Taylor Swift’s 50 Best Songs, Ranked

This introductory, career-establishing single certainly counts as a simple pleasure now, against all the more sophisticated writing she’s done since. But its winsomeness still speaks to how we experience music as not just a soundtrack to life events but a spiritual partnership with them. The genius of it was in a concept that hadn’t been tried much before — establishing that a couple might not just have “our song” but “our artist.” And in making Tim McGraw the guy, thank God she chose someone whose name and stature have aged well. We wouldn’t have quite the nostalgic affection that we do for this 2006 single if the teen lovers had bonded over Big & Rich.

In case there was any doubt that it’s unresolved childhood loneliness and rejection that make the greatest breeding ground for uber-driven superstars, Swift clears it all up for us by effectively conceding as much in this childhood origin story for her ambition and independence. It’s somehow more affecting for how matter-of-factly she presents these subdued moments of almost steely self-realization. (Later in the “Midnights” album, she revisited basically the same subject in a passing aside in the closing “Mastermind”; it almost felt like one of those moments in the theater where you get a quick reprise of an earlier key theme.)

Swift takes a backstage introduction to an indie-pop dude she had a crush on and turns it into something that feels like an epic moment at a royal ball. Even if you are a less than A-level romantic, you may still find something enduringly swoony about the way she frames something that feels like classic love at first sight (even if in practicality it’s check-his-socials-later-to-see-if-he’s-claimed at first sight). She probably forgot about the guy the next day, but she got a hell of a testament to the magic of instantaneous infatuation out of it. (And a fragrance.)

Swift has been surprisingly unafraid to boldly speak out about political matters in recent years, after being criticized for staying quiet in her early career. (Of course the blowback from going vocal has amounted to many times the crap she ever took for keeping her mouth shut.) She still hasn’t gotten topical too often in song itself, but a major exception came in the form of “Miss Americana and the Heartbreak Prince,” which subsequently lent half its name to a documentary about her political coming-out. This “Lover” track is basically a play on the idea that all adult life is just like high school, but now she’s breaking up not with a boy but with the center-right assumptions that had her growing up assuming that America would always stay on the right track. As tends to be the case with lyrics that exist entirely on a metaphorical plane, this isn’t one of her most emotionally connecting tracks. But to hear America’s one-time princess worry that she and the direction of her country may never, ever get back together is affecting.

Listening to “Tim McGraw” or “Teardrops” back in the day, how little would anyone have imagined that Swift someday would be decrying “the 1950s shit they want from me” while extolling the sensual benefits of a relationship that just cozily is what it is. “Lavender Haze” kicks off “Midnights” with a groove that’s almost a little too laid back to quite call R&B… although you could probably say that of a lot of the best subtle R&B. It’s Swift locked into a good groove in every possible regard.

This list needs a Christmas song, and you know it’s not going to be “Christmas Must Mean Something More,” at least not without a lot more spiked nog. Lucky for everyone’s personalized holiday mixes that Swift did eventually follow up her early Christmas EP many years later with a sentimental one-off (“Christmas Tree Farm”) but also, more significantly, this fairly unsentimental ode to hometown ex sex during the holidays. Like much of the “Evermore”/”Folklore” cycle, we can take this as an act of imagination (i.e., there is no mention of where the paparazzi are going to go while she and her old classmate briefly reignite some embers just for the hell of it). But all the mixed, pragmatic feelings that come up over the course of the song sure feel lived-in. Ho ho sigh.

This is the one that began it all, not on the country side of things, where she was already well-established before her sophomore album came out, but on the MTV side, where many “pop mixes” were to come before she finally “picked a lane,” as she put it. It sounds almost primitive now, but an honestly felt teardrop on an honest instrument never goes out of style. (Many years later, on “My Tears Ricochet,” she would subtly do a kind of sequel to this ballad, with record company executives understood to be replacing the far more benign Drew as the villains of the piece.)

It’s easy to see a lot of the darker material on “Folklore” through two lenses — that they’re breakup songs, or they’re breakup-with-Big-Machine songs. Either interpretation of “Mad Woman” works, but if this is one of her personal tunes on the album and not one of the character songs, the unusual intensity with which she writes and sings it sure makes it seem like it’s more about a recent business split than some long-ago bad romance she’s dredging up for song fodder. Of course, this interpretation is furthered by just how openly angry she allowed herself to be in her public messages about what went wrong, to the extent she has to know some observers were asking, “Why can’t she just move on?” However you feel about the situation with the sale of the masters, you have to take note of her refusal to take it any less seriously over time. “Every time you call me crazy, it makes me more crazy,” she warns. A scorpion fighting back “strike(s) to kill, and you know I will.” Geez, we’re a long way from slamming screen doors and first or last kisses here — and it’s riveting.

