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likeadevils · 6 days ago

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Red Timeline (Pt. 2)

This is a very long post that puts all the songs on Red in order of Taylor making them, with as many specific dates as possible. I’ve also included other songs she wrote while writing Red and quotes from Taylor and her collaborators talking about her process.

Because she wrote so much for Red, I’ve had to split this timeline into two parts. This one covers the songs she wrote in 2012:

Treacherous, I Knew You Were Trouble, 22, We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together, The Last Time, Holy Ground, The Lucky One, Everything Has Changed, Come Back... Be Here, Girl At Home, Nothing New, Babe, Message In A Bottle, Forever Winter, Run, The Very First Night (2010-2011 songs here)

If you don't want to read the whole post, check out this playlist of the album in order or this playlist of her entire discography.

KEY:

Song Dates:

🟢: There is some type of official source for the date

🟡: There isn’t an official source, but everything points to that date

🟠: I’m pretty sure that this is when it was written, but I wouldn’t be shocked if I was wrong. Or the period of time is just too large to be a definite date

🔴: Unknown, year comes from copyright

Other:

✍️: Record of Taylor (possibly) writing a song

🎤: Record of Taylor (possibly) recording a song

📌: Misc. Album activity

📌 January 2012: Moved to LA to work with new producers

Taylor: "With Red, [Scott Borchetta] came to me in January and said, 'I think the album's finished.' This time, I said, 'No, it's not – I need to keep writing.'" Taylor: "I turned in 20 songs and I had this immediate sinking feeling, this can't be done, this can't be it. I think the reason I said that was because I made the record exactly the same way I made the last three. I knew I hadn't jumped out of my comfort zone, which at the time was writing alone and working with Nathan [Chapman]."

🟠 January 2012: Girl At Home

Girl at Home is a little blip in the timeline– it's the only song that was produced by Nathan Chapman in 2012. There's lots of ways you could speculate about that– perhaps she was trying to see how producing a pop song with Nathan would turn out, perhaps it's evidence for the persistent rumors that Girl at Home is a demo. Either way, I'm inclined to put it as early in the timeline as possible. Nathan Chapman posted some behind the scenes photos of the Red and Speak Now sessions on instagram. The one below was likely taken while she was recording Girl at Home– it shows Taylor in Nathan's home studio with bangs and straight hair, and the only song recorded in his home studio after she had cut her hair is Girl At Home. (She is also bundled up, adding credence to Girl At Home being recorded in winter. But then again, Taylor is fond of being bundled up, so I wouldn't read into it too much).

🟡 January 2012: I Knew You Were Trouble (First Draft)

Taylor: "I wrote this melody for this chorus on the piano." Taylor: "I remember bringing in this slow, sad thing that I had written, called 'I Knew You Were Trouble.' I had originally called it 'Trouble'" Taylor: "'I Knew You Were Trouble' was an idea that I got almost six months before I was scheduled to write with Max Martin, and I emailed him and said 'I just got this idea, I can't wait to bring it to you. I know that we're not writing for a few months, but I just, I need you to know, I thought of this thing, I can't wait for you to hear it.'"

Taylor first wrote with Max Martin in late April, meaning Trouble was possibly conceived as early as October 2011. However, it seems like she didn't know she would write with Max Martin until December 2011 at the earliest, so I'm inclined to place this in January 2012, six months before they finish writing Trouble in June.

🟢 February 2012: Holy Ground

Lover Diaries

📌 February 13, 2012: MTV interview:

"So far, I've been writing so much in the last year and the label keeps telling me, 'All right, we're finished; all right, we're satisfied; OK, this is done now.' And then I just keep writing and I keep turning it in in different versions [...] I'm going to work on it until I literally have zero time left to work on it, because I'm having so much fun working on this album [...] I'm getting to work with people that I've always wanted to work with, from all different places in music. I'm trying to be as much of a sponge as possible. You have to evolve and try new things and change and that's what I've loved to do with this album."

📌 February 15, 2012: Extra Tv Interview:

"I'm really excited about the next record. I'm so excited about it. I've been writing it since before the last record came out, so there's been so much that has been amazing to write about, and you know right now I'm just having to pick from like the 30* songs that I have, that I love, and pick the best ones." [...] This has got to be the best form of revenge, just write hit songs about it. "Yeah, it’s not bad. But there’s the pressure of, like, it has to be good, and if it’s not, then your ex is kinda just like, "Ha-ha, it’s not good." So there’s the pressure of, you have to make a great record. And for me, I’m just obsessed with it when I’m making an album because I just want it to be better than all the ones I've made before, and I kind of compete with myself. I just drive myself insane with it." *Grain of salt: The amount of songs Taylor says she wrote for Red at different points doesn't add up, so give or take 5 songs.

🟢 February 29, 2012: Nothing New

In the below journal, Taylor mentions writing Nothing New on the plane ride from Sydeny to Perth. She arrives at the Sydney Airport on February 29, and was in Perth on March 1.

✍️ March 2, 2012: Lover Diary entry:

"I've been thinking a lot about getting older and relevancy and how all my heroes have ended up alone. I wrote a song on the plane ride from Sydney to Perth on the appalachain dulcimer I bought the day of my flight. I bought it because Joni played on most of her blue record. I taught myself to play 'A Case of You.' Anyway, I wrote a song on it called "Nothin New" and it's about being scared of aging and things changing and losing what you have. It says "I'm getting older and less sure of what you like about me anyway." And in the chorus it says "How can a person know everything at 18, and nothing at 22? And will you still want me … when I'm nothing new." It's a really vulnerable song, but I think it's important to say."

