Taylor Swift’s Songwriting Style, and Why It’s So Appealing
From the very beginning of Taylor Swift’s career, her songwriting style was – and still is – classified as “diaristic.” She writes personally, like in a diary, and draws her listener in with her vulnerable lyrics.
But beyond “diaristic,” how can we really describe Taylor’s songwriting style? What does she do that others don’t? And why has her music captured so many hearts and minds across the globe?
I’m your Swiftie English teacher, and I’m here to break it down piece by piece. Let’s uncover the key elements of Taylor’s songwriting: what she does, how she does it, and why it’s so successful.
Please Note: I am an English teacher and not a musician or musicologist. Here, I focus on Taylor’s lyrics, and not her production. For commentary on what makes her sound so appealing, see Billboard’s comprehensive article here.
🍎 This is Part 5 of my 9-part series: Taylor Swift 101 🍎
The Key Elements of Taylor Swift’s Songwriting
Taylor’s songwriting can’t be described by labels. The icon has gone through so many styles, genres and sounds that it can be hard to narrow down exactly what makes her songwriting unique.
Taylor has never played by the rules, but there are some common elements from every genre – and every era – that have remained constant.
Here are the key characteristics of Taylor’s songwriting that set her apart, and have (in my opinion) contributed to her massive success.
1. Diaristic Songwriting
Taylor has always written from personal experience. Her very first single, Tim McGraw, was a country ballad narrating the nostalgia of first love.
But many songwriters are diaristic, so why has Taylor’s style captured the world’s attention? It’s more about what she doesn’t say than what she does say.
Taylor reveals just enough to keep our interest piqued, but hides just enough to keep us guessing.
Her use of hidden messages in the liner notes (from her self-titled debut through 1989) made her lyrics an interactive game: ‘can you guess who I wrote this song about? ‘ This small detail created the Taylor Swift enigma, and challenged us to crack the code.
As she evolved into the world’s biggest celebrity, she revealed less and less, but cryptically hinted at more and more. If her debut album was an open, unlocked diary, The Tortured Poet’s Department is a redacted, encrypted file.
We are always left wanting more, but she’ll only ever give us selected pages. We yearn to see her inner world, and we’ll keep trying by interpreting the only clues she gives us: her lyrics.
It’s an endless game of cat and mouse, and Taylor always wins, because only she knows what’s really inside the diary of her life.
✏️ Reflect: Read the lyrics to Dancing With Our Hands Tied. What does Taylor reveal, and what does she keep confidential?
2. Narrative Songwriting
From the very beginning, Taylor’s storytelling set her apart from other artists. Instead of only describing a feeling, or only describing a situation, she creates entire worlds within her lyrics, complete with imagery, motifs, symbolism, and characters.
Within the short span of a song, she creates elaborate plot lines, complete with rising action, falling action, climax, and resolution. This is called the “narrative arc,” and it’s a standard literary device used to tell a complete, compelling story.
The best examples of Taylor’s narrative storytelling can be found in songs like The Last Great American Dynasty, All Too Well [10-Minute Version], no body, no crime, and champagne problems. In tracks like these, she’s written an entire novel with so few words, which is part of her brilliance.
In some albums and eras, she continues one narratives through multiple songs, deepening the meaning and expanding the world in which her stories exist.
The folklore love triangle is a good example of this, where the songs cardigan, betty, and august involve the same characters and storylines.
Two songs from evermore also lean into this fictional world, where tis the damn season and dorothea involve the same central characters, replying to one another across multiple songs.
But whether fictional or autobiographical, she always creates a narrative world that draws us in, which is part of what makes her songwriting continually compelling.
✏️ Reflect: Read the lyrics to champagne problems starting at the second verse: “You told your family for a reason”. Pretend the song starts at this point.
How does the meaning of the song change when you no longer have the backstory for context?
