All 274 of Taylor Swift’s Songs, Ranked

In the Swiftian universe, girls have fathers — and extremely heavy relationships with them — but boys rarely have mothers. The guy in this song has a mom and a sister — you have to go back to the scarf in Maggie Gyllenhall’s closet to find a guy with either one, let alone both. The sister in “Champagne Problems” gets only one line, but she’s the one with the actual champagne. (What can it mean that “Our Song,” one of her first hits, still has her scariest boyfriend’s-mama character?) So it’s fitting Taylor echoes the “All Too Well” piano chords for this tale, where a woman responds to her college boyfriend’s marriage proposal by blowing up her life along with his. She sees herself through the eyes of his family, their dorm friends, his hometown skeptics — but she realizes she can’t see herself in this picture at all.Best line: “She would have made such a lovely bride/What a shame she’s fucked in the head.”

“The Archer” is the ultimate Goth Tay powerhouse: obsessed with revenge and guilt, shooting poison arrows into her own heart, still trying to settle the score after the battle’s over. She’s an emotional Arya Stark who never gets to cross any names off her list, because she always needs to get in one more stab. (Taylor would be wiping the blood off her sword saying, “Oh, and another thing.” That’s why we relate, right?) One of the most hair-raising moments in her music: when she switches from “they see right through me” to “I see right through me!”Best line: “All of my heroes die all alone / Help me hold on to you.” Listen here.

How rude of Ms. Swift to write a song so full of lines I need to get carved on my tombstone — except it would take three or four tombstones to hold them all. The easiest Folklore song to underrate, because it seems so deceptively straight-ahead. But as in “Mirrorball,” the album’s other try-try-try song (also the other “I want you to know” song), her vocal goes right to the heart. Love the deadpan way she shrugs “I have a lot of regrets about that,” plus her very on-brand decision to sing the song in somebody’s doorway. “I was so ahead of the curve, the curve became a sphere” — what a math flex. Fact: Taylor could have invented geometry, but Euclid couldn’t have written this song.Best line: “They told me all of my cages were mental/So I got wasted like all my potential.”

Not the flashiest song on Midnights — there’s no fancy metaphor, no razzle-dazzle wordplay, no plot, no clever twist. Just her most painfully gorgeous melody, massive in its simplicity. Taylor spends most of “Labyrinth” just sighing, “Uh oh, I’m falling in love,” over neon synths that flicker and splutter like the circuits are melting down. She doesn’t lean on poetics here — the word “labyrinth” appears only once, when she sighs, “Lost in the labyrinth of my mind.” It’s one of Jack Antonoff’s craftiest productions — loads of Brian Eno circa Another Green World. Every “uh oh” and “oh no” hits so hard—she slides into each one from a different angle. If you’re ever in the mood to forget about Taylor the songwriter and just savor her as one of pop’s most brilliant vocalists, “Labyrinth” is one to cherish. It takes some nerve for her to use this Borgesian title for such a deceptively minimal tune, but this is a lavender labyrinth you can get happily lost in. A stealth classic. Best line: “Breathe in, breathe through, breathe deep, breathe out.”

Her most shameless urban-romance horror story, with two doomed lovers lost in a haze of pretentions and pheromones. They can’t stop trying to decode each other’s brains out, because that’s all they have in common. As she sings, “You’re not Dylan Thomas / I’m not Patti Smith / This ain’t the Chelsea Hotel / We’re modern idiots.” It’s full of clever flashes, right from the way it kicks off with that Prince drum thwomp. (Straight from his 1987 “It.”) As with all her love songs, except more so, it could not possibly matter less who she’s “really” singing about, because the whole point is that neither of them can see past the mirror right now, which makes these modern idiots perfect for each other. Torture, poetry, self-sabotage, absolutely insufferable levels of narcissistic delusion—now that’s a real New York love story.Best line: “At dinner you take the ring off my middle finger/And put it on the one people put wedding rings on / And that’s the closest I’ve come to my heart exploding.”

