Taylor Swift & The Persistence Of Memory

Or, how young America's favorite songwriter looks back

In November 2021, Taylor Swift released the re-recording of her 2012 studio album, Red, to tremendous fanfare and acclaim. While the Fearless re-recording earlier that year garnered plenty of buzz, Red managed to dominate the zeitgeist in a way that seemed unprecedented, even for an industry titan like Swift. The central piece in the puzzle of her ubiquity? Shockingly, a ten-minute song—specifically, a ten-minute version of a song that she was already re-releasing (and that was already five minutes long)—called “All Too Well.” Among the song’s chief delights is its refrain, reframed and repositioned but recurring all the same throughout the song’s staggering runtime: “I was there / I remember it all too well.”

Red was the first Taylor Swift album in which I had a personal stake. I had learned to play “Teardrops On My Guitar” on the piano when her self-titled debut dropped; I was part of a campaign in my eighth grade choir to perform “You Belong With Me” from Fearless at our end-of-year-performance (quick digression: the two most popular girls in our choir, a blonde and a brunette, acted out the conceit of the video with a handsome boy on the water polo team while me and the other dorks swayed and hummed in the background. 2011 was a fever dream). I delighted in the literary framing in “The Story Of Us” and also the music video in which Swift joined a proud tradition of white women making a ruckus in a place they’re not supposed to make a ruckus (see also: the video for Cascada’s “Every Time We Touch”). But I distinctly remember a sort of electrical charge while watching the marketing rollout for Red, and since 2012, I have had an opinion about Taylor Swift, in one way or another.

During the Red re-record and Midnights cycles, respectively, I found myself unavoidably drawn into the Taylor Swift Cinematic Universe. And when the Eras tour began in March, I stopped swimming against the current. For the last several weeks, a solid 50% of my music listening habit has been devoted to Taylor Swift. I have a Spotify playlist called “Best of Taylor” which contains all my favorite songs from all her albums in one place—the sugary sweet bangers, the devastating ballads, and everything in between. It is through this inadvertent Swiftish immersion program that I have uncovered a critical theme in her discography, which is the act of remembering. The New York Times has twice explored the proud Swiftian tradition of remembering; Lindsay Zoladz categorizes “All Too Well” as “the weaponization of memory;” Jon Caramanica knights her “pop’s maestro of memory” in his review of the opening night of the Eras tour.

I have been keeping a journal since 2016. While men are lauded as great historians, at least in contemporary paradigms, it is often women who are keeping the records. It is the women I know who fill blank books with records of their days. And is it not a great running joke that in heterosexual couples, women are shrill and pedantic about special days while men are bumbling goofs who are perpetually forgetting birthdays and anniversaries? Taylor Swift turns this stereotype into a sword that she wields with expert precision. Memory runs like bloody veins through her discography, both with her own assertions that she is the expert on her stories and with painfully specific details to prove it. In Taylor Swift’s universe, memory is, as Zoladz asserts, a weapon, but it is also compulsion, narcotic, an act of erasure, and the greatest possible expression of love.

While much of Swift’s reminiscing is purposeful, her most potent emotional experiences occur almost involuntarily. There are no shortage of references to the idea of remembering or recalling, but Swift employs the idea of the flashback to pack an additional emotional punch. On “Love Story,” from her second album, Fearless, she sings, “close my eyes and the flashback starts,” and on “If This Was a Movie” from the deluxe edition of her third album, Speak Now: “Flashback to a night when you said to me, ‘Nothing's gonna change, not for me and you.’” “Love Story” famously concludes with a proposal; on “If This Was A Movie,” the memory of this direct quote stands out amidst a tidal wave of other memories. The title track of her fourth album, Red, bemoans: “Remembering him comes in flashbacks and echoes.” Where “All Too Well” is about deliberate and precise recall for the express purpose of excoriation, “Red” is often more an expression of helplessness, of being victim to one’s own mind due to the sheer intensity of one’s emotions.