A song about why a relationship that’s escalated for some of the wrong reasons can’t help but feel right when you throw that slinky a groove on it — and throw in something Swift has never employed from her arsenal before: a solo saxophone. When she pulled this out for an especially sexy-sounding second number on an “SNL” appearance, it made fans wish this was a direction she’d explore more in the future. Listen, she’s got time.

Every female singer with a little bit of lung power and a big taste for drama should write their own version of an Evanescence song at least once in their career. This heavily orchestrated Goth-rocker from her third album, “Speak Now,” came at the tail end of the era when she still had a touch of girlish shrillness in her voice. She is 100% — no, maybe 1000% — a better singer now than she was then, but that doesn’t mean we can’t feel a twinge of quaint nostalgia for the less trained, barely post-adolescent, I-mean-it tones pushing this anguished lament over the top.

Yes, we are, or were, as a matter of fact. This “Reputation” opener made for a great introductory number on the 2018 tour of the same name, too. It gets knocked, in some quarters, for Swift having sung the verses in a kind of hip-hop cadence. But that does set up the constantly changing dynamics of the tune, which goes from that into a featherweight-sweet and sexy pre-chorus, before Max Martin and Shellback bring the hammer down again with a recurring synth riff that feels like heavy metal. That cathartic rush is worth the wait of the ellipses.

When Swift revealed that she’d enlisted the Dixie Chicks for a collaboration, nearly everyone assumed it’d be a fun lark, like the murder ballad she eventually did with Haim. Instead she murdered everyone’s hearts with “Soon You’ll Get Better,” a song about coming to terms with her mother’s cancer that hit upon many of the stages of grieving… not a death, but an illness that ends the carefree life a family once knew, anyway. This was most people’s “skip” track on the “Lover” album — but surely Swift, most of all, would know that’s no knock against it. Even if you’re blessed not to currently have any loved ones with chronic or incurable illnesses, this is one to necessarily be employed in private.

As the closing track on the 2019 “Lover” album, “Daylight” didn’t make that much of an impression; it seemed like maybe just one in a series of hopeful denouements to otherwise more dramatic collections, in a tradition with “New Year’s Day” and “Clean” but not as memorable. But the song turned out to be slightly the victim of a rare instance of overly busy balladic production that didn’t do the tune many favors. Stripped of that for a mostly acoustic version that appeared on a live album just before the pandemic, her of-the-moment love song became something more touching, like her one-night-only “Lover” show in the City of Lights really did bring it into the sunshine.

Swift really, really likes women who are viewed as insane. Hard to imagine why, after a few solid years of vilification in the previous decade, right? And so, after she bought a Rhode Island mansion in the mid-2010s, she formed an identification with a famous former owner, wealthy socialite Rebekah Harkness, and decided to tell her story of how she became willfully self-ostracized from her community. There’s a theme running there between that tracks like “Mad Woman,” but also with the older Swift song “The Lucky One,” a portrait of a star who threw it all away and went into happy seclusion. This is a terrific piece of character writing, and though it’s hardly diaristic in the manner of so many other Swift songs, it is possibly telling us that what she aspires to become late in life is a “crazy,” rich and powerful old spinster lady trading dirty looks and derogatory laughs across the fence with the townspeople. (Maybe let’s not mention this to Joe.)

What do you get from the girl who has everything? Everything but placidity, Swift tells her man in one of the more obviously true-to-life songs from 2020’s “Folklore.” In other words, for as long as she and her beloved are together, putting the phrase “You need to calm down” into action may not be possible. It’s less of a red flag than it might otherwise be, given that we understand it to be about an active celebrity couple. But probably lots of other couples where at least one partner is in a high-stress or high-visibility situation have been able to find themselves in this song, too. It’s a sweet, and just slightly foreboding, acknowledgement from one lover to another that there is some sacrifice involved sometimes in being with someone whose lifestyle, circumstances or even just natural personality type is… a lot.

