All 274 of Taylor Swift’s Songs, Ranked

Swift is no stranger to getting emo over her dresses, but this time it’s different: “I 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.

This song clearly comes from Taylor doing Fearless songs every night on the Eras Tour and asking the crowd, “Are you ready to go back to high school with me?” She must have kept thinking, “Damn, these teen crush songs are getting it done. Why stop writing these?” Even Aristotle would play air guitar to this hook, hitting that power-pop jangle in the sweet spot between “Hits Different” and “Paper Rings.” Best line: “I wanna find you in a crowd just to hide from you.”

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.”

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.”

A meditative 1989 nocturne – half acoustic introspection, half electro reverie – as she genuflects in the midnight hour.  Lucy Dacus cleverly folded this into Boygenius’ “We’re In Love” — not the last time on this list Lucy will come up.Best line: “I could go on and on, on and on/And I will.”

Five years after “London Boy,” the Tennessee Stella McCartney goes home, a Daisy Miller who makes it out of her English affair alive to tell the tale. The craftiest production on Tortured Poets, with a synth-pop pulse that adds a discreet percussive boost.Best line: “I founded the club she’s heard great things about.”

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?”

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. 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.”

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.”

“Florida is one hell of a drug,” indeed. A outlaw of love flees down south to escape her past, her memories, and her bad reputation, burying her secrets in the swamp, chanting “Fuck me up, Florida!” Florence Welch makes a surprisingly well-matched co-narrator. It’s in the proud pantheon of hiding-out-in-Florida songs, alongside Bob Dylan’s “Key West (Philosopher Pirate),” Steely Dan’s “Doctor Wu,” and Neil Young’s “Fontainebleau.” Welcome to Destin—everything is cheaper than it looks. Best line: “Is that a bad thing to say in a song?”

“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.

Like so many of the peaks on Tortured Poets, “The Bolter” hits home with the story of a woman who doesn’t quite fit into other people’s lives, but isn’t sure she wants to change that. “The Bolter” is a dangerous woman who makes sure she never gets pinned down, running at the first sign of trouble. It’s a showcase for Swift’s nimble vocals, hopping through the chorus until she slides into that massively surly hook, “All her fucking liiiiives flashed before her eyes.” Best line: “Splendidly selfish, charmingly helpless, excellent fun till you get to know her.”

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.” So many invisible strings between Taylor and the Grateful Dead. Here’s looking forward to her full-on 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.

After years of marveling at the great 1989 bonus tracks that didn’t make the album, it’s startling to hear these intense vault tunes that didn’t even make the cut as bonuses. But if Taylor combined the 1989 bonus/vault loosies into a 10-song album of their own, it would add up to 1989’s nastier, cattier, funnier evil sister. “Now That We Don’t Talk” shows off her acerbic wit, especially her staccato vocals when she snipes “it just ended” one petty syllable at a time. Funny to hear her drag “acid rock.” Poor Taylor—one minute you’re on a nice innocent yacht ride, next you’re trapped listening to Jefferson Airplane and Quicksilver Messenger Service bootlegs.Best line: “I don’t have to pretend I like acid rock/Or that I like to be on a mega-yacht / With important men who think important thoughts.”

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.”

“Slut!” is one of her most hard-hitting vault treasures, up there with “Nothing New” and “Is It Over Now?” It comes from the same place as “Blank Space,” or “Shake It Off,” but lets more of her anger show. As she explains in her new 1989 Prologue,  “I had become the target of slut shaming.” She’s trying to trust in a new romance (“in a world of boys, he’s a gentleman”) but all too aware of the world’s misogynistic disapproval, noting, “I’ll pay the price, you won’t.” Yet she resolves, “If they call me a slut / It might be worth it for once.” It’s a sadly pained love song and a scathing satire at the same time, indexing ways that patriarchy corrupts the heart. Can you imagine if she’d dropped this song on people in 2014? But like so much of 1989, “Slut!” was truly ahead of its time. Best line: “Being this young is art.”

“I love you, it’s ruining my life” could be the name of her autobiography. “Fortnight” starts off Tortured Poets with glossy synth-pop, with Post Malone chiming in with sympathetic back-up vocals. Taylor revisits the 1950s bad-marriage theme of Folklore, Evermore, and Midnights, in a suburban environment of cheating husbands and well-behaved housewives on the verge of nervous breakdowns.Best line: “I took the miracle move-on drug / The effects were temporary.”

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?

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. The live version in the Eras Tour movie turns this song into the terrifying horror movie it always deserved to be, a swirl of black capes and glowing orange orbs.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” sounded designed to explode live, from the “Thunder Road” harmonica to the most shameless lighters-up key change of her career. So one of the big emotional payoffs on the Eras Tour is when she finally gets to trigger that audience chaos when she gets to Yeah I Showed Up To Your Party o’clock. (Her live version at the Academy of Country Music Awards 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 stoplight?) 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.

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.

It’s rare to hear Taylor begin a song by admitting she’s at a loss for words — and mean it. But that’s what makes “Bigger Than the Whole Sky” so powerfully understated. It’s a twangy grief ballad, burrowing into the elegiac Mazzy Star vibe of “Sad Beautiful Tragic,” ten years after it was a forgotten highlight of Red. She mourns a goodbye that came too soon, without trying to describe what’s been lost or what kind of future is ending. But Jack Antonoff’s slide guitar eloquently fills in for all the missing details. At the end, she tries to rationalize her loss by shrugging that “it’s not meant to be,” but then rips that cliché apart as a lie she refuses to believe. Some things are meant to be, but aren’t, and those can be the toughest to mourn.Best line: “Every single thing I touch becomes sick with sadness.”

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.

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.

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.”

You wouldn’t last an hour in the asylum where they raised her. Taylor makes a luridly comic goth-horror melodrama of girlhood in America, in case you never noticed she’s been singing about this on every album she’s ever made. “Who’s Afraid Of Little Old Me?” is a fabulously hostile highlight of an album where she’s constantly dissecting the “circus life” of gender, with all her Monster on the Hill energy ablaze. It’s the evil twin of “Mirrorball,” filtered through Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. (“I am what I am because you trained me,” the ultimate curse.)Best line: “You don’t get to tell me about sad.”

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.”