taylorconnect

[taylorconnect]

TAYLOR ALMOST CALLED DEBUT A PLACE IN THIS WORLD?????

(knoxville news senteniel, july 21, 2006)

[taylorconnect]

Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show.

[taylorconnect]

“Back to December (Radio Edit)” Back to December (Single) 2010

This version of the song aired on country music stations and is shortened to meet radio airtime limits. It does not appear on any copies of the single.

[taylorconnect]

Live From The 52nd Grammy Awards // link

Tracklist

Today Was A Fairytale (Live From The 52nd Grammy Awards)

Rhiannon (feat. Stevie Nicks) [Live From The 52nd Grammy Awards]

You Belong With Me (feat. Stevie Nicks) [Live From The 52nd Grammy Awards]

[taylorconnect]

Midnights Timeline

This is a very long post that puts all the songs on Midnights in order of Taylor creating them. I’ve also included a few other songs she worked on while writing Midnights and quotes from Taylor and her collaborators talking about her process.

If you don't want to read all that, check out this playlist of the album in order, or this playlist of her entire discography. WARNING: there is a very large chunk on the playlists that I have no information on (Maroon-Dear Reader).

I’ve also added this color coded scale of how sure I am of the date: 

Confirmed: There is some type of official source for the date

Inferring: Nobody has officially said “This is when we wrote it,” but all available evidence points to that date

Speculation: This date is based off pure vibes and guesswork and is highly likely to change.

Unknown: All that is known is the year (from the US Copyright Offices

Renegade: March 7-15, 2021 (Confirmed)

Aaron: “I wrote the music [for Renegade] at some point after we finished [evermore], and sent it to her, because she was inspired by a llot of the Big Red Machine stuff we were working on. And she had already sung on Birch, a song that hasn't come out yet but is one of the major ones on the record. And I think she wanted to write a song for Big Red Machine. She very much feels like part of this community to me. So I wrote Renegade, the music, and sent it to her. And not unlike a lot of the things we've done together, one day I woke up to a voice memo from her and she had written this incredible song about how anxiety and fear get in the way of loving or being loved. And she was clearly thinking about Big Red Machine. And then we recorded her vocals and everything the week of the Grammys, when I was there in LA, and it was really nice to have something to think about that wasn't related to the Grammys - just to make music because you feel like making it." (transcript from jaimie)

High Infidelity and Would've Could've Should've: March 7-15, 2021 (Confirmed)

Aaron: [Would've Could've Should've], we wrote that song together, and recorded it while we were together in LA for the folklore Grammys. It goes back that far. And the same with High Infidelity. Those songs, we actually recorded in her house, the vocals, we recorded them then. And I just kept making music, and it was kind, after we had made folklore and evermore, I started to have ideas which I would share. And eventually, she obviously made most of Midnights with Jack, and it became something different. But High Infidelity, and Would’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve, and The Great War, and we made Hits Different with Jack and Taylor and I also, and it was great to be part of that record in that way. (transcript from @cages-boxes-hunters-foxes)

The Great War and Hits Different: between April-October 2021 (Speculation)

In the above quote talking about his songs on Midnights, Aaron says "Eventually, she obviously made most of Midnights with Jack, and it became something different," implying his stuff was written before the bulk of midnights in fall. He also says High Infidelity and Would've Could've Should've "[go] back that far," which implies they were some of the earliest stuff on Midnights, so it's safe to assume TGW and Hits Different come sometime afterwards.

Summer 2021: Jack has a session with Sounwave, Sam Dew, and Zoe Kravitz, where the instrumentals for Lavender Haze and likely Glitch are written

Rolling Stone interview with Sounwave: Before Antonoff began to work on Swift’s tenth album, he was cooking up tracks with Spears, Dew, and Zoë Kravitz [...] During a brainstorming session, the quartet put together a track that would eventually become “Lavender Haze.”

November 3 2021: It was announced that Joe has been cast in Stars at Noon, alongside Margaret Qualley, Jack Antonoff's then girlfriend now wife. Since Joe was parachuted into the film last minute, filming had already started, making it likely he left as soon as possible.

Taylor: We’d been toying with ideas and had written a few things we loved, but Midnights actually really coalesced and flowed out of us when our partners (both actors) did a film together in Panama. Jack and I found ourselves back in New York, alone, recording every night, staying up late and exploring old memories and midnights past.

November 8: Jack gets back from touring with Bleachers. Let the games begin.

Vigilante Shit: November 2021 (Speculation)

Vigilante Shit is the sole solo writing credit on the album, which implies it was written before her and Jack were holed up together 24/7. Also Scooter and his wife divorced in July. Beyond that there's no evidence this is early in the process, besides it making sense that Taylor wrote this alone, brought it to Jack, and then fell into a creative inferno.

Maroon, Anti-Hero, You're on Your Own Kid, Midnight Rain, Bejeweled, Labyrinth, Mastermind, Paris, and Dear Reader: November/December 2021 (Inferring)

I don't have enough info on the making of any of these songs to give them each their own little blurb, but if anything pops up I will update this post and reblog it letting y’all know.

Question..?: After November 21, 2021 (Inferring)

We know Rachel Antonoff, Dylan O'Brien, and Austin Swift were there the day they recorded it thanks to this behind the scenes footage of them recording the cheering vocals. Dylan was filming The Vanishings at Caddo Lake in Louisiana sometime between October 5 and November 20. I don't know exactly which dates he was filming-- he was in New York for All Too Well filming in late October and to attend the premiere on November 12, but since we know for sure he was in Louisiana on the 20th, I'm just gonna Occam's Razor it and say Question was written sometime after he got back from that.

You're Losing Me: December 5, 2021 (Confirmed)

December 17, 2021: Filming wraps on Stars at Noon, and with it the bulk of recording for Midnights.

Lavender Haze: Early 2022 (Speculation)

Lavender Haze, Snow on the Beach, and Karma are the only songs to have Henson Recording Studios credited (I can't find studio credits for the 3am tracks so there is possibly more on there). This could point to them all being recorded around the same time time, or it could be in reference to Jack and Sounwave's original recording sessions taking place at Hensen. I lean towards the former, since 1) it seems like the Winter 2021 sessions were mostly between Taylor and Jack, and the spring sessions have other collaborators, and 2) the tabloid rumors about Taylor and Joe getting engaged really started heating up in February 2022. On the other hand, Sounwave implies that there was a notable stretch of time between Lavender Haze and Karma, so I totally understand if you want to put it with the rest of the Winter 2021 sessions. Rolling Stone interview with Sounwave: A few months [after Jack and Sounwave wrote the instrumentals], Antonoff reached out to Spears, Dew, and Kravitz to see if he could pitch [Lavender Haze] to Swift, who loved it immediately. She wrote lyrics inspired by a Mad Men scene, numerous tabloid rumors and online gossip about her relationship status, and “1950s expectations.” “When Jack brought us in the hear for the first time, all our mouths dropped. She took it to a whole new world and made it her own. She created different pockets we did not hear.”

Glitch: Early 2022 (Speculation)

Rolling Stone interview with Sounwave: "Glitch,” one of the bonus songs on the Midnights (3am) edition, was born from the same studio session as “Lavender Haze.” I don't know if this means the instrumentals to Lavender Haze and Glitch were done in the same session, Taylor wrote the lyrics in the same session, or both. For the same reason as Lavender Haze, I lean towards this coming later in the process, as well as Glitch mentioning being together for six years, and in November 2021 Taylor and Joe had been together for a little over 5 years. That being said, Taylor could've assume the album was going to come out in 2022, and that she would stay with Joe until then, and bump up that date a bit. It's still very up in the air.

February 5, 2022: Taylor is photographed leaving Jack's house holding a keyboard.

Sweet Nothing: Spring 2022 (Inferring)

Joe is a co-write on this, meaning they likely wrote it after he got back from filming. It also mentions their trip to Ireland in 2021 and refers to it as "last July", implying it was written in 2022. While I was writing this timeline Taylor liked this post on twitter, implying that at least the second verse is in reference to Paul and Linda McCartney. The quote is from his poem Blessed, which you can read in this interview (TWs for death and cancer)

Bigger Than The Whole Sky: March 2022 (Inferring)

Claire Winter, a close friend of Taylor's, posts on Instagram that she miscarried. (I toyed with whether or not to add this, but seeing as Claire Winter made the information public herself, I decided to put it in. If she ever takes that Instagram post down, let me know and I'll delete this part.)

Snow on the Beach: April 1, 2022 (Inferring)

On April 1, Lana Del Rey posts a video on Instagram of Jack in the studio with an unidentified female voice in the background. Two days later she posts this photo, which Taylor and Jack both include in posts about Midnights/Snow on the Beach. Lana: Well, first of all, I had no idea I was the only feature [on that song]. Had I known, I would have sung the entire second verse like she wanted. My job as a feature on a big artist’s album is to make sure I help add to the production of the song, so I was more focused on the production. She was very adamant that she wanted me to be on the album, and I really liked that song. I thought it was nice to be able to bridge that world, since Jack [Antonoff] and I work together and so do Jack and Taylor. Taylor: And with Snow On The Beach, which features the genius Lana Del Rey, very lucky to have collaborated with her on that. And Dylan [O’Brien] was actually in the studio with me and Jack, because a lot of the time we record at his place, and Dylan was just hanging out, drinking wine with us, and listening to stuff, and he was just trying out the drum kit there. He wasn't serious. But we were drinking wine, and we were sort of like, 'We haven't recorded the drums for this one yet! See if you want to...' and he played the drums on the song. Sometimes it just happens like that. (transcript once again from jaimie)

Karma: Spring 2022 (Speculation)

Rolling Stone interview with Sounwave: The bubbly “Karma” came later [than Lavender Haze and Glitch], when Antonoff reached out to Spears for any other ideas he may have to contribute to the album and its synth-pop vision. “‘Karma’ was just a last-minute Hail Mary,” Spears says. “I remembered I was working with my guy Keanu [Beats] and had something that was too perfect not to send to her. As soon as I sent it, Jack was instantly like ‘This is the one. Playing it for Taylor now. We’re going in on it.’ The next day, I heard the final product with her vocals on it.”

April 19, 2022: Elle's interview with the Conversations with Friends cast is released, and when Joe is "asked if he hopes to continue writing songs, Alwyn simply says, “It’s not a plan of mine, no.”" It's possible this means Sweet Nothing was yet to be written, but I think it's more likely Joe was just denying in order to not create hype around a song that wasn't officially announced yet.

May 2022: Taylor teases Labyrinth lyrics in her NYU Commencement Speech and says m i d n i g h t very prominently on this instagram post, meaning by early summer she was likely confident in the album's name and which songs would make the tracklist.

And that's all for this timeline! Check out my others:

TIMELINES: debut • fearless • speak now • red • 1989 • rep • lover • folklore • evermore • midnights PLAYLISTS: debut • fearless • speak now • red • 1989 • rep • lover • folklore • evermore • midnights • entire discography GENERAL: tag

[taylorconnect]

Reputation Timeline

This is a very long post that puts all the songs on Reputation in order of Taylor creating them. I’ve also included a few other songs she worked on while writing rep and quotes from Taylor and her collaborators talking about her process.

If you don’t want to read all that, check out this playlist of the album in order or this playlist of her entire discography.