Love is the drug. “Clean” is the stark synth-folk ballad of an infatuation junkie struggling through some kind of detox, with a big assist from Imogen Heap. An intense finale for the all-killer homestretch of 1989.Best line: “Ten months sober, I must admit/Just because you’re clean don’t mean you don’t miss it.” Listen here.

There goes the loudest woman this town has ever seen. So many heroic witches, widows, crones, and madwomen on Folklore, but this one steals the show. “The Last Great American Dynasty” initially seemed more a gimmick than a song, with a clever twist that would wear off fast. But the intricate details just grow over time — melodically, production-wise, most of all vocally. Taylor’s in a haunted house where Rebekah is just one of the madwomen in the attic, and the ghosts make her feel right at home. Imagine singing “marvelous” in one song in 2012, tucking the word in your back pocket for the revenge sequel, then waiting eight years for the right moment to play that ace. Dali or no Dali, this woman will never lose a card-game bet in her damn life.Best line: “I had a marvelous time ruining everything.”

One of the stellar Aaron Dessner collaborations tucked away on the Midnights 3 A.M. Edition. “The Great War” comes clean about the side of Taylor who only wants love if it’s torture, going into the question of how emotional battles happen and how to end them, especially when you realize you’re the one firing the cannons. It’s a dilemma she’s written about honestly her whole career, from her teen ballad “Cold As You” (“I start a fight because I need to feel something”) to “Afterglow.” The World War One imagery and martial drums are fitting for a song about how easy it is for two hearts to dig themselves into trenches. But “The Great War” also doubles as a tribute to the type of lover who can help rescue you from your own destructive instincts, the kind you want on your side.Best line: “My knuckles were bruised like violets/Sucker-punching walls/Cursed you as I sleep-talked.”

The moment where this bittersweet symphony leaps from a nine to a 10 comes at the 4:25 point, when it feels like the song has reached its logical conclusion, until the Interior Monologue Voice-Over Taylor beams in to whisper: “Please don’t be in love with someone else/Please don’t have somebody waiting on you.” In the final seconds, for the coup de grace, she duets with herself.Best line: “The lingering question kept me up/ 2 a.m, who do you love?” Listen here.

“In your life you’ll do things greater than dating the boy on the football team / I didn’t know that at 15.” Still south of her twenties, she sings her compassionate, sisterly yet hard-ass advice to her fellow teenage girls. (Spoiler: boys are always lying about everything.) Childhood pal Abigail Anderson will always be her coolest BFF of all time; Taylor was a bridesmaid in her wedding just a few years ago.Best line: “We both cried.” Listen here.

Nobody does zero-to-60 emotional peel outs like our girl, and “Holy Ground” is her equivalent of Evel Knievel jumping the Snake River Canyon. Note the sly brilliance of how she steals that Eighties guitar riff from none other than Billy Idol, making this her “White Wedding” as well as her “Rebel Yell.” (Though the lyrics are about dancing with herself.) A highlight on the Red tour, showcasing Tay’s drum-solo skills.Best line: “Hey, you skip the conversation when you already know.” Listen here.

The bombshell buried halfway through The Anthology. “The Prophecy” is the confession of a woman who’s spent too many years praying for a dream that didn’t come true—until the wait makes her furious and dangerous. She rages on her knees, in one of her fiercest vocal performances. If you want to savor Swift the singer-as-singer, focus on the details of her compressed anger in the witchy climax: “A greater woman stays cool/But I howl like a wolf at the moon / And I look unstable/Gathered with the coven ‘round the sorceress’ table.” Listen to the way she stumbles over “unsssstable” — a terrifyingly casual detail. Swift never raises her voice, but she’s as spooky as Springsteen in “State Trooper,” Leonard Cohen in “Avalanche,” Patti Smith in “Birdland.” Best line: “Spending my last coin so someone will tell me it’ll be okay.”

