[DECODED] The lyrics of a showgirl: Breaking down Taylor Swift’s 20-year songwriting

Is it romantic
how all my elegies
eulogize me?
– ‘the lakes’ (2020)

As pop superstar Taylor Swift is set to be formally inducted into the prestigious Songwriters Hall of Fame on Thursday, June 11, data consultancy The Nerve takes a deep dive into her discography, finding themes that map not just the progression of her songwriting but also the shifts in her image as an artist.

The Nerve collated Swift’s discography from open-source database Musicbrainz, and filtered it down to tracks from the singer-songwriter’s 12 standard albums, including bonus tracks from deluxe album versions and From the Vault tracks from album re-recordings. 

The data consultancy then analyzed the lyrics in these songs through Probe, its content and narrative analysis solution, and found the following key themes:

These themes are present throughout a tumultuous but rewarding journey that saw Swift gain the adoration of people who found themselves in her music, lose this favor just when her stardom shot up to tremendous levels, and gain it back tenfold not long after. In all this, her songwriting was both a witness and a weapon. 

Excluded from the data were songs from extended plays, movie soundtracks, unreleased tracks, and features in other artists’ songs. Remixes, demos, and acoustic or piano versions of tracks were also removed to prevent song duplicates. 

This narrowed down the data to 242 songs in total.

Catharsis

Dominating at around 34% is catharsis, a purge of intense emotions to reach a state of restoration. This theme was prominent in Swift’s earlier albums, her self-titled debut in 2006, Fearless in 2008, and Speak Now in 2010.

She took us to the heart of a teenage girl who’s at once bursting with love and hurting from betrayal.  “Don’t you think I was too young to be played by your dark, twisted games?” she croons in “Dear John,” a scathing take-down of a lover nearly a decade older than her. 

The words were almost as if straight from her diary, with little need to flourish or to edit. Listen to her Speak Now album, for instance, which she wrote by herself.

Nostalgia

By Red in 2012, Swift had crossed her twenties, sailed across continents on tour, and crossed off some personal milestones on her list, including winning the Grammy Album of the Year for Fearless. 

Red and the subsequent album released in 2014, 1989, were her first dalliances with pop and veered away from the country scene. Not everyone was receptive to Swift’s departure from the genre that introduced her to the world, but this transition to pop gave her access to a wider audience — a catalyst for her journey to superstar status.

Here she partnered with Max Martin and Shellback, pop music auteurs who are known for crafting perfect pop hits, lyrics be damned. In the country genre, she found she could tell a story; in pop, she realized she could make a hit. But she still wished to marry these worlds.

Enter nostalgia (14% of her songwriting). In pop music discussions, this is referred to as hauntology, a phenomenon in which artists mine a “cultural memory” to trigger nostalgia in their music. For music critic Mark Fisher, it is a way of “listening to the relics of the future in the unactivated potentials of the past.” 

Swift’s Red harkened back to the 1970s in image, directly inspired by Joni Mitchell’s Blue album, even echoing her chiaroscuro album cover. 1989 is steeped in 1980s nostalgia, visually employing analog-vintage aesthetics, with the cover featuring a Polaroid picture of her.

Intimate, nostalgic motifs of fallen autumn leaves, photo albums, wired telephones, and “James Dean daydreams” were littered throughout her lyrics. Famous for this is “All Too Well,” one of her most critically acclaimed songs to date and one that she revamped into a sprawling 10-minute version.

WATCH: Taylor Swift reimagines ‘All Too Well’ in emotional short film

Fame and celebrity

reputation, released in 2017, appears to be her first extreme venture with fame and celebrity as a theme (21% of her songwriting). It’s a theme that we see increasing throughout her time under the spotlight (from 7% in her debut album to 19% in 1989, based on The Nerve’s analysis), but it was in reputation where she began to reckon with the fact that she is a celebrity. 

A series of events led her to this record: oversaturation at the apex of her career, slut-shaming as she moves on from yet another relationship, and a hate train that would push her to “disappear for a year.”