3. Character-Driven Narratives & Point of View
While the majority of Taylor’s songs come from her own perspective and life experience, some of her songs adopt a narrative style where she tells a story from a specific character’s perspective.
She’s always our author and narrator, but she’s not always our protagonist, as displayed in songs like Love Story (from the perspective of Juliet, a “damsel in distress”), betty (from the perspective of fictional character James), and tis the damn season (from the perspective of fictional character dorothea).
She also strategically uses archetypes and character tropes to portray specific themes and ideas, such as in the “mad woman in the attic” of mad woman, a satirical “monster on the hill” of Anti-Hero, and the trope of good-girl-who-falls-for-a-bad-boy in But Daddy I Love Him.
Though she may not always be the protagonist in her narratives, she always uses real, raw emotion to fuel her storytelling, which is why even her most blatantly fictional and satirical narratives resonate with her fans.
Even when she’s not writing from her own perspective, she builds complex, believable and relatable characters that we can see ourselves in.
✏️ Reflect: How would you describe the narrator of But Daddy I Love Him? How has Taylor written this character to be universally relatable?
4. Emotional Honesty & Vulnerability
You may think there’s not much about the world’s biggest superstar that we can relate to, but Taylor has a knack for connecting with fans despite her very abnormal life.
From the beginning of her songwriting career, she’s used vulnerable and honest emotions throughout her lyrics. For the best examples of this, look to her track fives, always the most raw and revealing track on any album.
Her first track five, A Place in This World, revealed her feelings of “otherness”, a universal emotion of feeling different and left out. Her second, White Horse, uses a fairy tale trope (the “white knight”) to portray the letdown of reality: there are no princesses and knights in shining armor in real life and real love.
Her most recent track fives have hit a whole new level of emotional vulnerability, including You’re On Your Own, Kid (about the loneliness of blazing your own trail) and So Long, London (about leaving a place and a person that was once your haven).
But the most important part of Taylor’s raw emotions in her lyrics is that they’re complex. A breakup is not only sad, it’s angry-making and frustrating. Falling in love is not only butterflies, it’s also terrifying and confusing. Growing up is not only daunting, it’s also thrilling and devastating.
Her layered emotions reflect what real life is like: it’s not only one feeling, it’s all the feelings, happening at the same time.
✏️ Reflect: What do you think Taylor’s most raw, vulnerable song is? Why do you feel that way, and how does it reflect experiences you’ve had in your own life?
5. Detailed Imagery & Metaphors
Over the years, Taylor’s lyrics have grown from simple and sweet to complex and cryptic. Her use of language has evolved with her career, steering toward something more akin to poetry than pop music.
She’s always used vivid descriptions, and they’ve only grown more potent with time. Imagery that describes sound, for example, began as “our song is the slammin’ screen door, stayin’ out late tappin’ on your window” has evolved into “Kaleidoscope of loud heartbeats under coats”.
Her metaphors, likewise, have only grown more complex and intriguing. One great example of this is her “colors of love,” first described in her song Red: “losing him was blue like I’ve never known, missing him was dark gray, all alone…but loving him was red.” These are fairly simple metaphors, where colors represent emotions.
But as her songwriting matured, so did her use of color metaphors. The color red comes back around in Maroon, where red is “The burgundy on my T-shirt when you splashed your wine into me / And how the blood rushed into my cheeks, so scarlet, it was maroon.”
The latter is much more complex and cryptic, and open to many more interpretations, reflecting the growth of Taylor’s songwriting as a whole. She’s also an expert at using imagery and metaphor combined, where each aspect of her lyrics paints a deeply layered world.
✏️ Reflect: What is your favorite TS metaphor, and why? What imagery does it conjure in your mind?
6. Constantly Shifting Genres & Themes
Taylor may have begun her career as the quintessential country artist, singing about pickup trucks and heartbreak. But she shifted – slowly, then quickly – into rock, pop, folk, and combinations of these genres.
