Taylor Swift removed heartbreaking lyric from final version of break-up song

Taylor Swift reveals she removed a heartbreaking lyric from one of the break-up songs that feature on her recent album.

Taylor Swift has revealed she removed a heartbreaking lyric from one of the songs that feature on her most recent album, The Tortured Poets Department.

The singer let fans into her creation process on her website this past weekend, during which she shared the First Draft Phone Memos of her song, My Boy Only Breaks His Favourite Toys, which was released on April 19.

As it turns out, the song’s last line on the album version is not the same as Swift had originally wrote for the break-up ballad.

In the outro of the album version, Swift sings, “Just say when, I’d play again. He was my best friend down at the sandlot.”

But in her phone memo version, which she played acoustically on a piano, the singer-songwriter made no mention of a sandlot. Instead, these were the heart-wrenching lyrics she sang: “He was my best friend and that was the worst part.”

In a previous interview with iHeartRadio before her album’s release in April, Swift explained that she wrote the song from the perspective of a child’s toy.

The 14-time Grammy winner co-wrote every song on The Tortured Poets Department, but she especially wrote My Boy Only Breaks His Favourite Toys all on her own.

Swift revealed the change when she made her First Draft Phone Memos available to fans. Picture: Neilson Barnard/Getty Images

“[It’s] being somebody’s favourite toy until they break you and then don’t want to play with you anymore,” she said, “which is how a lot of us are in relationships where we are so valued by a person in the beginning, and then all of the sudden, they break us or they devalue us in their mind.”

“We’re still clinging on to ‘No, no, no. You should’ve seen them the first time they saw me. They’ll come back to that. They’ll get back to that.’” she added.

“So it’s kind of like a song about denial, really. So that you can live in this world where there’s still hope for a toxic broken relationship.”

Swift released her double album The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology on April 19.

The singer on the set of her music video for Fortnight, which features on TTPD.

Some of the tracks on Swift’s TTPD album are believed to be about her relationship with ex-boyfriend, British actor Joe Alwyn, who she was dating up until last year.

The duo split in April 2023 after six years together, and Swift appears to have dropped Easter eggs about their relationship on her album.

However, Alwyn only just opened up about their split for the first time in June in an interview with told The Times.

Swift and Joe Alwyn dated for six years. Picture: Robert Kamau/GC Images

“I would hope that anyone and everyone can empathise and understand the difficulties that come with the end of a long, loving, fully committed relationship of over six and a half years,” he told the outlet. “That is a hard thing to navigate.”

“What is unusual and abnormal in this situation is that, one week later, it’s suddenly in the public domain and the outside world is able to weigh in,” he explained of the spotlight on their break-up.

“So you have something very real suddenly thrown into a very unreal space: tabloids, social media, press, where it is then dissected, speculated on, pulled out of shape beyond recognition.

“And the truth is, to that last point, there is always going to be a gap between what is known and what is said. I have made my peace with that.”

Originally published as Taylor Swift removed heartbreaking lyric from final version of break-up song