The Icon Sessions with Taylor Swift — Presented by Recording Academy's Songwriters & Composers Wing

I want to start at the very beginning. You learned a lot about song structure, and it started at a very early age. Nashville. Who was it that influenced you? How did that happen? Maybe a little history. I was about 10 when I started obsessively thinking about and planning how it would be possible for me to try to make music for the you know, I had heard that Faith Hill got discovered at the Bluebird Cafe. I started learning about the Bluebird Cafe, made it like a personal life goal to get to perform there. And in the process of this, I started picking up instruments and started writing my own songs, just kind of based on the structures and kind of architecture of the songs that I loved the most. And figuring maybe if I write enough of these, I might get decent at it. And so with those feelings and putting into the music, were you ever conscious of, I've got to make it fit this structure, or were you more just putting out the feelings in your music? I think when it comes to structure, it's sort of like when you learn sort of basic rules about something, it can really serve more as a framework. And, you know, we try to not be too formulaic with what we're doing, because we're ultimately trying to express human truth. But ultimately, even no structure is a type of structure, like anarchy is a type of society. Taking the traditional structure and flipping it and doing different things and breaking rules was something you've done quite a bit of that actually started on your first album. So amazing. Then as a teenager, you started writing some really advanced stuff, you know, Tim McGraw and that song, you introduced not only an artist, but you were a writer with a great instinct for storytelling. Where did that come from? I think storytelling was why music felt important to me. So in being drawn to that aspect of music, you know, I never turned to music to forget my human experience. I turned to music to remember it. And so in songwriting, I find myself drawn to consequences, stakes, and the passage of time so we can see those decisions through, you know, I love an epilogue in a book, I'm always trying to see what happened at the end of the story. And oftentimes in a song, you'd love to stay in one moment, but especially early on in my songwriting, I'd love to just be like, and this is how it ended. Jump around. Yeah, they got married. You did a bit of that in the Tim McGraw song where you wrote something that was ending, but it hadn't ended what it was going to end. And that's definitely a different type of song structure. That song, when I look back on it, it kind of establishes a pattern of writing in detail. That's something that people bring up to me a lot about my work is that I write in detail, but I do think it's important to determine that the details have to have a significance to the story at hand. And in that song, like there's a line that says, just a boy in a Chevy truck that has a tendency of getting stuck on back roads at night. And if look at that at face value, you're like, oh, that truck broke down a lot. But if you look into it, the double meaning is these are two teenagers who used to park and kiss and tell their parents that the truck broke down. Now we know. During this period, you were growing, you were perfecting your craft and you were following your instincts. What is it about this period or what is it that you did in that time that you think is unique or maybe a superpower for you? Wow. I think that at that point in time, I was a 16-year-old putting out an album in country music that was all about my life as a kid in high school. And, you know, back 20 years ago, people really thought very hard about demographics and about, you know, the way you got music out into the world was country radio. And I had so many people say to me on the label side of things like, you know, the country music demo is a 35-year-old female. How are they going to relate to you writing songs about your life in 10th grade? It's a fair question. If I were to look back and say, whoa, that's crazy. This is why this all worked. It was because I didn't listen to the people who said that I didn't have a valid perspective on life because I didn't fit into a certain demographic that they had studied because of the analytics of a certain genre and how people experience music. I think that music is so great because you actually don't know what's going to strike a chord with people. We're dealing in emotional truths that either resonate or don't. And that's what I was going to say to me. It felt like your instincts are one of your superpowers. You have many, but you trusted your instincts, both in your strategy, but also in your songwriting and what you put into your music. And is it sometimes difficult to trust your instincts when you're sharing your music with the public and you have to close that out and write from within? Or how do you approach that? I realized that I'm making music because I'm playing for the fans. I'm putting this out for people who care about it and who look to music as a way to cope with their life in the way that I did. I think that if you can actually go through all those checkpoints and realize that putting out music you've made that you love so much is not the path to universal validation, if you're still doing it, then you love it for the right reasons. That's serious. I don't know if there's been another songwriter that's had to take that into consideration as much as you have. The public perception, how they're receiving it, how they're interpreting it. Yeah. Anything you say, they're like, oh, easy for you to say. Right. But if you're sitting in the studio, how does that not block your creativity? How does that not slow down your process, having to think about how it's going to be interpreted? I don't know. Sometimes it fuels it. Sometimes when people are mocking me, it's really fun to mock them back. Sometimes I like to just use words that they have to look up in order to talk ---- about. But I go