All 229 of Taylor Swift’s Songs, Ranked

A New Order-like synth-pop tale of teenage isolation: another teenage girl from a wasteland of a home town, dreaming of getting out or running away, but using music and art and writing to create her own fantasy world.Best line: “I searched the party of better bodies/Just to learn that my dreams aren’t rare.”

A yearning prayer for a rock & roll boy on tour, weak in the knees as she pleads for him to jet back on any terms he chooses.Best line: “I guess you’re in London today.”

One of her defining early smashes – and the one that marked her crucial crossover to the minivan-mom adult audience, where country stars do most of their business. It also inspired the first anti-Taylor answer song – Joe Jonas sang, “I’m done with superstars/And all the tears on her guitar” in 2009, on the JoBros’ instantly forgotten Lines, Vines and Trying Times. She added a P.S. years later in “Invisible String,” after she and Joe became friends again — proof that her songs just go on rewriting themselves.Best line: “Drew walks by me / Can he tell that I can’t breathe?”

She must have heard a Mazzy Star song on the radio that morning and thought, “Hey, this sounds like fun.” All the details are in place, from her woozy Hope Sandoval mumble to the way it nails Sandoval’s exact tambourine sound. Such an underrated Red gem, one she’s almost never sung live, but it was one of her templates for the sound of Folklore — Mazzy Swift rights forever. Would any other songwriter on Earth have the sheer gall to get away with that title? Let’s hope nobody tries.Best line: “You’ve got your demons, and, darling, they all look like me.”

The most divisive track on Lover — but for those of us who cherish this song, it’s a tiny little haiku miracle. That harp. Those steel drums. That creepy Lost Boys choir. That “Moonlight Mile” guitar. The childhood vibe evokes the White Stripes’ “We’re Going to Be Friends,” but it’s all her. Also, love how this story starts with a lost glove — seven years after the lost scarf in “All Too Well.” Best line: “Call my bluff / Call you ‘babe.’”

Wait, she fell in love with a narcissist? Who saw that coming? Despite the Eurodisco bleeps and bloops, this is a total Nineties grunge-rock rager – she switches into Eddie Vedder/Scott Weiland mode when she growls that “over and over and over again if IIII could.” This is just waiting for her to turn it into a head-banging live guitar monster.Best line: “I never trust a playboy but they love me / So I fly ’em all around the world and I let them think they saved me.”

“You made a rebel of a careless man’s careful daughter” is one of those hooks where she seems to cram a whole life story into one line.Best line: “I was a flight risk with a fear of falling.”

Let’s face it: Swift has trained us to expect the unexpected, but nobody guessed she’d crown Folklore with the best song ever about 19th century Romantic poets. (Only competition: Van Morrison’s “Summertime in England.”) In “The Lakes,” she wanders the Windermere Peaks in the footsteps of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. It’s her answer to Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey,” as she roams the wide open spaces so she can listen to “the still sad music of humanity.” As a Wordsworth fanatic, I’m grateful this song exists (“Peele Castle” Hive, rise!) and Tay should keep it going with the lit fan-fic — maybe Emily Dickinson or Gertrude Stein next?Best line: “I want auroras and sad prose/I want to watch wisteria grow.”

Imagine a timeline where Taylor released this as the first single from Reputation, instead of “Look What You Made Me Do.” It’s safe to say people might have gotten the message faster. “The Man” is the sharpest feminist anthem she’s written (so far). The unspoken subtext: If these dudes had to spend a day in her shoes, they’d crumble like a soggy chunk of feta cheese.Best line: “When everyone believes you, what’s that like?” Listen here.

Taylor never really had a thing for cowboys, even in her country days, so it makes sense she’d rather be the cowboy than rope one for herself. She’s a grifter swindling her sugar daddies, until she falls for a fellow con artist. But they don’t know if they can give up the thrills of the chase — the same old dilemma of “you love the players and you love the game.” Aaron Dessner’s guitar adds the right touch of country-rock. “I’m waiting by the phone like I’m in an airport bar” is one of the best old-media jokes on an album that also has centerfolds and VHS tapes.Best line: “The skeletons in both our closets plotted hard to fuck this up.”