Another of her “I asked just one thing of you: to not leave” songs. Having forbidden that one command, like Adam of the garden, he of course banished when he realized his mistake, too late. This could have been a much more conventional song, melodically. But Swift had a dream where all she could utter was the word “stay!,” in an unnaturally high voice — and she worked that effect into the chorus instead of keeping the vocal in a natural register. it’s just another example of a Swift move that feels risky when you first hear it within a song and seems perfectly natural, even inevitable by the third listen. As fun a trick as that is, I’m still struck most of all by the ballsiness of the song… that however desperately she wanted the relationship to continue, once a fellow calls it, there are no takebacks. (That happens a lot in the Swift ouevre.) That’s actually some pretty good role-modeling going on, for her still emotionally impressionable younger fans.

We knew they were trouble, good trouble, when they walked in — Max Martin and Shellback that is, who were charged with updating Swift’s sound for just a handful of tracks on her fourth album, “Red.” Nathan Chapman was still the bigger part of the production picture, doing his part in expertly helming sensitive, wounded classics-to-be like “All Too Well” and “Sad Beautiful Tragic.” But the introduction of the Swedish overlords was a sign that we weren’t in Kansas anymore, or anywhere else where country music is going to rule forever. “I Knew You Were Trouble” was the most radical of the steps forward, throwing something like actual dubstep in for an artist who might have safely stuck closer to dobros. It’s slightly dated but still holds up — there’s almost a kind of musical violence to the electronic chorus, something that sounds like it really should be the soundtrack for a woman throwing herself onto the tile over a bad call with a good looker.

I’m going to out on a limb and boldly posit this as by far the funniest song Swift has ever written — and yes, despite her reputation for earnestness, there is some competition for that. When “Midnights” came out, there were some humorless scolds who laid into this song’s exaggerated statements of self-satisfaction and cosmic comeuppance as if they were to be taken completely seriously… as if “Karma is a cat / Purring in my lap ’cause it loves me / Flexing like a goddamn acrobat” isn’t some of the best comedy that anybody has written in any recent year. But acknowledging the levity of the writing doesn’t mean that Swift probably isn’t also completely serious, in some ways: The song is a victory lap, or maybe a vindication lap, of sorts when it comes to how mutual fortunes have swung around in certain circumstances. And no doubt she does believe that the arc of history bends toward justice for those with a moral center. Still, the awesomely clever co-production touches of Antonoff on this tune establish it as a soft banger. And it make for a great sequel to “I Forgot You Existed,” in which she contends that fate itself did not forget.

So many of Swift’s best post-breakup songs, especially in the early parts of her songwriting career, are her just reiterating the obvious to her exes, post-mortem. Like: All you had to do was… stay! All you had to say was… no! Dudes: You had one job.

This is a kind of sequel, in spirit, to “Blank Space.” In that one, she was still playing at being the bad girl, for satire. By the time of “Reputation,” she was doing it not so much for laughs — this is an “I could eff you up, seriously” song. No wonder it was such a highlight of her 2018 tour; the song rocks, and could manhandle a stadium with it as well as handled a single man.

A dire but weirdly satisfying fantasy of disruption. On the “Lover” album, with “Paper Rings,” Swift had also engaged — so to speak — in an engagement-ring scenario, but there, it was a joyful exploration of what it would feel like to make promises like paupers who couldn’t afford real rings. This song is the opposite in every conceivable way: The protagonist in her song says no to a proposal that was meant to lead to a big public pronouncement her would-be fiance had already promised his well-to-do family. Ruining everything is terrible and great and terrible again, as the singer imagines everyone saying, “She would’ve made such a lovely bride / What a shame she’s fucked in the head.” Once she would have played this for high musical melodrama, if she’d even have ventured to write a song so much not about herself before. Here, it’s all brilliant detail and delicacy on the way to that effed-up-ever-after ending.

Swift’s most outright feminist statement could read as polemical, and maybe it counts. But agitprop doesn’t get too much more fun, or too much more indisputably true. “When everyone believes ya —
what’s that like?” asks the woman whose word was automatically assumed to be suspect, as opposed to that of a guy who subsequently proved to be the least reliable narrator the entertainment world has ever seen. But we digress. This one is really an I’m-every-woman anthem, not personal memoir, and she serves her gender well with one you-know-it’s-fact zinger after another. There’s hardly any line she’s ever written that has better wordplay than one of the simplest lines she’s ever written: “If I was a man, then I’d be the man.”