On “Dress,” from her sixth studio album reputation: “Flashback when you met me, your buzzcut and my hair bleached.” It is worth noting that for all the pomp and bluster of this album, it is often referenced as her most romantic, even more so than her more conspicuously titled seventh studio album Lover. It is also the album with the fewest references to flashbacks or memories of any kind. While the narrator of reputation is relitigating past slights with professional and platonic enemies, her romantic life is much more focused on the present; however, this narrator’s preoccupation with her love object triggers automatic recollections of their earliest moments together, imbuing events that at the time likely read as insignificant with new resonance in hindsight. Contrast this with “Death By A Thousand Cuts” from Lover. The song, a breakup record on a track list littered with (occasionally saccharine) declarations of love, refers to “flashbacks waking me up,” sleepless nights haunted by the inability to erase the memory of a lover who is now long gone.

While Swift sometimes sings of being victimized by the weight of memory, she is also capable of framing this nostalgia as a deliberate choice. On “The Other Side of the Door” from the platinum edition of Fearless, she sings: “I keep going back over things we both said.” In contrast, “Come In With The Rain” from the same album asserts: “I could go back to every laugh but I don’t wanna go there anymore.” Swift establishes herself early on as a consummate archivist, acknowledging that she has a way into the depth of her memory, but it is her decision when and how she accesses it. On “Back to December” from Speak Now, she laments that she’s been “staying up playing back [herself] leaving.” “Back to December” is a rare track in which Swift not only did the leaving but has regrets for having done it; one could argue that this perpetual playback is a sort of atonement for having hurt a person without having a reason to do so. Her ninth album, evermore, revisits this conceit when she sings: “I replay my footsteps on each stepping stone, trying to find the one where I went wrong.” The idea of memory as weapon and the idea of memory as compulsion are wedded on “Would’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve” from the deluxe version of her tenth album, Midnights, when she sings that “memories feel like weapons.” And while Swift weaponizes memory against herself, she also ruminates on the public weaponizing its collective memory against her; “Lavender Haze,” from Midnights, contains the line, “they’re bringing up my history,” calling to mind the way she satirized public opinion on fifth album 1989’s breakout track, “Blank Space.” However, also on 1989 is the lyric “time moved too fast, you play it back,” which subverts the idea of playing back a memory as a form of self-flagellation. In this case, the playing back is its own kind of reward, as the narrator comes to realizations on “You Are In Love.”

Because Swift spends so much time unpacking and reframing her memories, it is no surprise that her biggest request of those who have left her life is that they remember her, too. On Speak Now’s “Mine,” she asks, “Do you remember we were sitting there by the water?” Strewn throughout her discography are pleas with lovers and friends to keep her in mind, even if time and distance separate them. On “The Very First Night,” a vault track from the 2021 re-recording of Red, she playfully demands: “Don’t forget about the night out in LA”; on 1989’s “Wildest Dreams”: “Say you’ll remember me standing in a nice dress, staring at the sunset”; on reputation’s “New Year’s Day,” the refrain chants over and over, “hold onto the memories, they will hold onto you.” Due to the perhaps outsized importance that Swift places on this kind of recall, she believes that she herself is most powerful as a memory. On evermore’s “long story short,” she believes she “must look better in the rearview.” The Red vault track “I Bet You Think About Me” includes: “You realized I’m harder to forget than I was to leave.” On “Wildest Dreams,” she fires the kiss-off: “I bet these memories follow you around.” Whether or not this is actually true is irrelevant; for Swift, both the sweetest reward and the greatest punishment is the inability to escape formative memories, the ability to rewind and replay any event at will, or against it. “Tim McGraw,” Swift’s first single off her debut, is perhaps the perfect augury for the lyrical content she would conjure in the coming decades. The refrain requests: “When you think Tim McGraw / I hope you think of me.” One of the most uncomplicatedly joyful entries in Swift’s discography, “Stay Stay Stay” from Red, contains the line “you took the time to memorize me” as evidence of a lover’s devotion. Swift paints pictures of proposals, escapes, oath-keeping, and assorted other displays of affection throughout her work, but the act of memorization may well be the most significant.