through several processes and coping mechanisms that I've gone through over the years, and one of them is saying, you chose this, you chose this every day. You could have opted out of this any day before it got unmanageably big. And I decided not to because I love it that much. And that's just where it begins and where it ends. And everything that comes with this ultimately is worth it as long as I get to still make music. That's special. That's incredible. Okay. Moving on a little bit, your album Red felt different, felt like you're trying some different things. You were pushing the boundaries of yourself as a songwriter, right? And I think 1989 then took you into some kind of pop direction, very deliberate pop. Did your process in writing those songs change from where you had come? Yes. I mean, I think I've always been very fascinated and challenged by the idea of never making a lateral move creatively. And it helped that being somebody who started this when I was 16 and then continued to put out albums, my life was changing so quickly that if you continue to write about your life and write from these new challenges and adventures, the sonic landscape of that and the soundtrack of that can change with you. So it's like with my albums, I would take my dedication to being a confessional songwriter and my belief that that's important and that although the details of my life may be different from other people's, it's the significance of those details that bonds us in our own shared human experience. You take that with you and with Red especially, that album was one where I had just come off of writing, like my album before that was called Speak Now and it was an album that I wrote completely solo. And on that album I really learned how to take a feeling I was feeling and then craft that on my own into a sound and kind of world build the music around my feeling for it. So what you had were songs that like, you know, the song Enchanted is about, you know, falling in love and that sort of glittery twinkly fairy lights feeling and that's exactly how the song sounds. There's a song called Never Grow Up that is a song to a little kid who's asleep in a crib and it sounds exactly like a lullaby. There's a song called Mean which was about criticism and at that time one of the criticisms I was facing was like, she's not country enough and so I made it like, I was like, put just as much banjo on this as we can possibly put on. So when I had learned that of how to match my feelings and to really influence what I was writing and how I was kind of influencing the production of it to sound exactly the same, it really helped later on when I would be able to write backwards from that. If somebody would send me a track, I'd listen to the first five seconds of the track and be like, oh my god, this is about a girl who goes home to her hometown on holiday break and it's cold and she falls in love with her old high school flame again but she has to go back to the big city but she's fallen in love with him over the course of two days, like what's she gonna do, you know? That is awesome right there, that's awesome. Yeah but Red was, to your point, Red was where I decided I'm gonna try to find myself by exploring all the edges of all the different producers I could work with, everyone from Dan Wilson to Jack Knife Lee to Max Martin to Nathan Chapman to, I was really, to Jeff Basker, I was like, I want to work with everybody I like, everybody whose music I like, I want to see what they're like in the studio and that album was very, it was very much like changing channels back when we used to do that. Yeah so it was like it, but it really was, when I look back on that album, it was, that was what made it exciting, was the variation of it and then I arrived at 1989 which I look at as a very sonically cohesive piece. Were there some of the rules that you learned in country that you had to break or what were some of the challenges? Because I know a lot of our members and people in the wing write in different genres but there's not been many people that have been able to transition at such a high level country writer to an extremely high level pop writer as well. What are those challenges like? Thank you. I think the main change would be, as a lyricist, just sort of the vernacular over the years that I would use because when it comes to writing just sort of different shades of my music, you can say the same thing many different ways. You can say I'm into you by saying your Midas touch on the Chevy door, November flush and your flannel cure. Or you can say you got that James Dean daydream look in your eye. They mean exactly the same thing. Everything that you touch glows. You are the most important thing in my world and I just saw you for the first time and I can't believe it and I don't know what to do with these feelings. But you can just choose to say them different ways and I think that the way that I've chosen to kind of express myself as a lyricist has changed over the years and there are times when those contradictions will come up where fans will be like, I can't believe the same person who wrote this wrote this because one will be very simplistic and silly and one will be very detailed and deep and we're doing tons of allegory and we're just in a whole other world of atmospheric speech. But I think that that human contradiction is fun. I think that it's fun to make playful songs. I think it's fun to make songs that are desolate and lonely and just bedraggled lyrically as well and that it's that human contradiction that I find interesting. Well it's also very hard to do, by the way, to be able to do both so you've mastered it. You also talk a lot about how much you love little phonetic things, you call it, the alliteration, the internal rhyme, consonant sounds, where the phrase sits. How do you prioritize those things and how do you decide, do I want to make it sound good or do I want to make it mean something? Well I think that ultimately we're trying to do both and when I talk about writing I try to explain it so it sounds like I think