If there’s any track on “Folklore” that’s been a little bit too slept-on, it might be “The 1,” a humble little masterpiece hiding in plain sight right there as the opening track. Why does this not get more love? Maybe it’s because of its very unassuming nature, which is actually makes it great and an essential part of the Swift canon. Lord knows she has given fans dozens of songs in which love is understood as an urgent matter of life and death. Here, it’s like, “Eh — would have been nice to have seen that one through to the end to see how it turned out, but no biggie.” That might be one of the ultimate signs of maturity in her writing, that the woman who made wuthering heights her lyrical brand can also sweetly say “c’est la vie” and make that work for a terrific song, too. Except, maybe the woman doth not protest enough — there’s a touch of melancholy in the unusual chord changes that she or Aaron Dessner built into the track that let you know the wistfulness runs deeper than the acceptance. Meanwhile, I suspect there’s a musical joke embedded in the title, which is written as a numeral, the way a musician would render it, versus “the one.” At the end of the chorus, the word “one” begins on the last note of one bar and slides over to the next, where it lands on… you know it, the 1. It’s like an additional subliminal tip-off that the guy that got away both wasn’t and was the one.

The greatest of all of Swift’s blatantly autobiographical and adoring love songs — admittedly a small subset of her overall work, given her penchant for drama, but there is some strong competition there. Not always one to look for the supernatural in things, Swift does use this exquisitely plucked acoustic track to wonder if there might be some serendipity in the air, tying things together with a divine smile. The lyrics here felt so baldly true to life that you knew even before you Googled it that her significant other of many years will turn out to have toiled in a blue shirt in a yogurt shop, or that one of her celebrity exes did in fact have a newborn infant that would have precipitated a gift from her. So much specificity for one sweet ditty, but again, with a chorus easily adapted by any young lovers who also see their paths as intwined by something spookier than chance.

Swift has never sounded so exhausted as she does on this track… which is part of its novel appeal, and sense of a different kind of honesty, since tiredness is not her natural state. Normally, “depleted-sounding” would not be the highest compliment we could pay a song, but this one is different. It’s the sound of someone standing in a doorway, maybe for the rest of time, asking for one more chance with a last bit of willpower they can’t quite physically manifest. As down-tempo as it is, it’s also kind of an anthem of hope… and, in its anti-assuming fashion, a total, flat-out earworm.

How many stitches did he get, Taylor? Twenty, was it? One reason her more autobiographical songs hold such power is her constant inclination to provide small details — eye color, necklace shapes, astrological signs, clothing items street names or, yes, numbers of stitches — while leaving fans to do guesswork, be it educated or fanciful, over just what kind of bigger picture these brushstrokes enhance. With “Out of the Woods,” one of the most talked-about tracks from “1989,” it’s really enough to know what the emotional tenor of the scenario is, and not who she spent a night in the emergency room with. If you can set some of those precise details on the back burner, you can experience it as a song about a relationship that’s come to some sort of reasonable plateau but isn’t really out of the woods yet. The telling way in the choruses that she keeps answering “good!” to every repetition of the “Are we in the clear yet?” question lets you know that this is a protagonist who constantly has to talk herself into believing that everything’s fine. The snowmobile emerged but she’s spending the whole lyric back in the trees.

This reads like one of the many works of fiction that Swift embarked upon with the “Folklore” album. At least, it’s hard to imagine that, even if she wanted to, a superstar is probably able to have the guilt-wracked “clandestine meetings” described in this deep dive into the morality and petty details of adultery. Yet Swift sure must have done some research with friends — or just has that vivid a literary imagination — to come up with absorbing details like “Leave the perfume on the shelf
that you picked out just for him / So you leave no trace behind” and “Tell your friends you’re out for a run / You’ll be flushed when you return.” Like, damn, girl. But this brilliantly written song isn’t just a list of 50 ways to meet your lover. There’s a real sense of panic, desire and self-loathing in verses describing an affair as “a dwindling, mercurial high — a drug that only worked the first few hundred times” and despairing: “You taught me a secret language I can’t speak with anyone else.” In just a few minutes, Swift has written a whole movie’s worth of insight about cheating. It certainly ought to give you faith in what she could pull off as an actual screenwriter.

