This post will be edited and updated frequently as I gather more information.
If you have a source (quotes by Taylor, producers, sightings, etc) for factual information that I have missed or am unaware of or that I’m mistaken about regarding Lover’s creation process, please let me know so that I can update this post as needed.
There are still songs that I need to attach info to, so any help in the right direction concerning the songwriting is appreciated.
The goal with this is to be as thorough, factual, and unbiased as possible in recreating this to give a realistic timeline of the creation of the album based on the evidence that we have access to.
Let’s talk about what we know, and what we don’t know, about how the Lover album came to be.
First things first, the obvious Easter eggs. We know that Lover (the song) was written during or prior to April 25, 2018 during reputation tour rehearsals, and became the decided upon album title for the eventual @taylorswift 7th album, Lover, released August 23, 2019. Taylor wore the “Lovers” shirt (pictured) in her 13 day countdown to the rep tour Instagram post on April 25, 2018 (x). She is also shown wearing this same outfit in the final scene of the Netflix rep Tour special (released 12/31/18), as an Easter egg that rep would lead to the Lover era in 2019.
This “Lovers” shirt and choice of Instagram post are a massive clue that the April 13, 2019-April 26, 2019 Instagram 13 day countdown to the ME! premiere (x) and official start of the Lover era was already decided upon the year before. This Easter egg would have taken meetings, planning, decision making, and shirt-buying in order to hide this album title egg prior to the posted date in April 2018.
In April 2019, Taylor did a cover story photoshoot and interview for Entertainment Weekly. On May 9, 2019, EW released a video of Taylor explaining her Easter eggs in regards to the Lover era. In the video, she says around the 1:50 mark, “You’re really just flexing on planning... You’re like, ‘I PLANNED THIS TWO YEARS AGO.’” In conjunction with this comment, Taylor also specifically confirmed that in the Spotify vertical video for Delicate, her fingernails are painted to reflect the planned pastel aesthetic of the Lover era, which was released the the preceding year on May 15, 2018.
Going off of the “two year” EW comment in April 2019, we can note that the planning and decision-making of the Lover era is suggested by Taylor to have already been underway some time in 2017, and DEFINITELY was by April 2018 before the “Lovers” shirt appeared. If we take the “two years of planning” comment at its most literal, the planning could have started as early as April 2017, if not even sooner. This would peg the Lover era as possibly being planned prior to the release of the reputation album on November 10, 2017. And if the planning of the ideas for the Lover era aesthetics, themes, and the time-specific (cursed calendar stamps) post-rep rollout was made as early as, if not before, 2017, this means that some of the songs themselves establishing those themes are likely to have been written prior to the detail planning.
The Reputation Connection Speculation
We know from released behind-the-scenes footage that much of reputation was made in summer/fall 2016.
Taylor often discusses rep in the Lover era (as she did not do interviews for rep) as being opposite in nature. She contrasts the harder side of rep with the softer, more vulnerable side of Lover.
Swift talked all things Lover, revealing that she wrote the album from an “open, free, romantic, whimsical place,” and whereas her last album, reputation, was “all cityscape, darkness, full swamp witch,” Lover “felt aesthetically very daytime.” (x)
We know that the two albums are built to contrast each other aesthetically. Taylor discusses the contrast, and it’s easily observable in the marketing and sonics and lyrics. The creation and marketing of the darkness and heaviness and seriousness of rep directly correlates to the lightness of Lover.
I was writing constantly. And a lot of the things I was writing ended up being songs for reputation. So after 1989, I didn’t write really anything. After I made 1989 and put it out, did all the promo stuff, went on tour… The Grammys happen, which is like this unbelievable blitz of excitement, followed by me going, “Oh my god, what am I going to make next?” I had no idea what to make next, because I was so proud. 1989 — I’m still so, so deeply proud of that record. But I was like, where do we go from here? I have no idea what comes after this. And so, when my life took a very dramatic shift, all of a sudden I knew what to make next — which is a strange dichotomy to feel like, ‘whoa, this is all really weird, twisted, dark and dramatic, but I can’t stop writing.’ I think I would have made reputation whether or not I actually put out the album or ever made another album again. That album was a real process of catharsis, and I thought I experienced catharsis before, but I’d never had until that album, because it was creating this strange defense mechanism. And, I’d never really done that in that exact way before. The only way I’d done it in the past, was with “Blank Space,” which I wrote specifically about criticisms I had received for supposedly dating too many people in my twenties. I took that template of, OK, this is what you’re all saying about me. Let me just write from this character for a second. (x)
Taylor would have had to come up with the opposing era themes fairly simultaneously, considering how thematically dramatic each era’s marketing was. They would not conceptually exist as eras (or albums) without the other, which gives me the impression that approximately half of Lover could have been written around or before the release of rep in 2017, with the possibility that some songs could have even been written during the rep sessions in 2016, especially given that the dual-sided nature of rep itself meant that it also had a softer side that, at the very least foreshadowed or led into, the creation of the softer nature of Lover.