about it a lot more than I do when I'm doing it. When you get visited by the idea fairy and you trust where that's going to take you based on your thousands of hours of doing this, you can enter sort of a flow state and then your taste and what you like kind of comes to the forefront. I like alliterations so much that they happen without me meaning for them to happen now and I like bouncy syncopation and I have these certain things that I just like and I don't even try to do them anymore. I'd have to try not to do them. Yeah so that's the fun of it. Obviously when you finish your first pass of something, I really am not someone who stops a song and says like let's put that away and revisit it later or like it exchanges parts out. I know a lot of people do that. I can't. I have to see it through but afterward I'll go back over and just be like hey could this line be punched up a bit and that's where sometimes I'll add alliterations where they don't exist but they usually already exist. And when you're doing that, whether it's in the original writing session or looking back, are you just trying different lines, trying different words, seeing how they feel, how they flow? The cool thing is that it happens differently every time. There could be just a line that I thought of three months ago, wrote down in my notes and all of a sudden now that I'm playing these chords on piano, all of a sudden I know what that line needs to be and so we're expanding outward from that. But first I had to figure out where is that line? Is that line the second line of the second verse? Is that the hook? Is that the first thing we're hearing? And that's where we're always constantly putting together puzzles as songwriters but we're also creating all the pieces of the puzzle first. So it really depends on if you get a centerpiece or a corner and really just your history as a puzzle putter together will hopefully inform you where that goes but that's the magic of it and the misery of it as well. So looking at how you produce records and you touched on it, what are some of the things that you like to do to complement your songs? How are you building production around your lyrics and your storytelling to make sure it's creating the right mood and the right vibe? You talked about the twinklies and is that something you work with producers and say no I want it to feel more like this? I know you produce a lot of it yourself as well so talk about that process if you don't mind. You know it can either be compelling to make a song sound exactly how it feels or to flip it which the people that really taught me the most about that are Max Martin and Shellback. So I think maybe the best example I have of this is that I wrote this really sad piano ballad called I Knew You Were Trouble. I want to hear that. I was really excited to bring it in and I played them this really really sad ballad and I was like I think just no drums and they're like what if it's dubstep? And what did you say? I don't know guys. Let's give it a run. I don't know. Like you know I also like have a lot of I don't know. I can't imagine them saying that to you though. You sat and played them the song they're like dubstep. Oh yeah like what if it's electric guitar and dubstep? Like we're not putting a piano in this but it ended up being the best thing for it and I think that as a collaborator my favorite people to be in the room with are yes and people. So why not try it? If they heard it and they thought dubstep and I came to them specifically because I didn't want to be making lateral moves creatively why wouldn't we go down that path? Like why wouldn't we? And I really think that enthusiasm in the studio it can really make or break what you end up creating. Yes and people. Yes. Don't be the person that comes to the show. I mean that's a great lesson for all of us as songwriters to approach the creative process with that spirit with the yes and. That's so important right? All right next little phase the Reputation album. You were writing, I guess it's a big phase, you were writing an environment where a lot of people the public in general believed they knew the story. They thought they knew the story. How did you change what you wrote and how did that public's perception make you adjust? It was a time in my life when for the very first time not the last people had really actively tried to misunderstand me just in general. And to misunderstand what I was trying to say and to purposely misinterpret it and it felt very stifling as a person as a human being. But ultimately as a writer it gave me this really when I look back on it this really sort of gnarled like bite when I would write my lyrics. Because I figured like okay this is when I learned like when people are in like a hate frenzy about a public figure or really anyone like it could be like you know your daughter in her middle school class. Like when people decide we're all going to stand around someone and point and mock them you can't respond with outward sincerity. Like any attempts you make to explain yourself earnestly or sincerely will just be mocked even worse. And so it was an interesting challenge as a writer to say what can you possibly say when everything you say is being returned to you in this sort of like distorted like like they just sort of overreact rather than react to anything that you say or do any position you take. And so I decided to put out a song called Look What You Made Me Do as the first single where I as a dead corpse emerge from a grave and then proceed to deliver this very like tongue-in-cheek sort of mischievous take on what it's like to feel cornered in that way. But the fun part of that album is that it had a lot of sides to it. Like if you looked deeper into that album it's an album about feeling so upset about this mass shaming that you felt like you were going through. You find this little cave and you crawl in there and you try to find like a tiny bit of warmth and that warmth sustains you for the entire time that you feel so massively misunderstood by people who don't know you. So that was a