But with her change in sound also came a shift in her subject matter. Her lyrics have constantly evolved to center around new themes, and as her life has grown more complex, so has her songwriting.
Her first three albums were mostly about love and heartbreak, but as she left teenhood and entered the adult world, more complex motifs emerged.
Red was her first true rock/pop album, and although it still contained her raw, diaristic storytelling, it incorporated more angry and regretful lyrics as displayed in songs like I Knew You Were Trouble and We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together.
In 1989, as her popularity skyrocketed and media chatter swirled relentlessly, she began subverting the media’s portrayal of her with satirical songs like Blank Space and New Romantics.
By reputation, she had truly mastered the art of clapping back, layering satire and sarcasm in songs like I Did Something Bad and Look What You Made Me Do.
In Lover, she began to comment on the patriarchy and her place within it, in songs like The Man and You Need to Calm Down.
As the world shut down with the pandemic, Taylor shifted once again, debuting a whole new side of herself with the indie and folk-influenced folklore and evermore. This was also the first time she began experimenting with fiction, while still using relatable themes and emotions as the bedrock of her storytelling.
In Midnights and The Tortured Poets Department, her lyrics became the most poetic and cryptic they’ve ever been, leaving us hungry to decipher the true meaning.
All of these lyrical shifts reflect how she’s grown as a human and as an artist, and the constant shape-shifting keeps our interest piqued.
Her genre shifts also have the happy consequence (deliberately, or by accident) of drawing in new fans with each incarnation, constantly growing her fanbase.
✏️ Reflect: During which “era” did you become a fan of Taylor Swift, and what about her music appealed to you during that era that may not have caught your attention before?
7. Varied Styles: Pen Genres
Taylor herself classifies her lyrics in three categories: glitter gel pen songs, fountain pen songs, and quill pen songs.
At the Nashville Songwriters Awards in 2022, Taylor revealed the definition of these pen genres.
Quill: “If the words and phrasing are antiquated…if my lyrics sound like a letter written by Emily Dickinson’s great-grandmother while sewing a lace curtain, that’s me writing in the quill genre.”
Examples: ivy, willow, cowboy like me
Fountain: “Most of my lyrics fall into this category…A modern storyline or references with a poetic twist: taking a common phrase, and flipping its meaning. Basically, trying to paint a vivid picture of a situation down to the chipped paint on a door frame, and the incense dust on the vinyl shelf. Placing yourself, and whoever is listening, right there in the room, where it all happened. The love, the loss, everything.”
Examples: All Too Well, Midnight Rain, The Archer, long story short
Glitter Gel Pen: “Frivolous, carefree, bouncy, syncopated perfectly to the beat. Glitter gel pen lyrics don’t care if you don’t take them seriously because they don’t take themselves seriously. Glitter gel pen lyrics are the drunk girl at the party who tells you you look like an angel in the bathroom.”
Examples: 22, Bejeweled, You Need to Calm Down, Karma
Within her own classifications, we can tell that Taylor herself knows that her songwriting is varied and prolific, and can’t be classified as only one style or one genre. Just like our own personalities and moods, Taylor’s lyrics change with the weather. But they always tell unique stories, and are rooted in real emotional vulnerability.
✏️ Reflect: What does using different “pen genres” allow Taylor to do in her songwriting? How would her discography look different if she only used one of these pens?
8. Using “Dear Reader” Moments
Taylor’s lyrics may be the only clues we get in the hunt for the “real” Taylor Swift, but sometimes she breaks the fourth wall, peeking out from behind the curtain of the TS machine.
Taylor has taken a hint from the iconic line from Jane Eyre, “Dear reader, I married him,” and made it her own. She uses these moments strategically, giving a knowing wink to her reader that tells us she’s been in on the joke the whole time.
One example is in The Last Great American Dynasty, where our narrator has been telling us the story of a rich widow and her house. In the last line of the bridge, she then pops out of the narrative to reveal: “and then it was bought by me.” It’s revealed that the story has really been about Taylor all along.
