1989 Prologues: Original vs. Taylor’s Version (Full Text + Analysis)

Taylor Swift’s album prologues are so helpful in understanding the meaning of her lyrics, but are even more insightful when compared on their own, side by side.

Here’s the original 1989 Prologue, compared side-by-side with the 1989 Taylor’s Version Prologue.

After you read the full text of each, I’ll compare and contrast the major themes and takeaways to see what we can learn about the art and the artist.

1989 Prologue (Original: Full Text, 2014) 

Please Note: In this album, Taylor switched the title case to all caps, and left her secret messages in lowercase letters. In the original album booklet, the foreword is written in all caps. I have reformatted it to be easier to read here. 

“Foreword 

“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 can 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 one 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”

-Taylor Swift, 1989 Original Prologue, 2014

1989 Taylor’s Version Prologue: Full Text, 2023

Please Note: In the album, the prologue is styled in a typewriter font in all caps – I have reformatted it to be easier to read here.

Prologue

When I was 24 I sat in a backstage dressing room in London, buzzing with anticipation. My backup singers and bandmates gathered around me in a scattered circle. Scissors emerged and I watched in the mirror as my locks of long curly hair fell in piles on the floor. There I was in my plaid button down shirt, grinning sheepishly as my tour mates and friends cheered on my haircut. This simple thing that everyone does. But I had a secret. For me, it was more than a change of hairstyle. When I was 24, I decided to completely reinvent mysеlf.

How does a person reinvеnt herself, you ask? In any way I could think of. Musically, geographically, aesthetically, behaviorally, motivationally… And I did so joyfully. The curiosity I had felt the first murmurs of while making Red amplified into a pulsing heartbeat of restlessness in my ears. The risks I took when I toyed with pop sounds and sensibilities on Red? I wanted to push it further. The sense of freedom I felt when traveling to big bustling cities? I wanted to live in one. The voices that had begun to shame me in new ways for dating like a normal young woman? I wanted to silence them.

You see—in the years preceding this, I had become the target of slut-shaming—the intensity and relentlessness of which would be criticized and called out if it happened today, the jokes about my amount of boyfriends. The trivialization of my songwriting as if it were a predatory act of a boy crazy psychopath, the media co-signing of this narrative. I had to make it stop because it was starting to really hurt.

It became clear to me that for me there was no such thing as casual dating, or even having a male friend who you platonically hang out with. If I was seen with him, it was assumed I was sleeping with him. And so I swore off hanging out with guys, dating, flirting, or anything that could be weaponized against me by a culture that claimed to believe in liberating women but consistently treated me with the harsh moral codes of the Victorian Era.

Being a consummate optimist, I assumed I could fix this if I simply changed my behavior. I swore off dating and decided to focus only on myself, my music, my growth, and my female friendships. If I only hung out with my female friends, people couldn’t sensationalize or sexualize that—right? I would learn later on that people could and people would.

But none of that mattered then because I had a plan and I had a demeanor as trusting as a basket of golden retriever puppies. I had the keys to my own apartment in New York and I had new melodies bursting from my imagination. I had Max Martin and Shellback who were happy to help me explore this new sonic landscape I was enamored with. I had a new friend named Jack Antonoff who had made some cool tracks in his apartment. I had the idea that the album would be called 1989 and we would reference big 80s synths and write sky high choruses. I had sublime, inexplicable faith and I ran right toward it, in high heels and a crop top.

There was so much that I didn’t know then, and looking back I see what a good thing that was. This time of my life was marked by the right kind of naïveté, a hunger for adventure, and a sense of freedom I hadn’t tasted before. It turns out that the cocktail of naïveté, hunger for adventure and freedom can lead to some nasty hangovers, metaphorically speaking. Of course everyone had something to say, but they always will. I learned lessons, paid prices, and tried to… Don’t say it… Don’t say it… I’m sorry, I have to say it… Shake it off.

I’ll always be so incredibly grateful for how you loved and embraced this album. You, who followed my zig zag creative choices and cheered on my risks and experiments. You, who heard the wink and humor in “Blank Space” and maybe even empathized with the pain behind the satire. You, who saw the seeds of allyship and advocating for equality in “Welcome To New York.” You, who knew that maybe a girl who surrounds herself with female friends in adulthood is making up for a lack of them in childhood (Not starting a tyrannical hot girl cult). You, who saw that I reinvent myself for a million reasons, and that one of them is to try my very best to entertain you. You, who have had the grace to allow me the freedom to change.

I was born in 1989, reinvented for the first time in 2014, and a part of me was reclaimed in 2023 with the re-release of this album I love so dearly. Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine the magic you would sprinkle on my life for so long.