Okay, so we already know Taylor gets a kick out of leaving great songs off the album — but this is ridiculous. Maybe even criminal. Yet perhaps “Right Where You Left Me” had to be a bonus track on Evermore, because hearing this song once means putting it on repeat and shutting down the flow of the album. A decade after Taylor was feelin’ 22, she gets trapped in 23, reliving the moment she got her heart broken, still sitting in that restaurant. (The same one where they had their first date in “Begin Again”?) Every time she gulps “you left me noooo,” it sounds more desperate, riding Aaron Dessner’s obsessive banjo hook. She feels paralyzed in the past, but his banjo keeps urging her to get running while she can. “Right Where You Left Me” is the only Swift song with an actual cry for help — twice — and it’s a startling sound. Repeat: she left this off the album.Best line: “Did you ever hear about the girl who got frozen?/Time went on for everybody else, she won’t know it/She’s still 23, inside her fantasy, how it was supposed to be.”

For the first 98 seconds, “Cruel Summer” is merely a perfect Taylor Swift song. Then for the bridge, she takes off into a deranged greatest-hits album’s worth of choruses from brilliant songs she hasn’t written yet. You could write a whole dissertation on the erotics of windows in Taylor’s songs — no poet since Keats has been so obsessed with the kind of desire that doesn’t dare use the door. “Cruel Summer” is about sneaking around and feeling ashamed of her secrets, but also feeling proud of how ashamed she is, until she finally yells her dirtiest secret out loud: “I love you — ain’t that the worst thing you ever heard?” But make no mistake, she loves her secrets more than she’ll ever love this paramour.Best line: “I snuck in through the garden gate / Every night that summer just to seal my fate.” Listen here.

A slow-burning, methodical, precise, savage dissection of a failed quasi-relationship, with no happy ending, no moral, no solution, not even a lesson learned – just a bad memory filed away. “Dear John” might sound like she’s spontaneously pouring her heart out, but it takes one devious operator to make a song this intricate feel that way. (“You are an expert at sorry and keeping lines blurry and never impressed by me acing your tests” – she makes all that seem like one gulp of breath.) Every line stings, right down to the end when she switches from “I should have known” to “You should have known.”Best line: “I’m shining like fireworks over your sad empty town.” Listen here.

The centerpiece of Evermore, an album full of haunted houses and eloquent ghosts. Taylor sings about her late grandmother Marjorie Finlay, an opera singer who used to play the San Juan supper clubs, with the key line, “If I didn’t know better/I’d think you were singing to me now.” Her hushed voice tells the story over pulsing vintage synths, in the minimalist mode of Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians. At the end, she samples Marjorie’s soprano voice. A song about getting to know your loved ones better after they’re gone, giving them a home in your memory, turning their lives into folklore and passing them on like folk songs.Best line: “Never be so kind you forget to be clever/Never be so clever you forget to be kind.”

A double-venti celebration of serial monogamy for Starbucks lovers everywhere, as Tay zooms through the whole cycle – the high, the pain, the players, the game, magic, madness, heaven, sin. Every second of “Blank Space” is perfect, from the pen clicks to the “nasss-taaaay-scarrr” at the end. The high might not be worth the pain, but this song is.Best line: “Darling, I’m a nightmare dressed like a daydream.” Listen here.

Ladies and gentlemen, will you please stand? This bombshell is the kind of twangy guitar ballad people thought she didn’t feel like writing anymore, except she’s celebrating the kind of adult passion people assumed wasn’t melodramatic enough for her to bother singing about. But when she hits those high notes in the chorus, it’s like the sensation at the top of the roller coaster when you realize you’re zooming all the way down. “Lover” sounds like a sequel to “Last Kiss,” but with a decade’s worth more soul going into it. She reclaims the cringiest noun in the language and makes it credible for the first time since Prince sang, “I Wanna Be Your Lover.” Great video too, especially when she goes into Sad Blue Violin Pluck mode. Imagine ending your twenties with a song this masterful. Imagine heading into your thirties the same way.Best line: “With every guitar-string scar on my hand.” Listen here.