You rang, Goth Taylor? At first this might have seemed like a minor pleasure on 1989, but it really sounds stronger and stronger over the years, especially when she hiccups the words “my last request ih-is.” The video features giraffes and zebras.Best line: “He’s so tall and handsome as hell/He’s so bad, but he does it so well.”

This rowdy hell-raising saloon sing-along about a rich ex is a delightful honky-tonk jam — the kind of straight-up Nashville vibe she was about to leave behind. In the classic “Friends in Low Places” country tradition, she taunts him for his “organic shoes” and “cool indie music concerts.” Which in 2012 meant he was into the National and Bon Iver.Best line: “The girl in your bed has a fine pedigree/And I bet your friends tell you she’s better than me.”

The finale of Lover, and a passionate sequel to “Clean.” “Daylight” takes off in the final minute when she gives a soliloquy that sounds like one of those 2 a.m. voice memos you forget about until you find them on your phone weeks later. “I wanna be defined by the things I love, not the things I’m afraid of” — it’s an affirmation to believe in.Best line: “I once believed love would be burning red, but it’s golden.”

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.”

The flip side of “Enchanted”: in this story Taylor is the chess master of love, plotting out every move in advance until her prey falls right into her logical trap. Love how she says, “Checkmate! I couldn’t lose.” Since Taylor recently revealed that the final scene of her “All Too Well” short film was inspired by Barbara Stanwyck in Stella Dallas, “Mastermind” could be Stanwyck in The Lady Eve, as the grifter scheming to destroy Henry Fonda’s life. (The Swift/Stanwyck connections go so deep.) Best line: “I’m only cryptic and Machiavellian because I care.”

“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.

It’s a long road through pop history from 1950s teen country star Brenda Lee chirping “Sweet Nothin’s” to the Velvet Underground chronicling street-punk existential despair in “Oh! Sweet Nuthin’.” But Taylor connects all the dots along the way. “Sweet Nothing” is her portrait of domestic bliss, co-written with “William Bowery” a.k.a. boyfriend Joe Alwyn. Love the moment where she writes a poem on the way home and he marvels, “What a mind.” Like so many of her finest love songs, it’s about finding the courage to stop hiding behind distractions, and letting yourself be seen.Best line: “Industry disrupters and soul deconstructers/And smooth-talking hucksters out-glad-handing each other.”

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.”

“Bejeweled” is full of late-night disco jitters, as Taylor sings about the the fear of stepping out onto the floor and putting her heart on display, until she takes the plunge because it’s scarier to think about *not* doing it. It sounds like this could be the neglected wife of “Tolerate It,” finally breaking free. (She boasts, “I polish up real nice,” as opposed to “I polish plates until they gleam and glisten.”) It’s got that “tears on the dance floor” vibe of “New Romantics,” except “New Romantics” was sung by a “we,” yet the singer of “Bejeweled” is feeling very alone indeed.Best line: “Sapphire tears on my face/Sadness became my whole sky/Some guy said my aura’s moonstone just ‘cause he was high.”

“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.

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.

The bonus track from Midnights is a breezy departure from the rest of the album, with sun-kissed California rock guitar and wildly funny lines about why Taylor is your ultimate Argumentative Antithetical Dream Girl. “Hits Different” sounds like it could be Betty or James a couple years down the line, after one of them skips town like an asshole outlaw. “I never don’t cry at the bar” feels like the truth. But “I don’t need another metaphor” is the funniest lie in the song, since Taylor loves piling up metaphors even more than she loves crying in bars.Best line: “Each bar plays ‘Our Song’/ Nothing has ever felt so wrong.”

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 ever since she chose it to kick off her remake series. 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. But it soars even higher now in Taylor’s Version, with all the adult soul in her voiceBest line: “You’re just so cool, run your hands through your hair/Absent-mindedly making me want you.” Listen here.