Keep reading

[taylorconnect]

Red Timeline (Pt. 2)

This is a very long post that puts all the songs on Red in order of Taylor making them, with as many specific dates as possible. I’ve also included other songs she wrote while writing Red and quotes from Taylor and her collaborators talking about her process. 

Because she wrote so much for Red, I’ve had to split this timeline into two parts. This one covers the songs she wrote in 2012:

Treacherous, I Knew You Were Trouble, 22, We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together, The Last Time, Holy Ground, The Lucky One, Everything Has Changed, Come Back... Be Here, Girl At Home, Nothing New, Babe, Message In A Bottle, Forever Winter, Run, The Very First Night (2010-2011 songs here)

If you don't want to read the whole post, check out this playlist of the album in order or this playlist of her entire discography.

KEY:

Song Dates:

🟢: There is some type of official source for the date

🟡: There isn’t an official source, but everything points to that date

🟠: I’m pretty sure that this is when it was written, but I wouldn’t be shocked if I was wrong. Or the period of time is just too large to be a definite date

🔴: Unknown, year comes from copyright

Other:

✍️: Record of Taylor (possibly) writing a song

🎤: Record of Taylor (possibly) recording a song

📌: Misc. Album activity

📌 January 2012: Moved to LA to work with new producers

Taylor: "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.'" Taylor: "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 [Chapman]."

🟠 January 2012: Girl At Home

Girl at Home is a little blip in the timeline– it's the only song that was produced by Nathan Chapman in 2012. There's lots of ways you could speculate about that– perhaps she was trying to see how producing a pop song with Nathan would turn out, perhaps it's evidence for the persistent rumors that Girl at Home is a demo. Either way, I'm inclined to put it as early in the timeline as possible. Nathan Chapman posted some behind the scenes photos of the Red and Speak Now sessions on instagram. The one below was likely taken while she was recording Girl at Home– it shows Taylor in Nathan's home studio with bangs and straight hair, and the only song recorded in his home studio after she had cut her hair is Girl At Home. (She is also bundled up, adding credence to Girl At Home being recorded in winter. But then again, Taylor is fond of being bundled up, so I wouldn't read into it too much).

🟡 January 2012: I Knew You Were Trouble (First Draft)

Taylor: "I wrote this melody for this chorus on the piano." Taylor: "I remember bringing in this slow, sad thing that I had written, called 'I Knew You Were Trouble.' I had originally called it 'Trouble'" Taylor: "'I Knew You Were Trouble' was an idea that I got almost six months before I was scheduled to write with Max Martin, and I emailed him and said 'I just got this idea, I can't wait to bring it to you. I know that we're not writing for a few months, but I just, I need you to know, I thought of this thing, I can't wait for you to hear it.'"

Taylor first wrote with Max Martin in late April, meaning Trouble was possibly conceived as early as October 2011. However, it seems like she didn't know she would write with Max Martin until December 2011 at the earliest, so I'm inclined to place this in January 2012, six months before they finish writing Trouble in June.

🟢 February 2012: Holy Ground

Lover Diaries

📌 February 13, 2012: MTV interview:

"So far, I've been writing so much in the last year and the label keeps telling me, 'All right, we're finished; all right, we're satisfied; OK, this is done now.' And then I just keep writing and I keep turning it in in different versions [...] I'm going to work on it until I literally have zero time left to work on it, because I'm having so much fun working on this album [...] I'm getting to work with people that I've always wanted to work with, from all different places in music. I'm trying to be as much of a sponge as possible. You have to evolve and try new things and change and that's what I've loved to do with this album."

📌 February 15, 2012: Extra Tv Interview: 

"I'm really excited about the next record. I'm so excited about it. I've been writing it since before the last record came out, so there's been so much that has been amazing to write about, and you know right now I'm just having to pick from like the 30* songs that I have, that I love, and pick the best ones." [...] This has got to be the best form of revenge, just write hit songs about it. "Yeah, it’s not bad. But there’s the pressure of, like, it has to be good, and if it’s not, then your ex is kinda just like, "Ha-ha, it’s not good." So there’s the pressure of, you have to make a great record. And for me, I’m just obsessed with it when I’m making an album because I just want it to be better than all the ones I've made before, and I kind of compete with myself. I just drive myself insane with it." *Grain of salt: The amount of songs Taylor says she wrote for Red at different points doesn't add up, so give or take 5 songs.

🟢 February 29, 2012: Nothing New

In the below journal, Taylor mentions writing Nothing New on the plane ride from Sydeny to Perth. She arrives at the Sydney Airport on February 29, and was in Perth on March 1.

✍️ March 2, 2012: Lover Diary entry:

"I've been thinking a lot about getting older and relevancy and how all my heroes have ended up alone. I wrote a song on the plane ride from Sydney to Perth on the appalachain dulcimer I bought the day of my flight. I bought it because Joni played on most of her blue record. I taught myself to play 'A Case of You.' Anyway, I wrote a song on it called "Nothin New" and it's about being scared of aging and things changing and losing what you have. It says "I'm getting older and less sure of what you like about me anyway." And in the chorus it says "How can a person know everything at 18, and nothing at 22? And will you still want me … when I'm nothing new." It's a really vulnerable song, but I think it's important to say."

🟢 Early March, 2012: The Lucky One

Taylor: "'The Lucky One' is a song that I wrote while I was in Australia. And it kind of talks about some of my fears, through telling the story of other people that I was inspired by. But, more than their stories being told... I'm pretty much singing about what I'm scared of."

Taylor was in Australia from March 1-14, 2012.

📌 April 1, 2012: 99.5 WYCD interview: "I've been in the studio in the last week."

Just based on when the songs were written, she was probably recording Holy Ground and The Lucky One with Jeff Bhasker.

📌 April 1, 2012: Philippine Daily Inquirer interview: When you meet someone that you're attracted to, do you go, "Here's a song"? "That can happen. I get inspired by the smallest or the biggest things. You meet someone and you wonder if you'll ever see them again. I could write so many songs about that. I have written so many songs about that. Wait till you hear my next record, it's all about that."

📌 April 2, 2012: Train: "Last night @/taylorswift13 told me DRIVE BY is her favorite song right now. Took this long to get my speech back. Big deal 4 us! Thank u, T!"

Babe was written with Pat Monahan, the lead singer of Train. To me, this implies that they hadn't yet worked together– Train seems genuinely surprised that Taylor likes their music. –

📌 April 5, 2012: Rolling Stone interview: "I have the entire summer just to finish up the rec­ord," says Swift, "so that will be awesome." Expect some new tricks: "There are a few songs that are completely from another person's perspective," adds the singer. "I really like the feeling of making little departures musically."

📌 April 12, 2012: Twitter: "Recording the next album. So happy"

This appears to have been taken in Dan Wilson's house, her producer for Treacherous and Come Back Be Here

🟡 April 12, 2012: Treacherous

Dan Wilson: "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."

🟡 April 13, 2012: Come Back… Be Here

Dan Wilson*: "We squeezed in two days, before a trip I was taking, and we did a song each day, totally countryside. But it was extremely inspiring. She gets such backhand appreciation from the press, but it's a bunch of bullshit. She's so spontaneous, and she was really on fire for the sessions we did together." *I can not find the original source for this quote. It started popping up on multiple sites around August 2013.

🟡 April 23, 2012: Message in a Bottle

Taylor: [Before writing WANEGBT] "I was in the studio with [Max Martin and Shellback] and we were writing a completely different song, about like, liking someone who doesn't know you like them or something."

🎤 April 23, 2012: Twitter: "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"

🟡 April 24, 2012: We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together

Max Martin: "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 that 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. 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." Taylor: "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."

🟢 May 15, 2012: Run

Taylor (May 15, 2012): "Eating cheeseburgers, scribbling on guitars, writing songs with @/edsheeran :)" Ed Sheeran (May 15, 2012): "In and out burger, defacing guitars and writing music with @/taylorswift13 ;)" Taylor: "We had both reached out to each other's camps at the same time. I showed up at his hotel in Arizona and we just wrote songs all day." Ed: "So the very first time we met… So I played Nashville, and her mum, Andrea, came down to watch me at the Ryman [...] and we sorta met after that in a hotel room in… I want to say like Seattle* or something? It wasn’t like Los Angeles, New York, L.A., Nashville, it wasn’t like that, I think it was Seattle?" So Taylor Swift’s mom Andrea introduced you? "Well, originally it was Frank, who was her radio guy, so that was the original meeting. And then we were in a hotel room, had some, I think we had burgers? Had some burgers, had a guitar, and we wrote this Run song, and I think like, part of another song?" *It was definitely in Arizona. Ed had just played in Phoenix, and there is no In-n-Out in Seattle.

🟢 May 17, 2012: Forever Winter

Mark Foster: "We actually wrote a song that day [we were photographed]. It's a really cool song, you know? We kind of just went into it casually, like let's just jam and just have fun, and something really cool came out of it. So yeah, we'll see what happens with it. She's been writing a lot for her next record. But yeah, it was a lot of fun working with her, she's super talented."

Taylor and Mark Foster, her co-writer, were photographed having lunch together on May 17.

🟢 May 27, 2012: Everything Has Changed

Taylor: "The first idea that hit me was this part of the song [...] there's a part on this song that goes 'I just want to know you better, know you better', and I got that idea while I was riding in the car with my friend Claire [Winters, probably], and she's talking about, like, 'Oh my God and then my sister says to me, this this this–' and she's like, 'What are you singing?' and I'm like [muffled] 'I just want to know you better–' and then the next day, I had demoed up the song with Ed, and she's like 'That's what you were singing in the car!'" Ed Sheeran: "When I landed in Los Angeles to record [Run], it was like the day before, she just said 'come round my house, we'll jam,' or whatever, and we jammed and wrote 'Everything Has Changed'. So those two songs were written probably in the space of two weeks." Ed Sheeran: "She has a little Taylor guitar, she got it out and she's like, 'I had this idea for this song,' ... and she pretty much had the verse, bridge and chorus done, but we argued about that one chord: "I just want to know you, better know you" – she didn't like that, and I kind of forced it upon her. It was quite a funny situation. [We were] surrounded by Grammys; she has like seven or eight, and like, Billboard Awards and Songwriting Guild, and I'm like, 'this chord,' and she's like [pointing to her awards]."

It's possible Taylor was flubbing the timeline a little bit, and actually came up with EHC while hanging out with Claire Winters on the 23rd, but it's also possible her and Claire hung out without posting it to Instagram.

🎤 May 28, 2012: Taylor and Ed were photographed entering a recording studio.

📌 May 31, 2012: Scott Borchetta: "Was with miss Swift yesterday... Omg... She is writing like crazy... I know it's hard to wait but I promise it will be worth it..."

🟢 June 1, 2012: 22

Taylor: Taylor says she wrote that particular "big" chorus [...] on a plane, on her way to a co-writing session with hit making writers and producers Max Martin and Shellback. "I walked in and I was so excited about it, and I played it for them and they were like, 'All right. Let's do this!' They loved it, too," Taylor recalls. "It was really, kind of, an exciting moment for me...[that] they loved it enough to not really change much about it and just to build out from there, and to write the rest of the song."