really fun challenge of that album and I'm very proud of it when I look back on it I think the things that I look back on now is like when I've gone through something that was like sort of an attempt to like drive me insane. When you when you don't allow that to happen and you use art and music as a way to like barrel roll out of that, those are the moments I'm the most proud of. That's great, great, great stuff. So then you have Reputation and Lover and I would say that's darkness and light, defensiveness, openness, back and forth right? Is that just where you were in your life or was that done intentionally? You said okay I've done this now I want to do this. Are you just writing exactly what you're feeling in the moment? It's really it's really that you know I'm not a big like mood board artist. I'm really much more of a mood artist. I always start there. I always start by how my life feels to me and really the aesthetics of the album are the last thing that I decide. You know some little details like that come to me along the way but it's fun to have these glimpses of what my life felt like that are so accurate to that and when I look back on my discography or whatever, I see exactly what I was going through at those points in my life and it feels to me that feels special. I know everybody's different that could feel like really strange and weird and like just open heart surgery to some people but for me it feels like very sacred and I look back now on songs that I wrote about just like just like gut-wrenching heartbreak and I look back and I'm like that was a really good lesson I learned. That song is about a really good lesson I learned. So it changes over time but it still is very reflective of the time I was going through. And what's great is those times are resonating with your fans your listeners and they're going through that with you at the same time and you have an incredible ability to convey that feeling and give people comfort and understanding there's other people going through it at the same time right? Yeah and I think that's that's really a unifying connector that drew probably everyone in this room to making music and a time that I felt that the most was when I made an album called Folklore in the pandemic and that that album is really really all about loneliness if you you know kind of delve into certain lyrics on songs like like Peace or Hoax or Exile it's really about feeling so completely alone which weirdly everyone on the globe was feeling to some extent and then getting to getting to put out that album and have us all have something that we could kind of say like oh yeah I felt that way too like that was I think the most intense feeling of unification I ever felt. It seemed on that Folklore project you were writing almost from a third perspective or writing in character how was that different for you? It was extremely different for me and sort of a like a pressure release valve. It was it was an escape into my imagination it was a it was all of a sudden I was walking on a cliff side and looking at the ocean instead of just being at home and and it was it was a lot of things all at once but with Folklore I was oftentimes creating the character and creating different characters who were interacting with each other and that was really fun. I just got to write in character for Toy Story 5 which was such a blast. Yes cheer for that. Toy Story 5 that's big. Not a lot of people get a chance to write those songs. Yeah especially for a character that I've loved for years and years and years this character Jessie who I've just always watched those movies specifically to see her and you know I relate to the way she reacts to certain situations. I react to how deeply her heart was broken and how deeply she feels but how she protects the people she loves and she's like I think you know it's really a lot more fun to write from a character when you really understand their motivations because you relate to them. So that's coming from inside but you you just said something that I was going to dig into the confessional songwriter. You said you're a confessional songwriter obviously when you're doing character writing maybe not so much but as a confessional songwriter what does that mean to you and and I'm not sure if you've all heard that term a lot but that's really interesting. Thank you. I think that when I say the term confessional songwriter it you know I think it's important to specify that not all not all shocking revelations you make about yourself are deep. Like just saying something dramatic shocking and wild doesn't make it something that's gonna help people make resonate with people be a important story that that sits in people's minds hearts and souls. We have to be purposeful. You can't just like scream something crazy and be like I'm a confessional songwriter just for the same exact reason why details should not be strictly decorative. Like let's not be haphazard with these things. Let's let's make them let's make them count. There's a song on my album Fearless which is the second album I put out and it's all written from the perspective of a child singing about their mother but you never hear the word mom or mother or mommy or anything like that. Like it's you you you know because the narrator is saying it's getting cold I've got my big coat on I hear your laugh and look up smiling at you I run and run past the pumpkin patch through the tractor rides look now the sky is gold I hug your legs and fall asleep on the way home. And those details serve the purpose of telling us exactly who our narrator is and I'm so mad I'm never gonna be a I'm never gonna write that. God dang it. A lot of writers don't need to dig back into the songs they've written with such depth as you have. Maybe talk a little bit about doing Taylor's versions what that meant and how did that affect you as a songwriter? Did you look at those songs say oh I wish I could tweak this or maybe I'll change that? It's interesting going into that process. I re-recorded all of my you know all of my music that I had that I had recorded