How Taylor Swift writes her lyrics

As we count down the hours to Midnights, pop's most prolific songwriter unpacks how she writes her songs. 

As we count down the hours to Midnights, pop's most prolific songwriter unpacks how she writes her songs. 

Quills, fountain, and glitter gel pens, that’s how Taylor Swift writes her songs (in her mind, at least.) 

On the eve of the release of her tenth album Midnights(arriving October 21), pop’s most prolific songwriter pens a letter for The Times, delving deep into her writing process. And revealing something “dorky” that she’s never publicly disclosed. 

“I have secretly established genre categories for the lyrics I write. They are affectionately titled Quill Lyrics, Fountain Pen Lyrics and Glitter Gel Pen Lyrics.” True Swift connoisseurs will already know exactly what she’s talking about. 

Swift says that she “came up with these categories based on what writing tool I imagined having in my hand,” when dotting lyrics down. She did used to literally use a quill, but doesn’t have one anymore. “I broke it when I was mad.”

“I categorise songs in the “Quill” style if the words and phrasings are antiquated, if I was inspired to write it after reading Charlotte Brontë or after watching a movie where everyone is wearing poet shirts and corsets,” she says. Songs for those amongst us who consider the six-part BBC Pride and Prejudice adaptation “comfort watching.” 

Swift points to the lyrics of evermore cut ‘ivy’ as an example of her quill-ink songwriting. “How’s one to know?/ I’d meet you where the spirit meets the bones/ In a faith forgotten land/ In from the snow/ your touch brought forth an incandescent glow/ Tarnished but so grand.”

“If my lyrics sound like a letter written by Emily Dickinson’s great-grandmother while sewing a lace curtain, that’s me writing in the Quill genre,” she says. 

The Fountain Pen genre captures all those feelings-y songs we clutch close to our chest. “Most of my lyrics fall into this category,” says Swift. “Fountain pen style means a modern storyline or references with a poetic twist. Taking a common phrase and flipping its meaning.”

Swift’s strongest songwriting plumbs through her personal memory through a macro-lens, with hyperspecific observations and literary piles of images (the red scarf, the refrigerator light.) 

Fountain pen is Swift “trying to paint a vivid picture of a situation, down to the chipped paint on the door frame and the incense dust on the vinyl shelf. Placing yourself and whoever is listening in the room where it all happened. The love, the loss, everything. 

“The songs I categorise in this style sound like confessions scribbled and sealed in an envelope, but too brutally honest to send,” she says.

The final category is Glitter Gel Pen, which Swift describes as “frivolous, carefree, bouncy, syncopated perfectly to the beat.” Those lyrics that are girlish, diaristic and a little bit cringe (that we love anyway.) 

“Glitter Gel Pen lyrics don’t care if you don’t take them seriously because they don’t take themselves seriously,” she says. “Glitter Gel Pen lyrics are the drunk girl at the party who tells you that you look like an angel in the bathroom. It’s what we need once in a while in these fraught times.”

The most clear-cut example of Glitter Gel pen is Red cut ‘Shake It Off’ “My ex man brought his new girlfriend/ She’s like ‘Oh my God’ but I’m just gonna shake/ And to the fella over there with the hella good hair/ Won’t you come on over baby we can shake, shake, shake.”