All 286 of Taylor Swift’s Songs, Ranked

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.”

Taylor should begin more songs with the line “I have this thing where…”, right? She has LOTS of this thing. “Anti-Hero” addresses her public persona, in the tradition of Taylor Lead Singles, as opposed to her private or creative life, with self-deprecating quips in every verse, and the sing-along chorus: “It’s me! Hi! I’m the problem, it’s me!”Best line: “Sometimes I feel like everybody is a sexy baby/And I’m the monster on the hill.”

The quiet heartbreaker on Tortured Poets, a piano ballad that hits home because it comes on so ordinary and unmelodramatic. Swift and Dessner don’t go for any fireworks here, just mourning a love that should have lasted years, with that “Evermore”-style piano. It peaks in the hushed moment where she gives the perfectly simple epitaph: “It was legendary/It was momentary.” Best line: “A con man sells a fool a get-love-quick scheme.”

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.”

“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.”

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.”

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.

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 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.

Taylor enters her Teenage Dirtbag Era with the Nineties slacker guitars of “Actually Romantic.” It sounds like Weezer and Wheatus meeting up with the Pixies to go swimming in the Caribbean. “Actually Romantic” sounds like a teaser for the full-blast rock album Taylor keeps us waiting for. Charli XCX must be proud to have inspired Tay’s funniest, brattest, least self-righteous dis track ever, with her most explicit sex AND drugs talk. But they’re both showgirls who’ve been pros forever, so don’t be surprised when they work it out on the remix. “A love letter to somebody who hates you,” Taylor calls it in the release-party movie. “In my industry, attention is affection.” Showgirl, it’s so confusing sometimes to be a showgirl.Best line: “How many times has your boyfriend said, ‘Why are we always talking about her?’”

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.”

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.”

“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.”

“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.

A pensive piano ballad at the end of The Anthology, celebrating the kind of inquisitive young romantic Swift can never stop singing about. This heroine re-reads the story of her life, pondering her “torrid affair” with a charismatic older man, wondering if she was the archer or the prey. As she sing, “He said since she was so wise beyond her years / Everything had been above-board / She wasn’t sure.” But she’s the author of this manuscript, telling her own life story as she goes along.Best line: “She rolled her eyes and said, ‘You’re a professional’/He said, ‘No, just a good Samaritan.”

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.”

“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.”

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.

“Lights, camera, bitch smile!” The only time Taylor goes for a dance-floor synth-disco banger on The Tortured Poets Department. It’s the flip side of “Mirrorball,” where she’s a super trooper hiding her tears from the audience because the show must go on. Jack Antonoff soups it up into an explicit homage to Vince Clarke, the synth-pop wizard of Depeche Mode, Yaz, and Erasure. As Antonoff once said, “Modern pop music should just write Vince a check for like a billion dollars for ripping him off all day long.”Best line: “I’m so depressed, I act like it’s my birthday.”

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.

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 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.

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.”

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.