🟢 Early March, 2012: The Lucky One

Taylor: "'The Lucky One' is a song that I wrote while I was in Australia. And it kind of talks about some of my fears, through telling the story of other people that I was inspired by. But, more than their stories being told... I'm pretty much singing about what I'm scared of."

Taylor was in Australia from March 1-14, 2012.

📌 April 1, 2012: 99.5 WYCD interview: "I've been in the studio in the last week."

Just based on when the songs were written, she was probably recording Holy Ground and The Lucky One with Jeff Bhasker.

📌 April 1, 2012: Philippine Daily Inquirer interview: When you meet someone that you're attracted to, do you go, "Here's a song"? "That can happen. I get inspired by the smallest or the biggest things. You meet someone and you wonder if you'll ever see them again. I could write so many songs about that. I have written so many songs about that. Wait till you hear my next record, it's all about that."

📌 April 2, 2012: Train: "Last night @/taylorswift13 told me DRIVE BY is her favorite song right now. Took this long to get my speech back. Big deal 4 us! Thank u, T!"

Babe was written with Pat Monahan, the lead singer of Train. To me, this implies that they hadn't yet worked together– Train seems genuinely surprised that Taylor likes their music. –

📌 April 5, 2012: Rolling Stone interview: "I have the entire summer just to finish up the record," says Swift, "so that will be awesome." Expect some new tricks: "There are a few songs that are completely from another person's perspective," adds the singer. "I really like the feeling of making little departures musically."

📌 April 12, 2012: Twitter: "Recording the next album. So happy"

This appears to have been taken in Dan Wilson's house, her producer for Treacherous and Come Back Be Here

🟡 April 12, 2012: Treacherous

Dan Wilson: "With Taylor, we had been kind of circling around, very much aware of each other's work for a while. We figured out these two days to work together and she came to my studio super excited and said, "I had an idea in the car." And she sang me the first three or four lines of it and said, "I want to call it 'Treacherous' and maybe the chorus can go like this." And we were writing the song in 10 minutes and she was just so full of excitement."

🟡 April 13, 2012: Come Back… Be Here

Dan Wilson*: "We squeezed in two days, before a trip I was taking, and we did a song each day, totally countryside. But it was extremely inspiring. She gets such backhand appreciation from the press, but it's a bunch of bullshit. She's so spontaneous, and she was really on fire for the sessions we did together." *I can not find the original source for this quote. It started popping up on multiple sites around August 2013.

🟡 April 23, 2012: Message in a Bottle

Taylor: [Before writing WANEGBT] "I was in the studio with [Max Martin and Shellback] and we were writing a completely different song, about like, liking someone who doesn't know you like them or something."

🎤 April 23, 2012: Twitter: "Sitting in my kitchen. Listening to music. Don't want to go to bed. Was in the studio tonight. Writing tomorrow. Should go to bed. Ok I will"

🟡 April 24, 2012: We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together

Max Martin: "Me and Johan [Shellback] had our first date with her at Conway Studios. I was a little nervous, you know, the good kind of nervous. Maroon 5 was recording in the studio next door. This guy shows up, a friend of theirs. We literally haven't started the session yet. The guy says, "I heard that Taylor Swift's here. I gotta say hello". I was like, "Really?" and the guy says, "I totally know her, it's fine, we're friends". He walks in and it turns out that he didn't know her. And I started sweating cause I was vouching for that guy. He started talking about some ex-boyfriend of hers. It was really messy. He leaves and I apologize, but she was super cool, no problem at all. Then I asked what that was all about and she told me the story about this guy that she was dating. I can't remember exactly what she said, but she said, "One thing's for sure, we are never ever getting back together", and I said, "That's pretty harsh". She said, "No no, we are never ever ever getting back together". And we're laughing about it, saying, "That sounds like a song title". Then we started on something else. The next day, she said, "I thought about what you said", and she played us this idea that became 'We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together'. I was so mad at that guy who ruined our session, but it turned into love, cause it never would've happened if he hadn't walked in." Taylor: "It's a definitive portrait of how I felt when I finally stopped caring what my ex thought of me. He made me feel like I wasn't as good or as relevant as these hipster bands he listened to…So I made a song that I knew would absolutely drive him crazy when he heard it on the radio. Not only would it hopefully be played a lot, so that he'd have to hear it, but it's the opposite of the kind of music that he was trying to make me feel inferior to."

🟢 May 15, 2012: Run

Taylor (May 15, 2012): "Eating cheeseburgers, scribbling on guitars, writing songs with @/edsheeran :)" Ed Sheeran (May 15, 2012): "In and out burger, defacing guitars and writing music with @/taylorswift13 ;)" Taylor: "We had both reached out to each other's camps at the same time. I showed up at his hotel in Arizona and we just wrote songs all day." Ed: "So the very first time we met… So I played Nashville, and her mum, Andrea, came down to watch me at the Ryman [...] and we sorta met after that in a hotel room in… I want to say like Seattle* or something? It wasn’t like Los Angeles, New York, L.A., Nashville, it wasn’t like that, I think it was Seattle?" So Taylor Swift’s mom Andrea introduced you? "Well, originally it was Frank, who was her radio guy, so that was the original meeting. And then we were in a hotel room, had some, I think we had burgers? Had some burgers, had a guitar, and we wrote this Run song, and I think like, part of another song?" *It was definitely in Arizona. Ed had just played in Phoenix, and there is no In-n-Out in Seattle.

