Trivia / Taylor Swift

• Acting for Two:
  • "You Belong With Me": playing the Hollywood Homely girl next door and the Cruel Cheerleader.
  • Taken up to eleven (up to fifteen?) in the "Look What You Made Me Do" video, where she plays fifteen different versions of herself bickering in the outro.
  • In "The Man", she plays both the male protagonist and herself as the director.
  • In "Anti-Hero", she plays three versions of herself (including a giant one).
• Alan Smithee:
  • She wrote the lyric and sung uncreditted background vocals for "This Is What You Came For" under the pseudonym Nils Sjöberg. The pseudonym pops up once again as a producer for a rerecorded version of "Look What You Made Me Do" in an episode of Killing Eve.
  • "exile" and "betty" from folklore credit a "William Bowery" as co-writer. It was widely assumed to be a pseudonym, as there was no other record of Bowery as a producer or songwriter; this turned out to be true, revealed in Folklore: The Long Pond Studio Session by Swift herself to be her then-boyfriend Joe Alwyn. The pseudonym is used once again in evermore in three songs ("champange problems", "coney island", and the titular track) as well as one Midnights track ("Sweet Nothing").
  • During the season finale of Killing Eve, a cover of "Look What You Made Me Do" with a male lead vocal with a songwriting credit by a band named Jack Leopards and the Dolphin Club appeared in the closing credit. Once again this was widely thought as a pseudonym as no paper trail or online record of the band was detected. It later came out that it was a band formed by Taylor, her long-time collaborator Jack Antonoff and her brother Austin Swift as vocal and is seen to be a way to get around with the reputation master copyright issue.
  • In one of the promotional Tik Toks for Midnights, Taylor used and widely promoted a track called "Life You Lead" by an artist with a male vocal named Niceboy Ed. Once again, no paper trail or online presence was found before her promotional Tik Toks, even after the album's release and Niceboy Ed has released two more songs.
• All-Star Cast:
  • The "Bad Blood" video, with (in alphabetical order) Jessica Alba, Lily Aldridge, Zendaya, Cindy Crawford, Cara Delevingne, Lena Dunham, Selena Gomez, Ellie Goulding, Gigi Hadid, Mariska Hargitay, Martha Hunt, Karlie Kloss, Kendrick Lamar, Serayah McNeil, Ellen Pompeo, Hailee Steinfeld, and Hayley Williams.
  • The video for "You Need to Calm Down" is a who's who of LGBTQ+ icons and celebrities (plus Ryan Reynolds). Here's a full list.
• Awesome, Dear Boy: While she's not at all fond of her work on the Cats film, she loved being able to work with the legendary Andrew Lloyd Webber, and write a song with him.
• Black Sheep Hit:
  • "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together" is a lot more bubblegum pop than her signature style. "I Knew You Were Trouble" has dubstep sounds in the chorus section.
  • "Shake It Off" is a peppy, horn-driven, very uptempo pop song even in comparison to the rest of the material on 1989, which is mainly '80's influenced synth-pop, none of which in turn can even remotely be considered as any kind of country music, the genre with which she became known initially. Of course, after that point this sound overtook country as Taylor's primary genre in the eyes of the general public.
  • folklore was classified as alternative and had zero promotion as Taylor only announced it on social media 16 hours before its release. The album still ended up being the #1 best selling album of 2020.
• Breakthrough Hit: A few different "breakthroughs":
  • While Swift's very first single, "Tim McGraw", was by most measures a hit on country radio, "Teardrops On My Guitar" was such a smash that it was remixed for pop radio, breaking her through to a new audience.
  • "Love Story" and "You Belong with Me" were even more massive crossover hits, establishing Swift as a true force on pop radio even in her country era.
  • After Speak Now's singles saw less success at pop radio, "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together" both asserted Swift's new pop sound and her status as a mainstream pop star for the next decade.
  • folklore marks the first time she ever charted in the Adult Contemporary Billboard, with "cardigan" and especially "exile" are smash hit singles there.
• Cash-Cow Franchise: Before her contract expired with Big Machine, she was bringing in over half the label’s annual revenue all by herself. She cited this for being one of the reasons she left on bad terms.