“There was so much theatricality in the darkness of reputation. It was secretly a love story, but it was also filled with angst, rebellion and this vengeful taking back of your life. Lover ended up being the album [where I was no longer] answering to something. In the past, I’ve definitely used my criticism as a jumping-off point for creativity. With reputation, I’d said everything I needed to say. I’d been tried in every possible way people could throw things at me, and I felt like now I just get to create.” (x)
While Max Martin was tasked with the majority of the “weaponized” rep tracks, the majority of the Jack Antonoff songs that make up half of rep are often looked to as the slower, softer, vulnerable songs that establish the “true secret love story” that Taylor refers to. His rep tracks credits are: Look What You Made Me Do, Getaway Car, Dress, This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things, Call It What You Want, and New Years Day.
The moments of my true story on that album are songs like “Delicate,” “New Year’s Day,” “Call It What You Want,” “Dress.” The one-two punch, bait-and-switch of Reputation is that it was actually a love story. It was a love story in amongst chaos. All the weaponized sort of metallic battle anthems were what was going on outside. That was the battle raging on that I could see from the windows, and then there was what was happening inside my world — my newly quiet, cozy world that was happening on my own terms for the first time. . . . It’s weird, because in some of the worst times of my career, and reputation, dare I say, I had some of the most beautiful times — in my quiet life that I chose to have. (x)
Jack Antonoff is the only common collaborator between reputation and Lover, and, as Taylor’s close friend and collaborator since 1989, it’s entirely possible that after the reputation album was finished to Taylor’s liking in 2016/2017, they continued creating together for the following project without stopping.
The Post-Reputation Tour Sessions and the Lover Era
We know from interviews with Taylor, the producers, and Miss Americana (2020) that ME!, The Man, You Need To Calm Down (Joel Little), I Forgot That You Existed, Miss Americana and the Heartbreak Prince, Afterglow, and It’s Nice To Have A Friend (Louis Bell and Frank Dukes) (x) were written and finished in the four months after rep tour from November to February 2019, after which the Lover album was “finished” (with 16 tracks, as best we know), marked by Taylor’s seven palm trees Instagram post on February 24, 2019 (x).
"I pretty much got into the studio when I got off [rep] tour and stayed there. I was very ready to make the next thing. I knew exactly what I wanted to make next." (x)
These post-rep tour writing sessions with Little, Bell, and Dukes do not account for the making of Lover (the song) or the album half that preceded it.
Jack Antonoff is the only other main in-studio album collaborator credited on the Lover album.
Two Antonoff songs off Lover can be traced to being written after February 2019 — Death By A Thousand Cuts in April and London Boy in June of 2019.
Even after “finishing” the Lover album in February with an assumed 16 tracks, and having created her longest album to date by April after writing the 17th song Death By A Thousand Cuts, she did not rule out changing the tracklist in May 2019 on Ellen. When asked if the album was finished, she said:
"Yeah, unless I write something else, and then I'll just put it on the album." (x)
London Boy was the 18th and final song made and added to the album as we know it in June 2019.
Antonoff is also the collaborator for Lover (the song) but the making of the track is not accounted for in the post-rep 4-month turnaround. Lover was made the spring/summer before, in April/July 2018, and marked the halfway point of the album for Taylor.