🟢 May 17, 2012: Forever Winter

Mark Foster: "We actually wrote a song that day [we were photographed]. It's a really cool song, you know? We kind of just went into it casually, like let's just jam and just have fun, and something really cool came out of it. So yeah, we'll see what happens with it. She's been writing a lot for her next record. But yeah, it was a lot of fun working with her, she's super talented."

Taylor and Mark Foster, her co-writer, were photographed having lunch together on May 17.

🟢 May 27, 2012: Everything Has Changed

Taylor: "The first idea that hit me was this part of the song [...] there's a part on this song that goes 'I just want to know you better, know you better', and I got that idea while I was riding in the car with my friend Claire [Winters, probably], and she's talking about, like, 'Oh my God and then my sister says to me, this this this–' and she's like, 'What are you singing?' and I'm like [muffled] 'I just want to know you better–' and then the next day, I had demoed up the song with Ed, and she's like 'That's what you were singing in the car!'" Ed Sheeran: "When I landed in Los Angeles to record [Run], it was like the day before, she just said 'come round my house, we'll jam,' or whatever, and we jammed and wrote 'Everything Has Changed'. So those two songs were written probably in the space of two weeks." Ed Sheeran: "She has a little Taylor guitar, she got it out and she's like, 'I had this idea for this song,' ... and she pretty much had the verse, bridge and chorus done, but we argued about that one chord: "I just want to know you, better know you" – she didn't like that, and I kind of forced it upon her. It was quite a funny situation. [We were] surrounded by Grammys; she has like seven or eight, and like, Billboard Awards and Songwriting Guild, and I'm like, 'this chord,' and she's like [pointing to her awards]."

It's possible Taylor was flubbing the timeline a little bit, and actually came up with EHC while hanging out with Claire Winters on the 23rd, but it's also possible her and Claire hung out without posting it to Instagram.

🎤 May 28, 2012: Taylor and Ed were photographed entering a recording studio.

📌 May 31, 2012: Scott Borchetta: "Was with miss Swift yesterday... Omg... She is writing like crazy... I know it's hard to wait but I promise it will be worth it..."

🟢 June 1, 2012: 22

Taylor: Taylor says she wrote that particular "big" chorus [...] on a plane, on her way to a co-writing session with hit making writers and producers Max Martin and Shellback. "I walked in and I was so excited about it, and I played it for them and they were like, 'All right. Let's do this!' They loved it, too," Taylor recalls. "It was really, kind of, an exciting moment for me...[that] they loved it enough to not really change much about it and just to build out from there, and to write the rest of the song."

🟢 June 2, 2012: I Knew You Were Trouble

Taylor: "I brought it to Max Martin and Shellback, and I said, "At the end of the chorus I just want this to go crazy. I want it to be really chaotic; I want the bass line to do this, like [makes loud GUH GUH GUH sound] [...] I don't really know what to call it, but I just kind of sing it how I want it to sound. And they're like, "Oh, sort of like a dubstep thing." And I'm like, "I guess, I don't know? Whatever that is, whatever that ridiculous sound that I made with my mouth when I was trying to figure out what to say." You end up doing a lot of that when you're recording and writing, being like "It kinda sounds like this! [Does a laser-y SCHOOM sound]." I wanted the song to sound as chaotic as the emotion felt. I wanted it to be loud and out of control." Taylor: "I was like, 'I don't know if we could have some kind of intense bass drop or something, like dubstep is really awesome…' And they were just like, 'Yes, absolutely!' And then Shellback was like, 'In the verse, let's do this really frantic drum beat.' And it just was something I would never have thought of; to make the beat of the verse really up-tempo, and then make the intensity drop off the chorus, and then have it build back up, and then have a production explosion at the end of the chorus. It was so thrilling! I couldn't believe the song started where it started and then their added ideas with production. They ended up seeping into my brain and I started thinking the way that I would hope they would think. I would write a verse and Max would be like, 'This is this many syllables, can you shorten it and make it more succinct, but convey the same message?' And I would just go off into a corner and I felt like I had this amazing assignment. So the challenge of it was so thrilling for me."

🎤 June 5, 2012: Twitter: "It's been a wonderful week in the studio. I'm so excited about so much."

🟡 Early June: The Last Time

Gary Lightbody: "Her and Ed were recording the song they did on the record together in Santa Monica, about two blocks away from where I am standing right now. Ed invited me, with Taylor's permission, to come into the studio and say, "Hi." I'd never met Taylor. She said she was a fan. Apparently, the night before, she and Ed had been playing and singing "Set the Fire to the Third Bar" together. It was lovely to hear that she knew our music, you know. I can't remember if I was bold enough to ask if she wanted to work with me. But it might well have been me. Or if it was her who said, "Do you want to write a song together?" I can't remember. We wrote "The Last Time" together and that was great. The three of us collaborated on it really well." Gary Lightbody: "It was so fast. She works really fast. She's extraordinary. We actually did that song, wrote it and recorded it in a day. And that was the version of it on the record, which is very rare. Normally you write and record something with somebody and then down the line they'll record it, if you're lucky. With her, the whole thing was done in nine hours. I hope we can do it again sometime!" Jacknife Lee: "Taylor came to Topanga. Body guards, big black car. We wrote a song in a couple of hours and sang it sitting on the sofa. She had a handheld microphone. Then we had pasta for dinner and hung around with my kids. She left and I finished the song off. Owen Pallett [Arcade Fire/Final Fantasy] did some strings very quickly. [...] It was out of my field of expertise and interest, but I was intrigued and my girls were thrilled. Taylor was nice and very professional. She knew what she wanted and there was no fucking about."