• Content Leak:
  • 1989 was leaked 2 days before its official release.
  • Reputation leaked online about 12 hours before it was released.
  • Speak Now (Taylor's Version) has 10 copies stolen from a warehouse in France 1 month before its official release. 8 copies were retrieved but 2 copies are still at large.
  • Quite a few of her tracks were leaked to a group called "Inner Circle" - some of them have been released to the public. Some of them are later released as complete tracks by Taylor herself like "You All Over Me", "We Were Happy", "That's When", "Don't You", "Bye Bye Baby" on Fearless (Taylor's Version); "Better Man", "I Bet You Think About Me", "Forever Winter", "Run" on Red (Taylor's Version) and "All of the Girls You Loved Before" as a bonus track on Lover.
  • "Blank Space (Taylor's Version)" was accidentally posted in an Instagram reel by her official account a week before 1989 (Taylor's Version) was scheduled to be released.
  • The name and tracklist of THE TORTURED POETS DEPARTMENT were leaked on TikTok about a week before the official announcement at the Grammys, but they were mostly dismissed by the Swiftie community. However, in the hours after the announcement the leak began to draw significant attention, forcing Swift to release the entire tracklist just a day later, in contrast to the slower rollout for Midnights. The standard edition of the album also leaked a day before the official release, although the Anthology tracks managed to remain under wraps until their release.
• Contractual Purity:
  • She once openly stated she fully believes in this trope and that she has a responsibility to her younger fans. Here's a clip from her interview with with 60 Minutes where she discusses it.
    Swift: It'd be really easy to say, 'I'm 21 now. I do what I want. You raise your kid.' But that's not the truth of it. The truth of it is that every singer out there with songs on the radio is raising the next generation, so make your words count.
  • It took Taylor a long time to openly advocate a political position. When it finally happened (supporting a Democratic party nominee) it was widely speculated to have taken so long because of her popularity in southern pro-Republican states and partly because her silence had begun to be believed by those on the right to be tacit support of the far-right conservatism that reared up with the election of Donald Trump.
    • To that point, she's become a lot more outspoken about her personal/political views in the aftermath of the 2016 election and the reception for Reputation.
  • Even after she began to employ Precision F-Strike and openly discussing adult themes (like more overt references to sex and alcohol) in her music from 2017 onward, Swift has always released a censored version of her songs, including non-singles, presumably because of this trope (and Money, Dear Boy).
• Creator Backlash: While Swift is proud of the fact that she writes all of her own lyrics, she has admitted that some of her older songs from when she was a teenager have not aged well, as they deal with emotions that she would handle differently as an adult:
  • Her setlists tend to ignore the first album entirely, outside the occasional performance of "Our Song" and "Teardrops On My Guitar". This is especially notable in "the Eras Tour" set list, which includes no songs from the album in the permanent rotation.
  • She has singled out "Picture to Burn" as a type of emotion she would handle differently now, because she’s more mature and grown up. She said in an interview that it's an example of when she was young and immature and didn’t know how to handle her emotions in an adult way.
  • Similarly, she's not too proud of some of the lyrics in "Better Than Revenge", specifically those that veer into Slut-Shaming and insinuating that you can "steal" a person. Again, she chalks this up to immaturity. As of 2019, she and Joe Jonas have mended fences and now both laugh about the whole situation. The Taylor's Version re-recording changes the line "she's better known for the things that she does on the mattress" to "he was a moth to the flame, she was holding the matches".
  • When asked by a fan to perform "Dear John" as a surprise song for the Reputation Stadium Tour, Taylor refuses and stated the reason is that it is too painful for her to perform the song live. It seems that she had healed since then, as she finally performed the song live again in 2023 as a surprise song, even with a speech disclaimer for fans to not send hate to the person that they think inspired the song.
  • While she never explicitly stated that to be the case, she seems to dislike the original version of "Girl At Home". The "Taylor's Version" of the song on the Red re-release has a completely different arrangement and production to the point of almost being a completely different song.