A handful of songs in her discography are so rooted in their remembrances that it would be futile to quote just a single lyric. “Ronan,” a devastating tribute to a child who passed away from cancer, is, unsurprisingly, an evocative collage of tender images, all of which function as a declaration that the narrator remembers everything about this person whose life was cut tragically short. There may be no lyricist better suited to memorialize a life than Caramanica’s “maestro of memory.” “Last Kiss” from Speak Now and “right where you left me” from evermore are heartbreaking soliloquies of memory as paralytic, with lines woven throughout to lodge the narrator in an inescapable time loop. But one of Swift’s most triumphant tracks is also a call to remember: Speak Now’s “Long Live.” It is one of the few songs in her discography to speak directly to her fans (as well as her collaborators), and its success largely rests on the assumption that diehard listeners of hers engage in the same type of constant recollection that she does. It’s an assumption that pays off; fans are known to weep when the song is performed at live shows. Part of being a Taylor Swift fan is seeing oneself in her worldview—it’s no surprise that this particular song is her preaching to the converted.

The existence of the re-records themselves is perhaps the greatest testament to the power of Taylor Swift’s memory. In revisiting these recordings and reimagining them as a mature woman, looking back on work she made as a teenager or fledgling young adult, she is imbuing the work with a kind of clarity that can only come with age. While on “Breathe” from Fearless, she sings, “I see your face in my mind as I drive away,” demonstrating her tendency to archive memories even moments after they’ve happened, Swift’s recollections of pivotal moments only grow more potent as she gains more distance from them. “Would’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve” in particular, with clear lyrical parallels to Speak Now’s “Dear John,” is a piercing upgrade to what was already an unstoppable force of a song. And even when she’s not updating her lyrical content, simply the changes in her voice as she moved from her 20s to her 30s is enough to fortify a track with new meaning.

All of this brings us back to the song which sparked the idea for this essay: the ten-minute version of “All Too Well.” When the original version of the song dropped in 2012, I missed the boat on it. Even if I had been a fan, much of it would have been lost on me. I was 15 years old and had yet to come within spitting distance of a real date or kiss. The complexities of the pain depicted in “All Too Well” were many years away for me. However, in the intervening ten-plus years, I have had some life experiences, to say the least. And while I firmly believe that anyone can recognize the songwriting acumen on display in the song, it takes on a kinetic, electrifying power when listening through the lens of a lived heartbreak. To have a relationship ended on someone else’s terms is always painful, even when it is done respectfully. But to experience the kind of constant denial illustrated in “All Too Well” is utterly destabilizing, a sort of existential despair that is too frequently minimized when breakups are played for laughs in the media (see: the stock image of a woman sobbing into a pint of ice cream). For Swift to repeat “I was there / I remember it all too well” over and over again, she is not merely recounting the story of a breakup. She is reclaiming her identity and stepping back into her body (a body that has been keeping the score, as she points out with the line “I’m a soldier who’s returning half her weight”). Swift could be saying that she remembers all of it too well—that her memory is eidetic, and that she remembers absolutely everything. She could be saying that what she remembers, she remembers all too well—that she wishes she could recall what she knows with less clarity, but it hits too hard nonetheless. Likely, she would concede that both readings are valid. It is this layered approach that makes “All Too Well” a contender for Swift’s magnum opus, an example of the Swift songwriting machine operating at maximum efficiency.   

While Swift, like many artists, is a veteran scribe of songs about love, loss, and coming of age, there is perhaps no more persistent theme in her vast body of work than memory. For Taylor Swift, to remember is to love, to remember is to mourn, to be remembered is to be adored. And on Lover, an album primarily known as a tribute to romantic love, she couldn’t help but open the record with what she might deem the greatest insult of all time: “I Forgot That You Existed.”

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