🟢 June 2, 2012: I Knew You Were Trouble

Taylor: "I brought it to Max Martin and Shellback, and I said, "At the end of the chorus I just want this to go crazy. I want it to be really chaotic; I want the bass line to do this, like [makes loud GUH GUH GUH sound] [...] I don't really know what to call it, but I just kind of sing it how I want it to sound. And they're like, "Oh, sort of like a dubstep thing." And I'm like, "I guess, I don't know? Whatever that is, whatever that ridiculous sound that I made with my mouth when I was trying to figure out what to say." You end up doing a lot of that when you're recording and writing, being like "It kinda sounds like this! [Does a laser-y SCHOOM sound]." I wanted the song to sound as chaotic as the emotion felt. I wanted it to be loud and out of control." Taylor: "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 this amazing assignment. So the challenge of it was so thrilling for me."

🎤 June 5, 2012: Twitter: "It's been a wonderful week in the studio. I'm so excited about so much."

🟡 Early June: The Last Time

Gary Lightbody: "Her and Ed were recording the song they did on the record together in Santa Monica, about two blocks away from where I am standing right now. Ed invited me, with Taylor's permission, to come into the studio and say, "Hi." I'd never met Taylor. She said she was a fan. Apparently, the night before, she and Ed had been playing and singing "Set the Fire to the Third Bar" together. It was lovely to hear that she knew our music, you know. I can't remember if I was bold enough to ask if she wanted to work with me. But it might well have been me. Or if it was her who said, "Do you want to write a song together?" I can't remember. We wrote "The Last Time" together and that was great. The three of us collaborated on it really well." Gary Lightbody: "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: "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."

This was definitely written after May 29, when Taylor and Ed recorded Everything Has Changed, and before June 10, when Gary tweeted: "Last day in LA 2dy. Have had a great time writing, relaxing & clowning." Taylor and Gary's schedules don't line up until June 3 at the earliest.

📌 June 10, 2012: Lover Diary entry:

"I've been in the studio non stop. This week I was in with Max Martin and Johan Shellback, the guys I wrote 'Getting Back Together' with. The first day, I had to do this corporate performance for an arena full of managers [...] When I finished there, I got on the plane and this idea came to me "I don't know about you, but I'm feeling 22." I wrote the entire chorus on the plane ride to LA. When I landed, I went straight to the studio and played it for Max and Johan. They loved it. I was so excited. I wrote 22 about how much fun I've been having this summer and this year in general. It's so carefree and sounds like a summer anthem. I was floating on a cloud after we wrote it. The next day I brought them a chorus called 'Trouble' that's about how I should've known what I was getting into. We came back to 'Trouble' and it turned out to be absolutely amazing. It's so edgy and unexpected. It's almost dub step. My friends love that one the most. I love writing so much. It's the only thing that makes total sense to me. If I missed a day in the studio, I'd be so mad at myself. God I've been having such a beautiful life lately. I can't believe it. It's like there's magic in the air."

🔴Spring 2012: Unknown song

Ryan Adams: Adams [...] got a call from Swift while she was writing songs for her 2012 album Red, asking if they could work on a song together. "She basically already had this thing done [...] I just sat down and went, 'What about this?' And 'What about this?' We worked on a bridge, and we finished it. I guess I was the guy who could call people that would come in around 11 or 12 to jam."

🟠 Summer 2012: Babe

Pat Monahan: When he 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. The track didn't make the album, but Pat says eventually, when Taylor puts out a deluxe re-released version of Red, "the song, I think, will be on there [...] 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."

Pat could mean two albums when he says "He wanted to collaborate with her on a song for Train's next album"; California 37, released April 13, 2012, or Bulletproof Picasso, released September 12, 2014. Either one is a bit of a stretch. California 37 would've probably been wrapped sometime in early 2012– February, at latest. Taylor was still working in Nashville in Jan, but she was in LA in February, meaning it is possible for them to have worked together then. BUT we also have that Train tweet in April ("Last night @/taylorswift13 told me DRIVE BY is her favorite song right now. Took this long to get my speech back. Big deal 4 us! Thank u, T!") where they seem surprised that she likes Drive By, which was released in January– before they would've worked together. On the flip side, it would be weird to not only start writing for Bulletproof Picasso when they had just released an album a couple months before, but to be reaching out to collaborate. So just pick whatever feels less weird for you.

🟠 Summer 2012: The Very First Night

Espionage, the production team behind this, is based in New York, and are Train's longtime collaborators, meaning Taylor likely started working with them on Pat Monahan's recommendation.

📌 July 9, 2012: Finalized the album

Facebook: "Oh hey! I'm writing you from Nashville, where I just sat in a big room with a lot of people and made a lot of decisions about a lot of things happening very soon. And as vague as that sentence was, I think you know what it means. Stuff is about to happen. And I love you more than ever. Taylor"

📌 August 13, 2012: Album announcement

Taylor: "I ended up having to pick from between 30-35* songs that I had written that I really wanted to make the album. It was really hard to get it down to 16." *Grain of salt: The amount of songs Taylor says she wrote for Red at different points doesn't add up, so give or take 5 songs. In February, Taylor said she had written roughly 30 songs for the album. Taylor made 14 songs between that quote and this one. 

That's all for this timeline!

TIMELINES: debut • fearless • speak now • red • 1989 • rep • lover • folklore • evermore • midnights • ttpd PLAYLISTS: debut • fearless • speak now • red • 1989 • rep • lover • folklore • evermore • midnights • ttpd GENERAL: tag • entire discography playlist

[taylorconnect]

Red Timeline (Pt. 1)

This is a very long post that puts all the songs on Red in order of Taylor making them, with as many specific dates as possible. I’ve also included other songs she wrote while writing Red and quotes from Taylor and her collaborators talking about her process. 

Because she wrote so much for Red, I’ve had to split this timeline into two parts. This one covers the songs she wrote in 2010-2011:

State Of Grace, Red, All Too Well, I Almost Do, Stay Stay Stay, Sad Beautiful Tragic, Starlight, Begin Again, The Moment I Knew, Ronan, Better Man, I Bet You Think About Me, Both of Us (B.o.B.), Safe & Sound, and Eyes Open. (2012 songs here)

If you don't want to read the whole post, check out this playlist of the album in order or this playlist of her entire discography.

Key:

Song Dates:

🟢: There is some type of official source for the date

🟡: There isn’t an official source, but everything points to that date

🟠: I’m pretty sure that this is when it was written, but I wouldn’t be shocked if I was wrong. Or the period of time is just too large to be a definite date

🔴: Unknown, year comes from copyright

Other:

✍️: Record of Taylor (possibly) writing a song

🎤: Record of Taylor (possibly) recording a song

📌: Misc. Album activity

🟠 Summer 2010: Stay Stay Stay (First Draft)

The copyright for Stay Stay Stay says that it was created in 2010 (The only song on the album besides All Too Well). In January 2012, Taylor said that she had been writing songs for Red since before Speak Now came out. It's possible this was written towards the end of the year, but Taylor has mentioned a period of intense writer's block around that time, so I'm inclined to place this earlier.

📌 Late 2010: Six month long writer's block

Taylor: [All Too Well] came after a six-month writing drought that followed a particularly toxic relationship. "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." Liz Rose: “When we wrote [All Too Well], I hadn't heard from her in awhile. She hadn't really been writing.”

We don't know what six months she's talking about. The last song she writes for Speak Now is The Story Of Us, in June 2010, and the first song she writes for Red is All Too Well, in December, exactly six months. However, she stopped writing All Too Well for months at a time, so it's also possible she's talking about October 2010-March 2011, when she finishes writing All Too Well, which would line up with her relationship with Jake Gyllenhaal, and with the quote about writing songs for Red since before Speak Now came out.

🟡 December 2010: All Too Well (Rough Draft)

Taylor: "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!'" Taylor: "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.'"

🎤 December 13, 2010: Photographed entering and leaving a recording studio.

Probably for this radio interview, but in the interest of being thorough, I'm including it.

🟢 February 2011: All Too Well (First Draft)

I like to think she wrote this after attending the Vanity Fair Oscar party on February 27, but all we know for sure is that Taylor started actively working on All Too Well in February.

🟡 March 1-4, 2011: All Too Well

Taylor: "I ended up taking [the recording from rehearsals] home and listening to it and I was like, 'I actually really like this, but it definitely is like 10 minutes long and I need to pare it down, so I'm going to call Liz Rose. [...] And she came over, I played it for her, and she was like 'Whoa, I love this.' And so we kind of edited it and pared it down to what it is now, but that was a very serendipitous creation of song" Liz Rose: "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?' [...] 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."

Taylor left for tour on March 5 and was gone the rest of the month, meaning it had to have been written sometime in the first four days.

🟡 March 20, 2011: Better Man

Taylor: "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: "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."

Taylor had a tour date in Madrid on March 19, and then her and her band stayed there an extra day

🟢 March 2011: Begin Again (First Draft)

Taylor: "The first inspiration [for Begin Again] came when I was on tour in Europe [in early 2011]. I'd been alone for a while and had time to think about my past experiences. But I wrote it in pieces-I'd start and then second-guess myself. I had to sort through my own insecurities." Taylor was on tour in Europe from March 5-March 30, 2011.

✍️ March 24, 2011: Twitter: Writing a song all afternoon in my hotel room. Dublin, Ireland.

🟠 Spring 2011: State of Grace (First Draft)

Taylor: "'State of Grace' was a song that I wrote at the beginning process of making this album." Taylor: "When I wrote [State of Grace] I had that feeling like, ‘This is going to start the show, this will be what we start the show with.’"

By "the beginning process", she could mean the first half of the album, which was written in 2011 and produced by Nathan Chapman in Nashville, but that gets contradicted by her immediately saying Red (which was also written in 2011 and produced by Nathan Chapman in Nashville) was written "halfway through" making the album. So, I'm going to take the quote on its face value, and say State of Grace was written towards the beginning of the writing process, sometime in Spring 2011.

🟠 Spring 2011: The Moment I Knew

This could've been the song she was recording on her birthday in 2010, but I think that was from a radio interview she did that day. Taylor has talked about experiencing some pretty tough writer's block around that time, only broken by All Too Well, so I'm hesitant to say she wrote another song right before that. Furthermore, The Moment I Knew is copyrighted as being created in 2011.

📌 May 22, 2011: Billboard Music Awards interview: "Um, a timeline for the next album... I have no idea right now. I think that, for me, I just write whenever I'm inspired to do so– I've been constantly writing lately."

✍️ June 11, 2011: The New Yorker interview: 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." *Grain of salt: The amount of songs Taylor says she wrote for Red at different points doesn't add up, so give or take 5 songs. 

🟠 Early June, 2011: I Almost Do

It's possible we never heard that song about moving on that she mentions in The New Yorker (out of the roughly 25 songs she wrote for Red in 2011, we have heard 12). It's also possible she was talking about Begin Again; in an interview with People Country, Taylor mentions working on it throughout 2011. But I think she's talking about I Almost Do. This is partially because her arm lyric on June 4 was "​​I guess we're all one phone call from our knees" and partially because she's confirmed to have written I Bet You Think About Me, which shares similar themes, later this month.

🟠 June 2011: Starlight (First Draft)

Taylor: "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 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. And then her daughter Rory ended up coming to a show a couple weeks later and I told her about the song and she was like, 'you have to meet my mom, she would love to meet you.' So that was kind of what that song was about."

By August 2011, Taylor had finished a 900 page book about the Kennedy women, wrote a Robert Kennedy quote on her arm, and visited JFK's grave. By this point, it's safe to assume that Taylor would've known how Robert and Ethel Kennedy met, ergo Starlight needs to have been written before August. I lean towards June, mainly because of the following diary entry.