  • The setlist for the first two legs of the Eras tour include "invisible string" as the opener of the folklore section. It was replaced with "the 1" since the third legs of the tour. At the time she explicitly stated the reason is to be "sneaky" but one must wonder if the later announcement of the break up with her boyfriend / collaborator Joe Alwyn is truly the reason why she replaced a Silly Love Song with a Love Nostalgia Song.
  • Live from Clear Channel Stripped 2008 was recorded for an Internet performance during the promotional tour of Fearless and was released by Swift's old label Big Machine Record as an album without her permission in 2020. She openly denounced the album and called it "tasteless" and "shameless greed in the time of coronavirus".
• Creator Breakdown: The most popular example of this since Hideaki Anno and Neon Genesis Evangelion. Just about all of her songs are based on Real Life scenarios, most of which were relationships with boyfriends or high school friends with whom she had parted ways. Lampshaded by Swift herself, who said, "If you listen to my albums, it’s like reading my diary." Three particular instances stand out, mostly because all three of them are one long breakdown for the entire albums and not just particular songs:
  • reputation is primarily about an extremely stressful period in her career when she felt her reputation (some of it accurate, or at least based in truth, some of it not) was overshadowing her work and who she truly is. It also has some influences from her sexual assault trial and her extremely public blowup with Kanye West which caused a lot of the public to turn against her, the latter of which became Harsher in Hindsight when, in 2020, new footage surfaced that revealed she had been more truthful about what exactly went down. She's said in interviews writing the album was therapeutic for her — fittingly, her next album Lover is pure Creator Recovery.
  • Her very next two albums after Lover, folklore and evermore were written back-to-back throughout the quarantine of the COVID-19 Pandemic, which undoubtedly influence the extreme darkness in the albums compare to her body of works, with multiple songs mentioning or heavily implying death, loss, grief, mental health deterioration, and/or abuse, on top of lacking the typical happy endings permeate her usual works.
  • While promoting Red (Taylor's Version), she revealed that she was going through a very hard time in her life when creating and promoting the original, to the point of having to hide in the bathroom and cry in between interviews, while still trying to put on a happy face for the cameras. The album itself covers a very painful breakup, "Forever Winter" express her immense guilt and sadness at not noticing someone close to her struggled so much with mental health (widely speculated to be about Jeff Lang and why many fans thought it wasn't included in the original track list because it was too painful for her) and the ten-minute version of "All Too Well" hints at her struggles with an eating disorder (something she only publicly acknowledged for her documentary Miss Americana in 2020). She admitted it was a relief to be able to make the album over again when she was in a much better place emotionally.
  • The song "Forever Winter" in Red (Taylor's Version) is stated by Taylor to be inspired by a personal experience of not knowing someone close to her struggle so much with his mental health. Fans widely speculate that it is about her friend Jeff Lang, who died of an overdose shortly after Speak Now was released and two months before she was spotted with the co-writer of the song Mark Foster.
  • Midnights is explicitly about the "sleepless nights" that she experienced. The album is filled to the brim with Break Up Songs and touches on self-loathing, sexism, loneliness, and loss of innocence. With the news of her break up with her long term boyfriend and sometime collaborator Joe Alwyn, a lot of the songs on the album became Harsher in Hindsight.
  • The break up with Alwyn also explained why a lot of her songs in the "Surprise Song" sections in the Eras Tour were filled with angry, sad, or longing break up songs.
• Creator Couple:
  • Swift and Harry Styles are alleged to have written some songs together that never saw the light of day.
  • Swift wrote the lyrics and sung uncredited background vocals for "This Is What You Came For" with Calvin Harris while they were still dating. However, because they wanted to not take away focus from the song (which Harris planned to release as a single featuring Rihanna), she took the pseudonym Nils Sjöberg. This proved to be one example of the trope backfiring since the identity of "Sjöberg" came out after the breakup, leading to a public spat over who deserved more credit for the songwriting.