Anti-Hero is another great example of Taylor’s meta moments, where she says satirically, “it’s me, hi, I’m the problem, it’s me.” She reveals she’s both the narrator and the subject, indulging every piece of gossip surrounding her reputation, and clapping back by leaning in.
But the most important example of Taylor’s “dear reader” moments is, of course, the song Dear Reader: “never take advice from someone who’s falling apart.” “You should find another guiding light,” she tells her fans, “but I shine so bright.” ‘I know you look up to me‘, she tells her reader, ‘but you shouldn’t – I don’t know what I’m doing’.
What these moments do is give us a peek behind the curtain, past the facade of Taylor Swift and into the real person Taylor Swift. It bridges the distance between her and her reader, making her music that more relatable and vulnerable.
✏️ Reflect: Why do you think Taylor breaks the fourth wall in her songwriting? What does it add to your experience as a fan?
9. Unconventional Song Structures
Taylor doesn’t only tell stories with a beginning, middle, and end to keep us engaged: she uses song structures that mimic an emotional roller coaster.
While a typical song might begin with an intro, move into the first verse, enter the chorus, then repeat, Taylor’s songs are significantly more complex. She adds pre-choruses and expository bridges that turn up the emotional investment.
Her pre-choruses create rising action, which slowly builds up to the chorus, which will eventually all lead up to the emotional climax of the bridge.
In Cruel Summer, for example, the first pre-chorus reads:
“Killing me slow, out the window
I’m always waiting for you to be waiting below
Devils roll the dice, angels roll their eyes
What doesn’t kill me makes me want you more”
Here, she’s building anticipation, and the chorus that follows will describe “what doesn’t kill” her. But in the second pre-chorus, the lyrics change, and give us more information:
“So cut the headlights, summer’s a knife
I’m always waiting for you just to cut to the bone
Devils roll the dice, angels roll their eyes
And if I bleed, you’ll be the last to know”
While they both contain death and injury metaphors, the first pre-chorus tells us that this love is painful, dangerous, and exciting.
The second pre-chorus expands the protagonist’s emotional world, telling us that she wants the pain, and will disregard the consequences of this romance, no matter what.
These both lead up to the bridge, which climaxes with “I love you, ain’t that the worst thing you ever heard?” All this rising intensity has led up to this moment, where she says the quiet part out loud: ‘I love you, it hurts, but I don’t care. Hurt me.’
If Cruel Summer were simply verse-chorus-verse, it would be a very different – and a much more boring – song. We wouldn’t have gotten enough information to be invested, and we wouldn’t understand the point of view of the narrator.
Taylor creates complex song structures that keep our interest piqued, build tension, and give her characters both motivation and resolution. They make her songs more relatable, and more human.
(For more examples of Taylor’s expert use of pre-choruses and bridges, see my dissection of would’ve, could’ve, should’ve, Getaway Car, All Too Well [10-minute version], Anti-Hero, and evermore.)
✏️ Reflect: Taylor’s bridges often serve as the emotional climax to her stories. What is your favorite bridge, and why? What happens in the beginning and middle of the song that has built up to the bridge?
10. Wordplay & Lyrical Precision
Taylor often uses clever wordplay, puns, double meanings, repeating sounds, and twists common turns of phrase in her lyrics. This adds sophistication and layers of meaning, which keeps us entertained and intrigued.
