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Writing of Red Timeline

This post wants to showcase how Red by Taylor Swift came to be, what challenges and discoveries she made while making her fourth album, but most of all how curious, passionate and eager to learn she is.

DISCLAIMER: If you know dates and/or have info about the making of Taylor's songs, please consider sharing them with me, I'd be forever grateful. If you don't want to for whatever reason, I need to kindly ask you to not read this timeline as I believe that every fan is equal and deserves to know the same things about Taylor's songwriting & recording process.

Please, credit me if you take info from this timeline.

Love is gonna be a huge theme in what I write about, just because there are no two similar relationships, there are no two times where you feel love the same way, or hurt the same way, or rejection the same way, or frustration. That at 22 is different than it was at 18 or 19 when I made my last album. As you grow, you change in the way you prcess emotions. I guess that for me that's always gonna be the focal point of my music, and also telling stories of people that I know, telling stories that hit me really hard. And now I have a different approach to this record. I'm getting to work with people that I've always wanted to work with, I'm 22 and I just wanna learn as much as I can, trying to be as much of a sponge as possible. You have to evolve and try new things and change and that's what I've loved to do with this album.

June 16, 2010: The Story Of Us is the last song Taylor writes before having a writer's block that ended 6 months later.

"There’s a kind of bad that gets so overpowering you can’t even write about it. When you feel pain that is so far past dysfunctional, that leaves you with so many emotions that you can’t filter them down to simple emotions to write about. That’s when you know you really need to get out."

Late December 2010: Taylor comes up with All Too Well during a Speak Now Tour rehearsal.

[Interview with Pop Dust] The lyric I’m most proud of on the album is from ‘All Too Well’: ‘And you call me up again just to break me like a promise / so casually cruel in the name of being honest.’ That was something I came up with while ranting during a soundcheck. I was just playing these chords over and over onstage and my band joined in and I went on a rant. Those were some of the lines I thought of. I was going through a really hard time then, and my band joined in playing, and one of the first things that I came up with, just, like, spat out, was ‘And you call me up again just to break me like a promise, so casually cruel in the name of being honest.’

[Taylor to Rolling Stone, My Transcript] "The first song that was written was All Too Well, and it was a day when I was just like a broken human walking into rehearsal just feeling terrible about what was going on in my personal life. And I walked in and I remember we had just hired David Cook… I think it was his first day meeting me, and I think I ended up just playing four chords over and over again and the band started kicking in, like Amos Heller on bass, and people started playing along with me. I think they could tell I was really going through it. And I just started singing and riffing and sort of ad-libbing this song that basically was All Too Well. And it started with ‘I walked through the door with you, the air was cold’ – like it literally just was that song, but it had probably seven extra verses. And it included the f-word, and I remember my sound guy was like ‘Hey, I burned a CD of that thing you were doing, in case you want it.’ And I was like ‘Sure!’

[Brian Mansfield, UsaToday] Chronologically, the album began with All Too Well, a song she wrote almost two years ago with Liz Rose, one of her earliest and most regular co-writers. The song came after a six-month writing drought that followed a particularly toxic relationship.

February 2011: Taylor reworks All Too Well.

[GMA] The song All Too Well was the hardest to write, because it took me a long time to filter through everything that I wanted to put in the song. It started out being probably like a ten-minute song, which you can't put on an album, and I had to filter it down to, like, a story that, that could work in the form of a song, and I called my, my friend and cowriter Liz Rose and I said "come over, we've got to, we've got to filter this down." And it took me a really long time to get it to its final form.

March 1-4, 2011: Taylor edits All Too Well with Liz Rose's help. Taylor left the US on March 5th for the European leg of the tour so the very first days of March are the only possible days in which Taylor and Liz could've met to write.

[CountryDaily] "It's about this relationship that I had and it tells the story of it from start to finish, so it's all these pieces of memories, one by one listed off. It's one of the most vivid pictures that I've ever gotten to paint with a song," she says of the song she co-wrote with Liz Rose. "It's the first song I wrote for the record a year and a half ago. I called her and said, 'I've been working on this song and it's going to be nine minutes long if I finish it the way that it is. You've got to help me edit this down, make it more concise and make it a story that can be told in the form of a song that isn't going to be an hour long because I've written so much.' She came over and we sat down and wrote it and it became one of the songs on the record that displays the most amount of hurt. It starts off with the innocent beginnings and goes all the way down to the bitter end and follows the relationship as it's crashing down, and the hook of it is, I was there. I remember it all too well."

[Liz Rose to Rolling Stone] When we wrote the song, I hadn’t heard from her in awhile. She hadn’t really been writing. I was in Nashville one day, slowly moving the last bits of junk out of my garage so I could move to Dallas. […] I was in my driveway and my phone rings, and it’s Taylor saying, ‘Man, I’ve got this thing and I really need you to help me with it. Can you write today? What are you doing today?’ [I later] drove over to Taylor’s. It was the first song she wrote for that record, I think. She had a story and she wanted to say something specific. She had a lot of information. I just let her go. She already had a melody and she started singing some words, and I started writing things down, saying, ‘Ok, let’s use this, let’s use that.’ She mentioned a plaid shirt, and I wrote that down in a corner, and when we got to the end, I said, ‘Let’s put the plaid shirt in there.’ That turned into one of the best lines. […] It was the most emotional, in-depth song we’ve ever written.

March 20, 2011: While in her hotel room in Madrid, Taylor writes Better Man.