  • folklore and evermore have a few cowriting credits ("exile", "betty", "champange problems", "coney island", "evermore") by Swift's then-boyfriend Joe Alwyn under the pseudonym William Bowery. She even stated in Folklore: The Long Pond Studio Sessions that Alwyn came up with the instruments and a huge chunk of the lyrics on both of the songs he was credited with on folklore. She later revealed that quite a few of the promotional materials she released date back to reputation are pictures and videos taken by Joe. The lyric video for "exile" even features him. Midnights has one writing credit by him with the song "Sweet Nothing", a love song about the simple pleasures of a long-term relationship. Another case of a brutal Deconstruction as the three albums they created together became smash hits (with "exile" in particular became a smash hit radio single) and revitalized her career and fame, which ultimately may have been one of the reasons for their break up in April 2023.
• Creator's Favorite: Taylor stated during the announcement of evermore that the main reason of the album's creation is that she just can't stop writing songs because she loves the style of folklore so much. She even notes that this is highly unusual for her, as she moves on pretty quickly with her previous albums:
  I've never done this before. In the past I've always treated albums as one-off eras and moved onto planning the next one after an album was released. There was something different with folklore. In making it, I felt less like I was departing and more like I was returning.
• Creator Recovery: Lover seems to be one to Reputation, being a "love letter to love itself" in contrast to the darker and more personal subject matter lyrically than the previous album, with a more upbeat pop sheen similar to 1989 musically (although it contains more blatantly sociopolitical and feministic statements than any previous Swift album).
• Dawson Casting: Several of her videos, such as "Fifteen" and "The Story of Us", in which she plays high schoolers. Minor examples earlier, as she wasn't that much older than her characters, but it's started getting played more and more straight as she gets older (though to her credit, she doesn't look it).
• Demand Overload: The release of Midnights temporarily crashed Spotify. Similarly, the pre-sale for her Eras Tour concert sale crashed Ticketmaster and even prompted them to cancel the general sale since there were no seats available.
• Denial of Digital Distribution: She has a history of Denial of Streaming: Her album 1989 did not appear on Spotify when it was released in October 2014, and the rest of her catalogue was removed the next month. In March 2015, all of her music except 1989 was put on Tidal (which doesn't have a free tier). In June 2015, she refused to put her music on Apple Music because she thought it was unfair that artists wouldn't see any royalties from streams during the three-month free trial. Apple acquiesced to her demand, and the following week, she announced that 1989 would stream for the first time on Apple Music (alongside her back catalogue). However, she didn't want to put it on other services yet. As of 2017, her music is back on most streaming platforms.
• Doing It for the Art:
  • A Rolling Stones article revealed that the official announcement to switch from country to pop from 1989 onward was against her label's wish and was the direction she wanted to take her music in.
  • Taylor was a big fan of Where the Crawdads Sing and wrote the song "Carolina" around 2021 using only instruments that were available before 1953, the year of the setting in the novel. When she heard of a movie of the adaptation of the novel and the involvement of Reese Witherspoon, Swift reached out to the team and asked for the song to be in the movie, which they happily agreed to after hearing the song.
• Executive Meddling:
  • Big Machine had to get several radio stations to spam the first three singles from Speak Now for a day to get any of them to #1 on Mediabase (thus meaning they missed out going #1 on Billboard).
  • "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together" got its huge debut thanks to a bunch of Clear Channel stations spamming the song for a day. They have done this to several other artists in 2012.
• Fan Community Nicknames: "Swifties" is the most common one.
• History Repeats: Swift established herself by making pop-oriented country music that earned a mixed reception from country fans, before abandoning country altogether to do mainstream pop music, which catapulted her to being one of the most commercially successful singers of her time. For classic rock fans, this may sound rather familiar.
• Magnum Opus Dissonance: While she's still proud of the album and performs songs from it frequently, Taylor apparently wasn't 100% satisfied with the way Red turned out, saying it wasn't "sonically cohesive." To say the Swifties disagree is a massive understatement — many consider it to be her finest work thus far, and it contains the fan-favorite "All Too Well."
• Meme Acknowledgement:
  • Taylor acknowledged the "It's Becky" meme by wearing a T shirt with the line printed on it.
  • During the Era tour, she gave a speech acknowledged that she saw the meme "Taylor hates Evermore" on Tik Tok.