This moment is a reflection of the woods we’ve wandered through and all this love between us still glowing in the darkest dark.

I present to you, with gratitude and wild wonder, my version of 1989.

It’s been waiting for you.

Taylor

-Taylor Swift, 1989 Taylor’s Version Prologue, 2023

Comparing 1989 Prologues: Themes, Messages & More

Both of these prologues contain similar themes and messages, but how have Taylor’s views on the album, her life, and her career changed in the 9 years in between?

Here are the central ideas she touches on in each, and how they’ve evolved for her over the years.

For a quick refresher on this era, see my brief timeline of Taylor’s career.

On the Themes of 1989

Original: “In the world we live in, much is said about when we are born and when we die. 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…”

TV: “I was born in 1989, reinvented for the first time in 2014, and a part of me was reclaimed in 2023 with the re-release of this album I love so dearly…This moment is a reflection of the woods we’ve wandered through and all this love between us still glowing in the darkest dark.”

Taylor’s original 1989 prologue makes it very clear that the album we’re about to hear is all about rebirth and reinvention. This period of limbo in between birth and death is rife with chances to start over, and start fresh. 

2023 Taylor calls this time “the woods we’ve wandered through,” and it’s an apt metaphor. All our lives we wander through the woods, where we can’t see the forest through the trees, hoping we’ll make it out alive and get perspective. 

The theme of both 1989 and 1989 Taylor’s Version, therefore, isn’t just rebirth: it’s all the little things along the way that make us want to be reborn, and make us crave reinvention. She points not only at the new person she’s become with this album, but at all the catalysts that made her retreat and re-emerge in the first place.  

Both versions of 1989 describe the “messy middle” of reinvention. Welcome to New York isn’t about moving, but it’s about why she wanted to move. Shake it Off isn’t about being unbothered, it’s about why she has to emotionally protect herself with coping mechanisms. Wildest Dreams isn’t just a romantic fantasy, it’s about what she would be able to do were the cameras not on her at every moment. 

Vault tracks like Slut and Suburban Legends expand the context of her motivations. They give us a peek behind the curtain at the wizard manufacturing her future, and describe why she needed to retreat to the lab in the first place, to cook up a new version of herself.  

On the “Why” of 1989

Original: “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.”

TV: “I had the idea that the album would be called 1989 and we would reference big 80s synths and write sky high choruses. I had sublime, inexplicable faith and I ran right toward it, in high heels and a crop top.”

Rebirth and reinvention isn’t only the theme of 1989, it’s also the central motivation behind writing it. She didn’t magically reinvent herself, then write an album about it: the entire thing was a calculated process. 

2014 Taylor told us that she wanted to write new stories; ones that didn’t involve “coming of age” and “coming undone.” She wanted to rewrite the narrative of her life, because she didn’t like where the current one was headed. 

2023 Taylor tells us that she took this plan and giddily ran with it, “in high heels and a crop top.” She’d write a totally different style of music, and thought her risk would pay off big time with “inexplicable faith” and optimism. Magically, she’d get an entirely new narrative. Right? 

Wrong. The slut shaming would still run rampant, even if she didn’t write songs about her exes or hang out with boys. But – and here’s the important part – it set a precedent for her future reinventions. This rebrand worked, and worked so well, that it became a formula. 

Pre-1989, Taylor slowly reinvented herself with every studio album, but it was subtle. 

Post-1989, every album and every era is distinct, sonically, lyrically, and graphically. 

From 1989 on, every era has been a reinvention, with Taylor ‘coming into her own.’  

On Her First Reinvention

Original: “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?”

TV:  “The voices that had begun to shame me in new ways for dating like a normal young woman? I wanted to silence them…If I only hung out with my female friends, people couldn’t sensationalize or sexualize that—right? I would learn later on that people could and people would.”

2014 Taylor looks at this reinvention with excitement and appreciation. “Isn’t it wild and intriguing and beautiful to think that every day we are new?” she wonders, marveling at the miracle of it all. 

But 2023 Taylor lets us know that behind the scenes, all was not “intriguing and beautiful.” This reinvention was an attempt to “silence them”: the voices in her head, and the voices in the media, that targeted her very normal 20-something behavior. 

Her reinvention did a lot of things, but silencing the voices was not one of them. No matter what she did, she unfortunately discovered, “people could and people would” find things to criticize and shame her for. 

Instead of “everyday we are new,” everyday she’d hear a new voice trying to tear her down. It’s here that we can see that her following album, reputation, was not out of the blue. It was a natural consequence of years of unmitigated criticism and judgment. 