Swift used to count as a country star in her early days, but never really indulged in what we’d call “country-rock.” She did a little bit, though, in dribs and drabs on the “Folklore” and “Evermore” albums, where the laconic quality of a few of Aaron Dessner’s in particular lent itself to something that felt a little like the laid-back early ’70s style. One of the more obviously fictional narratives she was trying out, “Cowboy Like Me” has her as an unsentimental grifter in some unnamed resort area — I’m picturing Montana — who meets and falls for someone in the same shady line of non-work. It’s good that Taylor doesn’t really believe that “forever is the sweetest con,” and good that she’s stretched out to the kind of writing where she can create a character to say it.

After her second album, “Fearless,” Swift had an album of the year Grammy but also a reputation as someone who only wrote vindictive songs about ex-boyfriends. (There are people who still believe this, to this day. You should not have these people as your friends.) So it was the beginning of a correction in the popular mindset when, for her third album, “Speak Now,” she made a point of writing a song for an ex-boyfriend in which she took credit for what went wrong and expressed apologies and regrets — normal human actions, in other words, for someone who was not the narcissistic teen wraith some of the culture had set out to make her. All image adjustment concerns aside… damn, this is still just a lovely song, isn’t it?

If your tear ducts can withstand this bold line of attack from a song about Swift’s late grandmother, you’re made of more stoic stuff than most of the rest of us. (Maybe you’re a good candidate to go join the grifters in that other “Evermore” track, “Cowboy Like Me.”) For me, it was the receipts that finally got me — that is, the part where she’s singing, “I should’ve asked you how to be / Asked you to write it down for me / Should’ve kept every grocery store receipt / ‘Cause every scrap of you would be taken from me.” Any kid who ever took for granted that a cherished elder would always be around has been there, but the specificity of just how tiny a remnant she’d settle for is heart-rending. And it’s hard to imagine anything to melt your already-rended heart more than Swift pulling out the stops to actually include an audio excerpt of her grandmother’s operatic singing for a ghostly coda. This has been your pool (as in, puddle on the floor) reporter.

No amazing amount of depth to this one — it’s just pure cotton candy, with a little emotional fiber sprinkled around the edges. Her fandom is in near-universal agreement that this should have been a single to accompany her planned “LoverFest” tour of 2019, but that summer turned out to be crueler than anyone imagined, so it was a smash only in an alternate reality. The kind of Vocoder part in the call-and-response verses suggests this bop has an origin point somewhere in the ELO era, and of course it’s hard not to think of Banamarama, who were also cruelty-tested once upon a time. But this was all late-2010s in all its glory, before that glory got masked up.

The premise of the closing song of “Midnights” sounds almost megalomaniacal, when you read it on paper, and maybe even when you’re first hearing the brashness of the lyric. Swift sings that, as a not-so-evil genius, she pre-engineered every aspect of coming together with the partner with whom she now shares a deep, fulfilling relationship. It’s a statement of near-omnipotence you usually only find in pop songs with darker leanings. To an extent, we have to understand that she’s exaggerating, for effect, about these apparent superpowers of hers. And yet the end intent of the song is deeply serious: She’s explaining that women historically have to go to extreme lengths to be the steerer in relationships that controlling men typically screw up. There’s also a whole backstory about the childhood slights that led her to develop these powers to manipulate for good. This leads to one of the greatest lines in all of Swift-dom: “I swear, I’m only cryptic and Machiavellian ’cause I care.” Is she kidding with that lyric? At least a little, I’m sure. Is she dead-serious, too? Undoubtedly. Suffice it to say that entire thesis papers will be written just about this one audacious track.

Back in the “Fearless” days, we occasionally got Taylor Swift, the rock singer. (Arguably, we still have her, just without the rock arrangements.) The prime example was this track that pitted the polite guy who does everything right, who inspires no passion at all, versus the apparent scoundrel she was forced to leave behind, who made her want to stand in monsoons. Rock ‘n’ roll was played as a character trait for Mr. Passion, versus the string quartet on the verses that represented Mr. Right. Hearing those slamming guitars kind of fade in, the way they occasionally do on hits like “I Touch Myself,” was a nice way to alert the listener there’s a storm coming. However exaggerated the differences in this triangle might have been, it was only album 2 and Swift was already wanting to signal she wasn’t completely the Nice Girl portrayed on album 1.

It got a little confusing, for non-hardcore Swifties, trying to figure out which characters in which “Folklore” songs were which, after she revealed some of them recurred and had payoffs from one tune to another. Does the couple that shares a sweter together stay together? Did they come back together years later, as the pining outro strongly suggests? What we can say for sure is that Taylor Swift firmly cemented what Mister Rogers first promised: the cardigan as a signifier that everything is going to be all right.