This was definitely written after May 29, when Taylor and Ed recorded Everything Has Changed, and before June 10, when Gary tweeted: "Last day in LA 2dy. Have had a great time writing, relaxing & clowning." Taylor and Gary's schedules don't line up until June 3 at the earliest.

📌 June 10, 2012: Lover Diary entry:

"I've been in the studio non stop. This week I was in with Max Martin and Johan Shellback, the guys I wrote 'Getting Back Together' with. The first day, I had to do this corporate performance for an arena full of managers [...] When I finished there, I got on the plane and this idea came to me "I don't know about you, but I'm feeling 22." I wrote the entire chorus on the plane ride to LA. When I landed, I went straight to the studio and played it for Max and Johan. They loved it. I was so excited. I wrote 22 about how much fun I've been having this summer and this year in general. It's so carefree and sounds like a summer anthem. I was floating on a cloud after we wrote it. The next day I brought them a chorus called 'Trouble' that's about how I should've known what I was getting into. We came back to 'Trouble' and it turned out to be absolutely amazing. It's so edgy and unexpected. It's almost dub step. My friends love that one the most. I love writing so much. It's the only thing that makes total sense to me. If I missed a day in the studio, I'd be so mad at myself. God I've been having such a beautiful life lately. I can't believe it. It's like there's magic in the air."

🔴Spring 2012: Unknown song

Ryan Adams: Adams [...] got a call from Swift while she was writing songs for her 2012 album Red, asking if they could work on a song together. "She basically already had this thing done [...] I just sat down and went, 'What about this?' And 'What about this?' We worked on a bridge, and we finished it. I guess I was the guy who could call people that would come in around 11 or 12 to jam."

🟠 Summer 2012: Babe

Pat Monahan: When he told Taylor that he wanted to collaborate with her on a song for Train's next album, she asked him to write a song with her for her album, Red. The track didn't make the album, but Pat says eventually, when Taylor puts out a deluxe re-released version of Red, "the song, I think, will be on there [...] It's a song called 'Babe,'" continues Pat. "So it's her song; I was just lucky enough to be a part of it with her, and I'm gonna ask the same of her in the future."

Pat could mean two albums when he says "He wanted to collaborate with her on a song for Train's next album"; California 37, released April 13, 2012, or Bulletproof Picasso, released September 12, 2014. Either one is a bit of a stretch. California 37 would've probably been wrapped sometime in early 2012– February, at latest. Taylor was still working in Nashville in Jan, but she was in LA in February, meaning it is possible for them to have worked together then. BUT we also have that Train tweet in April ("Last night @/taylorswift13 told me DRIVE BY is her favorite song right now. Took this long to get my speech back. Big deal 4 us! Thank u, T!") where they seem surprised that she likes Drive By, which was released in January– before they would've worked together. On the flip side, it would be weird to not only start writing for Bulletproof Picasso when they had just released an album a couple months before, but to be reaching out to collaborate. So just pick whatever feels less weird for you.

🟠 Summer 2012: The Very First Night

Espionage, the production team behind this, is based in New York, and are Train's longtime collaborators, meaning Taylor likely started working with them on Pat Monahan's recommendation.

📌 July 9, 2012: Finalized the album

Facebook: "Oh hey! I'm writing you from Nashville, where I just sat in a big room with a lot of people and made a lot of decisions about a lot of things happening very soon. And as vague as that sentence was, I think you know what it means. Stuff is about to happen. And I love you more than ever. Taylor"

📌 August 13, 2012: Album announcement

Taylor: "I ended up having to pick from between 30-35* songs that I had written that I really wanted to make the album. It was really hard to get it down to 16." *Grain of salt: The amount of songs Taylor says she wrote for Red at different points doesn't add up, so give or take 5 songs. In February, Taylor said she had written roughly 30 songs for the album. Taylor made 14 songs between that quote and this one.

That's all for this timeline! Red Part 1 is here, and you can check out the other albums in my pinned post!

#txt*#taylor swift #timeline*#alright finally out

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likeadevils · 8 days ago

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Red Timeline (Pt. 1)

Because she wrote so much for Red, I’ve had to split this timeline into two parts. This one covers the songs she wrote in 2010-2011:

State Of Grace, Red, All Too Well, I Almost Do, Stay Stay Stay, Sad Beautiful Tragic, Starlight, Begin Again, The Moment I Knew, Ronan, Better Man, I Bet You Think About Me, Both of Us (B.o.B.), Safe & Sound, and Eyes Open. (2012 songs here)

If you don't want to read the whole post, check out this playlist of the album in order or this playlist of her entire discography.

Key:

Song Dates:

🟢: There is some type of official source for the date

🟡: There isn’t an official source, but everything points to that date

🟠: I’m pretty sure that this is when it was written, but I wouldn’t be shocked if I was wrong. Or the period of time is just too large to be a definite date

🔴: Unknown, year comes from copyright

Other:

✍️: Record of Taylor (possibly) writing a song

🎤: Record of Taylor (possibly) recording a song

📌: Misc. Album activity

🟠 Summer 2010: Stay Stay Stay (First Draft)

The copyright for Stay Stay Stay says that it was created in 2010 (The only song on the album besides All Too Well). In January 2012, Taylor said that she had been writing songs for Red since before Speak Now came out. It's possible this was written towards the end of the year, but Taylor has mentioned a period of intense writer's block around that time, so I'm inclined to place this earlier.