These pressures were building for a long time, and her attempts at relieving the pressure – by reinvention – didn’t play out the way she’d hoped. reputation was her explosion. 

On Slut Shaming 

Original: “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.”

TV: “…the jokes about my amount of boyfriends. The trivialization of my songwriting as if it were a predatory act of a boy crazy psychopath, the media co-signing of this narrative. I had to make it stop because it was starting to really hurt.”

Taylor’s slut shaming was not something that emerged during her 1989 era. It was a narrative that the media ran with as soon as this pretty blonde songwriter emerged on the scene, intensified during Speak Now, reached monstrous proportions during Red, and continued, no matter what she did next. 

2014 Taylor tells us she’s unbothered by this, but with 2023 Taylor’s context, we can see that she was not, in fact, able to Shake it Off. Who would be? It’s a harsh spotlight, on which the media shone unrealistic and old-fashioned patriarchal ideals. 

2023 Taylor tells us “it was really starting to hurt,” and of course it was. She had tried to shake it off mentally in her previous eras, but during 1989, she tried to shake it off physically. 

She moved, changed her friends, changed her songwriting, changed her hair, and changed her style. And yet, the slut-shaming still followed. 

A byproduct of this era was that, because she was only hanging out publicly with female friends, the narrative that Taylor was/is queer came on the scene. “People could and people would” copy and paste any narrative they wanted onto her pop stardom, as if they had a blank space to do so. 

The slut shaming narrative was, unfortunately, something that would only start to quiet down once the world started to speak up. It’s still around today, but 2024 Taylor is one of the most powerful women in the world, and has (hopefully) learned how to really shake it off, and shut it up when it gets too loud. 

On Optimism & Naivete 

Original: “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.”

TV:  “I had a plan and I had a demeanor as trusting as a basket of golden retriever puppies…There was so much that I didn’t know then, and looking back I see what a good thing that was. This time of my life was marked by the right kind of naïveté, a hunger for adventure, and a sense of freedom I hadn’t tasted before.”

2014 Taylor is wildly optimistic, embracing this huge change with open arms and not thinking much of it, because change already “happens to me little by little every day.” 

2023 Taylor looks back and is grateful for her optimism, which was full of “the right kind of naïveté, a hunger for adventure, and a sense of freedom.” It allowed her to change and move directions at will, because she assumed it would all work out. 

But her “demeanor as trusting as a basket of golden retriever puppies” would – unfortunately – lead to being manipulated. Snakegate – her first major worldwide scandal and attempted “cancellation” – happened during this era. 

Between 1989 and reputation, she’d lose that blindly optimistic and trusting nature, and reemerge with a vengeance in songs like Look What You Made Me Do and I Did Something Bad. She’d never again blindly “trust a narcissist,” or anyone else. 

On Her Fans

Original: “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.”

TV: “You, who saw that I reinvent myself for a million reasons, and that one of them is to try my very best to entertain you. You, who have had the grace to allow me the freedom to change.”

In both prologues, Taylor thanks her fans for giving her “the courage” and “the freedom to change.” It’s because of us and our loyalty, she says, that she could go in a million different directions, and always be supported. 

2023 Taylor finally admits that her reinventions were – as we suspected all along – aimed at entertaining us, and keeping her narrative fresh and fashionable. 

In the Miss Americana documentary, we get a longer peek behind the curtain inside her process. She admitted on film that part of this series of reinventions is to prolong her career, as the lifespan of a female pop star is all too short. 

We already had hints that Taylor was worried about the longevity of her career from songs like Nothing New and The Lucky One. But post-1989 and reputation, she’ll dive further into these worries in candid songs like mirrorball and Dear Reader. 

Today, we know that there’s a dark side to her fanbase always craving more. Though we’ll always support her reinventions and redirections, we can see that it takes its mental toll on her in songs like mirrorball, I Can Do it With A Broken Heart, The Prophecy, You’re On Your Own, Kid, and more. 

On New York

Original: “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.”

TV: “The sense of freedom I felt when traveling to big bustling cities? I wanted to live in one..I had the keys to my own apartment in New York and I had new melodies bursting from my imagination.”

From the very beginning, big cities were metaphors for “making it” and success for Taylor, which we can see in songs like Mine and Mean. Moving to New York, therefore, means she really “made it” in her mind. 

2014 Taylor tells us that it took courage to face this big city move, and that “you have to know who you are and what you want” to live there. 

But since she was amidst her first big reinvention, did she really know who she was and what she wanted? Or was she running, trying to escape the “voices” of judgment and shame? 

