Desire) and Taylor recording the vocals at Conway Studio in LA.

“I wrote it with my friend Jack Antonoff who’s dating my friend Lena. Jack sent me this song, it was just an instrumental track he was working on and immediately I knew the song it needed to be. And I wrote it as a kind of commentary on what their relationship has been like. So it’s actually me looking and going, ‘This happened and that happened, then that happened and that’s how you knew you are in love.’”

“I’ve never had that, so I wrote that song about things that Lena Dunham has told me about her and Jack Antonoff. That’s just basically stuff she’s told me. And I think that that kind of relationship — God, it sounds like it would just be so beautiful — would also be hard. It would also be mundane at times.”

“We first worked on that song together and realized we kind of have a good thing, and the next thing we did was ‘Sweeter Than Fiction,’ which was on the [One Chance] soundtrack, and after that we did ‘Out of the Woods’ and another song called ‘You Are in Love.’

January 26, 2014: At the Grammy's, Diane Warren reveals that she and Taylor wrote a song together.

[Transcript] “I worked with Taylor Swift on a great song. I don't even know what she's done [for her next album], I'm excited about the one that we did, it's pretty cool.”

[Billboard 2016 Interview] “I know [Swift] likes it, so hopefully it will see the light of day. I know she really likes the song. She didn’t want me to give it away, so hopefully that means she wants it.”

February 9, 2014: [From the 1989 Booklet] While in London, during the European leg of the Red Tour, Taylor and Imogen Heap write Clean in just 9 hours at Imogen's home studio. Taylor will sing the song just two times.

Voice memo here;

“'Clean' I wrote as I was walking out of Liberty in London. Someone I used to date – it hit me that I’d been in the same city as him for two weeks and I hadn’t thought about it. When it did hit me, it was like, ‘Oh, I hope he’s doing well’. And nothing else. And you know how it is when you’re going through heartbreak. A heartbroken person is unlike any other person. Their time moves at a completely different pace than ours. It’s this mental, physical, emotional ache and feeling so conflicted. Nothing distracts you from it. Then time passes, and the more you live your life and create new habits, you get used to not having a text message every morning saying, ‘Hello, beautiful. Good morning.’ You get used to not calling someone at night to tell them how your day was. You replace these old habits with new habits, like texting your friends in a group chat all day, and planning fun dinner parties, and going out on adventures with your girlfriends, and then all of a sudden one day you’re in London and you realize you’ve been in the same place as your ex for two weeks and you’re fine. And you hope he’s fine. The first thought that came to my mind was – I’m finally clean.”

“'Clean' is the last song on the album for a lot of reasons, but mostly because it felt like the complication of this emotional process I’ve been going through for the last couple of years. You know, I feel like my personal life was really, really discussed, and criticized, and debated, and talked about to a point where it made me feel almost kind of tarnished, in a way. And the discussion wasn’t about music. It broke my heart that I had made an album that I was proud of, and I was touring the world, and playing sold-out stadiums, and still they managed to only want to talk about my personal life. At a certain point I felt a switch and it was at the end of recording this album that I began to feel like my life was mine again and my music was at the forefront again. I was living my life on my own terms and I really no longer cared what people were saying about me. That was when I started so see people talk less about the things that didn’t matter.”

“I had this metaphor in my head about being in this house, there’s been a drought but you feel like there’s a storm coming. Instead of trying to block out the storm you punch a hole in the roof and just let all the rain come in, and when you wake up in the morning, it’s washed away.”

[Imogen Heap] “We met at my studio in London. She had the bare bones of “Clean.” She had the lyric, the chorus and the chords. I thought it was brilliant.I was really writing the tiniest amount just to help her do what she does. I put some noises, played various instruments on it, including drums, and anytime she expressed she liked something I was doing, I did it more. It was a really fun day. She recorded all her vocals during that one session. She did two takes, and the second take was it. We always thought she would probably re-record it, because we thought it can’t possibly be that easy. But after we lived with it for a few months, we felt it was great. I knew she loved it. She said she loved it and her mum loved it. But I wasn’t sure it would be included on the album. But everyone felt it had something special. It came together really magically.”

[Taylor about Imogen Heap] “The coolest thing about Imogen for me was that there was no one else in the studio. There was no assistant; there was no engineer. It was her doing everything.”

February 11, 2014: Taylor gets a haircut. (I'm including this for funsies)

February 15, 2014: Taylor, Max Martin and Shellback write Shake It Off.

Voice memo here;

[Lover Journal] LA. This week I've been in the studio with Max and Johan every day and it has been the most creatively successful and fulfilling time. The first day, Johan just made a really up tempo drum beat because we decided we needed something up and light. We worked at it for a few hours before i just started singing "shake it off, shake it off, shake it off" And then the best way i know how to describe it is that the chorus just fell out of the sky. It ended up being this song about doing your own thing even though haters are gonna hate, and you just have to dance to your own beat. We all went home and I wrote the first and second verses and brought them in the next day. We wrote this chanty cheer leader bridge that I absolutely LOVE. We spent all day doing vocals and the next day recording the background vocals. I think it'll end up being the first single and Max said it's his favorite song he's ever been a part of.