Lover Creation Timeline As We Know It:
In August 2019 for the release of Lover, Taylor told the Morning Mash Up:
I did make every single song [on Lover] for this album. But there was a song called ‘This Love’ that I had written closer to the Red album but it ended up being on 1989. There was also a song called ‘Better Man’ that I wrote back when I was writing Red. I ended up pitching it to this amazing band called Little Big Town. And they took it all the way to #1 on country radio! But for this album I was writing, and writing knowing it was all for this album.
There are 18 tracks on the final version of Lover. The timing of 9 of those tracks can be accounted for during the post-rep period between November 2018 and June 2019.
1 (Lover) appears to have been made in July 2018, or possibly April 2018.
Cruel Summer is registered as created in “2018”.
Soon You’ll Get Better was made in June/July 2018.
The remaining 6 Lover tracks with TBD timeframe origins are: Daylight, The Archer, I Think He Knows, Paper Rings, Cornelia Street, and False God.
All we know for certain about these 6 tracks is that they have to have been made by February 2019 at the latest, as 16 album tracks for Lover were completed by then.
We have no evidence to support their creation within the post-rep tour sessions from November 2018 to February 2019 that took place with Little, Bell, and Dukes.
There is a chance they were made with Antonoff during fall/winter 2018-2019, but we do not have any proof, on top of the fact that Taylor pointed to the making of Lover (the song) as a halfway point in the album creation process, and that song appears to have been made in April/July 2018. And again, the “Lovers” shirt appeared prior to the supposed song making in April 2018. This means that it is likely those 6 tracks preceded the concept of Lover and were written with Antonoff prior to April 2018.
With Jack Antonoff. Date TBD.
With Jack Antonoff. Date TBD.
With Jack Antonoff/St. Vincent. 2018 (?)
Photo via: @fearlyssa Cruel Summer listed as being created in 2018. Note: The reputation songs are listed as 2017 creations when we know from behind the scenes videos that they were made in 2016, so this may not actually be an accurate reflection of a song’s actual creation date.
Taylor on Cruel Summer songwriting at Secret Sessions:
"This song is one that I wrote about the feeling of a summer romance, and how often times a summer romance can be layered with all these feelings of, like, pining away and sometimes even secrecy. It deals with the idea of being in a relationship where there's some element of desperation and pain in it, where you're yearning for something that you don't quite have yet, it's just right there, and you just, like, can't reach it. So, this has some of my favorite lyrics on it, and it was so fun to write this. Jack and Annie [Clark] did the track and a lot of the instrumentation, and I did the topline in whatever language that is. A topline is all the notes and the lyrics you hear. So whatever you would sing, that is what I wrote on this. It was just so fun to write this one and I really love this one. Jack and I like to do ranting bridges. Like in 'Out of the Woods' where the bridge is the biggest moment of the song — we revisited that concept." (x)
With Jack Antonoff. Date TBD.
Taylor on ITHK songwriting at Secret Sessions:
"Basically, I was playing around with the idea of quiet confidence. There's something so sick about quiet confidence; somebody who, they're not arrogant, they're not cocky, like, that's obnoxious. But, there are certain people who just walk in and they don't need to be arrogant because there's something beaming from within them that they probably aren't even in control of. And when you meet a person like this, you're like, 'Why do I want to walk over there and talk to that person?' I can't explain it, but I think it's this quality. It can be a really shy person, it's not like you gotta be loud. Some people just seem like they know who they are, they don't need to brag about it. And I think that's such an interesting quality because I can't really explain it. And so I wrote a song about that. I mention a street called 16th Avenue, and that's a street in Nashville where I used to write songs. The songwriting/publishing houses are on that street, so if you're wondering if I just picked a random number, I didn't." (x)
With Jack Antonoff. Date TBD.
Taylor on Paper Rings songwriting at Secret Sessions:
We just were messing around, just wanting to make something really, really fun. And I had all these lyrics about all these funny memories of how something can start off in a really quirky way and surprise you. Like how it says, “I hate accidents, except when we went from friends to this.” So I wanted to show the quirkiness of a relationship and how it’s like, wow, this really fell together in really interesting, funny, playful, cute pieces. And now it’s something we’re both really stoked happened exactly the way it did. (x)
With Jack Antonoff. June/July 2018.
