All 206 of Taylor Swift’s Songs, Ranked

Swift is no stranger to getting emo over her dresses, but this time it’s different: “Only bought this dress so you could take it off.” Her most carnal slow jam is also one of her saddest – the ache in her voice, the yearning in those synth sparkles. There’s something so “Little Red Corvette” in the way she interrupts her own wordplay with forlorn sighs. As for that golden tattoo – hold on, we’re going home.Best line: “I don’t want you like a best friend.” Listen here.

A meditative 1989 nocturne – half acoustic introspection, half electro reverie – as she genuflects in the midnight hour.Best line: “I could go on and on, on and on/And I will.”

“Too young to know it gets better” is an empathetic hook from a songwriter just moving into her twenties. “Forever Winter” is a Red vault outtake where she’s worried about a troubled friend, wishing she could protect them from their tribulations. It makes a companion to a very different 2021 tune: her Big Red Machine single “Renegade,” another song about the mechanics of compassion.Best line: “He spends most of his nights wishing it was how it used to be/He spends most of his flights getting pulled down by gravity.”

“Put your lips close to mine/As long as they don’t touch” – now there’s an entrance line. Taylor braves the ski slopes of love, with a seething acoustic guitar that finally detonates halfway though. A weird sonic detail: if you play this immediately after Joni Mitchell’s “People’s Parties,” the transition is almost frighteningly perfect.Best line: “Nothing safe is worth the drive.”

A Hollywood girl who’s too shiny for her tiny hometown — the loudest woman this town has ever seen — comes back for the holidays, staying with her parents, and falls right back into the arms of the boy she left behind. Dorothea realizes she doesn’t really fit in either place, but she’ll soon be heading back to her bitch-pack of fair-weather friends in L.A. The best U2-style guitar on a Swift song since “State of Grace.”Best line: “The road not taken looks real good now/Time flies, messy as the mud on your truck tires.”

A little-known charity single for cancer research, unlike anything else in her songbook. She wrote this about Ronan Thompson, a four-year-old Arizona boy who died of neuroblastoma, after she read his mom’s blog. She turned the blog posts into an eloquent ballad (crediting Maya Thompson as co-writer) and performed “Ronan” at the Stand Up to Cancer benefit. You might expect it to be manipulative and obvious; it isn’t. It’s emblematic of the kind of narrative she could keep doing for decades to come — an early run for her Folklore and Evermore character studies. She sings it with even more soul on Red (Taylor’s Version).Best line: “What if the miracle was getting even one moment with you?”

The saddest song on her saddest album — so what else would she call it but “Happiness”? Taylor’s lifelong romance with The Great Gatsby pays off here, when she quotes Daisy Buchanan and sings, “I hope she’ll be a beautiful fool.” And “I haven’t met the new me yet” is a poignant line from a songwriter who’s collected so many New Mes over the years. She also sings about “the dress I wore at midnight” — bet that’s the same party dress she’s wearing in “The Moment I Knew,” a song about getting stood up on her 21st birthday. Taylor released this exactly ten years after that night, just in time for her 31st birthday. The lesson, as always: she plans everything.Best line: “I pulled your body into mine every goddamn night/Now I get fake niceties.”

This hidden jewel took on a whole new luster after it became her blueprint for Folklore and Evermore. “Safe and Sound” ventures into rootsy folkie territory, on the Hunger Games soundtrack. She explores crevices in her voice she’d never opened up before, teaming up with the Civil Wars and producer T-Bone Burnett. The Swift-Burnett connection raises the question of how long it’ll take her to collaborate with Elvis Costello, a songwriter with whom she shares some fascinating affinities. At the very least, Tay should cover “New Lace Sleeves.”Best line: “Don’t you dare look out your window, darling/Everything’s on fire.”

What a ghostly scene: a spectre watches her funeral, haunting her enemies, friends, and lovers. “I didn’t have it in myself to go with grace” — maybe not a huge surprise. One of her spookiest Goth Tay ballads, especially when she admits, “I still talk to you,” and the ghost choir adds, “When I’m screaming at the sky.”Best line: “If I’m dead to you, why are you at the wake cursing my name?

A banjo-core Tay-visceration of people who are mean, liars, pathetic, and/or alone in life, including the ones who live in big old cities. Always a live highlight on her early tours, showcasing her murderers’ row of a band, the Agency.Best line: “Drunk and grumbling on about how I can’t sing.” Listen here.

It slams like a lost Blondie hit, from somewhere between Parallel Lines and Eat to the Beat. The way she sings the word “drown-i-i-i-ing” alone makes it.Best line: “He was long gone when he met me/And I realize the joke is on me.” Listen here.

We knew she was trouble when she walked in – or at least we should have guessed from her debut single. You couldn’t make this up – a nervy high school kid shows up with a country ballad she whipped together after math class one day, about slow dancing in the moonlight to the pickup truck radio: “When you think Tim McGraw/I hope you think of me.” Within a couple of years, she’s an even bigger star than McGraw is.Best line: “He said the way my blue eyes shined/Put those Georgia stars to shame that night/I said, ‘That’s a lie.’” Listen here.