✍️ June 17, 2011: Lover Diary entry: "I've become blissfully happy with my life. [...] I've noticed this onset for a while, but it's really hit me in the last week, and especially since I wrote those 2 new songs. I really do need to create in order to live and feel worthwhile. [...] I'm happy that tomorrow morning I get on a plane to Pittsburgh, play a stadium of 60,000 people, then fly home. I'm happy that the next day, I'm recording 2 new songs."

🎤 June 19, 2011: Per the previous diary entry, Taylor recorded two songs.

🟢 June 24-26, 2011: I Bet You Think About Me

Lori McKenna: "A couple days before she gets here, I'm eating dinner with the kids, and I get a FaceTime from a number I didn't know [...] And I answer it because we were like, 'Who's FaceTiming me?' And it's Taylor like, 'Hey, I'm coming to town. Would you have some time?'" McKenna and Swift share a mutual friend – songwriter Liz Rose. McKenna had met Swift once or twice, and McKenna said sure. [...] "It's one of those real fun co-writes where you're just the cheerleader. You're the coffee maker. You'll get a sandwich if they need to eat or something, but you're there for moral support." Lori McKenna: "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 [...] If the line is right, she knows it's right, and she remembers what it is." Taylor: "'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."

Over the years, Lori McKenna has said it was written either the day before, the day of her first show, or the day of her second show at Foxborough Stadium for the Speak Now tour.

✍️ June 30, 2011: Taylorconnect: "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."

🟢 August 26, 2011: Cannonball

Justin Bieber (August 26, 2011): "#writing" Kuk Harrell (August 27, 2011): "Wow!! Got to see @//justinbieber & @/taylorswift13 write a song together last night!! SMASH!!!! SMASH!!! SMASH!!! Let's do it again Yall!!!"

This is an unreleased song that was intended for Justin Bieber’s album, but Scooter Braun allegedly cut it.

🟢 September 8, 2011: Red (First Draft)

Taylor: "'Red' is a song I wrote halfway through this album, and it changed what this album became [...] because, to me, this song is very different, very descriptive, and it has an edge to it that, to me, kinda expanded what I wanted to do." Taylor: "It was really one of those songs that made me think like, maybe I want to be expanding what I'm trying to do with my music, sonically." Taylor: "Red came about halfway through the two years. And after that, I felt like it was such an interesting direction that I wanted to follow it, and I wanted to go and write with people I’ve never written with, work with people I’ve never worked with." Lover Diary Entry (dated September 8, 2011): "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'. [...] 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-e-e-e-d". I'd love to name next album red. Scott came over because I called him and he was still working at the office. He said this 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 report card. Recording again tomorrow."

📌 September 13, 2011: Vogue interview conducted:

Swift is working on her fourth album: "There’s just been this earth-shattering, not recent, but absolute crash-and-burn heartbreak," she says, "and that will turn out to be what the next album is about. The only way that I can feel better about myself—pull myself out of that awful pain of losing someone—is writing songs about it to get some sort of clarity." [...] "The only time in my life I have ever been starstruck was meeting Caroline and Ethel Kennedy," she says. "I got to spend the afternoon with Ethel a couple of weeks ago. She is one of my favorites because you look back at the pictures of her and Bobby and they always look like they are having the most fun out of everybody. You know, eleven kids, all these exotic animals on their property. I’ve read a lot about them."

🟢 October 2011: Both of Us

B.o.B: "She actually arranged for me to come to Dallas, and brought me out and I played her the song, she liked it and it just naturally happened, you know what I mean?" B.o.B: "I played her the song at her show ... and instantly she loved it. She was like, 'Bob, I have tears in my eyes. I love this song. I'm down. I want to be a part of it." ... And she sounded amazing on the record. (She) actually rewrote some of my verses as well."

B.o.B was a special guest on the Speak Now Tour on October 9, 2011.

🟢 October 4, 2011: Sad Beautiful Tragic

Twitter (October 4, 2011): "Leaving Little Rock, headed to New Orleans. Writing a song on a moving bus." Taylor: "'Sad Beautiful Tragic' is a song that I wrote while I was on tour, and I was on a tour bus that was moving, and I just started playing this really haunting, sad chorus, and it just, kind of was very simple, like "What a sad beautiful tragic love affair" and it was just reflecting on something that was lost, y'know, and you can't get it back. And I went home and I called Nathan Chapman and said "Hey, I wrote a song. Please please please can we record today" and, of course he said yes, and we use that original demo on the album because it just came across so pure and raw." Taylor: "'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."

✍️ October 18, 2011: Hollywood Reporter interview conducted: "I've written 25* songs so far, so it's coming along really well. I've been writing a lot, and I like to take 2 years to make a record. We're at the end of year one and I still have a year left to go to write. It's looking really great." *Grain of salt: The amount of songs Taylor says she wrote for Red at different points doesn't add up, so give or take 5 songs.

🟡 Late October 2011: Ronan

On October 21, 2011, Taylor invited Maya Thompson, Ronan's mom, to meet her backstage at her show. Maya gave Taylor a personalized letter about Ronan's story, and Taylor told Maya that she'd been reading the blog for over a year. She didn't tell Maya that she had written a song for Ronan until September 4, 2012, so it's possible Ronan was written anytime between May 2011-September 2012. That being said, I lean towards it being written in October; there's a couple blog posts* from October 2011 that Taylor seems to directly reference, and Taylor mentions having just written two songs at the end of the month. *TW for suicide

✍️ October 30, 2011: Lover Diary entry: "I've written two songs in the last few days. I want to record them so bad, but my voice is shot from being so run down."

📌 November 10, 2011: CMA's acceptance speech: "The reason I obsess over [performing songs] so much is that I obsess over writing them so much… With this next album, I'm so excited because I've been writing so much. We're still in the first gear of making it, so as we finish songs and demo them in my producer's basement, I can picture them being played on the stage."

🟢 November 2011: Eyes Open

Taylor: "I was working with T-Bone a lot on the soundtrack, just you know, putting songs together. There’s another song on the soundtrack that I did for it, so we were working on that song [before writing Safe and Sound]."

🟢 November 19, 2011: Safe and Sound

Taylor: "The movie studio came to me and said ‘Would you be interested in making music for this movie?’ and I immediately read the book. I read it in like, two days and fell in love with it [...] When I got the call, I thought, from what I'd heard about the movie, 'It's an action movie, right? We're probably going to be writing a song that's like, "We're going to win!" ' And then I read the book, and I thought, 'No, we're going to have to write sort of a death lullaby, it's so different from what I thought.'" Taylor: "[T-Bone Burnett] said ‘Do you think it would be good to call the Civil Wars and see if they’d want to come write?’ and I said ‘Absolutely’. I’d had this title that I’d been working with called Safe and Sound, and I just knew that I’d wanted it to deal with, sort of the empathy, sort of the more sensitive, sad, bittersweet side of this story. [...] And we all got together and as soon as John Paul got his guitar and started playing this melody, me and Joy started singing over it, and it happened so quickly." Taylor: "We wrote this song and recorded it in one day, the same day we wrote it."

The Civil Wars posted these two photos on instagram, with the captions dating the writing session to November 2011. The only time Taylor was in L.A (and not spending all day at an awards show) in November was the 19th.

📌 December 1, 2011: MTV interview conducted: "I can't tell you [what emotions I'm writing about on TS4], because it's a secret. It will be unveiled when it all comes out, because they all seem to have a theme to them, the records that we've put out so far, and this one is no different. It's very different in what it's about, but it's no different in the fact that it has its own name."

🎤 December 13, 2011: Twitter: "Studio/birthday/new album/red shoes" and "Took a break from the studio to visit the label, where they gave me this!"

🟡 December 2011: State of Grace

On Red, Taylor has two Nashville studios credited. The first is Pain In The Art, Nathan Chapman's home studio, which Taylor largely used for demos and first drafts. The second studio is Blackbird Studios. On Red, there are five songs credited to Blackbird Studios: State of Grace, Red, Stay Stay Stay, Starlight, and Begin Again. Looking at the musicians credited, you can further divide it into two recording blocks: State of Grace and Stay Stay Stay, and Red, Begin Again, and Starlight. Red, Begin Again, and Starlight all have solid evidence of being reworked at a later date (more on that later). State of Grace, on the other hand, is a bit more speculative. Taylor has always talked about Red (the song), as a big sonic departure, something that sounded nothing like anything she'd written before... and it doesn't sound that different to State of Grace. Don't get me wrong, they're definitely two different songs, but the stuff she cites as being revelations on Red are also found on State of Grace. So, it makes sense for State of Grace's production to have been retouched after Red.

🟡 December 2011: Stay Stay Stay

State of Grace and Stay Stay Stay have identical studio personnel. Furthermore, Nick Buda, Chad Carlson, Eric Darken, Leland Elliott, and Matt Rausch all only have two credits on Red, and they're for State of Grace and Stay Stay Stay. This leads me to believe they were recorded around the same time. It also makes sense for Stay Stay Stay to have been retouched, seeing as it would've been written a year and a half before, and possibly not even professionally recorded.

🟡 December 2011: Red

Scott Borchetta: Borchetta, the president of her record label, heard a version of her song "Red" produced by her usual collaborator Nathan Chapman. Borchetta says, "The song 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, Borchetta says, than the first pass. "And Taylor basically said, 'All right, would you call Max [Martin]?'" *Grain of salt: Scott Borchetta has a habit of taking credit for things that were likely Taylor's idea.

Scott Borchetta said there were three drafts of Red. The second draft had a more pop sound, but was still just Taylor and Nathan Chapman (possibly recorded on September 9). Then, the final draft with a new producer. Borchetta says Taylor wanted the new producer to be Max Martin, but for whatever reason they ended up going with Dan Huff, who has a producer credit on the version released in 2012.

🟡 December 2011: Begin Again

Taylor: "I wrote it in pieces-I'd start and then second-guess myself. I had to sort through my own insecurities."

🟡 December 2011: Starlight

Starlight has slightly different studio personnel from Red and Begin Again, suggesting it was done at a slightly different time. However, there are still clues that Dan Huff got called in at a later date— the biggest one is the electric guitar is credited as "Conceived by Nathan Chapman, Played by Dann Huff" (credit to @taylor-on-your-dash for this theory)

📌 December 13-24 2011: Harper's Bazaar interview conducted:

"As an artist you have to be really self-aware. As a songwriter, especially [...] You need to be aware enough to catch yourself creating similar things to what you have created before and steer away from that. You have to grow, otherwise you will lose people's attention and you will get bored with yourself." So, will her fourth album, due later this year, be a major departure? "I think so," she says cautiously. "The tone is a little different. This one is focused on an all-encompassing, heartbreaking thing that happened, about the rise and fall of a relationship [...] I really, really, really, really want to nail this next record. I'm probably going to go into that semi- crazy, mumbling-to-myself-in-public, hysterically, ridiculously rambling, lyric-editing mode that I go into in the last six months of making a record. There are about 25* songs I have written so far, and the trick is going to be paring them down to the ones that will make this something I am more proud of than anything I have done before." *Grain of salt: The amount of songs Taylor says she wrote for Red at different points doesn't add up, so give or take 5 songs. This is also the same number she gave on October 18, 2011.

📌 January 2012: Moved to LA to work with new producers

Taylor: "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.'" Taylor: "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 [Chapman]."

That's all for this timeline!