  • When she performed "The Great War" as a surprise song, she acknowledged the trend of using the song on Tik Tok after fans have (or haven't) managed to purchase a ticket to the tour.
  • After the music video for "willow" came out, many people online (mostly jokingly) accused Taylor of being a sorceress or a witch whenever something strange or coincidental happened to her, Swifties, or other people around her. During an Eras Tour show in Buenos Aires, a video went viral of a plane flying over the stadium right as she was singing the lines "I thought the plane was going down/How'd you turn it right around?" from "Labyrinth." Taylor later reposted the video on her Twitter account with the caption "Never beating the sorcery allegations."
• Orwellian Retcon:
  • She was sixteen when she wrote "Picture to Burn", which originally included the line, "So go and tell your friends that I'm obsessive and crazy/That's fine, I'll tell mine you're gay." Since then, she has stopped singing it that way in concerts, and no longer sells the song with that line, instead switching it to the version originally used for the radio, "So go and tell your friends that I'm obsessive and crazy/That's fine, you won't mind if I say...". When her albums eventually got licensed to Spotify, only the aforementioned radio edit of the song was made available.
  • The "Hey kids, spelling is fun!" line from "ME!" has been removed from any version of the song besides the music video. She hasn't explained its removal, but one could guess that she was never on board with the line from the get go since Brendon Urie came up with it. Another, more obvious reason could be that she got rid of the line due to it being widely panned by critics.
  • The "Anti-Hero" music video was edited to remove a 5 second shot of the weight she is standing on displaying the word "Fat" due to outcry that she was endorsing fat phobia. Although the scenes have many defenders who think it was expressing her bulimia and actually condemning fat phobia and unrealistic beauty standards.
  • "If This Was A Movie" was originally a Deluxe track for Speak Now. The Taylor's Version rerelease now slot it in the Fearless (Taylor's Version) playlist. This is speculated to have been done so that Speak Now (Taylor's Version) can be entirely self-written.^note  Speak Now is often praised for being entirely self-written, when in fact "If This Was a Movie" has a co-writer
• Promoted Fanboy:
  • Lucas Till, who has a Celeb Crush on Swift, appeared in the video for "You Belong With Me".
  • "White Horse" appeared on an episode of Grey's Anatomy, a favorite show of Taylor's.^note If the song wasn't to appear on the episode, it would have been on Speak Now instead of Fearless.
  • Her first single was, at least in part, an ode to Tim McGraw, and then she worked with him (and Keith Urban) on his 2013 single "Highway Don't Care".
    • During the Nashville stop on the Reputation Stadium Tour, McGraw, and his wife Faith Hill, joined Taylor to sing "Tim McGraw"! To say the crowd went nuts would be an understatement.
  • Before she moved to Nashville, she idolized George Strait. In 2007, she toured with him as one of the opening acts, and during one of the shows in her home state of Pennsylvania, he mentioned her by name between numbers. She was backstage when he did so, and was immediately floored and had to be carried to her dressing room to recover.
  • She has been a very vocal fan of The Dixie Chicks and frequently cited them as inspiration despite the band's reputation among the conservative country audience. Swift record "Soon You'll Get Better" with the Chicks as backup vocal and instrument for Lover.
  • She stated that she was a fan of The National and Bon Iver for a long time before collaborating with them extensively on folklore and evermore.
• Reality Is Unrealistic: With the rerecordings coming out, Taylor's accent from her earlier albums has been frequently referred to as a "fake country" accent that she's just dropped now. (Mostly due to the differences between her accent and a traditional Southern accent.) Her accent on those albums is actually very much real and is standard for central Pennsylvania (where she's from). It's faded for the most part, including from her speaking voice, as she no longer lives there. (A notable exception to this is "I'll Bet You Think About Me" from Red (Taylor's Version), which uses her native accent.)
• Referenced by...: Has it's own page.