An ode to a forbidden extramarital crush, with Taylor raging, “It’s a fire, it’s a goddamn blaze in the dark, and you started it!” “Ivy” has weird musical echoes of the Grateful Dead — those Jerry Garcia-style guitar ripples, or the way the chorus leaps into that “goddamn” a la “Uncle John’s Band.” It shouldn’t be a surprise — Aaron Dessner and his brother Bryce masterminded a great 2015 tribute album, Day of the Dead. (His guitar also goes full Garcia in “Cowboy Like Me.”) Here’s looking forward to Taylor’s Deadhead era — imagine how great her American Beauty will be.Best line: “The old widow goes to the stone very day/But I don’t, I just sit here and wait/Grieving for the living.”

Always here for the Taylor castle metaphors. The warmest Rep electro-ballad, about how exotic it feels to give up worrying about judgy strangers and start living a damn life. “Call It What You Want” celebrates a mature relationship — the kind where you turn off your phone for hours at a time and pull down the shades and risk letting yourself get a little known.Best line: “Not because he owns me / But ’cause he really knows me.” Listen here.

Taylor gave this one away to Little Big Town, who turned it into a massive 2016 country hit. “Better Man” came to loom large in her legend as a writer, so it was worth the wait to finally get her own proper version. “Better Man” hits even harder with Taylor wailing her tale of adult regret, confessing to the mirror, “The bravest thing I ever did was run.”Best line: “I gave to you my best/And we both know you can’t say that.”

“Drop everything now! Meet me in the pouring rain!” Oh, this girl loves her precipitation scenes, but “Sparks Fly” really brings the thunder. It shows off her uncanny power to make a moment sound gauchely private and messily public at the same time. (Waxahatchee has another excellent song called “Sparks Fly” — no relation.)Best line: “Just keep on keeping your eyes on me.” Listen here.

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.”

Not always a subtle one, our Tay. This extremely 1986-sounding synth-pop groove is full of hushed-breath melodrama, where even the guy taking off his coat can feel like a plot twist. (Why would he keep his coat on? This is his apartment.) And the long-running songwriting badminton between her and Harry Allegedly is pop call-and-response the way it ought to be – no matter how much misery it might bring into their personal lives, for the rest of us it means one great tune after another.Best line: “You got that James Dean daydream look in your eye/And I got that red lip classic thing that you like.” Listen here.

She opens Red with one of her grandest love songs in arena-rock drag, and the U2 vibe makes sense since she’s also got a red guitar and the truth. The acoustic version was always a welcome bonus track on the expanded Red, but it sounds even more autumnal now on Taylor’s Version. If “State of Grace” is her U2 song, what’s the U2 song that sounds most like Taylor? Probably “All I Want Is You,” though you could make a strong case for “A Sort of Homecoming.”Best line: “Up in your room and our slates are clean/Twin fire signs, four blue eyes.” Listen here.

“Take my hand, wreck my plans, that’s my man” is a great hook from the songwriter who turns plan-wrecking into an art form. “Willow” is the perfect song to introduce Evermore, all rustic guitar and spooky romance, deep in the woods. Taylor really committed to the concept at the Grammys, singing “Willow” on the roof of a moss-covered cabin. In the video, she gazes at her reflection in a pool like Narcissus, and like she once sang, the narcissists love her. Heartbreak: the Nineties trend that always comes back strong.Best line: “Show me the places where the others gave you scars.”

The Betty/Inez/James love triangle is at the heart of Folklore, inspiring three of its best songs. Every aspect of “Betty” sounds designed to explode when she finally gets to take it to the stage, from the “Thunder Road” harmonica to the most shameless lighters-up key change of her career. Picture all the beer that will get sloshed on you when it’s So I Showed Up To Your Party o’clock. (Her live version at the Academy of Country Music Awards in September 2020 was an arena-rock blast, for the year with no arenas.) Also love how when Taylor steps into the mind of a 17-year-old boy, the first thing she fantasizes about his male privilege is the right to make unchallenged assumptions. If James is a boy, that is. (Taylor takes care to leave it open — but has any boy in her songs ever stopped at a streetlight?) Key question: Was James in his car driving around the party listening to 1989? Because he follows all the advice she gives in “How You Get the Girl” and (surprise) it works.Best line: “Will you kiss me on the porch in front of all your stupid friends?”

“You said you never met one girl who had as many James Taylor records as you,” indeed. Sweet Baby Tay drops a deceptively simple ballad that sneaks up and steamrolls all over you, as an unmelodramatic coffee date leads to an unmelodramatic emotional connection. She’s always been outspoken about her mad love for her namesake JTand Carly Simon, but “Begin Again” could be the finest collabo they never wrote.Best line: “You don’t know why I’m coming off a little shy/But I do.” Listen here.

