Any Taylor Swift fan knows the lyrics to one her most-beloved hits—“All Too Well” (and its unabridged 10-minute version)—like the back of their hand, but in a new interview, the pop superstar details the story behind the track like never before.
Yesterday afternoon, The New York Times unveiled a list of the 30 Greatest Living American Songwriters, as chosen by over 250 music insiders, with input from six NYT critics.
Swift, unsurprisingly, was chosen as one of the 30 finalists, alongside other living legends like Bob Dylan, Carole King, Mariah Carey, Kendrick Lamar, Bad Bunny, and more. And to coincide with her selection, the Pennsylvania native sat down for an interview with the publication, where at one point, she spoke about the making of “All Too Well.”
“The whole thing with ‘All Too Well’ was that this was a very emotional rant that I did in, like, a soundcheck,” she explained. “We were rehearsing for the Speak Now tour. I was very sad, in a way that, you know, you’re like 21 years old and you’re just excruciatingly… sadness is you. You are sadness. I just, in a break, I started playing the same four chords over and over again. It’s basically the same four chords over and over again for the whole song, and it just became this thing where I just started rambling and this thing went on for a really, really long time.”
The heart-wrenching track is widely believed to be about Swift’s short-but-passionate relationship with actor Jake Gyllenhaal, which began in late 2010 and ended in early 2011, around the holidays. (Her now-famous lines about his green scarf live rent-free in every Swiftie’s mind.)
As it turns out, it was only by chance that Swift ended up recording the song that would become the first piece of her fourth studio album, Red. “It was like more than 10 minutes that this rambling rant went on, and it wasn’t cohesive, and it wasn’t really that structured, but it felt afterward like—I think my mom or somebody went up to the sound guy and was like, ‘Did you, by any chance, record any of that?’ And he was like, ‘Yeah, I did.’ And I would have walked away from it if he didn’t have a recording of it.”
Swift went on to call the track a “catharsis of intense emotion,” and she confessed that the original cut was a little more unfiltered than the one fans have now heard. “There [were] some really angry, scathing parts that I was like, ‘[I’m] kind of going to have to make this into a song that’s a little bit more palatable.’ Because I already felt so like raw, putting that song out, as detailed as it was.”
On 2012’s Red, “All Too Well” was originally cut down to a five-and-a-half minute track, before Swift let slip that it was born from a messier, longer version.
“I made the mistake of kind of explaining how the song came to be in an interview,” she joked. “It ended up being a really fortuitous mistake that turned into being like, ‘Oh, I’m so glad that happened.’”
Due to fan demand, Swift decided to record a 10-minute version more akin to that original “rambling” one, which she included on the re-release of her fourth studio album, titled Red (Taylor’s Version). (The song would eventually go on to reach No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, becoming the longest track in history to do so. Its coinciding short film, directed by Swift, won Best Music Video at the Grammys.)
However, it wasn’t such an easy process. “For years, the fans were like, ‘Give us the 10-minute version, give us the 10-minute version.’ And I was going back through diaries and finding like little fragments of it,” Swift explained. “And I didn’t have the old thing anymore. So I was looking through safes, trying to find the CD, but I had to go back and piece together lyrics and stuff. But it was—that was the most extensive restoration process I’ve ever done on a song. I don’t think I’ll ever experience anything like that again.”
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