• She Also Did: She also co-wrote Kellie Pickler's 2008 single "Best Days of Your Life", Boys Like Girls 2009 hit "Two Is Better Than One (also a feature vocal on some versions of the song), Miley Cyrus-as-Hannah Montana's 2009 single "You'll Always Find Your Way Back Home", BOB's 2012 hit "Both of Us" (also contributing a prominent vocal feature), Calvin Harris and Rihanna's huge 2016 hit "This Is What You Came For", Little Big Town's 2017 hit "Better Man", and Sugarland's 2018 hit "Babe". "Best Days of Your Life", "This Is What You Came For" and "Babe" also feature her on backing vocals. She is also lead vocal and writer for the song "Renegade" as well as vocal for "Birch" as part of the band Big Red Machine as well as being the writer and feature vocal for "The Alcott" for The National.
• Screwed by the Network: When Taylor left Big Machine in late 2018, she wanted to either buy her master recordings or the record label itself.^note This isn't common practice, but is not unprecedented; Rihanna did it when she moved labels in 2016. Big Machine wanted her to sign another six album contract that would only transfer the album masters to her slowly over time and never offered Taylor the chance to buy them outright. Knowing that CEO Scott Borchetta was looking to sell the label and that Republic Records would at least give her ownership of her future work, she moved on. Borchetta subsequently sold the label to Scooter Braun’s company, Ithaca Holdings. Braun is a former manager of Kanye West, resulting in a man she doesn’t like and who doesn’t like her owning eleven years of her work. Big Machine additionally sent her a cease and desist letter in Fall 2019 saying that she couldn’t sing her old music, throwing a wrench into plans for a project with Netflix and for several performances and her tour until the case goes to court. As of 2021, however, the law seems to be on Swift's side and she's begun rerecording her back catalogue.
• Streisand Effect: In late 2017, a minor blog named PopFront published an article suggesting a Taylor Swift song contained Alt-Right dog-whistles. It received exactly one comment - until two months later, when Swift's lawyer sent them an angry letter demanding they take the post down, and also that they couldn't publish said angry letter because it was copyrighted. Naturally, PopFront published it, a bunch of very large blogs picked up the story, the ACLU got involved, and many, many more people ended up seeing the article.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Swift originally signed with RCA Records but left the label before releasing any music due to the label executives not wanting her to play her own songs.
  • Speak Now was originally titled Enchanted, but she changed the named after Scott Borchetta thought it was too childish for a more mature album compare to her first two albums.
  • Before Brie Larson was cast, there were rumors that Taylor was shortlisted by Marvel Studios to play the title role in Captain Marvel.
  • Lover was originally titled Daylight, but she changed it after thinking it was too sentimental.
  • Swift had planned to have a tour focused on her 7th album called the "Lover Fest" in 2020, which was being promoted as a festival-type event that would have featured multiple artists playing to massive crowds, including being the first show held at the new SoFi Stadium in the Los Angeles area. The COVID-19 pandemic forced her to delay the tour to 2021 and eventually cancel it. While the pandemic also led to the creation of folklore and evermore, two beloved projects, it also meant that the entire Lover era came to an abrupt end; many Swift fans particularly mourn the fact that fan favorite "Cruel Summer" was never released as a single or even performed live until 2023. It even led a widely speculated rumor that she was forced to scrap "Cruel Summer" as the final single from the album due the unfortunate lyrical content (about experiencing a "fever dream high" in a cruel summer) in the wake of the pandemic, which Taylor confirmed to be true in June 2023 when she released the song as a single.
  • A leaked setlist from one of her backup dancers revealed that the original setlist for the Eras tour include "Evermore" as well as "Tim McGraw" and "Teardrops on My Guitar" in the permanent setlist. The final setlist remove "Evermore" and the two songs from her first album were replaced by a surprise song section.
• Why Fandom Can't Have Nice Things: After a MeatCanyon parody animation mocked Swifties and Taylor herself, Swifties then sent death threats to Papa Meat himself.
• Word of God:
  • She once provided the origins of each of her song on her website, though she became much more coy about providing direct explanations (let alone admitting whether a given song was autobiographical) once her personal life became dominant tabloid fodder around the Red era.
  • Folklore: The Long Pond Studio Session is half-concert film, half-Taylor explaining the process behind the songs of Folklore, especially with the reveal of the identity of one her co-writers, William Bowery.

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