TIMELINES: debut • fearless • speak now • red • 1989 • rep • lover • folklore • evermore • midnights • ttpd PLAYLISTS: debut • fearless • speak now • red • 1989 • rep • lover • folklore • evermore • midnights • ttpd GENERAL: tag • entire discography playlist

[taylorconnect]

Speak Now Timeline

This is a very long post that puts all the songs on Speak Now in order of Taylor creating them. I’ve also added a few other songs she wrote while writing Speak Now and quotes from Taylor and her collaborators talking about her process.

If you don't want to read all that, check out this playlist of the album in order or this playlist of her entire discography.

Due to a surprising amount of digital decay and her life not being highly documented yet, exact dates are bit harder to come by then they are with following albums, but you can still find a few! I’ve added this color coded scale of how sure I am of the date: 

Confirmed: There is some type of official source for the date

Inferring: Nobody has officially said “This is when we wrote it,” but everything points to that date

Speculation: This date is based off pure vibes and guesswork and is highly likely to change.

Unknown: All that is known is the year (from the US Copyright Offices)

More notes: I will probably be editing it as information about vault songs and new details about old songs get come out, so it probably won’t be finished until July, so check back in with this post and/or follow me if you want updates. Most tweet dates come from crawling through the wayback machine, but if you want further sourcing, feel free me an ask/dm.

Without further ado...

Sparks Fly: Late 2006 (Inferring)

Taylor opened up for Jake Owen on October 31, 2006 In Portland, Oregon (the secret message for the song), and wrote Sparks Fly about the experience shortly after. I’ve seen a few second hand sources say she wrote it on the airplane ride back to Nashville later that same night, but I can’t find Taylor herself saying that, so it might just be an old fandom legend, or the source has been lost to digital decay, or I just haven’t looked hard enough. She first performs the song in May 29, 2007.

Haunted: 2009 (Unknown)

Taylor: "Haunted" is about the moment that you realize the person you're in love with is drifting and fading fast. And you don't know what to do, but in that period of time, in that phase of love, where it's fading out, time moves so slowly. Everything hinges on what that last text message said, and you're realizing that he's kind of falling out of love. That's a really heartbreaking and tragic thing to go through, because the whole time you're trying to tell yourself it's not happening. I went through this, and I ended up waking up in the middle of the night and writing this song about it.

February 17, 2009: Tweets "It's 3:58 am in London.. And I accidentally fell asleep at 6:30 pm, so now I'm wide awake and have no idea what to do. Write a song?"

It’s possible that this was what Taylor was referring to when she said she “ended up waking up in the middle of the night and writing [Haunted]”, but it’s also very possible that Taylor didn’t write a song on February 17, and waking up in the middle of the night and writing a song is not a rare occurrence in Taylor’s life, so one tweet doesn’t really prove anything.

March 13, 2009: Tweets "A day off in Sydney. Drove two hours out of the city and spent the day on the beach. Wrote a chorus you'll hear on the next record. :)"

Pure speculation, but I think she was working on Mr. Perfectly Fine. It was created in 2009, and in my opinion, of the possible songs it has the most notable chorus.

March 19, 2009: Posts on Myspace “I’m wiped out. I’ve been in the studio all day ( I know, I know.. We JUST put out a new album. I think I have a problem, I cannot stop writing songs.) It’s so much fun knowing that you can take your time, because you have like a year and a half to make something you’re really proud of. I love recording a few songs, waiting a few months, recording a few more.. Instead of devoting a few weeks to “record the album” and then it’s just done. I like dragging it out, that way you can be meticulous about every detail. Daydream about different ways to put the songs together, and then take them apart. I’m pretty obsessed with the whole process. So needless to say, it was good to be back in the studio with my redheaded producer who I missed terribly.”

If This Was A Movie: April 2009 (Inferring)

Taylor has literally never talked about this song, but April would be six months after and Joe Jonas broke up in late September/early October 2008.

April 24, 2009: Taylor plays in Jonesboro, Arkansas, and possibly writes a song: "I'd get my best ideas at 3:00 AM in Arkansas, and didn't have a co-writer around and I'd just finish it. And that would happen again in New York [likely Enchanted], that would happen again in Boston [likely Long Live], that would happen again in Nashville." (x)

May 23, 2009: Taylor records Half Of My Heart with John Mayer

On March 1, 2009: John Mayer tweeted: “Waking up to this song idea that won’t leave my head. 3 days straight now. That means it’s good enough to finish. It’s called Half of My Heart and I want to sing it with Taylor Swift. She would make a killer Stevie Nicks in contrast to my Tom Petty of a song.” On May 23, John Mayer tweeted "I couldn't get Taylor Swift on my record so I found the world's greatest impersonator, Laura Jacksheimer" with a picture of Taylor.

Superman: Spring 2009 (Speculation)

This could have been written any time in 2009, but due to it's general sound and the following quote, I’d guess it was written sometime in spring, when her and John Mayer first started working together. Taylor: “This was a guy that I was sort of enamored with, as usual. This song got its title by something that I just kinda said randomly in conversation. He walked out of the room, I looked over at one of my friends and said, ‘Man, It’s just like watching Superman fly away.’”

May 29, 2009: Posts on Myspace “Tomorrow, after the performance on the Today show, I’ll fly back to Nashville and record a lot of new songs I’ve written in the last few weeks. I’m really excited about that.” (She also posts "Tonight I went shopping at Top Shop in New York with the band. I got purple shoes. I’m really excited about the purple shoes, and I just needed to tell someone. I got purple shoes. Ok. That’s done." Which. If I had a nickel for everytime Taylor teased her new album by posting about shoe colors I'd have two nickels, which isnt a lot but it's weird that it happened twice.)

June 4, 2009: Posts on Facebook "In the studio. I don't know whose computer I'm using. Pssh.. Such a rebel right now.."

June 9, 2009: Tweets (about recording Thug Story) "If I said I was in the studio with T-Pain, would you believe me?"

Better Than Revenge and Let’s Go (Battle): June 2009 (Inferring)

These were probably written sometime between June 12, when the Jonas Brothers released “Much Better”, and July 1, when Taylor posted on Myspace: “What else is new.. Recording a bunch of new songs. Lots of new things to write about…..”

Last Kiss: 2009 (Unknown)

Taylor: "The song "Last Kiss" is sort of like a letter to somebody. You say all of these desperate, hopeless feelings that you have after a breakup. Going through a breakup you feel all of these different things. You feel anger, and you feel confusion, and frustration. Then there is the absolute sadness. The sadness of losing this person, losing all the memories, and the hopes you had for the future. There are times when you have this moment of truth where you just admit to yourself that you miss all these things. When I was in one of those moments I wrote this song."

July 22, 2009: Tweets "Hanging with my producer Nathan, discussing the next adventure" and then in a separate tweet "...album #3."

Never Grow Up: Fall 2009 (Speculation)

Lover Diary Nathan Chapman: "The song 'Never Grow Up' is just she singing and I on acoustic guitar. We recorded ourselves live. That song probably happened in two hours." This could’ve been written at any time in 2009, but I put it here because she bought her Nashville apartment sometime before October.

September 8, 2009: Tweeted "Last night in nash before heading out tomorrow for 4 shows, then VMA's. But right now I can't put the guitar down."

September 13, 2009: VMAs Incident

Enchanted: September 15, 2009 (Confirmed)

On September 15, Taylor attended an Owl City Concert in New York Taylor: "It was about this guy that I met in New York City, and I had talked to him on email or something before, but I had never met him. And meeting him, it was this overwhelming feeling of: I really hope that you're not in love with somebody. And the whole entire way home, I remember the glittery New York City buildings passing by, and then just sitting there thinking, am I ever going to talk to this person again? And that pining away for a romance that may never even happen, but all you have is this hope that it could, and the fear that it never will. I started writing that in the hotel room when I got back. Because it just was this positive, wistful feeling of: I hope you understand just how much I loved meeting you. I hope that you know that meeting you was not something that I took lightly, or just in passing. And I think my favorite part of that song is the part where, in the bridge, it goes to sort of a stream of consciousness of ‘Please don't be in love with someone else/Please don't have somebody waiting on you.' Because at that moment, that's exactly what my thoughts were. And it feels good to write exactly what your thoughts were in a certain moment.”

September 26, 2009: Taylor plays in Little Rock, Arkansas, and possibly writes a song: "I'd get my best ideas at 3:00 AM in Arkansas, and didn't have a co-writer around and I'd just finish it. And that would happen again in New York [Enchanted & Back To December], that would happen again in Boston [Long Live], that would happen again in Nashville." (x)

October 17, 2009: Tweets "Travis: you look so out of it. Me: I'm writing a song in my head. Travis: oh, I apologize. I didn't realize you were working."

November 30, 2009: Tweets "If I had a dime for every time my producer and I blurt out the same thing at the same time, followed by an awkward, uncoordinated high five..."

Ours: December 6, 2009 (Inferring)

Myspace Post on December 6: “I just got back to Nashville this morning after being in LA all week. Today I was out and about and in the studio all day” Taylor: "I wrote this when I was about to turn 20. I was in a relationship I knew people wouldn't approve of, and it was just a matter of time before everyone found out. When you're first getting to know someone, it's a fragile time, and then you add newspapers and magazine covers and it can get kind of rough. I wanted to have this song to play for him when it got difficult. Singing it for him was one of the sweetest moments I can remember."

December 22, 2009: Tweets "I was writing a song and my pen fell into the piano. Still trying to figure out if I should do anything about this."

January 2010: Starts polishing up the demos made in 2009 into fully produced tracks

Billboard: "Swift and Chapman had begun recording new songs almost as soon as "Fearless" was released. The two cut demos in his basement studio and would only take those songs to larger facilities once they felt they had an emotional foundation in the basic tracks. Still, it wasn’t until early 2010 when the album truly began to coalesce." Nathan Chapman: "We stripped it down and made the demos first. Taylor came to my studio and I played all the instruments on the demos, and because I have a good vocal booth, her demo vocals ended up being the vocals you hear on the record. After finishing the demos, we went out to different studios, and tried different combinations of engineers and musicians to replace some of the elements of my demos, mostly the programmed drums, and to do additional overdubs. [...] A pop artist would probably release what we'd done after five hours, but country artists don't want to hear programmed drums, they don't want to hear fake stuff. So once we had recorded the demos, we would book whatever studio we wanted for each song, to replace the drums, in many cases the bass, and to add whatever overdubs we envisioned, like fiddle, keyboards, percussion and strings. After we got the demos right, we opened it up and allowed ourselves to spend money and cut a big record." Taylor tweets on January 11: "Studio-ness with all the same boys who played on Fearless" and on January 13: "More recording. So excited. So excited. So excited. See, I said that three times. Once for every album we've made in this studio."

January 13, 2010: Posts on Myspace “Thank you January. I have had this month off. I have walked on snow-covered grass and discovered new coffee shops and laughed hysterically with friends about things that probably weren’t technically funny. I’ve written songs on napkins and sat at a giant table with my whole family on my mother’s birthday, all of us in one place for the first time in too long. I’ve gotten to take what has happened to me and process it to my full capability, and celebrate it the way it deserved to be celebrated. I’ve made new music. I’ve gone over the memories and jumped up and down with my producer and floated around with nothing on my schedule other than just appreciating what my life has somehow turned into. [...] Getting back in the studio with the same guys I trust and know and love.. (right, the pointing one: my producer Nathan Chapman) (Left, the waving one: Bass extraorinaire, Tim Marks. Clearly marked on his road case.) [...] Nick Buddha is in charge of the drums.”