Examples:
- “You call me up again just to break me like a promise” – All Too Well [10-Minute Version]
- “I’ve come too far to watch some name dropping sleaze tell me what are my words worth” (the lakes, name dropping the romantic poet Wordsworth)
- “You had a speech, you’re speechless” –champagne problems
- “Time is taking its sweet time erasing you” –Sad Beautiful Tragic
- “If I can’t relate to you anymore, then who am I related to?” -coney island
- “Old habits die screaming” –The Black Dog
- “I lived in your chess game, but you change the rules everyday” –Dear John
- “We never painted by the numbers baby, but we were makin’ it count” –the 1
- “I bury hatchets but I keep maps of where I put ’em.” –End Game
- “Boys will be boys, then where are the wise men?” –Miss Americana & The Heartbreak Prince
- “My heart’s been borrowed and yours has been blue, all’s well that ends well to end up with you.” –Lover
- “And you say I abandoned the ship, but I was going down with it” –So Long, London
These clever uses of wordplay add layers of meaning, opens up her lyrics to multiple interpretations, and always keeps us interested and curious.
✏️ Reflect: What’s your favorite turn of phrase that Taylor has used in her lyrics, and how has she made it her own? How does it change the meaning?
11. Use of Literary & Pop Culture References
Taylor is not only inspired by great works of literature and film, she also references them directly in her lyrics. Keen-eyed readers will be rewarded if they thoroughly dissect each line, finding little Easter eggs that lead to other great works of art.
Examples:
- “Feelin’ so Gatsby that whole year” in This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things name-checks The Great Gatsby, the classic F Scott Fitzgerald novel about the American Dream.
- “They say all’s well that ends well” in All Too Well references the Shakespearean Classic All’s Well That Ends Well, a comedy about lies, betrayal, and deceit.
- Wonderland references Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carol, comparing a romance to Alice falling down the rabbit hole.
- New Romantics references the new romantic movement of the 80s, characterized by big hair and big attitudes.
- “He can be my jailer, Burton to this Taylor” in Ready For It? references the doomed on-again, off-again romance between Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.
- “I looked around in a blood-soaked gown” from You’re On Your Own, Kid references Stephen King’s Carrie.
There are many, many more references in Taylor’s lyrics (see my complete list here). But what purpose do they serve? They up the intelligence factor.
Taylor knows that her art does not exist in a vacuum, and is always influenced and inspired by other artists. Her frequent nods to external inspirations help us examine her artistic contributions in the context of the world in which they were born, as well as add new layers of sophistication and meaning.
✏️ Reflect: Have you ever read a book or watched a film because Taylor pointed you to it? What was it, and how did it change the meaning of the lyrics for you?
Why Taylor’s Songwriting Style Works
As we’ve seen, Taylor doesn’t just have one signature style: she has many. Her ability to blend all of these elements together is what really makes her songwriting unique.
We may not have one label for Taylor’s songwriting style, and that’s very purposeful: it allows her to keep shape-shifting and keep evolving into new styles and genres.
The combination of these styles and signature elements – along with a masterful marketing team – has made her one of the most successful and respected songwriters of all time.
She’s been a country songwriter, a pop songwriter, and folk songwriter, but she never strictly follows any of the established patterns of any of these genres. She blazes her own trail, constantly giving us something new and fresh, while still maintaining her signature narrative style that keeps us engaged.
Where will she go next? Keeping us guessing is her ultimate strategy: we don’t know, and we don’t care. We just love being along for the ride, lyric by lyric.
➡️ ➡️ ➡️ Next Lesson: Why Taylor Swift’s Songs Hit Harder: The Power of Narrative Structure
🎓 All Lessons in Taylor Swift 101 🎓
Unit 1: An Introduction to Taylor Swift
A Quick Timeline of Taylor Swift’s Career: The Basics You Need to Know
Genres and Eras: Taylor Swift’s Artistic Evolution
Unit 2: The Art of Storytelling
How Taylor Swift Uses Storytelling to Make Us Feel Everything
Taylor’s Signature Songwriting Style & What Makes it Effective
Why Taylor Swift’s Songs Hit Harder: The Power of Narrative Structure
Unit 3: Unlocking Taylor’s Lyrics: Literary Devices and Deep Themes
Imagery, Metaphors & Symbolism: How Taylor Builds Worlds