📌 Late 2010: Six month long writer's block

Taylor: [All Too Well] came after a six-month writing drought that followed a particularly toxic relationship. "There's a kind of bad that gets so overpowering you can't even write about it [...] When you feel pain that is so far past dysfunctional, that leaves you with so many emotions that you can't filter them down to simple emotions to write about, that's when you know you really need to get out." Liz Rose: “When we wrote [All Too Well], I hadn't heard from her in awhile. She hadn't really been writing.”

We don't know what six months she's talking about. The last song she writes for Speak Now is The Story Of Us, in June 2010, and the first song she writes for Red is All Too Well, in December, exactly six months. However, she stopped writing All Too Well for months at a time, so it's also possible she's talking about October 2010-March 2011, when she finishes writing All Too Well, which would line up with her relationship with Jake Gyllenhaal, and with the quote about writing songs for Red since before Speak Now came out.

🟡 December 2010: All Too Well (Rough Draft)

Taylor: "The first song that was written was 'All Too Well', and it was a day when I was just like a broken human walking into rehearsal just feeling terrible about what was going on in my personal life. And I walked in and I remember we had just hired David Cook… I think it was his first day meeting me, and I think I ended up just playing four chords over and over again and the band started kicking in, like Amos Heller on bass, and people started playing along with me. I think they could tell I was really going through it. And I just started singing and riffing and sort of ad-libbing this song that basically was All Too Well. And it started with 'I walked through the door with you, the air was cold' – like it literally just was that song, but it had probably seven extra verses. And it included the f-word, and I remember my sound guy was like 'Hey, I burned a CD of that thing you were doing, in case you want it.' And I was like 'Sure!'" Taylor: "The lyric I'm most proud of on the album is from 'All Too Well': 'And you call me up again just to break me like a promise / so casually cruel in the name of being honest.' That was something I came up with while ranting during a soundcheck. I was just playing these chords over and over onstage and my band joined in and I went on a rant. Those were some of the lines I thought of. I was going through a really hard time then, and my band joined in playing, and one of the first things that I came up with, just, like, spat out, was 'And you call me up again just to break me like a promise, so casually cruel in the name of being honest.'"

🎤 December 13, 2010: Photographed entering and leaving a recording studio.

Probably for this radio interview, but in the interest of being thorough, I'm including it.

🟢 February 2011: All Too Well (First Draft)

I like to think she wrote this after attending the Vanity Fair Oscar party on February 27, but all we know for sure is that Taylor started actively working on All Too Well in February.

🟡 March 1-4, 2011: All Too Well

Taylor: "I ended up taking [the recording from rehearsals] home and listening to it and I was like, 'I actually really like this, but it definitely is like 10 minutes long and I need to pare it down, so I'm going to call Liz Rose. [...] And she came over, I played it for her, and she was like 'Whoa, I love this.' And so we kind of edited it and pared it down to what it is now, but that was a very serendipitous creation of song" Liz Rose: "I was in Nashville one day, slowly moving the last bits of junk out of my garage so I could move to Dallas. […] I was in my driveway and my phone rings, and it's Taylor saying, 'Man, I've got this thing and I really need you to help me with it. Can you write today? What are you doing today?' [...] It was the first song she wrote for that record, I think. She had a story and she wanted to say something specific. She had a lot of information. I just let her go. She already had a melody and she started singing some words, and I started writing things down, saying, 'Ok, let's use this, let's use that.' She mentioned a plaid shirt, and I wrote that down in a corner, and when we got to the end, I said, 'Let's put the plaid shirt in there.' That turned into one of the best lines."

Taylor left for tour on March 5 and was gone the rest of the month, meaning it had to have been written sometime in the first four days.

🟡 March 20, 2011: Better Man

Taylor: "I remember I was on tour, and I wrote it alone in a hotel room. And I remember standing in front of a mirror—I think the first thing I thought of was, 'I wish it wasn't 4am, standing in a mirror, saying to myself, 'you know you had to do it." That was an actual visual from my life that ended up being the first thing I wrote, and then I expanded outward from there. And it was a song that I really thought belonged on the album and there were just too many songs I loved that I had written in that period of time, so some of them had to be left off. I think I chose All Too Well over Better Man. I think that was what happened. I was either going to put on All Too Well or Better Man, and then I left off Better Man." Taylor: "I was in Madrid, and I was in my hotel room all day. And I was going through this crazy, emotional thing and I wrote a song about it and it'll probably be on the next record. I'm telling you that. I'll tell you the title afterwards."

Taylor had a tour date in Madrid on March 19, and then her and her band stayed there an extra day

🟢 March 2011: Begin Again (First Draft)

Taylor: "The first inspiration [for Begin Again] came when I was on tour in Europe [in early 2011]. I'd been alone for a while and had time to think about my past experiences. But I wrote it in pieces-I'd start and then second-guess myself. I had to sort through my own insecurities." Taylor was on tour in Europe from March 5-March 30, 2011.

✍️ March 24, 2011: Twitter: Writing a song all afternoon in my hotel room. Dublin, Ireland.

🟠 Spring 2011: State of Grace (First Draft)

Taylor: "'State of Grace' was a song that I wrote at the beginning process of making this album." Taylor: "When I wrote [State of Grace] I had that feeling like, ‘This is going to start the show, this will be what we start the show with.’"

By "the beginning process", she could mean the first half of the album, which was written in 2011 and produced by Nathan Chapman in Nashville, but that gets contradicted by her immediately saying Red (which was also written in 2011 and produced by Nathan Chapman in Nashville) was written "halfway through" making the album. So, I'm going to take the quote on its face value, and say State of Grace was written towards the beginning of the writing process, sometime in Spring 2011.

