TRACK FIVE: THE BALLAD OF ALL TOO WELL
13.
October 2012: Taylor Swift releases her greatest song, All Too Well.
Its the heart ofRed,a gigantic rock & roll power ballad.
Swift at the 2012 MTV Video Music Awards in L.A.Christopher Polk/Getty Images
It builds from a hushed girl-at-her-piano confession to her loudest, most passionate vocal thunder.
The strange journey of All Too Well is one of my favorite music stories ever.
Hers too, probably.
Taylor has a mystique about her Track Fives.
On any given album, its the emotional bloodbath.
All Too Well is the most famous of all Track Fives, but they never fail.
It goes where I go.
But now its just the song.
It destroys crowds every night on the Eras Tour.
It set a new record as the longest number-one hit in history, dethroning American Pie.
(The courtroom was adjourned; the scarf was not returned.)
She must have wished many times that shed kept her mouth shut.
But all this talk inspired her to go back and open up a story she thought was finished.
She introduced it with a few words, thanking her fans for rescuing it from oblivion.
A record label didnt pick this as a single.
It was my favorite, she said.
It was about something very personal to me.
It was very hard to perform it live.
Now for me, honestly, this song is one hundred percent about us and for you.
Every version of All Too Well tells a different story.
The original five-minuteRedversion, which has never lost any of its power.
The ten-minute epic, looking back in anger.
Theres the Sad Girl Autumn Version from the Long Pond Studio sessions, with Aaron Dessner on piano.
That acoustic solo performance.
The Eras Tour stadium sing-along.
I really do write about girlhood a lot, Taylor said in 2022, at the Tribeca Film Festival.
I think nineteen and twenty is such a profound age for young women.
I wanted to tell that story, about girlhood calcifying into this bruised adulthood.
February 2014: A miserable gray Saturday afternoon.
Im walking around Brooklyn, in heavy snow, feeling dismal and defeated.
Someone I love is in trouble, digging themselves deeper.
Im just making it worse when I have a go at help.
I keep listening to two songs on my iPod: All Too Well and Dear John.
Theyre the only songs that feel clumsy and glum and wintry enough to fit my mood.
In All Too Well, she goes from I remember it all to YOU remember it all.
Another young girl with a story shes been told not to remember.
Both hits sound shiny and bright on the surface.
But today, they belong deep in the snow.
This guitar hath been anointed with my sacred tuneage!
As she recalled, My band joined in and I went on a rant.
She wanted to hang on to this idea.
It took me a really long time to get it to its final form.
Basically, I was her editor, Rose said in 2008.
Shed write about what happened in school that day.
She had such a clear vision of what she wanted to say.
And shes come in with the most incredible hooks.
When she talked about All Too Well in the early days, she told this story, sometimes verbatim.
It started out being probably like a ten-minute song, which you cant put on an album.
And I had to filter it down to a story that could work in the form of a song.
But it was tantalizing to hear about that ten-minute version.
When would we hear the directors cut?
She wasnt bluffing, was she?
You guys just wouldnt let it go.
It says, Love is so short, forgetting is so long.
She sang it at the Grammys in 2013, solo at her piano.
She didnt touch her crowd-pleasingRedhits.
It didnt seem to make sense.
She released it onRed (Taylors Version)in November 2021.
He tells her, Its supposed to be fun, turning twenty-one.
She cries while bystanders ask her what happened.
She sharpens her adult anger, looking back at the power dynamics of a relationship with an older man.
(Happiness came out on the eve of her thirty- first birthday ten years after the party.)
At the end of The Moment I Knew, the boy calls to tell her hes sorry.
She says, Im sorry, too, then catches herself saying it.
That was the moment she knew.
Not the last time shed apologize to a man for what he did, then spend years wondering why.
Shes a detective who never files the cold cases away.
November 2021: Taylor premieres her fifteen-minute short film in New York, the day the album drops.
A thirteen-plex on the Upper West Side.
They hand out All Too Well pocket-tissue packs at the door.
(Not souvenirs, either they get audibly used.)
There were cheers for the close-up of her red typewriter.
Its a rare public appearance for Taylor she hasnt been spotted anywhere all year.
But its definitely the first time Ive ever seen her walk on to polite applause.
She knows shes on foreign turf, and shes eager to impress.
Its so surreal to see her work to win people over.
Ive never seen anybody go and blow somebodys head off.
So why should I make films about them?
But I have seen people destroy themselves in the smallest way.
Whoa I felt that.
She discusses that Neruda epigraph, calling it a line that haunted me and still haunts me.
Its a violent thing to read something that poignant.
That scene of the ex-boyfriend standing outside in the cold, wearing her old scarf?
She isnt invited, so she stands on the sidewalk, peering through the window.
It makes sense Swift is a fan.
My personal fave is one nobody else likes,My Reputation,a soapy melodrama from 1946.
Shes a young war widow who becomes the shame of her small town.
Did you know Stevie Nicks lost a velvet jacket once?
A quintessential Seventies rock story.
Cameron Crowe wrote a news bulletin forRolling Stone,in the Stevie-crazed summer of 1978.
Nicks has all but given up on it being returned,Rolling Stonereports.
Any information would be appreciated.
Theres a hotline number.
The photo depicts her in black mourning clothes, with a widows veil.
The lost girls of rock & roll, they remember the sacred relics that get left behind.
Nobody else will ever fucking understand.
But her stories keep on telling themselves, long after shes finished writing the song.
All Too Well keeps evolving, expanding, beyond anything she could have imagined.
Its a song to get passed around until it comes back as something new.
Maybe this thing was always going to be a masterpiece.
But it cant turn into a masterpiece until she tears it all up.
From the bookHeartbreak Is the National Anthem: How Taylor Swift Reinvented Pop Music,by Rob Sheffield.
Copyright 2024 by Rob Sheffield.
To be published on Nov. 12, 2024, by Dey Street Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