So much of the “Fearless” album came to be about the bracingly candid breakup songs, or embracing the fairy tale, in “Love Story,” and rejecting it, in “White Horse” (and “Fifteen,” for that matter). That was more than enough grist to get Swift the first of her three album of the year Grammy wins, while she was still a teenager. But amid all that high romance and higher drama, there’s something at least as enduring about the simpler ambitions of the title song, which just speaks — via a typically great melodic line — to being unafraid. It was followed by a career that’s embraced what the song promised at pretty much every moment.

One thing that Swift didn’t have a lot of in her catalog: 6/8 waltzes. Situation rectified! It’s a wedding song for people who don’t intend, right away at least, to get married — there’s even a fakeout wedding scene in the middle of the song that ends with them vowing in front of God and onlookers to be, well, lovers — but anyone who wants to use it for actual nuptials probably gets a pass. It’s just universal enough to get that kind of usage in American customs and rituals, but you have to savor the bits that are pure Swift, whether it’s the guitar-string scars on her fingers or her custom-made vow: “Swear to be overdramatic and true.” Wait, is it her entire public she’s pretend-marrying, as well as this guy?

At 6 minutes and 44 seconds, it’s still the longest song she’s released that doesn’t actually announce its running time in the title. And as a slow burn, it ends every second of the anger, sorrow, shame, lashing out and self-reclamation it unleashes. “Dear John,” about a character that the title does not leave too much cryptic mystery about, details the worst night she ever had that involved someone showing up for her party instead of missing it. At the time, it felt jolting well beyond expectation, that after the kiss-off experiences detailed in her previous album, she’d moved on to unabashedly detail what she considered a far more damaging experience. In retrospect, it doesn’t play as quite as musically furious a ballad as it seemed at the time, but it still packs a hell of a punch. And she still means it: One of the bonus tracks on the “Midnights” album, “Would’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve,” is clearly intended as a 12-years-later sequel, with certain numerological connotations that give her meaning away even if the lyrics didn’t. In Swift land, there are certain things you never get over — a curse, but for the purposes of art, also a blessing.

This is not necessarily the song you want to go back to constantly for pleasure now, but what a pleasure it was in 2016 when Swift used it to explode her own mythos, in one of the great power moves of modern pop. Her goal, she said, was to take every terrible trope that was being spread about her (hey, didja hear she was a serial dater?) and own it in a prideful anthem of ill will. And she did it magnificently, playing her public like a violin, including the ones who mostly got it and even the smaller portion that was left puzzled by her pop variant on country music’s classic “Your Good Girl’s Gonna Go Bad.” The satire was broad, but effective. Unfortunately, looking at the generation of influencers that’s arisen since, it’s not clear that some of them didn’t just take this spoof as a how-to manual.

The finest song from Swift’s first album is an idyllic vision of an America where screen doors slam behind happy families and innocent teen lovers, who keep their late-night phone calls on the down-low “’cause it’s late, and your mama don’t know.” Imagine such a wonderful place exists — it’s easy if you try. Yes, it’s a song of puppy love, but maybe more importantly, it’s a Taylor Swift origin story. The premise of the lyric is that the developing couple, who are working up the courage to kiss, does not have “their song” yet. (They may have their artist, Tim McGraw, but that’s different, right?) So the tune ends with her sitting down to put pen to paper to write one, instead of passively waiting for something suitable to come up on the radio they can adopt. Mostly, you’ve probably thought of this as a frilly crush song — and it’s a great one of those, too — but what it really is first and foremost, right under our noses, is a declaration of young female artistic agency.

Surely you know the story behind this, among the greatest of all “answer” songs. Girl meets industry blogger boy; industry blogger professes admiration until her somewhat off-key performance at the Grammys causes him to spontaneously declare girl’s career completely over; girl writes song pushing back on that, landing a triple-platinum single with her response. And she does it with a pointed return to country music, something she had already effectively moved past in everything but name by the “Speak Now” album, singing in a childlike tone that made her sound like a little hillbilly David, taking on an influencer Goliath. Probably not many of those millions of fans paid close attention to the exact background to the lyrics. But apart from the “I can’t sing” bridge, this song was applicable to anyone who’s ever felt bullied in life, by a classmate, boss, family member, etc. It’s too bad it predated the social media explosion, by a little: “Mean” is really the Twitter National Anthem.