According to Natalie Maines Instagram, the Dixie Chicks were making their album in the studio with Jack Antonoff in June and July of 2018. (x) (x)
Taylor on SYGB songwriting at Secret Sessions:
"This song is one that was hard to write, because it's something that I'm going through right now. My dad got cancer when was 13 and he got better, and it wasn't a very long process, but things with my mom have been very different. This song is special in a lot of ways because when I wrote this one, I recorded it with Jack, and he was working, at the time, with the Dixie Chicks, making their new album. That's the band that made me wanna do this. There's a handful of artists that made me wanna do this. The Dixie Chicks taught me that you can have a strong female voice, saying whatever she wants in music, and experimenting with having a very feminine aesthetic, but very tough resilience to them. And their musicianship, the way that they played their instruments made me wanna play an instrument. Basically, I said to Jack, 'Can you please play this song for the Dixie Chicks? It's a really special song for me and my family, and they were such a big part of my life, and I wonder if maybe they can sing background vocals on it, or maybe even play on it if they wanted to.' And he played it for them, and they got really emotional hearing it, and wanted to sing on it and play fiddle and banjo on it too. So, the background vocals that you're hearing in this song are the Dixie Chicks, who I'm obsessed with." (x)
With Jack Antonoff. Date TBD.
1 of 3 songs written solo by Taylor for the album.
Daylight must have preceded Lover in song conception and album theme.
“I was kind of in my head referring to the album as Daylight for a while. But Lover, to me, was a more interesting title, more of an accurate theme in my head, and more elastic as a concept.” (x)
We do not know for certain if it was made before or after Cornelia Street, but due to similar creative processes and artistic agency on Taylor’s part with the solo writing, it’s likely the three songs (Daylight, Cornelia Street, and Lover) are the heart of the album and possibly have a connected time frame creatively. One guess could be summer 2018 around the time of Lover’s creation.
However, for this particular song, a concept or creation as early as 2017 when the rep album was being finalized would be consistent with “two years” EW comment for planning the rep to TS7 concept transition and early album theme and account for TS7 being mentally referred to as Daylight by Taylor before she settled on Lover as the album title.
On Daylight’s songwriting at Secret Sessions:
"I wrote 'Daylight' about the idea that, reputation, for me, aesthetically and thematically, felt like a very, very long night of storms and volcanic eruptions, floods, hurricanes, hail, tornadoes, endless fire, an astroid hit. And so it felt like trying to figure out what's what throughout all that. I did gain sort of an insight that I didn't have before, which was like, even though all this stuff has happened and you, at times, feel really down about stuff that's happened in your life or your past or whatever, letting it go is a really, really, really, important step. Even if you never fully get there. Reminding yourself to let things go as they present themselves, even if you can't seem to let them go yet, is a helpful exercise. And realizing that you can find love in literally the worst times in your life. You can find friendship in the worst times in your life, you can find the best things in your life that you will have forever in temporary, really awful times that will pass. And so those were all the themes I was thinking about when I wrote this song, but I don't think I was necessarily thinking about them because I wrote it really fast. But, I think about them now.” (x)
With Jack Antonoff. Date TBD 2017-2019.
Interestingly enough, while conducting research for this timeline, I discovered that April 2017 is right around the time that 23 Cornelia Street, the apartment Taylor lived in starting June 2016, was already put back on the market (x). It’s very interesting that this April 2017 date lines up with Taylor’s “two years of planning” comment to EW magazine in April 2019 that marked a significant time of conception for the Daylight/Lover era. The rep album would have been finished by this transitional point in spring/summer 2017 and Taylor and Antonoff could have potentially been moving on to TS7 tracks already. Given the location inspiration behind the song, it is possible that the inspiration for the creation of Cornelia Street could have struck around spring/summer 2017 at the earliest.
Taylor on Cornelia Street songwriting at City of Lover, Paris, September 2019:
“So there’s a song that I wrote on this album alone. And I wrote this song actually when I was in the bathtub! So, anyway, just for context. A lot of the time, I write songs about nostalgia, and a lot of memories. I like to go back over memories. You know, I use songs almost like photographs, so that I can go back and remember a time, and remember exactly what it was like to experience it. And uh, this is definitely one of those nostalgia songs.”
Given that the concept and theme of the song is personal nostalgia and memories of her 2016-2017 home, and it features a similar creative process to Lover and Daylight as 1 of 3 songs written solo for the album, a summer 2018 creation is most likely.