on a former label. We know. And not many people know I've been really quiet about it. I just hide it. Secret. Haven't been vocal about it at all. So it was an interesting thing because at first it's like when the dog actually did eat your homework and you're like now I have to redo it all and then I have to go in to the teacher and be like the dog ate my homework. And like the public and the media since it hadn't really been done before in that way and I guess on like such a big scale and so loudly and obnoxiously the public kind of like did a little bit side eye me the way that a teacher would if you did say the dog had eaten your homework. And so that was an interesting place to start from and I had to sort of get myself from the place of being like everyone says this isn't going to work and everyone's saying that like nobody's going to want to hear my new take on the same work. But actually I got to a place where it felt like it felt like defiant reclamation of what was always mine to begin with. I was like oh actually maybe I could go back and sing these exact same notes you know be faithful to the work that I'm very proud of and not be changing notes or like doing crazy riffs or anything. But maybe I could like improve the sonic quality of this music and that's how I feel about it now when I listen to the Taylor's versions even now that I've gotten all my music I own everything I've ever made which is. Congrats. This is not an official question I'm just curious for myself. How did you just decide to call them Taylor's versions? Were you sitting at the house one day I'm gonna call these Taylor versions. Literally. Yeah like sometimes sometimes it's just the the it's just hiding in plain sight you know. That's great. But yeah like when I would go back some I had these songs that were songs that I'd left on the cutting room floor for one reason or another and sometimes those songs resonated more with me when I when I re-recorded them. There's a song that I had written when I was 22 called Nothing New and it ended up being a duet with Phoebe Bridgers who is a friend of mine and that song is about feeling like you're aging out of the music industry. I wrote it when I was 22 and I was like I'm washed up and boring and everyone's over me and it's sad and so I kind of get why I didn't put it on red because that's like I feel like that's kind of a passing thought when you're 22 like that's a sad night with a bottle of wine but at when I was like 30 and I was re-recording it I was like oh no this hits this hits. I love it. The song All Too Well has now been an album track. It's been a 10-minute version. It's been a new recording. It's been a short film. I can't stop. Yeah it's awesome. What does that say about that song or a great song? Oh that's thank you for saying that. I think the most interesting thing about the journey of the song All Too Well is that it was a song that was never a single on the album Red and it was always a song that I just personally was so proud of. I was just like man I hope the fans gravitate towards that and then they did and I went through the whole album cycle of Red. It was never a single and then when we were headed into Grammys actually the fans just were like please play All Too Well. Please play All Too Well in the Grammys and it just felt like the right thing and so I played this song on the Grammys and it's always had sort of this like it's always been sort of like powered by fans caring about this song and so you know all the iterations of it really speak to the fact that you know when they love something that passionately I'm gonna listen to that and that's been such an interesting story of a few different songs in my career. The song Cruel Summer was never a single on the Lover album until the fans were so vocal about how they wanted to hear it on the Eras Tour. Years later, three plus years later I was putting together the Eras Tour and the fans were like all we want to hear is Cruel Summer so I the first full song on that in that set list. That propelled it to have this weird viral success that then made the label say like hey would you want to put out Cruel Summer as our single and I was like you can do that? It's from a three-year-old album and it turns out you can so it's been really delightful to see that and that is lovely. So sitting next to one of the all-time greatest songwriters I have to ask you some like very specific detailed questions about your process because I think we all want to hear some of these answers. For you does it start usually? I know it's different every time but is it lyric first? Is it melody? You're in the shower? Are you at a piano or on a guitar and it starts with music first? How does your song process begin? I think if you limit yourself to one of those ways you're really cutting off a lot of opportunity and I think that I'm very welcoming of any idea however it lands. It could be that you know I don't write a song every day like but I will have a cool twist of a common phrase almost every day or you'd write it down somewhere so I've got like a notes app that's crazy it's just like scroll like you'd scroll forever and that really comes in handy because when I am in a session or when I when I do like lock on to that flow state of writing a song I can scroll through and immediately like this fits this is perfect oh my god this is what this is about and so like I don't think we need to be like purists about when these ideas come to us and having to like chase down that idea because it just came to you like I have to get out of bed and write this right now if you have to then go do it but if if you can like save an idea fragment that's that's a lyric in one space so that when you're in your sessions you can be like yeah you can access it and and it's either that or like if I have a melody whether it has lyric attached to it or not I'll just like no matter what grab my phone no matter what embarrassing social situation I'm in because you think you will remember it you will not you won't and we've all been there where it's like you're drifting