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All 206 of Taylor Swift’s Songs, Ranked

From teen country tracks to synth-pop anthems and rare covers, a comprehensive assessment of her one-of-a-kind songbook through the Folklore and Evermore era

Image of Taylor Swift

From teen country tracks to synth-pop anthems and rare covers, a comprehensive assessment of her one-of-a-kind songbook through the 'Folklore' and 'Evermore' era

Taylor Swift the celebrity is such a magnet for attention, she can distract from Taylor Swift the artist. But Swift was a songwriter before she was a star, and she’ll be a songwriter long after she graduates from that racket. It’s in her music where she’s made her mark on history — as a performer, record-crafter, guitar hero and all-around pop mastermind, with songs that can leave you breathless or with a nasty scar. She was soaring on the level of the all-time greats before she was old enough to rent a car, with the crafty guile of a Carole King and the reckless heart of a Paul Westerberg — and she hasn’t exactly slowed down since then.

So with all due respect to Taylor the myth, the icon, the red-carpet tabloid staple, let’s celebrate the real Taylor — the songwriter she was born to be. Let’s break it down: all 206 tunes, counted from the bottom to the top. The hits, the flops, the deep cuts, the covers, from her raw 2006 debut as a teen country ingenue right up to Folklore, Evermore, and her Taylor’s Version series.

Every fan would compile a different list — that’s the beauty of it. She’s got at least 5 or 6 dozen songs that seem to belong in her Top Ten. But they’re not ranked by popularity, sales or supposed celebrity quotient — just the level of Taylor genius on display, from the perspective of a fan who generally does not give a rat’s nads who the songs are “really” about. All that matters is whether they’re about you and me. (I guarantee you are a more fascinating human than the Twilight guy, though I’m probably not.)

Since Taylor loves nothing more than causing chaos in our lives, she’s re-recording her albums, including the outtakes she left in the vault before. So far, she’s up to Fearless and Red. For the Taylor’s Version remakes, both versions count as the same song. It’s a tribute to her fierce creative energy — in the past couple years she’s released an avalanche of new music, with more on the way. God help us all.

Sister Tay may be the last true rock star on the planet, making brilliant moves (or catastrophic gaffes, because that’s what rock stars do). These are the songs that sum up her wit, her empathy, her flair for emotional excess, her girls-to-the-front bravado, her urge to ransack every corner of pop history, her determination to turn any chorus into a ridiculous spectacle. So let’s step back from the image and pay homage to her one-of-a-kind songbook — because the weirdest and most fascinating thing about Taylor Swift will always be her music.

How to Watch Taylor Swift’s Acoustic ‘Folklore’ on Disney+

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37

“Willow” (2020)

“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.”

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36

“Betty” (2020)

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?”

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35

“Begin Again” (2012)

“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.

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34

“Fearless” (2008)

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.

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33

“22” (2012)

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.

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32

“Getaway Car” (2017)

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.

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31

“Cornelia Street” (2019)

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.

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30

“Last Kiss” (2010)

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.

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29

“Nothing New,” With Phoebe Bridgers (2021)

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.”

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28

“Cardigan” (2020)

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.”

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27

“Ours” (2010)

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.

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26

“Our Song” (2006)

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.

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25

“Evermore” (2020)

Taylor’s title tracks are usually bangers, but “Evermore” is a pensive piano meditation where she sits alone by the fireside, trying to figure out how it all went so wrong. We know Tay grew up a hardcore Def Leppard fan, so it’s no surprise the piano here echoes “Hysteria,” their saddest and most proto-Swiftian hit. (She sang a fantastic “Hysteria” with them on CMT in 2008.) Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon joins for the call-and-response bridge. Love the half-chuckle in the line “it was real enough to get me through”: the closest she comes to one of her Taylor Laughs in the Folklore/Evermore era.Best line: “I rewind the tape, but all it does is pause.”

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24

“Red” (2012)

The mission statement for Red, this century’s most ridiculously masterful megapop manifesto. Eurodisco plus banjos – the glitter-cowgirl totality Shania Twain spent years trying to perfect, with a color-tripping lyric worthy of Prince Himself, faster than the wind, passionate as sin. Plus, her all-time gnarliest pileup of Swiftian metaphors. (Nitpick: What kind of crossword puzzle has no right answer? What self-respecting puzzlemaster would sign off on that?)Best line: “Lovin’ him is like driving a new Maserati down a dead-end street.” Listen here.

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23

“Seven” (2020)

Two little girls in the Pennsylvania woods, trying and failing to understand each other. It’s a lost childhood bond (maybe same one from “It’s Nice to Have a Friend”?), from the perspective of a kid too young to recognize that her friend’s angry dad is the ghost in their family’s haunted house. (The traumatizing fathers on Folklore are a plotline in themselves.) The little girls dream of escaping, running away to be pirate twins, but there’s no resolution — just a mystery that gets more confusing she tries to live with it.Best line: “Please picture me in the weeds, before I learned civility.”

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22

“The Archer” (2019)

“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.

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21

“We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” (2012)

Like, ever. Her funniest breakup jam, because it’s her most self-mocking. She could have made the guy in this song a shady creep—a cheater, a liar, a scarf-stealer, etc. But, no, he’s just a needy little run-of-the-mill basket case, exactly like her, making the same complaints about her to his own bored friends, though his complaints can’t be as catchy as this chorus. And the video is a gem, especially when she’s wearing the Tay Is Seriously Mad Now glasses. Where is that indie-rock bar that still has a pay phone?Best line: “And I’m like, I mean, this is exhausting, OK?” Listen here.

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20

“New Year’s Day” (2017)

What a twist: the one-time poet laureate of teen crushdom turns out to be even sharper at adult love songs. “New Year’s Day” is her hushed piano-and-guitar ballad about two people waking up the morning after the party and getting back to the reality they share together. It captures the romance of mundane domestic details – sweeping up the glitter, rinsing out bottles, realizing this total nothing of a day is a memory you will cherish long after you’ve both forgotten the party. This is the kind of song she could keep writing into her forties and fifties.Best line: “Please don’t ever become a stranger whose laugh I could recognize anywhere.” Listen here.

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19

“This Is Me Trying” (2020)

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.”

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18

“Clean” (2014)

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.

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17

“The Last Great American Dynasty” (2020)

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.”

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16

“Coney Island” (2020)

Twelve miles from Cornelia Street, but it feels a lifetime away. “Coney Island” is her duet with the National, trading verses with singer Matt Berninger, for an Evermore highlight that picks up the story from Folklore. “Coney Island” sounds like the “August” girl left her small town, forgot about James and Betty, moved to New York, found a hipster boy, figured everything would be different in the big old city, then found herself stuck in the same old story all over again. When you’re a grown-up, they assume you know nothing.Best line: “We were like the mall before the Internet/It was the one place to be/The mischief, the gift-wrapped suburban dream.”

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15

“Fifteen” (2008)

“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.

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14

“Enchanted” (2010)

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.

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13

“Holy Ground” (2012)

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.

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12

“Right Where You Left Me” (2021)

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.”

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11

“Cruel Summer” (2019)

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 guy.Best line: “I snuck in through the garden gate / Every night that summer just to seal my fate.” Listen here.

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10

“Dear John” (2010)

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.

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9

“Marjorie” (2020)

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.”

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8

“Blank Space” (2014)

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.

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7

“Lover” (2019)

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.