2023 Taylor tells us this New York moment was about craving a “sense of freedom.” And though New York is a freeing city for us civilians, it could never be such for Taylor. While I can walk down the streets of NYC blissfully anonymous, Taylor can’t do that anywhere, either now or in 2014. 

But – and here’s the most important part – New York represented not only physical freedom, but creative freedom. 

In her iconic Welcome to New York, she tells us that this bustling place is “a new soundtrack” to her life, and she had “new melodies bursting form my imagination” in this sparking, loud, dynamic environment. 

The vibe of New York energized her, and she’ll go on to draw inspiration from the city again and again, in songs like Cornelia Street, Maroon, and Delicate. New York’s “blaring truth” was that it opened up her world, physically and creatively. 

It was more than a move, it was a moving on from her country sensibilities once and for all. 

On Love in The Spotlight

Original: “I wrote about the thrill I got when I finally learned that love, to some extent, is just a game of cat and mouse…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.“

TV: “It became clear to me that for me there was no such thing as casual dating, or even having a male friend who you platonically hang out with. If I was seen with him, it was assumed I was sleeping with him.”

Though publicly she wasn’t dating during the period between Red and 1989, and tried only to be spotted with her girlfriends, privately we can see that it was a different story.  

In her previous album Red, she described epic heartbreaks, and thought that love could only “break, and burn, and end.” But here in 1989, she seems to gain a different perspective: “love,” she says, “is just a game of cat and mouse.”

2023 Taylor tells us why she came up with this new narrative: “there was no such thing as casual dating” in her world. So what did she do? She leaned into satire. 

If she couldn’t date without being labeled a slut, and her songwriting was called into question for lambasting her exes, she leaned in instead of running away. That old saying, ‘if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em?’ That’s exactly what she did. 

The result? Blank Space, her ultimate satirical look at her reputation and her romances. If the media would mark her with a Scarlet ‘A’ no matter what she did, she took that scarlet and put it right on her lips. 

This way, at least she owned her own narrative, and got to control the message. She really ran with this satirical message in reputation, in songs like End Game, Don’t Blame Me, and I Did Something Bad. 

On The Lessons of 1989

Original: “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.”

TV: “It turns out that the cocktail of naïveté, hunger for adventure and freedom can lead to some nasty hangovers, metaphorically speaking. Of course everyone had something to say, but they always will. I learned lessons, paid prices, and tried to…Shake it off.”

2014 Taylor used her intuition to “follow this gut feeling,” leading her toward new stories and new ways of narrating. She jumped in feet-first into a new sound, a new city, a new era, and a new image. 

2023 Taylor looks back and sees that this new adventure caused “some nasty hangovers,” or emotional turmoil. She learned from 1989 that no matter what she did, or in what way she did it, “everyone had something to say, but they always will.” 

So what was the lesson that 1989 taught her? Change is good, and change is scary. But you can’t change other people; you can only change yourself. 

Therefore, you should probably “shake it off” and let other people talk. You don’t have to listen to what they say, anyway. 

This lesson will come roaring back around in reputation and all the records that followed, and she’ll carry these mental notes with her wherever she goes, and however she gets there. 

1989 Prologues: Final Thoughts 

Comparing these album prologues is like uncovering a teenager’s diary: we learn what happened, when, why, how, and where we go from here. 

They chart Taylor’s emotional journeys, and in the ever-expanding map of the Swiftverse, serve as checkpoints to remind us of where we came from, and where we are. 

We can see the lessons of Red, and begin to spot the emotional themes that will become so prominent in reputation. 

The seeds of what will become Lover, folklore, evermore, Midnights, and TTPD are all here, like small sprouts that will take root in Taylor’s mind and grow to massive oak trees. 

In 2014, we learned about the “messy middle” of reinvention, and in 2023, we learned why this reinvention was necessary. It will serve as a roadmap for all of the creative directions to come, and we can trace that road back to where it all began: 1989. 

More Album Prologues 

• Debut Album Prologue
• Fearless & Fearless TV Prologues
• Speak Now & Speak Now TV Prologues
• Red & Red TV Prologues
• reputation Prologue & Why She Disappeared

Lyrical Analysis of 1989 (Taylor’s Version) 

• Welcome to New York
• Blank Space
• Style
• Out of the Woods
• All You Had to Do Was Stay
• Shake it Off
• I Wish You Would
• Bad Blood
• Wildest Dreams
• How You Get the Girl
• This Love
• I Know Places
• Clean
• Wonderland
• You Are in Love
• New Romantics
• Slut! [From the Vault]
• Say Don’t Go [From the Vault]
• Now That We Don’t Talk [From the Vault]
• Suburban Legends [From the Vault]
• Is it Over Now? [From the Vault]