February 22, 2010: Posts on Myspace "I’ve been writing lots of songs"

February 13, 2010: Writes in her diary "I’ve been obsessing over the new album. I always do that until it’s just right. I don’t know if I have the formula just right for this one yet. I know there are great songs. I just need to figure out the strands that bond them together into a great album. And I will obsess until it’s there. This album, any album, is the next 2 years of my life. It has to be more than amazing. It has to be great enough to keep my attention for 2 years."

Mine: March 10-12 2010 (Inferring)

Taylor (above interview, at 5:17): "I wrote Mine somewhere on the road, I think in Texas, actually." Nathan Chapman: "The demo for 'Mine' apparently took less than five hours to record, and sounded, according to Chapman, "almost identical to the record. After that we worked on the track for another four months, off and on, and spent $30,000 to make sure it sounded perfect in the real world."" Taylor: "This song is the first single because it has this…there was this moment between Nathan and I, my producer, when I brought this song in and when we made this demo in one day in his basement and we just kinda looked at each other and we were like, "This is it. This is the one. All of the times that I've had "The Moment" with songs of "This is the one," it's been a good call, so I'm hoping for the best on this one. Wish me luck." Scott Borchetta: "Mine" was a turning point in the album’s development. Swift and Chapman had begun recording new songs almost as soon as "Fearless" was released. The two cut demos in his basement studio and would only take those songs to larger facilities once they felt they had an emotional foundation in the basic tracks. Still, it wasn’t until early 2010 when the album truly began to coalesce. Swift presented "Mine" to Borchetta in his office [...] "We probably played that song four or five times," Borchetta recalls. "I’m jumping around playing air guitar, she’s singing the song back to me, and it was just one of those crazy, fun, Taylor teen-age moments."

March 13, 2010: Taylor records Mine, brings it to Scott Borchetta, and says she’s done with TS3

Scott Borchetta: "I said, ‘Keep going,’ [...] She kind of looked at me like, ‘You’re challenging me.’ And I said, ‘Yeah. You’ve found true north here. Keep going.’ " Taylor: “During Speak Now, when I went to (label head) Scott Borchetta and said, 'The album’s finished,’ he said, 'No, it’s not – you need to keep writing.’” (Right after playing in Texas, Taylor leaves for a vacation in the Bahamas, meaning Taylor likely had about a day in Nashville between the two trips).

Innocent: Late March 2010 (Inferring)

Billboard: “It was some time in the period after that challenge — between February and June — that Swift wrote “Innocent,” her response to the Kanye West incident.​​” Taylor: “Some songs take 30 minutes to write, and some take six months, which was the case with “Innocent.” When things affect me intensely and really hit me hard, it can take a while to figure out what I think about it and what to say about it.” (March would be just over 6 months since the VMAs).

March 24, 2010: Taylor goes lunch with Taylor Lautner and both of their publicists, inspiring Back To December.

Taylor: Swift says she based the song on a conversation she had with the guy about whom she's singing. "It's not loosely based," she says. "It's almost word-for-word. It is a song and a conversation that needed to happen, because I don't want to hurt people. If you unintentionally do so, you've got to make that better."

Speak Now: Early April, 2010 (Inferring)

On April 3, Taylor attended the wedding of Josh Farro as Hayley Williams (who is Josh's ex) plus one. That day she also tweeted: ""Nathan you smell really good! Is that a new cologne?" "Thanks! Actually it's a two in one shampoo and soap. From Dial." My producer rules." implying she was in the studio. The conversation below could have happened any day after the VMA awards in September, when Hayley first reached out to Taylor, but I think Taylor probably wrote the song fairly close to naming the album after it. Taylor: "This song was inspired by one of my friends who was telling me about her childhood sweetheart, crush guy. They were kind of together in high school and went their separate ways, and it was kind of understood that they were gonna get back together. Then, she one day comes in and tells me he's getting married. He had met this girl who was just this mean person who made him completely stop talking to all of his friends, cut off his family, had him like so completely isolated. And I just, kind of randomly, was like, "So, you gonna speak now?" She was like, "What do you mean?" And I was like "Oh, you know, like storm the church, speak now or forever hold your peace? I'll go with you. I'll play guitar. It would be great." She was just kind of laughing, and later on I just was wrapping my mind around that idea of how tragic it would be if someone you loved was marrying somebody else. Later I had a dream about one of my ex-boyfriends getting married, and it just all came together that I needed to write this song about interrupting a wedding. For me, I like to think of it as good versus evil, and this girl is so completely painted as the evil one. So this is "Speak Now.""

April 13, 2010: Names TS3 Speak Now

Lover Diaries: "So I’ve been obsessing over the new record to the point where it’s all I can focus on. I’m majorly stressed and borderline losing it, with all these lists and chronic dissatisfaction. Perfectionist-ness. I keep growing tired of songs because I know I’ve raised the bar and I can beat half the songs. Scott and I had lunch the other day. We were talking about the record and I had this epiphany. I didn’t talk in interviews about how I felt about much of what has happened in the last 2 years. I’ve been silent about so much that I’m saying on this album. It’s time to Speak Now. Scott freaked out. He loved it. We have a title, ladies and gentlemen!" Scott Borchetta: ""At one point, the record was not called ‘Speak Now.’ It was called ‘Enchanted,’ [...] We were at lunch, and she had played me a bunch of the new songs. I looked at her and I’m like, ‘Taylor, this record isn’t about fairy tales and high school anymore. That’s not where you’re at. I don’t think the record should be called "Enchanted."’” Swift excused herself from the table at that point. By the time she came back, she had the "Speak Now" title"

Dear John: Spring 2010 (Speculation)

This was likely written sometime after February 2010 (Taylor implies she's single in her vlog and her diary). Beyond that, it could have been anytime between February and June 2010.

Brief Interruption: The next two songs (Back to December and Mean) are going to use quotes from this interview that @1989worldtour found. If you've already listened to the interview attached to the Mine section, then it's the same interview

Back To December: Early May, 2010 (Inferring)

Taylor (above interview, at 5:12): "Back to December was written in New York City. Taylor was in New York city from May 3-5, and May 12-15 2010. she was not photographed in New York any other time in early 2010, and given her busy touring schedule, I doubt she was in New York at another time. USA TODAY: “Swift says she based the song on a conversation she had with the guy about whom she's singing. "It's not loosely based," she says. "It's almost word-for-word. It is a song and a conversation that needed to happen, because I don't want to hurt people. If you unintentionally do so, you've got to make that better."”

Mean: May 29, 2010 (Speculation)

Taylor (above interview, about 6 minutes in): "I started this song called Mean on my, like sitting on my kitchen counter, just playing it, and then, you know, took a plane and flew to the venue where we were gonna play that night and finished it in the dressing room." Now, this may be a too literal interpretation of "took a plane and flew to the venue where we were gonna play that night," but if we want to theorize: the only tour date (that Taylor could've conceivably written Mean during) without another show right before or after it was in Baton Rogue on May 29, 2010.

Long Live: June 2010 (Confirmed)

Lover Diary She likely wrote this around June 5, when she ended the Fearless Tour at Gillette Stadium (Wikipedia counts two festivals as being part of the Fearless Tour but Taylor doesn't, so I'm going with her opinion), since she said that she wrote a song for Speak Now in Boston (which is the closest major city to Gillette)

The Story Of Us: June 9-16, 2010 (Confirmed)

Taylor attended the CMT Awards (Which goes on to be the secret message for The Story Of Us) on June 9 and was sat very close to John Mayer. Taylor: "The people closest to me are used to me deserting a conversation and bolting into some corner of the room with my phone out, hunched over, singing some melody or lyric or hook into my phone. I wrote “The Story of Us” about running into an ex at an awards show, and I came home and sat down at a kitchen table and told my mom, “I felt like I was standing alone in a crowded room.” She tried to console me, but I was gone at that point." Lover Diary: "So I’ve been a little studio rat since the tour ended [...] Ever since, I wake up to my cell phone alarm around 9:30 each morning. Throw on a sundress, skip make up, tie my hair in a messy side braid, and head out the door with no shoes on. Because the only walking outside I’ll be doing is from my house to my car, then from my car, three steps to Nathan’s basement studio. [...] I worked on a song for a few days, then basically finished it in the car on the way to Nathan’s this morning. It. Is. So. Good. And I can safely say I am DONE writing this record!! This song is up-tempo, and hooky and sort of torn-sounding … like this horrible stressed confusion that comes on when you knew the person you’re pining away for is in the room. And for some reason, there are these invisible walls keeping things from being ok. So you’re not fine. And they’re not fine. And I’m so happy I wrote that song!! Footage of Taylor working on TSOU

June 30, 2010: Taylor tweets “@amosjheller is SLAYING a bass part in the studio right now. http://twitpic.com/21am7t” 

Footage Nathan Chapman: “We tried several bassists until we had a bass part that worked, which was played by Amos Heller, of Taylor's live band. In Nashville, it's rare for a road musician to be on the record, but he earned his way into this record by kicking ass. In fact, all Taylor's road musicians played some parts on the album, which was important for me and her.”

July 15, 2010: The orchestra for Back To December and Haunted are recorded (footage here, same outfit as these candids)

Taylor (talking about Haunted): “I wanted the music and the orchestration to reflect the intensity of the emotion the song is about, so we recorded strings with Paul Buckmaster at Capitol Studios in Los Angeles. It was an amazing experience - recording this entire big, live string section that I think in the end really captured the intense, chaotic feeling of confusion I was looking for."

And that's all for this timeline! Check out my others:

TIMELINES: debut • fearless • speak now • red • 1989 • rep • lover • folklore • evermore • midnights PLAYLISTS: debut • fearless • speak now • red • 1989 • rep • lover • folklore • evermore • midnights • entire discography GENERAL: tag

[taylorconnect]

1989 Timeline

This is a very long post that puts all the songs on 1989 in order of Taylor creating them. I’ve also included a few other songs she worked on while writing 1989 and quotes from Taylor and her collaborators talking about her process

Of all the albums in Taylor's discography, I think this is the one that improves the most when you listen to it in order. All of those things Taylor was talking about in the promo for this album-- how this is an album of her coming into her own, figuring out her values, learning to stand on her own two feet-- it all clicks into place. Listening to it in order has made me cry on more than one occasion, and it's also the thing that made me start this whole crazy process of figuring out the dates she wrote each song.

If you don't want to read the whole post, check out this playlist of the album in order or this playlist of her entire discography.

I’ve also added this color coded scale of how sure I am of the date: 

Confirmed: There is some type of official source for the date

Inferring: Nobody has officially said “This is when we wrote it,” but all available evidence points to that date

Speculation: This date is based on guesswork and is highly likely to change, or, all that is known is the general season.

Unknown: All that is known is the year (from the US Copyright Offices)

Without further ado...

Oct 6, 2012: Taylor seems to have been in a studio in London (Note: I have no idea where this photo comes from and I can not find a place that specifies if this is a music studio or radio interview.)