Listening to the “Folklore” album, you could jump to assume that “Gold Rush,” like some of the other songs, is character writing. Otherwise, why would Swift be coming up with a song about someone who’s even prettier than she is, whose sheer charm takes up all the oxygen in a room — something that can’t be happening a lot to one of the most sought-after pop superstars in the world? Unless there was a romantic partner in her past who actually fit that bill… someone whose “hair (was) falling into place like dominos”… It all starts to make sense. But even if you don’t read that far into it, it’s a phenomenal song about the price being paid for being around that kind of charisma being too high to pay, whoever the charmer might be.

When “Midnights” first came out, with none of the songs pre-issued to the public, if you weren’t paying attention to video premieres or that sort of splash, you might have taken “Anti Hero” as one of the odder songs on the album, not a sure out-of-the-box hit. But in Swift land, slightly weird works. Even the initial minor controversy over the “sexy baby” line — is it cribbed from “50 Rock,” or is it infantilization — abated, as almost everyone took it for as funny as it was, in the course of a verse where Swift is imagining herself as a feared and hated monster who’s going to be taken down. It’s a song about self-loathing, as she described it, and imposter syndrome, and clinical or unclinical depression… and wouldn’t you know, it’s also a deeply funny bop. That we can have such a bizarre amalgam at the top of the Hot 100 for weeks on end proves that, thanks to Swift being able to sell something this idiosyncratic, these are strange and wonderful times.

This is not the first time Swift relegated one of an album’s better numbers to bonus-track status, although she usually makes the right editing decisions. But “Right Where You Left Me” is another case entirely from, say, even “New Romantics”: The “Evermore” deluxe-edition also-ran is flatly one of her best and most dramatic songs, period. As a song about not being able to let go of an obsession with a deceased relationship, it’s pretty close to being up there with “All Too Well,” even if the fact that it’s written mostly in metaphor lands it in slightly more intellectualized territory than that other favorite.

Playing the role of someone presumably other than herself for this one, Swift describes in calm, cool, clipped sentences how she was dumped by a beau at a dinner meeting, and then simply never got up from the table, herself; she’s been frozen in place there, a ghost, for years. (Lucky or unlucky for her, not a high table turnover rate at this place.) If you are obsessive enough by nature to have become obsessed with the obsession in “All Too Well” — show of hands? — then you’ll probably have lived “Right Where You Left Me” at some point in your life. Swift’s talky verses suggest the cadences of somebody who really has been only talking to herself for too long, and collaborator Aaron Dessner is a perfect foil in creating a tense, slow build toward a big chill. A bit of sad, distorted guitar at the end sounds like it might be being piped in from the alternate dimension the protagonist is slowly sinking into.

Swift has plenty of superior instances across her many records of breakups that sound like the end of the world. But she doesn’t have many of them that sound like a party. “We Are Never…” is the best bacchanal in her catalog. I’m not sure I want to join the exact celebration that is happening in her music video for the song, because furries are scary. But the way Max Martin and Shellback stacked her vocals on this fizzy delight of a song clearly aurally indicate that Swift is capable of having a freedom soiree all by herself. Everything here clicks into place for a start-to-finish perfect pop song, from the peculiar stop-and-start opening guitar riff to the cheerleader-style chant that makes the chorus one of the great modern pop sing-alongs. Even all the indie bands whose records her ex thought were much cooler than her love this song. And, of course, embedding a voice memo late in the track, one in which Swift seems to be spontaneously describing a recent split with language that will make its way into the song title, is just a hilarious power move.

A sense of recovery from trauma figures into a number of Swift’s songs, most of all this “1989” closer that represented a one-time co-write with indie artist Imogene Heap. The word “clean” is used with two different meanings here, although pretty much toward a common end. It’s clean as in the feeling of taking a prolonged shower after the accumulated grime of a sucky relationship… or as in getting clean, kicking an addition to toxic love. Either way, there’s been some bad juju at play, and somebody — Nurse Heap, maybe? — is helping take the curse off. What prompted Swift to co-write this calming, cathartic ballad is probably nobody’s business, but a lot of listeners have brought their own ugly experiences or addictive experiences to bear in appreciating this bath-salt ballad.

