Taylor Swift Says She Knew 'Lover' Would Be Her Title Track and Shares Its 'Special' Meaning
For Taylor Swift, writing title track “Lover” felt like no work at all.
The pop star, 29, climbed behind musician and NPR host Bob Boilen’s famous desk last Friday to put on an intimate concert in D.C. for NPR Music’s Tiny Desk Concert Series — and opened up about the making of some of the songs from her newest album, Lover.
“Wow! This is a lot of people in a tiny office, I love it!” the singer exclaimed while greeting NPR employees and fans who came to watch her perform.
After introducing herself, Swift explained why she was so excited to be given the chance to put on a Tiny Desk concert.
“Tiny Desk is like one of my favorite corners of the internet, and I always love seeing, like, it’s an opportunity for artists to decide a different way to showcase their music,” she said. “So you’re kind of inundated by overwhelming opportunity and choices.”
“I just decided to take this as an opportunity to show you guys how the songs sounded when I first wrote them,” Swift revealed, jokingly adding, “so it’s just me. There’s no dancers, unfortunately.”
The Red artist then opened up her concert with an acoustic version of “The Man,” before switching to the piano to perform “Lover.”
“There’s a song that I wrote on the album that I knew as soon as I wrote it, it was going to be the title track,” she said of the hit. “Writing songs is strange because it never happens exactly the same way, but sometimes it happens in a way that feels like this weird haunting that you can’t really explain. Like you don’t know where these ideas came from and you feel like you didn’t work at all to write it, and that’s the best kind of song.”
“With this song [Lover], it was just one of those weird moments, just middle of the night, I’m like in my pjs, stumbling to the piano as I got this idea and the song just happened really quickly,” she added.
“Lover” was a particularly special track for Swift because of the larger meaning behind the song.
“There’s a line in the song that I’m really proud of, and the line says, ‘With every guitar string scar in my hand, I take this magnetic force of a man to be my lover,’ and that line is really special to me because I’ve spent quite a bit of time writing break-up songs,” she told the audience.
With Swift’s seventh studio album and its title track, the Grammy winner reveals details of her ultra-private three-year romance with British actor Joe Alwyn. The singer makes it clear with her new music that she’s in the best place she’s ever been with Alwyn — and found the true love she’s been writing about since she was a teen.
Earlier this month, the couple, who have been dating since 2016, celebrated her appearance on Saturday Night Live with a rare public date night. On Oct. 5, Alwyn and Swift were spotted holdings hands as they headed to Zuma in New York for SNL’s afterparty.