This Love: Oct 17, 2012 (Confirmed)

October 19, 2012: Taylor mentions wanting to work with Imogen Heap, prompting Imogen to get in touch with Taylor

Time Interview: Who’d be your dream collaboration, especially now that you’re taking more musical risks? Let me think. Imogen Heap! She’s amazing. Taylor: Someone asked me in an interview "Who would you like to work with?" and I said Imogen Heap. I get an email to my management, sent like "Imogen just saw that Taylor just said an interview that she would like to work together" She said "Why don't you come out to my studio." Imogen: I got a phone call [in 2014] saying Taylor Swift was in London, she'd love to work with me and the only date she could do (between 4 sold out 02 arenas!) was the day after we got back, Sunday. It was both unexpected and not at the same time as I'd heard Taylor was a fan a while back via this Time magazine piece but somehow didn't think it would actually happen.

Fall 2012: Taylor possibly writes a song with Harry Styles and Jacknife Lee (her producer for The Last Time)

“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. 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.”

All You Had to Do Was Stay: Jan 10, 2013 (Confirmed)

Taylor is photographed outside Conway, and then tweets "Back in the studio. Uh oh..." Later, Taylor confirmed that she was recording All You Had To Do Was Stay. Taylor: I had a dream that my ex showed up at my door, knocked at my door, and I opened it up, and I was about ready to launch into the perfect thing to say [...], Instead, all that would come out of my mouth was that high-pitched chorus of people singing, 'Stay!'...and then you go to say something else, and it's just like 'Stay! Stay! Stay!' And I woke up, I was like 'Oh, that was mortifying. But that's kind of a cool vocal part.'

January 11, 2013: Taylor is photographed outside Conway again

How You Get The Girl: Jan 15, 2013 (Confirmed)

Taylor posts a picture of her playing a guitar in the studio, captioned "Somewhere in LA..". Later, Taylor confirmed that she was recording How You Get The Girl. Given what was going on in her personal life, she likely wrote this sometime in the fall/winter of 2012, but all we know for sure is the date she recorded it.

February 9, 2013: Tweets "Grammy rehearsals last night, studio today, who knows what tonight holds! (I do. Laying around watching TV and eating candy.)"

March 6, 2013: Taylor is photographed outside a studio in LA

March 23, 2013: Posts a picture of her playing guitar captioned "Pre show. Columbia, South Carolina"

I Wish You Would: May 28, 2013 (Inferring)

Taylor is photographed out for lunch in Rhode Island with Lena Dunham and Jack Antonoff on May 27, before leaving for her show in Phoenix, Arizona the next day Jack:  "We were hanging out at her house in Rhode Island and we were talking about John Hughes movies, and a lot of the music that inspired [them], and just this general culture of sound in that time period that was really larger-than-life in an anthemic, positive way. These songs could be at the end of films that were really, really beautiful and said a lot. That actually ended up being a song called 'I Wish You Would' which is going to be on her album. We first worked on that song together and realised we kind of have a good thing.

Taylor: Max Martin and [Karl Johan] Shellback [Schuster] were the last people I collaborated with on [2012 album] Red, and I wished we could have done more and explored more. So going into this album, I knew that I wanted to start with them again. Then I thought, “Wouldn’t it be amazing to work with Ryan Tedder?” And then I was with Jack Antonoff and Lena Dunham at the beach, and we started talking about our favorite ’80s music. All of this started happening organically, and I found myself gravitating toward pop sensibilities, pop hooks, pop production styles. Taylor: “This is a song I did with Jack Antonoff, and Jack is one of my friends and so we 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, like 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".”

June 7, 2013: At the CMA fest, Taylor is asked if she's started writing for her next album yet

“It's starting, all the anxiety is starting and when the anxiety starts, then the writing happens right afterward, usually. Um, so, yeah, I basically... I like to, I like to write for about two years before I'm finished with an album because I... at this point I kind of know that whenever I write in the first year is going to get thrown 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, 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, and, uh, y'know, It's harder to call people you don't know, and it's harder to think of topics you haven't covered and think of new ways to say old emotions that everyone feels, but, that's the goal at this point."

June 20-21, 2013: Taylor and Selena Gomez hang out, and Taylor potentially writes Wildest Dreams.

July 15, 2013: Taylor gives a brief interview to Rolling Stone

“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 [on Red],” she says. “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.”

July 18, 2013: Taylor unfollows the three backup dancers that left her tour for Katy's, meaning Bad Blood was likely written sometime between July and November 2013.

Sweeter Than Fiction: Summer 2013 (Speculation)

Taylor wrote this one over email, and then it was recorded in New York (partially in Jack's living room, partially in an actual studio)

August 25, 2013: Taylor and Selena Gomez hang out at the VMAs, and Taylor potentially writes Wildest Dreams.

August 25, 2013: Taylor gives a brief interview on the VMAs red carpet

"But I think [songwriting is] about to start to kick into full gear. I'm about to go into the studio. It's about to get really intense."

Out Of The Woods: September 14 2013 (Inferring)

On September 14, Fun cancelled their show. Taylor was likely either flying to or from Charlottesville, where she had a show for the Red Tour. Jack: "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]" Jack: "So 'Out Of The Woods' 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." Taylor: "This is a track that Jack Antonoff sent me, and I was actually on a plane, I got it and I got on a plane and I'm listening to it, and I'm just like listening to it and mumbling melodies cause the song came to me immediately like, in full [...] I think what I should start by playing you, is when I got the track, what I sent him like an hour later, and it is, me.. um, me singing what came to me, which ended up being the finished version of the song, or at least really close to it."

September 20, 2013: In a brief interview with USA Today, Taylor says she plans to work on her next album between the next few legs of the Red Tour

"I’ll be in the studio, figuring out what comes next. I really like to take two years to make a record, and I’ve been writing and doing stuff for the last year. This is kind of the year that it goes into overdrive, and it’s all I think about and I become obsessive over it and I’m hard to talk to"

September 22, 2013: Taylor gives an interview to New York Magazine where she talks about her plans for TS5

These days, Swift is thinking a lot about her next record. While on the Red tour, she’d been writing songs and stockpiling ideas: reams of lyrics, thousands of voice memos in her iPhone [...] she plans to spend much of 2014 writing and recording the new album, a prospect she finds exhilarating and terrifying. “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.” Swift hopes to collaborate with new songwriters and producers. But she planned to begin, she said, by heading back into the studio with Max Martin and Shellback. “I want to go in with Max and Johan first, just to figure out what the bone structure of this record is going to be. “I have a lot of things to draw from emotionally at the moment. But I have to draw from them with a different perspective than on Red. I can’t say the same things over and over, you know? I mean, I think it’s just all the more important that I don’t ever allow myself to coast. At the same time, there’s a mistake that I see artists make when they’re on their fourth or fifth record, and they think innovation is more important than solid songwriting. The most terrible letdown as a listener for me is when I’m listening to a song and I see what they were trying to do. Like, where there’s a dance break that doesn’t make any sense, there’s a rap that shouldn’t be there, there’s like a beat change that’s, like, the coolest, hippest thing this six months—but it has nothing to do with the feeling, it has nothing to do with the emotion, it has nothing to do with the lyric. I never want to put things in songs just because that might make them popular, like, on the more rhythmic stations or in dance clubs. I really don’t want a compilation of sounds. I just need them to be songs.”

September 28-October 5, 2013: Taylor and Selena Gomez are in the same city, and Taylor potentially writes Wildest Dreams.

October 12, 2013: Taylor gives an interview to the Associated Press

Swift: I think the goal for the next album is to continue to change, and never change in the same way twice [...] How do I write these figurative diary entries in ways that I’ve never written them before and to a sonic backdrop that I’ve never explored before? It’s my fifth album, which is crazy to think about, but I think what I’m noticing about it so far is it’s definitely taking a different turn than anything I’ve done before. AP: You said recently you’ve been working on songs for the new album for about six months. What can you tell us about what you have planned? Swift: It’s too early to tell who are going to be my predominant collaborators, but I do know that my absolute dream collaborators were Shellback and Max Martin on the last project. I’ve never been so challenged as a songwriter. I’ve never learned so much. I’ve never just been so excited to show up to the studio every day, just because you never know what we’re going to put together. I’ll bring in ideas and they’ll take such a different turn than where I thought they were going to go, and that level of unexpected spontaneity is something that really thrills me in the process of making music. ... What if we did this? What if we made it weirder? What if we took it darker? I love people who have endless strange and exciting ideas about where music can go."

October 14, 2013: At the NSAI, Taylor talks about reinventing herself for different albums

"I’m making my 5th record now, so I think you have to change things up, you have to explore different corners of music as much as you can. Cause I really, it’s been a big goal of mine to never make two albums that sounded the same. I really want my fans to be able to be like "Oh that song? Clearly that's from the Fearless album", "No that one, that one was from Red" and so I’m in the process of doing that thing all over again for my 5th album and it’s amazing to be in the studio and to be songwriting again, and be honored for songwriting tonight"

Blank Space: October 26, 2013 (Inferring)

It looks like she’s wearing the same outfit in this behind the scenes footage and these candids Taylor: "I was going into write with Max Martin and Shellback, who are two of the primary collaborators on 1989, and I... was preparing all these things, and I, I think Blank Space was like the third thing I played them, and they just stopped and they were like "NO, this is the first thing we're working on today." [...] I had the idea for the chorus and I had the hook, but a lot of the verse was gibberish." Taylor (On what song took her the least amount of time to write): "Blank space, cause I'd written a lot of the lines down already in the year preceding the session"

October 29, 2013: Tweets "Sitting in the studio writing the next album (!!!!) and wanted to thank you for the American Music Award nominations!"

November 1 : While promoting Keds, Taylor is asked about her next album

"What I go through is going to be the story that I tell. I think lyrically, I always try to tell my fans exactly what’s happened to me in the last two years, and that’s the thing they can expect. Everything else, they won’t be able to expect. Having been in the studio with this one, I’m just like… oh, this is going to be fun"

Bad Blood: Fall 2013 (Speculation)

The backup dancer drama seems to have kicked off in mid-July. Given that it's produced by Max Martin and Shellback, and Taylor was in the studio with them pretty much non-stop from October-November, we can assume that it was recorded sometime in the Fall of 2013

New Romantics: Fall 2013 (Speculation)

Unfortunately, Taylor doesn't really talk about this song. Given that it's produced by Max Martin and Shellback, and Taylor was in the studio with them pretty much non-stop from October-November, we can assume that it was recorded sometime in the Fall of 2013

Wildest Dreams: Fall 2013 (Speculation)

Selena reportedly told a fan she was there when Taylor wrote this, and I've noted above all the times Selena could have been with Taylor in 2013 (Here's my personal ranking of how likely each date is). Given that it's produced by Max Martin and Shellback, and Taylor was in the studio with them pretty much non-stop from October-November, we can assume that it was recorded sometime in the Fall of 2013.

Wonderland: Fall 2013 (Speculation)

Another one Taylor just doesn't talk about all that often. Given that it's produced by Max Martin and Shellback, and Taylor was in the studio with them pretty much non-stop from October-November, we can assume that it was recorded sometime in the Fall of 2013

Nov 20, 2013: Taylor posted "While in the studio, I came to the realization that my bangs are long enough to use as a sleep mask on long flights. Then I remembered I don't ever use sleep masks on flights. So really, I just need a haircut"

November 25, 2013: Taylor and Scott Borchetta have a meeting to talk about her plans for TS5 and are both asked about the next album at the AMAs

Taylor: “We got a lot already. 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.” Scott Borchetta: "Well earlier today we got together and she played me seven new songs, and she’s just on fire. The level of desire and passion that she has just to keep getting better, she’s an artist that just really never wants to just say ‘Well okay this is good enough’. It’s always gotta be better. She’s in amazing creative place right now." By the end of November, Taylor had likely recorded This Love, All You Had To Do Was Stay, How You Get The Girl, I Wish You Would, Out Of The Woods, Blank Space, Bad Blood, New Romantics, Wildest Dreams, and Wonderland. That’s 10 songs total, 5 of which were likely recorded in the past two months, and 7 that had been made since Taylor and Jack had their conversation about 80s music in May.

