Breaking Down Your Taylor Swift Love Story
By Emma Foose on March 21, 2025
Many people know the 14 time Grammy award winner, Taylor Swift, for her breakup songs and catchy pop anthems. Today we are going to dive a bit deeper into her discography exploring how growing up alongside your audience can create music that shapes a generation.
We are going to first enter the Taylor Swift universe during her 4th studio album- Red. Lyrically and Musically Red resembles a heartbroken person, Swift wrote the album at just 20 years old after a tumultuous relationship with actor Jake Gyllenhaal who was 29 at the time.
Our first track, representing a 20 year old girl who is happy, free, confused, lonely, devastated, euphoric, wild and tortured by memories of the past.
Jumping forward to 2022- Taylor releases Midnights, her 10th studio album. She is now 33 years old and has amalgamated her past albums into an R&B Synth pop style track list. In many ways, Midnights is Taylor reflecting on her youth and adolescence through restless minds on her journey to becoming a fully realized adult. Maroon is the second track on the album, representing the haunting memories of a long- ago romance.
In Red, Swift sings about the emotional rollercoaster of loving and losing someone you thought you knew. While being released almost a decade later, Maroon tackles these same emotions from a more mature lens.
While we will never know exactly who Swift is referencing in Maroon, we do know the album was inspired by her sleepless nights reflecting on regrets, loss, self criticism and heartbreak.
Stepping back in time again, we go to Taylor’s third studio album. Speak Now. Released in 2010, written when she was just 19 years old. Speak now is an album about young love and discovering who you are. It is also the first time
Swift opens up about the devastation that can come from being manipulated during a relationship with someone much older. Swift, 19 at the time, was involved with John Mayer, 34. She reflects first on this relationship on the track Dear John. Taylor again reminds us how formative this relationship was for her on the Midnights Bonus Track, Would’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve.
Throughout the years, Taylor continues to come back to her autobiographical style of writing. Letting audiences in on her most vulnerable moments, and without saying it directly letting them know they aren’t alone. In the words of Travis Kelce, “she has a song for everything man”.
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