🟠 Spring 2011: The Moment I Knew

This could've been the song she was recording on her birthday in 2010, but I think that was from a radio interview she did that day. Taylor has talked about experiencing some pretty tough writer's block around that time, only broken by All Too Well, so I'm hesitant to say she wrote another song right before that. Furthermore, The Moment I Knew is copyrighted as being created in 2011.

📌 May 22, 2011: Billboard Music Awards interview: "Um, a timeline for the next album... I have no idea right now. I think that, for me, I just write whenever I'm inspired to do so– I've been constantly writing lately."

✍️ June 11, 2011: The New Yorker interview: She had written about ten* songs so far for her next album. Asked to characterize them, she said, "They're sad? If I'm being honest." The most recent one, she said, "is about moving on." *Grain of salt: The amount of songs Taylor says she wrote for Red at different points doesn't add up, so give or take 5 songs.

🟠 Early June, 2011: I Almost Do

It's possible we never heard that song about moving on that she mentions in The New Yorker (out of the roughly 25 songs she wrote for Red in 2011, we have heard 12). It's also possible she was talking about Begin Again; in an interview with People Country, Taylor mentions working on it throughout 2011. But I think she's talking about I Almost Do. This is partially because her arm lyric on June 4 was "I guess we're all one phone call from our knees" and partially because she's confirmed to have written I Bet You Think About Me, which shares similar themes, later this month.

🟠 June 2011: Starlight (First Draft)

Taylor: "I get a lot of style inspiration from the 1960s, so I'll go and look at black and white pictures, and look at photos from the '50s and '60s, and I came across this picture of these two kids dancing at a dance. It immediately made me think of how much fun they must have had that night. It was back in the late '40s. I ended up reading underneath that it was Ethel Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy. And they were, like, 17. So I just kind of wrote that song from that place, not really knowing how they met or anything like that. And then her daughter Rory ended up coming to a show a couple weeks later and I told her about the song and she was like, 'you have to meet my mom, she would love to meet you.' So that was kind of what that song was about."

By August 2011, Taylor had finished a 900 page book about the Kennedy women, wrote a Robert Kennedy quote on her arm, and visited JFK's grave. By this point, it's safe to assume that Taylor would've known how Robert and Ethel Kennedy met, ergo Starlight needs to have been written before August. I lean towards June, mainly because of the following diary entry.

✍️ June 17, 2011: Lover Diary entry: "I've become blissfully happy with my life. [...] I've noticed this onset for a while, but it's really hit me in the last week, and especially since I wrote those 2 new songs. I really do need to create in order to live and feel worthwhile. [...] I'm happy that tomorrow morning I get on a plane to Pittsburgh, play a stadium of 60,000 people, then fly home. I'm happy that the next day, I'm recording 2 new songs."

🎤 June 19, 2011: Per the previous diary entry, Taylor recorded two songs.

🟢 June 24-26, 2011: I Bet You Think About Me

Lori McKenna: "A couple days before she gets here, I'm eating dinner with the kids, and I get a FaceTime from a number I didn't know [...] And I answer it because we were like, 'Who's FaceTiming me?' And it's Taylor like, 'Hey, I'm coming to town. Would you have some time?'" McKenna and Swift share a mutual friend – songwriter Liz Rose. McKenna had met Swift once or twice, and McKenna said sure. [...] "It's one of those real fun co-writes where you're just the cheerleader. You're the coffee maker. You'll get a sandwich if they need to eat or something, but you're there for moral support." Lori McKenna: "She had this little nugget of a song which was 'I Bet You Think About Me,' she knew that was the hook," Swift had asked her if she should lean in the folk direction (which they did) and after that, the rest flowed blissfully as McKenna recalls, "I don't remember anything other than sitting here watching how incredible she is. She knows what she wants to say and when she says the right thing, she remembers it. She didn't write anything down. There was no recording of the song [...] If the line is right, she knows it's right, and she remembers what it is." Taylor: "'I Bet You Think About Me' is a song I wrote with Lori McKenna, who is one of my favorite singer-songwriters ever. I'd always wanted to work with her. And I wrote this with her at her house when I was playing Foxboro Stadium on the Speak Now Tour. We wanted this song to be like a comedic, tongue in cheek, funny, not caring what anyone thinks about you sort of break up song, because there are a lot of different types of heartbreak songs on Red. Some of them are very sincere, some of them are very stoic and heartbreaking and sad. We wanted this to be the moment where I was like, 'I don't care about anything.' And we wanted to make people laugh with it, and we wanted it to be sort of a drinking song, and I think that that's what it ended up being."

Over the years, Lori McKenna has said it was written either the day before, the day of her first show, or the day of her second show at Foxborough Stadium for the Speak Now tour.

✍️ June 30, 2011: Taylorconnect: "Lately, I've been writing a LOT. Like, all of a sudden, everything I've wanted to say, express, or just let out for the past several months has just recently become a song. I'm really excited about that. It's a freeing feeling when all of a sudden one day, you're able to verbalize exactly how you feel in a verse, chorus, verse, bridge, chorus pattern."

🟢 August 26, 2011: Cannonball

Justin Bieber (August 26, 2011): "#writing" Kuk Harrell (August 27, 2011): "Wow!! Got to see @//justinbieber & @/taylorswift13 write a song together last night!! SMASH!!!! SMASH!!! SMASH!!! Let's do it again Yall!!!"

This is an unreleased song that was intended for Justin Bieber’s album, but Scooter Braun allegedly cut it.

