1989 liner notes
Prologue"These songs were once about my life. They are now about yours."
I was born in Reading, Pennsylvania on December 13, 1989.
In the world we live in, much is said about when we are born and when we die. Our birthday is celebrated every year to commemorate the very instant we came into the world. And a funeral is held to mark the day we leave it. But lately I've been wondering... what can be said of all the moments in between our birth and our death? The moments when we are reborn...
The debate over whether people change is an interesting one for me to observe because it seems like all I ever do is change. All I ever do is learn from my mistakes so I don't make the same ones again. Then I make new ones. I know people can change because it happens to me little by little every day. Every day I wake up as someone slightly new. Isn't it wild and intriguing and beautiful to think that every day we are new?
For the last few years, I've woken up every day not wanting, but needing to write a new style of music. I needed to change the way I told my stories and the way they sounded. I listened to a lot of music from the decade in which I was born and I listened to my intuition that it was a good thing to follow this gut feeling. I was also writing a different storyline than I'd ever told you before.
I wrote about moving to the loudest and brightest city in the world, the city I had always been overwhelmed by... until now. I think you have to know who you are and what you want in order to take on New York and all its blaring truth. I wrote about the thrill I got when I finally learned that love, to some extent, is just a game of cat and mouse. I wrote about looking back on a lost love and understanding that nothing good comes without loss and hardship and constant struggle. There is no "riding off into the sunset," like I used to imagine. We are never out of the woods, because we are always going to be fighting for something. I wrote about love that comes back to you just when you thought it was lost forever, and how some feelings never go out of style. I wrote about an important lesson I learned recently... that people can say whatever they want about me, but they can't make me lose my mind. I've learned how to shake things off.
I've told you my stories for years now. Some have been about coming of age. Some have been about coming undone. This is a story about coming into your own, and as a result... coming alive.
I hope you know that you've given me the courage to change. I hope you know that who you are is who you choose to be, and that whispers behind your back don't define you. You are the only person who gets to decide what you will be remembered for.
From the girl who said she would never cut her hair or move to New York or find happiness in a world where she is not in love...
Love, Taylor
1. Welcome To New York
Hidden Message: We begin our story in New York
2. Blank Space
Hidden Message: There once was a girl known by everyone and no one
3. Style
Hidden Message: Her heart belonged to someone who couldn’t stay
4. Out of the Woods
Hidden Message: They loved each other recklessly
5. All You Had to Do Was Stay
Hidden Message: They paid the price
6. Shake It Off
Hidden Message: She danced to forget him
7. I Wish You Would
Hidden Message: He drove past her street each night
8. Bad Blood
Hidden Message: She made friends and enemies
9. Wildest Dreams
Hidden Message: He only saw her in his dreams
10. How You Get the Girl
Hidden Message: Then one day he came back
11. This Love
Hidden Message: Timing is a funny thing
12. I Know Places
Hidden Message: And everyone was watching
13. Clean
Hidden Message: She lost him but she found herself and somehow that was everything
DELUXE
14. Wonderland
15. You Are In Love
16. New Romantics
17. I Know Places" (Piano/Vocal) (Voice Memo)
18. I Wish You Would (Track/Vocal) (Voice Memo)
19. Blank Space (Guitar/Vocal) (Voice Memo)