Dec 21, 2013: Taylor briefly talks to Billboard about TS5

"I’m really loving collaboration right now [...] I see it as a bit of an apprenticeship. I want to be around people who love writing songs and have done it for years. Every time I’m in a studio I’m learning, like how to build a drum track, and getting a new perspective on things. It’s so thrilling to keep learning on your fifth album. As soon as [an album] comes out I’m figuring out what the next one will be. It’s gotten to the point where each one is a reinvention, which is what I like best. I like it when it sounds new and people don’t know where you’re going to go next."

Say Don't Go: Jan 1, 2014 (Confirmed)

Diane Warren: Warren, who typically writes on her own, says the two of them “sat down and wrote the song […] from scratch” during the last few days of 2013. She remembers being impressed with how specific Swift was with her lyricism and how considerate she was about how her fans might receive it. “She was very particular about how she said certain things. It was a really interesting experience. She gets her audience [...] She’s deeply aware of how her fans want to hear something. I can’t explain it, but that’s probably why she’s the biggest fucking star in the world.” Several days after writing the song together, they got into Warren’s office to record a demo, where Swift played it on her acoustic guitar. “We demoed it on New Year’s Day. And I’m a workaholic, and that’s fine for me,” she says. “But I remember being impressed that she did, too. Everybody’s on vacation, but she showed up.”

You Are In Love: Jan 2014 (Inferring)

This song is copyrighted for 2014. Taylor has said a few times that Clean, Shake It Off, and Style were the last songs written for the album, meaning You Are In Love was likely completed in January or early February. Given Taylor's busy schedule in late January and early February, I'd guess this was written at some point in early January. Furthermore, I'd guess it was sometime after the 9th, when she returned from looking at house in New York.

I Know Places: Jan 22, 2014 (Confirmed)

Taylor: "I sent this voice memo to Ryan Tedder because I'd always wanted to work with him, and finally we scheduled some studio time. So I always wanna be prepared, I wanted to send him the idea that I was working on before we went into the studio just in case he wrote back and said "I can't stand that, I wanna work on something else, think of something else" So I just sat down with the piano, put my phone on top of the piano and just kind of explained to him where I wanted to go with the song, how I saw the melody sitting in and we ended up recording the song the next day and it ended up being on the record called "I Know Places" So this was the voice memo that I sent to him the night before we ended up finishing the song"

Welcome To New York: Jan 23, 2014 (Confirmed)

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 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. 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."

January 26 2014: Dianne Warren says that she recently wrote a song with Taylor

"I worked with Taylor Swift on a great song [...] I'm excited about the [song] that we did, it's pretty cool Dianne in 2016: “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.”

January 26 2014: Taylor loses Album of the Year at the Grammy's to Daft Punk. She tells a few different stories about what the rest of the night looked like for her-- in some she goes home alone, in some she has some friends over-- but in all of them, this is the night where she decides that she's gonna name the album 1989, and she's not going to let her label tell her to put any country songs on it.

Clean: Feb 9, 2014 (Confirmed)

According to Imogen Heap's blog post, Taylor had the first verse and chorus by the time they got into the studio, and then wrote the second verse and bridge during the session. Taylor's part was wrapped up in 9 hours, ending at 8pm, while Imogen stayed up until 4am because she didn't want to stop working on it. Taylor: ""Shake It Off" and "Clean" were the last two things we wrote for the record, so it shows you where I ended up mentally. “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. [...] The first thought that came to my mind was – I’m finally clean." Imogen Heap: I was really writing the tiniest amount just to help her do what she does. I put some noises to [“Clean”], 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 [for “Clean”] 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.

February 15, 2014: Taylor posts "It was a studio Valentines Day with Max and Johan!"

Shake It Off: Feb 15, 2014 (Confirmed)

Lover Diaries (From Feb 22): "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.” 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 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." Taylor: "The problem was, I had all these lyrics, and I didnt have, like... writing session was coming up and I'm just like "I'm not getting a melody, I'm dead, I don't know what I'm gonna do." The thought terrified me, so I just sorta sulked into the studio and I was like "Guys, I have like an idea but its like, lyric, but I... and I know the vibe I want-- I want it to start off and the second the song starts, I want it to be the song where like, if it's played at a wedding, and there's this one girl who hasn't danced all night at the reception, all her friends come over to her and there like "You have to dance, come on, you have to dance on this one!". That's what I wanted. So I was like "Shellback, can you just go to the drum kit and try to play that?" Taylor: "There's one thing that I've always said to Max, is like "I don't like horns" I just always had a thing about it, I was always like weirdly scared of it, or intimidated by horns, I don't know what it was? It's a weird, like, nerdy studio fear of mine. I was like "No, no horns!" and I don't.. I don't even know, I don't have a reason for it, I love songs that have horns on them, I was just like "I don't think I can pull off horns." Strange. But, he goes over to the mellotron and he starts playing this horn sound. I'm like "What are you doing. Don't do that." and he's like, "No, I think this is cool" and I'm like "No it's not cool, and where are your chorus chords, because, that, you're just playing three chords over and over again and I can't make a chorus out of them, why don't you go to like a chorus chord that starts off the chorus, where is the one, like why don't you go--" and then there was this moment, where I thought of the whole chorus, and it's over the chords that I had just told him are not "chorus chords", which is a ridiculous thing to say."

February 18, 2014: Taylor is photographed entering Conway Studios

Style: Feb 19, 2014 (Confirmed)

Niklas Ljungfelt (guitarist): I played on “Style,” a song I started with Ali Payami for ourselves. He was playing it for Max Martin at his studio; Taylor overheard it and loved it. She and Max wrote new lyrics. But I recorded the guitar on it before it was a Taylor song. It was an instrumental. I didn’t have a clue that Taylor would sing on it. The inspiration came from Daft Punk and funky electronic music. Taylor: I'm pretty sure after we finished this one I knew the record was done. Shake It Off and Style were the last two songs to be written for 1989.

March 2014: Taylor's interview with Glamour is published (likely conducted two months beforehand)

TS: Working on this album has been unbelievable [...] I'm already in love with it. It's so different. CL: What's the new sound? TS: On Red I did three songs with Max Martin Shellback [...] I think we'll be doing a lot more than three songs together on the next album [Laughs].

March 26, 2014: Taylor is photographed entering a music studio in New York

May 30, 2014: Taylor writes in her diary:

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, wondering 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 within 10 seconds. The shot. The cover. It’s a Polaroid of me sitting against a beige wall with a blue seagull swear shirt on. You can see my red lips, but the photo cuts off my eyes. From 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.

August 23, 2014: Taylor is photographed walking out of a studio in LA (Note: I can not find a place that specifies if this is a recording studio, dance, photography, radio, or television studio.)

Now That We Don't Talk: Summer 2014 (Speculation)

Seeing as Taylor said she didn't have time to figure out the production, I imagine this came fairly late in the process. Taylor has a habit of adding songs right up to the deadline-- with Folklore and Evermore, she added multiple songs a week before the album came out. The latest she added songs to albums while signed to Big Machine was September, though (both Forever & Always and So It Goes...), so I assume that's the absolute latest she could've added a song to 1989. Taylor: "Now That We Don’t Talk” is one of my favorite songs that was left behind, it was so hard to leave it behind, but I think we wrote it a little bit towards the end of the process and we couldn’t get the production right at the time. But we had tons of time to perfect the production this time and figure out what we wanted this song to sound like. I think it’s the shortest song I’ve ever had, but I think it packs a punch, I think it really goes in. For the short amount of time we have, I think it makes its point.

And that's all for this timeline! Check out my others:

TIMELINES: debut • fearless • speak now • red • 1989 • rep • lover • folklore • evermore • midnights PLAYLISTS: debut • fearless • speak now • red • 1989 • rep • lover • folklore • evermore • midnights • entire discography GENERAL: tag

[taylorconnect]

Masterpost: Taylor Swift & The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo

Since I think the book The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo (TSHOEH) helps in understanding bearding, lavender marriages and PR stunts, I thought I’d combine all the parallels I have found to Taylor’s life. Before I start, I want to point out that I could not have done this without various anons and other tumblr users (listed at the end of this post). I’m sure there are still some parallels missing, but I will try and update this post whenever I come across something new. If you have any questions or want to add something, just message me or add in the comments of this post. Now… sit back, grab a glass of wine and enjoy this deep dive. [Obviously this contains spoilers.]

Keep reading

[taylorconnect]

"We're too busy dancing to get knocked out off our feet" New Romantics, Taylor Swift

[taylorconnect]

Music hopefuls try to make it in Nashville

ABC News Transcripts, 4 November 2004, Good Morning America

ROBIN ROBERTS (Voice Over) Three voices, three dreams. Following their hearts and taking a chance on Nashville. 14-year-old Taylor Swift moved to Music City just six months ago with her passion for the guitar and angelic voice.

ROBIN ROBERTS (Voice Over) She has a gift for songwriting. And in her eyes, the twinkle of a young woman born to be a star.

TAYLOR SWIFT, MUSICIAN Hey y'all. I’m Taylor. And I just moved here about six months ago.

ROBIN ROBERTS (Voice Over) Tonight is Taylor Swift’s very first time playing at Nashville’s legendary Bluebird Cafe, where hundreds of hopefuls come once a week and show up with just a song and a guitar.

ROBIN ROBERTS (Voice Over) Garth Brooks was discovered here, and so was Faith Hill. But the man whose record label helped Shania Twain rise to superstardom, says for everyone who makes it, there’s thousands who don’t.

LUKE LEWIS, CHAIRMAN, UNIVERSAL MUSIC GROUP NASHVILLE Lots of luck, talent. Stars have to line up, great songs. Probably more than anything, great songs.

TAYLOR SWIFT When I go through something, I have to write a song about it. I have to write a poem about it, writing is everything to me.

ROBIN ROBERTS (Voice Over) This freshman in high school practices and writes songs at home and in the studio 30 hour a week.

TAYLOR SWIFT It’s been what I have been living for, for my entire life.

ROBIN ROBERTS (Voice Over) At least since age three when Taylor performed Lion King songs to anyone who would listen.

ROBIN ROBERTS (Voice Over) Then when she turned six, she heard LeAnn Rimes for first time.

TAYLOR SWIFT I was just dead set. That’s what I’m gonna be, I’m going to be like her.

[taylorconnect]

Country Weekly, December 2006.

[taylorconnect]

Article written about Taylor’s record being released in October 2006.

#10yearsoftaylor

[taylorconnect]

Don't come for me about this album art...

Anyway it's another Demo Mix! Foolish One holds a grip on my heart so I am unbelievably happy this came out the way it did! Sort of between Fearless and Speak Now sounding.

Creds to Damned Sink for the acapella and to Karaoke All Keys for the seriously perfect instrumental track, just acoustic enough but not too stripped down. And well, creds to me for putting it together ig.