Oh Fearless, it’s easy to take you for granted sometimes. The first time I heard her sophomore record (the record company literally played it over the phone for me because they were so afraid of it leaking) I thought, “Holy cats, this is a perfect pop album. She’ll never top this.” Then she topped it seven times in a row, to the point where it became one of history’s most curiously overlooked perfect pop albums. But Fearless has a whole new mystique now that she’s chosen it to kick off her remake series — Fearless (Taylor’s Version) happens to be the biggest-selling album anybody has released in 2021. The title anthem gathers so many of her favorite tropes in one chorus — rain, cars, fancy dresses, boys who stare at her while driving instead of watching the damn road, shy girls posing as brave and faking it till they make it — and builds up to a swoon.Best line: “You’re just so cool, run your hands through your hair/Absent-mindedly making me want you.” Listen here.

Approximately 22,000 times more fun than actually being 22. The best song about turning the double deuce since Neil Young’s “Powderfinger,” if not the Stratford 4’s “Telephone,” it’s also her first shameless disco trip, with that Nile Rodgers-style guitar flash. But the power move is that “uh oh” into the chorus – the oldest trick in the book, except she makes it sound brand new every time.Best line: “This place is too crowded, too many cool kids.” Listen here.

One of Swift’s most endearingly McCartney-esque traits is the way she goes overboard with her latest enthusiasm and starts Tay-splaining it as her personal discovery. On 1989, she informed us all what New York is; on Reputation, she breaks down the concept of “alcohol.” (Wait, you can drink beer out of plastic cups? Tell us more!) Hence “Getaway Car,” where Film Noir Tay makes her big entrance, knocking back Old Fashioneds at the motel bar, a femme fatale playing two fall guys against each other. In the glorious final minute, she decides to sell them both out and speeds off to her next emotional heist.Best line: “Nothing good starts in a getaway car.” Listen here.

A ballad about how scary it is to realize how much you have to lose — how the brand-new-crush tingle of “Holy Ground” eventually turns into the place where you have to build a life. She looks around an apartment where she’s memorized every creak in the floor, a neighborhood full of romance, and comprehends how fast it all could turn into a heartbreak hotel.Best line: “Baby, I get mystified by how this city screams your name.” Listen here.

Toward the end of Speak Now, when you’re already wrung out from sad songs and begging for mercy, this six-minute quasi-doo-wop ballad creeps up on you to inflict more punishment. One of those flawless Nathan Chapman productions – so sparse, so delicate, flattering every tremor of her voice.Best line: “I’m not much for dancing, but for you I did.” Listen here.

Taylor and Phoebe are the Ghostface and Raekwon of the Sad Girl agenda — two kindred spirits blending their voices for a mournful guitar ballad of getting older, losing your novelty, but still crying in your bedroom. “Nothing New” is the vault track everybody was fiending for from Red (Taylor’s Version) — but it’s even better than we were hoping. The eternal question: “How can a person know everything at 18, and nothing at 22?” As you can tell from Folklore, Evermore, and Punisher, these two know the ingenue blues inside out. Can we please get a whole Taylor-Phoebe duet album?Best line: “They tell you when you’re young/‘Girls, go out and have your fun’/Then they hunt down and kill the ones who actually do it.”

The sweater left behind under someone’s bed, like the lost scarf in “All Too Well” or the lost glove in “It’s Nice To Have a Friend.” (Or the ex-wife’s dress left in the closet in Fiona Apple’s “Ladies”?) Swift sorts through the memories that go with breathing in the scent of a remembered lover, over brooding piano. “I knew you, leaving like a father, running like water” sure jumps out of the song, as startling as the “careless man’s careful daughter” in “Mine.” The day she wrote this song with the National’s Aaron Dessner, she posted a photo with the caption, “Not a lot going on at the moment.” Why do we ever believe a word she says?Best line: “Chase two girls, lose the one / When you are young they assume you know nothing.”

Like so many of her songs, “Ours” sounds like it could be channeling the 16-blue mojo of the Replacements’ punk-rock bard Paul Westerberg. (Melodically, it evokes “When It Began,” though it feels more like “I Will Dare.”) Especially the best line, which is possibly the best-est “best line” on this list, and which I sing to myself a mere dozen times a day.Best line: “Don’t you worry your pretty little mind/People throw rocks at things that shine.” Listen here.

The hit that made me a Swift fan, the first moment I heard it in 2007 – it knocked me sideways in the middle of lunch. (The CW played it as interstitial music between afternoon reruns of the Clueless sitcom and What I Like About You.) “Our song is a slamming screen door,” what a genius hook. I Googled to see who wrote this; it turned out the songwriter was also the singer and – how strange – she was just starting out. I hoped she might have at least another great tune or two in her. This song and that voice have kept slamming those screen doors ever since.Best line: “We’re on the phone, and you talk reeeeeal slow/’Cause it’s late and your mama don’t know.” Listen here.