“I’ll be your mirror,” the Velvet Underground once sang; this is Swift following up with: “Let me count the ways.” The Antonoff-cowritten “Folklore” track really does qualify as “shimmering,” for lack of a less obvious word. But deceptively so — Swift obviously doesn’t mean to suggest that serving as a pure reflector to the world’s varying wants and needs is a healthy thing, even though she sounds awfully darn pliant about the prospect within the confines of the magical music. This one has been compared to the Sundays and other prettily guitar-based indie-pop groups of yore, with a lulling electric guitar and a missing drumbeat you keep expecting to kick the song further into gear at any moment, in vain. It’s all so lovely — the funny thing is, in coming up with a song about being a people-pleaser, she came up with one of her most legitimately ear-pleasing tunes.

Swift’s partner in this deeply sexy track is cosplaying as James Dean, at least in her mind, and she’s cosplaying as… Taylor Swift? Thee’s no duet part to let his hear point of view, but she does attest that he likes her “good girl faith and a tight little skirt,” and there’s no reason to believe she’s misreporting what turns the guy on. Honestly, Swift has never written a less deep song, and depth has never mattered so little, either. Max Martin and Shellback put some of their computer programming instincts aside to start this off with an R&B electric guitar riff that immediately sucks you in. And once the kind of light-disco-martial beat kicks in, the track feels like taking an open-top drive around Miami with Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas, only they’re a horny hetero cis couple.

Swift was playing with a lot of fresh tricks on her “Reputation” album, and well, from some hip-hop styled phrasing on her part to some harsher electronic sounds being brought in by Max Martin and Shellback, making their final appearance to date on a Swift album. But with her other go-to collaborator of the time, Jack Antonoff, Swift crafted the song that is the most conventional-sounding track on the album, and also ultimately the best: “Getaway Car.” While much of the rest of the album flits back and forth between a defensive posture against public perceptions and an embrace of secret love, “Getaway Car” is something else altogether: an open letter of intent to move on, sung by a Bonnie who’s about to ditch her Clyde, with no particular shame or guilt attached to her leavin’ feelings.

In some ways this might be the most hard-ass song Swift ever wrote — it’s pretty close to a taunt, to a soon-to-be ex. She’s describing the dynamic of how sometimes you need a fresh flirtation to pull you out of a failing relationship, and how that can take on serial form: “Don’t pretend it’s such a mystery / Think about the place where you first met me / Ridin’ in a getaway car,” she tells the possibly uncomprehending fellow. This is an uptempo track with a lot of fun to how it plays, but the haunting quality of the chorus melody makes it feel profoundly sad, too, like she’s not as tough as she sounds, describing an escape pattern that’s just destined to be repeated by her and others over and over. Anyway, if you were to read this as literally about her past, it’s something that the public record shows she’s clearly moved on from. The happy ending is inherent, leaving us this strangely wonderful combination of arena-rock and hardboiled, fatalist noir to enjoy as one of her most fascinating tracks.

In its original, truncated form on the “Red” album, “All Too Well” already felt a fluid narrative, but stretched out to more than twice its length for a “Taylor’s Version” remake, its details and remembrances transcend any sense of linear narrative. The song’s story feels almost like a “Groundhog Day” of meditative pain in which the story will never end because the couple will just never stop breaking up, in her mind. (Well, it might end if the sister ever returned the damn scarf, but by this point she don’t need their closure.) It becomes almost like a chant, even more soothing than it is bitter.

Having effectively talked Swift into recording a 10-minute draft of the song with their longstanding, cult-like devotion to the tune, Swifties need to take it to the next level. You know there have got to be another 10 minutes’ worth of rough verses to “All Too Well” in a drawer somewhere. We need the full-on Gregorian experience of this song, right? It’s time to petition for “All Too Well (20-Minute Version).” (Could you even imagine the explosion of joy?)

It’s as eternally teenaged as anything Swift ever wrote, but that’s no reason to have to grow out of it. Adult life is full of nothing if not many equivalents to high-school friend-zoning. Who among us eer stops wishing we’d be seen for our true selves by the guy who can’t take his eyes off the cheer captain, whether for us that’s the boss, peers, a distracted spouse or a seemingly indifferent deity? To the end, we beat on — boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the bleachers!

But seriously, has there been anything more monstrously hooky than this in the succeeding decade and a half? Even the parts of the song that seem like they shouldn’t work — like the way that Swift adds extra, melodically odd lines to the second verse (“What you doing with a girl like that?” What you doing singing in a key like that?) — only masterfully set up the return to the chorus to end all 21st century anthemic choruses. It is all of human yearning and striving packed into a song about remembering to take your specs off so the kid next door realizes you’re a cutie.