🟢 September 8, 2011: Red (First Draft)

Taylor: "'Red' is a song I wrote halfway through this album, and it changed what this album became [...] because, to me, this song is very different, very descriptive, and it has an edge to it that, to me, kinda expanded what I wanted to do." Taylor: "It was really one of those songs that made me think like, maybe I want to be expanding what I'm trying to do with my music, sonically." Taylor: "Red came about halfway through the two years. And after that, I felt like it was such an interesting direction that I wanted to follow it, and I wanted to go and write with people I’ve never written with, work with people I’ve never worked with." Lover Diary Entry (dated September 8, 2011): "It was a long flight, but I'm so happy I chose to come home. Mostly because I wrote a song on the plane on the way home called 'Red'. [...] In the evening I went to Nathan's studio to record. When I played Red for him, he lost it. He absolutely freaked over the lyrics. I was so happy. As we started recording it, it got more and more awesome, with banjo and this affected vocal part that runs under the chorus going "re-e-e-e-e-d". I'd love to name next album red. Scott came over because I called him and he was still working at the office. He said this song takes it to the next level. He lost it over this song. My mom loves it too. It's so different than anything we've done. I can't even tell you how alive and worthwhile I feel when I'm writing a new song and I finish it and people like it. It's the most fulfilling feeling, like getting an A+ on report card. Recording again tomorrow."

📌 September 13, 2011: Vogue interview conducted:

Swift is working on her fourth album: "There’s just been this earth-shattering, not recent, but absolute crash-and-burn heartbreak," she says, "and that will turn out to be what the next album is about. The only way that I can feel better about myself—pull myself out of that awful pain of losing someone—is writing songs about it to get some sort of clarity." [...] "The only time in my life I have ever been starstruck was meeting Caroline and Ethel Kennedy," she says. "I got to spend the afternoon with Ethel a couple of weeks ago. She is one of my favorites because you look back at the pictures of her and Bobby and they always look like they are having the most fun out of everybody. You know, eleven kids, all these exotic animals on their property. I’ve read a lot about them."

🟢 October 2011: Both of Us

B.o.B: "She actually arranged for me to come to Dallas, and brought me out and I played her the song, she liked it and it just naturally happened, you know what I mean?" B.o.B: "I played her the song at her show ... and instantly she loved it. She was like, 'Bob, I have tears in my eyes. I love this song. I'm down. I want to be a part of it." ... And she sounded amazing on the record. (She) actually rewrote some of my verses as well."

B.o.B was a special guest on the Speak Now Tour on October 9, 2011.

🟢 October 4, 2011: Sad Beautiful Tragic

Twitter (October 4, 2011): "Leaving Little Rock, headed to New Orleans. Writing a song on a moving bus." Taylor: "'Sad Beautiful Tragic' is a song that I wrote while I was on tour, and I was on a tour bus that was moving, and I just started playing this really haunting, sad chorus, and it just, kind of was very simple, like "What a sad beautiful tragic love affair" and it was just reflecting on something that was lost, y'know, and you can't get it back. And I went home and I called Nathan Chapman and said "Hey, I wrote a song. Please please please can we record today" and, of course he said yes, and we use that original demo on the album because it just came across so pure and raw." Taylor: "'Sad Beautiful Tragic' is really close to my heart. I remember it was after a show and I was on the bus thinking about this relationship that ended months and months before. The feeling wasn't sadness and anger or those things anymore. It was wistful loss. And so I just got my guitar and I hit on the fact that I was thinking in terms of rhyming; I rhymed magic with tragic, changed a few things and ended it with what a sad beautiful tragic love affair. I wanted to tell the story in terms of a cloudy recollection of what went wrong. It's kind of the murky gray, looking back on something you can't change or get back."

✍️ October 18, 2011: Hollywood Reporter interview conducted: "I've written 25* songs so far, so it's coming along really well. I've been writing a lot, and I like to take 2 years to make a record. We're at the end of year one and I still have a year left to go to write. It's looking really great." *Grain of salt: The amount of songs Taylor says she wrote for Red at different points doesn't add up, so give or take 5 songs.

🟡 Late October 2011: Ronan

On October 21, 2011, Taylor invited Maya Thompson, Ronan's mom, to meet her backstage at her show. Maya gave Taylor a personalized letter about Ronan's story, and Taylor told Maya that she'd been reading the blog for over a year. She didn't tell Maya that she had written a song for Ronan until September 4, 2012, so it's possible Ronan was written anytime between May 2011-September 2012. That being said, I lean towards it being written in October; there's a couple blog posts* from October 2011 that Taylor seems to directly reference, and Taylor mentions having just written two songs at the end of the month. *TW for suicide

✍️ October 30, 2011: Lover Diary entry: "I've written two songs in the last few days. I want to record them so bad, but my voice is shot from being so run down."

📌 November 10, 2011: CMA's acceptance speech: "The reason I obsess over [performing songs] so much is that I obsess over writing them so much… With this next album, I'm so excited because I've been writing so much. We're still in the first gear of making it, so as we finish songs and demo them in my producer's basement, I can picture them being played on the stage."

🟢 November 2011: Eyes Open

Taylor: "I was working with T-Bone a lot on the soundtrack, just you know, putting songs together. There’s another song on the soundtrack that I did for it, so we were working on that song [before writing Safe and Sound]."