It had to be made by February 2019 at the latest, as the original 16 album tracks for Lover were completed by that point.
With Jack Antonoff. Apparently created July 13-18, 2018, though conceptually the rep rehearsals “Lovers” shirt in April 2018 pre-dates this studio visit. (x) (x) (x) (x)
1 of 3 songs written solo by Taylor for the album.
We know that Lover (the song), marked some kind of halfway point for Taylor in making the album, and that Daylight preceded it. Because the creation dates of the following songs are creatively unaccounted for, we can potentially speculate that Cruel Summer, The Archer, I Think He Knows, Paper Rings, Cornelia Street, Soon You’ll Get Better, and False God were the songs that made up the early incarnation of the pre-Lover half of the TS7 era concept as it possibly existed in 2016-2018 in order for the stated Lover era planning to be put into motion before reputation was finalized.
"Like, with reputation, I came up with the album name before I even wrote song number one for that album, but with this one, I was halfway into writing the songs before I wrote the song ‘Lover.’ That’s the song I wrote alone and it was one of those songs that just freely — I just somehow wrote this song really quickly in the middle of the night at my piano — and all of a sudden I knew that was the title of the album. … I almost called the album Daylight, which is the name of another song on the record, but I felt like that was a little too on the nose because reputation was such a dark, like evening-nighttime-city album, and I thought that calling the next album Daylight would be too obvious and it's such a love album. It's an album about all different forms of love. Even when love hurts, this album is about the full spectrum that love makes us feel, so I was like, this album is definitely going to be called Lover.” (x)
It is interestingly to note here that Taylor wore the “Lovers” shirt during rep rehearsals in April 2018 to foreshadow the Lover era countdown the following year. All other shirts Taylor is known to have worn during this time that I am aware of were her rep merch pieces, so it was an intentional deviation to hide an Easter egg for Lover on top of the Instagram countdown foreshadowing.
It follows that Taylor had at the very least planned the Lover album concept and song title well before both April 2018 when it was hinted at during rep reheasals and July 2018 when the song was apparently made with Antonoff.
🧐📝 The timing of the “Lovers” shirt on April 25th, the Instagram post quoting the song lyric on July 13th, and the studio appearance on July 18th is odd. Discuss, fact check, and inspect assumptions of the timeline of these events. Much of the album creation process timeline is centered on marking this July 18, 2018 studio appearance as the date that Lover was recorded in NYC with Jack Antonoff, putting the album at its halfway mark, naming it Lover from Daylight...
Taylor on Lover songwriting at Secret Sessions:
"I'm really, really proud of this song, because it's always been very hard for me to write love songs that weren't about love, and like, pining, love and secrecy, love and fear. If I wasn't writing 'Love Story,' which wasn't even about my own life; like really, it was about movies I had seen, and Romeo and Juliet, and sort of a fragment of it was my own life. But, I haven't really been able to write a pure 'Oh my god I love you' love song, and this is the one that I'm the most proud of. So this song is like that. And basically, I wanted it to sort of exist in a timeless era, where you wouldn't be able to guess if it was being played at a wedding reception in 1980 or 1970 or now. So, there were no instruments that we used that were new instruments since things that were invented post 70s. And so, I kind of wrote the bridge as if they were vows. You know how when people write their vows and they sort of, like, customize them; I kind of wanted to do that in the bridge of this song." (x)
It’s Nice To Have A Friend
With Louis Bell/Frank Dukes. Nov 2018-Feb 2019.
With Louis Bell/Frank Dukes. Nov 2018-Feb 2019.
I Forgot That You Existed
With Louis Bell/Frank Dukes. Nov 2018-Feb 2019.