[Max Martin during the lawsuit] “Shellback started out with a drumbeat. Shellback, Taylor, and I then collaboratively developed the melody and other lines of ‘Shake It Off’ to Shellback’s drumbeat. I did not write or provide any input into any lyrics in ‘Shake It Off,’ which were written entirely by Taylor.”

“I've had every part of my life dissected – my choices, my actions, my words, my body, my style, my music. When you live your life under that kind of scrutiny, you can either let it break you, or you can get really good at dodging punches. And when one lands, you know how to deal with it. And I guess the way that I deal with it is to shake it off.”

“The message in the song is a problem I think we all deal with and an issue we deal with on a daily basis. We don’t live just in a celebrity takedown culture, we live in a takedown culture. People will find anything about you and twist it to where it’s weird or wrong or annoying or strange or bad. You have to not only live your life in spite of people who don’t understand you, you have to have more fun than they do.”

February 19, 2014: Taylor, Max Martin, Shellback and Ali Payami write Style. This is the last song made for the album.

“I loved comparing these timeless visuals with a feeling that never goes out of style. It's basically one of those relationships that's always a bit off. The two people are trying to forget each other. So, it's like, 'All right, I heard you went off with her, and well, I've done that, too.' My previous albums have also been sort of like, 'I was right, you were wrong, you did this, it made me feel like this' – a righteous sense of right and wrong in a relationship. What happens when you grow up is you realize the rules in a relationship are very blurred and that it gets very complicated very quickly, and there's not a case of who was right or who was wrong.”

“This song is about those relationships that are never really done. You always kind of have that person, that one person who you feel might interrupt your wedding and be like, ‘Don’t do it cause we’re not over yet.'”

February 19, 2014: While on tour, Ryan Tedder produces another three versions of Welcome To New York.

[Ryan Tedder interview] “I was in Switzerland on a tour bus, and I did four versions of 'Welcome to New York,' one of which I liked personally more, but the thing about artists is they become very obsessed with the demo. She was in love with the demo so no matter how hard I fought, she brought it back to the demo, so really what you hear is what I did on the first day.”

March 24, 2014: [From a Lover Journal] Taylor moves to New York.

[Lover Journal] So in the last few weeks, I've completely moved into my apartment in Tribeca. That's right, I'm writing this from my new bed in my new place, watching Law and Order with Meredith. Strangely, I've never felt more busy.

May 29, 2014: [From a Lover Journal] Taylor chooses another photo for the cover, after having a nightmare of the previous one being not enough.

May 30, 2014: Taylor chooses the album cover.

[Lover Journal] Shanghai. So we got to China at around 2pm and I knew it would completely ruin me if I slept when i got to the hotel, so I decided to work out. WHY IS THIS PEN RUNNING OUT?! Just went to my purse and got my pen. So a crazy story unfolded in the last 24 hours. Last night, I had this vivid dream where the photo I'd chosen for the album cover wasn't good enough, intriguing enough, artful enough. it woke me up. I couldn't shake it and it stayed with me all day. Because that nagging feeling I'd been pushing back for weeks was now confirmed in my gut... it wasn't good enough. I went to the venue, mind racing, wandering if I'd have to do an entirely new photo shoot... I got to my dressing room with newer versions of the "cover" I looked at it and felt nothing. The team pulled up this new scanned file of the polaroids we had taken during the shoot. I saw it within 10 seconds. The shot. The cover. It's a polaroid of me sitting against a beige wall with a blue seagull sweatshirt on. You can see my red lips but the photo cuts off my eyes. For some reason unknown to me it's the most intriguing photo i've seen. I think it's the mystery of not seeing my eyes. Maybe it just looks effortlessly cool. The craziest moment came when something caught my eye. The cover photo is photo 13. I kid you not. I played a sold out show in Shanghai tonight and the crowd was amazing. Tomorrow we go to Tokyo, where they'll have the whole ticker tape parade at the airport. Smile and wave...

Conclusive notes

What 1989 represented for Taylor:

“The 1980s was a very experimental time in pop music. People realized songs didn't have to be this standard drums-guitar-bass-whatever. We can make a song with synths and a drum pad. We can do group vocals for the entire song. We can do so many different things. And I think what you saw happening with music was also happening in our culture, where people were just wearing whatever crazy colors they wanted to, because why not? There just seemed to be this energy about endless opportunities, endless possibilities, endless ways you could live your life. And so with this record, I thought, 'There are no rules to this. I don't need to use the same musicians I've used, or the same band, or the same producers, or the same formula. I can make whatever record I want.'”

“In the past, I've written mostly about heartbreak or pain that was caused by someone else and felt by me. On this album, I'm writing about more complex relationships, where the blame is kind of split 50–50 ... even if you find the right situation relationship-wise, it's always going to be a daily struggle to make it work.”

Bonus: Secret Messages

Author's note: I wrote this timeline around 2 years ago. While I found some dates later on, this is 100% my research. If you use this timeline for your posts, research or whatever, PLEASE, credit me! I'd be very thankful. This is 2 years of work.

Links to my other Timelines:

Writing of Fearless Timeline

Writing of Speak Now Timeline

Writing of Red Timeline

My Spreadsheet with an timeline overview

Credits:

Most of the quotes have been copy-pasted from Taylor Swift Switzerland.

Taylor Swift Pictures for the candids.

Heather from Nerdy by Nature for the WTNY handwritten lyrics picture.