🟢 November 19, 2011: Safe and Sound

Taylor: "The movie studio came to me and said ‘Would you be interested in making music for this movie?’ and I immediately read the book. I read it in like, two days and fell in love with it [...] When I got the call, I thought, from what I'd heard about the movie, 'It's an action movie, right? We're probably going to be writing a song that's like, "We're going to win!" ' And then I read the book, and I thought, 'No, we're going to have to write sort of a death lullaby, it's so different from what I thought.'" Taylor: "[T-Bone Burnett] said ‘Do you think it would be good to call the Civil Wars and see if they’d want to come write?’ and I said ‘Absolutely’. I’d had this title that I’d been working with called Safe and Sound, and I just knew that I’d wanted it to deal with, sort of the empathy, sort of the more sensitive, sad, bittersweet side of this story. [...] And we all got together and as soon as John Paul got his guitar and started playing this melody, me and Joy started singing over it, and it happened so quickly." Taylor: "We wrote this song and recorded it in one day, the same day we wrote it."

The Civil Wars posted these two photos on instagram, with the captions dating the writing session to November 2011. The only time Taylor was in L.A (and not spending all day at an awards show) in November was the 19th.

📌 December 1, 2011: MTV interview conducted: "I can't tell you [what emotions I'm writing about on TS4], because it's a secret. It will be unveiled when it all comes out, because they all seem to have a theme to them, the records that we've put out so far, and this one is no different. It's very different in what it's about, but it's no different in the fact that it has its own name."

🎤 December 13, 2011: Twitter: "Studio/birthday/new album/red shoes" and "Took a break from the studio to visit the label, where they gave me this!"

🟡 December 2011: State of Grace

On Red, Taylor has two Nashville studios credited. The first is Pain In The Art, Nathan Chapman's home studio, which Taylor largely used for demos and first drafts. The second studio is Blackbird Studios. On Red, there are five songs credited to Blackbird Studios: State of Grace, Red, Stay Stay Stay, Starlight, and Begin Again. Looking at the musicians credited, you can further divide it into two recording blocks: State of Grace and Stay Stay Stay, and Red, Begin Again, and Starlight. Red, Begin Again, and Starlight all have solid evidence of being reworked at a later date (more on that later). State of Grace, on the other hand, is a bit more speculative. Taylor has always talked about Red (the song), as a big sonic departure, something that sounded nothing like anything she'd written before... and it doesn't sound that different to State of Grace. Don't get me wrong, they're definitely two different songs, but the stuff she cites as being revelations on Red are also found on State of Grace. So, it makes sense for State of Grace's production to have been retouched after Red.

🟡 December 2011: Stay Stay Stay

State of Grace and Stay Stay Stay have identical studio personnel. Furthermore, Nick Buda, Chad Carlson, Eric Darken, Leland Elliott, and Matt Rausch all only have two credits on Red, and they're for State of Grace and Stay Stay Stay. This leads me to believe they were recorded around the same time. It also makes sense for Stay Stay Stay to have been retouched, seeing as it would've been written a year and a half before, and possibly not even professionally recorded.

🟡 December 2011: Red

Scott Borchetta: Borchetta, the president of her record label, heard a version of her song "Red" produced by her usual collaborator Nathan Chapman. Borchetta says, "The song was brilliant–great melody. But I told them* that the way it was recorded, guys, the production just doesn't match the song. It needs a pop sound." So Chapman and Swift asked Borchetta if they could take another crack at it. They did–and it was worse, Borchetta says, than the first pass. "And Taylor basically said, 'All right, would you call Max [Martin]?'" *Grain of salt: Scott Borchetta has a habit of taking credit for things that were likely Taylor's idea.

Scott Borchetta said there were three drafts of Red. The second draft had a more pop sound, but was still just Taylor and Nathan Chapman (possibly recorded on September 9). Then, the final draft with a new producer. Borchetta says Taylor wanted the new producer to be Max Martin, but for whatever reason they ended up going with Dan Huff, who has a producer credit on the version released in 2012.

🟡 December 2011: Begin Again

Taylor: "I wrote it in pieces-I'd start and then second-guess myself. I had to sort through my own insecurities."

🟡 December 2011: Starlight

Starlight has slightly different studio personnel from Red and Begin Again, suggesting it was done at a slightly different time. However, there are still clues that Dan Huff got called in at a later date— the biggest one is the electric guitar is credited as "Conceived by Nathan Chapman, Played by Dann Huff" (credit to @taylor-on-your-dash for this theory)

📌 December 13-24 2011: Harper's Bazaar interview conducted:

"As an artist you have to be really self-aware. As a songwriter, especially [...] You need to be aware enough to catch yourself creating similar things to what you have created before and steer away from that. You have to grow, otherwise you will lose people's attention and you will get bored with yourself." So, will her fourth album, due later this year, be a major departure? "I think so," she says cautiously. "The tone is a little different. This one is focused on an all-encompassing, heartbreaking thing that happened, about the rise and fall of a relationship [...] I really, really, really, really want to nail this next record. I'm probably going to go into that semi- crazy, mumbling-to-myself-in-public, hysterically, ridiculously rambling, lyric-editing mode that I go into in the last six months of making a record. There are about 25* songs I have written so far, and the trick is going to be paring them down to the ones that will make this something I am more proud of than anything I have done before." *Grain of salt: The amount of songs Taylor says she wrote for Red at different points doesn't add up, so give or take 5 songs. This is also the same number she gave on October 18, 2011.

📌 January 2012: Moved to LA to work with new producers

That's all for this timeline! Red Part 2 is here, and you can check out the other albums in my pinned post!

#txt*#taylor swift #timeline*#hello everyone the old timeline was accidentally deleted so now we're getting this one

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