She addressed these all in reputation, the first in her discography where love is not the most dominant word. “Time” takes its place. As she reflected on the pitfalls of her celebrity, Swift sings in different songs: “I’ve been breaking hearts a long time,” “I rose up from the dead; I do it all the time,” “It was the best of times, the worst of crimes.”

In reputation, Swift figuratively and explicitly kills her own manicured persona.

Visual imagery 

While visual imagery (also 21% of her songwriting) never strays too far away from her records, it is in folklore and evermore that we find Swift at her most vivid. 

Two major life events took place preceding these records: the master recordings of her first six albums were sold, and the pandemic shut down the world. “In isolation, I let my imagination run wild,” Swift wrote when folklore dropped. 

She wrote and released both albums in 2020, and they were her first major efforts to distance herself as the protagonist in her music. Here she paints detailed pictures of how a widowed American socialite wreaks havoc in her small island, lamentations on a midnight train about a rejected proposal, and even a love affair from the perspective of each character that spans three different songs (“august,” “betty,” and “cardigan,” in that order).

She took this time to approach her own experiences through a distanced lens. She likened her masters to “jewels” now worn by those who sold them, glittering on the hands that buried her. She morphs herself into a mirrorball, hung on a ceiling, shining for everyone. Her lover’s kiss hangs “like the Gardens of Babylon.” 

Through folklore and evermore, she found new and exciting ways to depict love, the main keyword present throughout all of her discography. With this comes a noticeable shift in public perception — for many, here comes Swift all grown up.

By Midnights in 2022, we see a more equal ratio of these key themes. This is the album that launched her career-defining “The Eras Tour” and won her her fourth Album of the Year, the only artist in history to achieve this. These songs that chronicled “13 sleepless nights throughout her life” employed the distanced lens she takes on her own life, and it is her most mysterious body of work because of it. To this day, many fans ponder who the “we” and the “us” in this album refer to, especially in the narratives that depart from her earlier work, like avoiding marriages and indulging in emotional cheating.

Some of these questions were answered in THE TORTURED POETS DEPARTMENT in 2024 — her return to catharsis after a long foray into visual imagery, and her most expansive body of work to date. Now 34, and decades apart from who she was when she debuted, Swift grieved the loss of her longest romantic relationship and the short, fiery affair that followed after.

Here, Swift tackled negative themes she had not touched before, including drugs (“You needed me but you needed drugs more”), suicide (“I dream of cracking locks / Throwing my life to the wolves / Or the ocean rocks”), and even animosity toward her own fanbase (“I don’t cater to all these vipers dressed in empath’s clothing”). 

This album is a shockingly candid portrait of a pop superstar who, at this time, was at the top of her game, still embarking on the highest-grossing music tour in history and dating a star football player.

While her writing remained personal, it had also begun to come from a different place: gone was the wide-eyed innocence of a girl with dreams, replaced by a mature outlook of a superstar who has achieved the same dreams — but had come to terms with their pitfalls.

Emotional baggage

In The Life of a Showgirl in 2025, what she calls a musical representation of “The Eras Tour,” she experimented with everything she’d learned. This manifested in emotional baggage, the last key theme in Swift’s discography at 9.5%, where the artist drew from and reflected on the scars from the past — gained from the rise and fall of her fame, and the heartbreaks in between. 

The theme only appears at around 8% in The Life of a Showgirl, but with this album seemingly the fairytale ending she dreamed of from the start, each instance is profound. 

“If you’d never come for me, I might have drowned in the melancholy,” Swift sings in her latest hit “The Fate of Ophelia.” “All the right guys promised they’d stay / Under bright lights, they withered away / But you bloom,” she croons in “Elizabeth Taylor” as she calls out to her fiancé.

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Through and by her own songwriting, Swift takes a journey to the summit, falters, and comes back stronger — as she sings — like a ‘90s trend. She’s immortal now, baby dolls. – with reports from Gillian Uy/Rappler.com

Probe is a content and narrative analysis solution developed by The Nerve’s award-winning team of data forensics experts. This enables brands and organizations to analyze thousands of posts across all online platforms and decode visual narratives with advanced image intelligence. To learn more, email [e-mail].