Taylor on IFTYE songwriting at Secret Sessions:
“So the album's called Lover, it's about all the facets of love that I find really interesting. Love is the broadest thing you could ever write about. And love, even when it's good, has every facet of emotional complexity in it to write from. And so, coming from having released an album called reputation, reputation was an album all in response to something — a lot of things — that happened in my life. So, reputation was pretty much like a coping mechanism. Reputation was like going through all the stages of grief over the loss of one's reputation; kind of like throwing a funeral for something that maybe wasn't even good for you to have in the first place. In doing that, and in picking the first song and writing the first song on this album, I wanted to complete the cycle of grieving, almost, and the cycle of when you go through some drama or some frustrating stuff in your life where a relationship ends, or you're going through this turmoil in your life, there's all these phases you go through. And then, when you're really done with it, you hit indifference. The actual definition of getting over something is a shrug. And so, I was working with this production duo, it's Louis Bell and Frank Dukes, and they had worked with my friend Camila [Cabello], and she had made some really cool stuff with them, so I was like, 'Let’s try it.' And so, I played it for them, and they started making the track, and I wrote the song and I wanted it to be just as simple as the emotion of indifference is." (x)
With Joel Little. Nov 2018-Feb 2019.
Taylor on The Man’s songwriting at Secret Sessions:
"This is a song that I have wanted to write for a very long time, but never knew exactly how to. I often think about what my career would have been like, and what my headlines about my career would have been like if I had been a man instead of a woman. Not what would I do differently or anything, but if I had had the same accomplishments, the same mistakes, the same dating history, the same statements — what would have been different? This is a song called 'The Man,' and it's just about how the world would be if I had been a dude in my approximations of it." (x)
Miss Americana and the Heartbreak Prince
With Joel Little. Nov 2018-Feb 2019.
With Joel Little. Nov 2018-Feb 2019.
With Joel Little. Nov 2018-Feb 2019.
With Jack Antonoff. April 2019.
Taylor mentioned the film Someone Great in her Ellen Degeneres interview in May 2019, and later claimed to have written DBATC after watching it, meaning the song was written sometime after the movie premiere on April 19, 2019 but before her Ellen appearance on May 15, 2019. Taylor knew by her EW interview that was conducted at some unspecified time in April that the Lover album would be her longest album to date after Red (2012). This means the album had to have at least 17 tracks total by the end of April, which narrows down the time frame for the writing and making of Death By A Thousand Cuts to April 20-April 30, 2019 (x). In speaking about Someone Great on August 23, 2019, Taylor said:
"It's a movie about how she has to end this relationship that she didn't want to end because she's still in love with the person but they just grew apart and he's not a jerk. It's just sad because it's just realistic, time passed and now we're different people and that is the most devastating thing." (x)
It’s interesting to note that according to the director, this movie was inspired in some part by Taylor’s 1989 (2014) album, especially Clean (x). The movie also features the real life 23 Cornelia Street location in the West Village neighborhood where Taylor lived from June 2016 to April 2017 and ultimately wrote a song about (Someone Great movie stills and neighborhood photos pictured for comparison) (x) (x).
If these connections are as “meta” as Taylor claimed and this is the true origin story of when and why Death By A Thousand Cuts was written, it’s interesting to note that Taylor would definitely have noticed the location of her old neighborhood in the film, thus inspiring some emotional/mental connection between the songs Death By A Thousand Cuts and Cornelia Street.
With Jack Antonoff. By June 19, 2019. Last track created by the Lover album deadline for the August 23, 2019 album release date.
London Boy was the last song added to the album as production with Jack Antonoff was finished last minute around June 19 2019, making it the 18th and final song for the Lover album as we know it (x). The song incorporates the beat of Cautious Clay’s 2018 song “Cold War”, which was used in a pivotal sex scene (x) in the film 2019 Booksmart. Taylor highly praised the film and cast and bought tickets to see it on May 27, 2019. (x) Cautious Clay was contacted in June sometime before the 19th to get permission to sample the song in London Boy, and was asked to respond quickly to meet the album submission deadline for Lover. (x)
Taylor on London Boy songwriting at Secret Sessions:
"With this song, I just kind of wrote about, basically, what it was like to basically be like, 'Bye guys! I'm gonna go here for a long time.' And there's a voice that you'll hear in the beginning of it, and it's Idris Elba's voice talking about London. And in the bridge, there's a name-check of Stella McCartney, and this name-check where I reference her was when I like ... I went over and played her the song. So, I played it for her, and she was like 'Oh my God, let's do something.' And I was like, 'OK!' And so then that's why we have this merch collaboration. She's got really amazing designs, and having them be at accessible pricing is really cool and really wonderful, and I'm glad we could figure that out." (x)
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