off to sleep you're like that is so catchy yeah that I'm going to remember it and I'm so tired gone don't listen to those voices saying you're tired you need to record it right now it does not matter if like it just it doesn't matter like if somebody thinks that that's weird that you're that you're just like you know that's what like a lot of them sound like and then you wake up in the next morning you're like whoa what is that no most of the time you're like that was awful but every once in a while so just wrapping up Taylor when you place yourself now next to the writer of Tim McGraw what are some of the things that are the same and what are some of the things that have evolved and changed into this new writer that's a really beautiful and eloquent question if I look back at the song Tim McGraw there are actually sort of hints that at everything that was going to happen in the next 20 years like um like character character work like when it says he said the way my blue eyes shined put those Georgia stars to shame that night I had never been to Georgia that was not real I had never that had not happened but it's like as you know you kind of are working around like sort of character and like what what feels like what this character would have said and what paints a picture that kind of informs this story that we just locked into because that first line described so much for us also sort of the idea of a song as a message um the song that jumps forward in time and even in jumping forward in time it's saying I hope you reflect back in time the sort of time machine song and um I also just think that uh I've I've loved and then I think this can happen in in as you as you grow up I love my country roots more and more um the further along this path I get and I I want to honor them more and more and I feel more more tied and more loyal to them the people that that that shaped who I am as a as an artist and as a writer that that all happened in Nashville love it love it room full of songwriters and composers when they leave today what do you hope they the takeaway is from our conversation oh uh I hope that um I hope that you will show up to work even when the idea fairy doesn't I hope that you will not be the person who shoots down everyone's ideas in the room but has not brought any of your own I I hope that you will remember the yes and of the improv session that is your recording sessions and that is life as well and I hope you remember that in the music industry as wild and ever-changing as it is enthusiasm can protect you from anything I would know so this is uh this is the piano that I brought with me all around the world on the and something that really became something the fans um paid a lot of attention to and would kind of um like make a lot of guesses about every night was I had this section called the acoustic section I would do different songs every night one on guitar and one on piano and I started to really have a blast with um creating medleys towards towards the middle end part of the tour and I really just think about um different songs I could mash up with other songs um that would be surprising and kind of a surprise and delight moment for fans and um and and a way that I would kind of pick the songs is I'd find some sort of through line whether that was like you know rhythmically or these are these are all about a similar emotion and I prepared one for you today that um if I was still on the arrows tour I would do this one and it's um it's songs that are uh connected to each other by the common theme of um being about memory and reliving certain detailed memories of your life and the significance of those memories through the days of the blades of the grass in summer will the free fall of being younger I memorize the sound of your bad footsteps it's been a long time life has ways of leaving those days behind seeing you tonight I remembered I loved you came back when I met it I saw you standing there in the light of the same smile but it's been a while but I knew that I knew you I knew that I knew you salt air and the rust on your door I never needed anything more are you sure never have I ever before but I can see is lost in the memory August slipped away into a moment in time it was never mine and I can't see you twisted in bed sheets August slipped away like a bottle of wine cause you were never mine still changing for the better wanting was enough for me it was enough to live for the hope of it all cancel plans just in case you call and say meet me behind the mall so much for summer love and seeing us cause you weren't mine to lose in our rivers I cry when we said goodbye watching if I made it up in my mind but you look me in the eye I walked through the door with you and it's cold but something about it felt like home somehow and I left my scarf there at your sister's house and you still got it in your drawer even now and I know it's long gone your magic's not here no more and I might be okay but I'm not fine at all it's through we are again on the little town street you almost ran the red cause you were looking over at me when in my head I was there I remember it all too well here we are again when I loved you so you kept me like a secret but I kept you like an oath sacred prayer and we'd swear to remember it all too well remember when I pulled up and said get in the car and then canceled my plans just in case you call back when I was living for the hope of it all I remember it remember when I pulled up and said get in the car then cancel my plans just in case you call back when I was living for the hope of it all I knew it and I knew I loved you came back when I met it I saw you standing there in the light of a window wearing that same smile that's been a while I knew it I loved you came back when I met it I saw you standing there in the light of a window wearing that same smile it's been a while but I knew it all too well I knew it all too well and I remember it in the days of the blades of the grass and summer I remember it you were the free fall of being younger I knew it I knew it all too well