[Taylor on Amazon Music] Transcript: The song Better Man is one that I originally wrote for the Red album. I remember I was on tour, and I wrote it alone in a hotel room. And I remember standing in front of a mirror—I think the first thing I thought of was, ‘I wish it wasn’t 4am, standing in a mirror, saying to myself, 'you know you had to do it.“ That was an actual visual from my life that ended up being the first thing I wrote, and then I expanded outward from there. And it was a song that I really thought belonged on the album and there were just too many songs I loved that I had written in that period of time, so some of them had to be left off. I think I chose All Too Well over Better Man. I think that was what happened. I was either going to put on All Too Well or Better Man, and then I left off Better Man.

[Taylor in May 2011] "I was in Madrid, and I was in my hotel room all day. And I was going through this crazy, emotional thing and I wrote a song about it and it'll probably be on the next record. I'm telling you that. I'll tell you the title afterwards."

Taylor had a tour date in Madrid on the 19th. She spent the time before the show with her backup singer Liz Huett, cutting her hair and overall having an enjoyable day. However, it seems like they unexpectedly stayed an extra day in Madrid, therefore placing the Better Man writing date on the 20th rather than on the day of the show. (credits for the find: @likeadevils)

March 27, 2011: Taylor posts a picture of her guitar, saying “Writing a song all afternoon in my hotel room. Dublin, Ireland”. It's unknown on which songs she was working.

March 2011: Taylor starts writing Begin Again.

[People Country, My Transcript] "This is the last song on the album, which chronicles these relationships that were sweet in the beginning and bitter in the end. When someone criticizes you all the time, if you're a people pleaser like me, you change little things about yourself to make it work. But if you change too many things, you lose who you are. So it's a love song, but it's more about getting back your self-confidence. The first inspiration came when I was on tour in Europe [in early 2011]. I'd been alone for a while and had time to think about my past experiences. But I wrote it in pieces-I'd start and then second-guess myself. I had to sort through my own insecurities. It's a nice way to end the record because it breaks the cycle. It's saying, I'm drawn to the sunlight instead of just the rain."

Taylor breaking down the song:

He didn't like it when I wore high heels -> "One day going to meet friends, I had heels on and thought, I should take those off, but realized, I want to wear them. And we're not together. There's no one to look at me skeptically anymore."

He always said he didn't get this song -> "I love a pop melody and I'm not mad if it's a radio hit. I'd get nothing but Eye rolls from listening to the music I like. It was a big point of contention in that relationship."

Walked in expecting you'd be late -> "If you get used to waiting around, whether in a restaurant or emotionally you know you're in a damaging relationship."

Like a little kid -> "There was something dark and too adult about I what I had experienced You should keep some element of childhood-that wonderment and ability to laugh."

I've been spending the last 8 months / Thinking all love ever does / Is break and burn and end -> "That line flowed right out of me. That's exactly what happened. I don't want to fight with someone all the time. and wonder what's going on, or am I cool enough for you?"

You said you never met one girl who Had as many James Taylor records as you -> "James Taylor reminds me of home, and home reminds me of comfort, and comfort was what I never had in the previous relationship."

But you start to talk about the movies family watches every single Christmas -> "That moment came from real life and it's one of last parts I wrote. When you're in a dark relationship, all you talk bout are problems, so when that conversation happened, I thought, "This is so light and innocent and good I want this.""

May 22, 2011: During a brief interview at the Billboard Music Awards, Taylor says she’s “been constantly writing lately.”

June 11, 2011: Taylor says, during a show in Detroit, that she had written 10 songs, all of them sad.

[New Yorker Interview] "In Detroit, Swift seemed somewhat melancholy. Once in a while, I had the feeling that she was on the verge of bursting into tears. She said that she had recently decided that life is “about achieving contentment... You’re not always going to be ridiculously happy.” She had written about ten songs so far for her next album. Asked to characterize them, she said, “They’re sad? If I’m being honest.” The most recent one, she said, “is about moving on.”

I think that the songs written were: All Too Well, I Almost Do, The Moment I Knew, and Better Man.

“I Almost Do' is a song I wrote about the conflict that you feel when you want to take someone back, and you want to give it another try, but you know you can’t. And you can’t because you know it’s hurt you so deeply that you know that you couldn’t bear to go through that again. So you’re sitting there and wondering where they are and hope that they think about you and that you’re almost picking up the phone call, but you just can’t. I think I needed to write this song in order to not call that person actually. I think that writing the song was what I did instead of picking up the phone.”

June 17, 2011: [From a Lover Journal] Taylor writes that she's "feeling blissfully happy, especially since I wrote those 2 songs", which she will record after flying back to Nashville after the show in Pittsburgh, PA., on June 19th. One of them may be State Of Grace.

[Taylor, My Transcript] State Of Grace is a song that I wrote at the beginning process of making this album, and I think it helps to define what the rest of the record is about just with one line: there's a line in the song that says "Love is a ruthless game, unless you play it good and right" and that's kinda like a warning. This is gonna happen if you don't play this right, and this is what could happen if you do. As soon as you hear that song, you know that there are two way it could go: you could be good to people or you could not play fair and both the outcomes are reflected on the record.

[On Good Morning America] "I wrote this song about when you first fall in love with someone — the possibilities, kind of thinking about the different ways that it could go. It’s a really big sound. To me, this sounds like the feeling of falling in love in an epic way."

June 24, 2011: Taylor meets up with Lori McKenna at her house in Boston. They write I Bet You Think About Me.

[Taylor on Amazon Music] "‘I Bet You Think About Me’ is a song I wrote with Lori McKenna, who is one of my favorite singer-songwriters ever. I’d always wanted to work with her. And I wrote this with her at her house when I was playing Foxboro Stadium on the Speak Now Tour. We wanted this song to be like a comedic, tongue in cheek, funny, not caring what anyone thinks about you sort of break up song, because there are a lot of different types of heartbreak songs on Red. Some of them are very sincere, some of them are very stoic and heartbreaking and sad. We wanted this to be the moment where I was like, ‘I don’t care about anything.’ And we wanted to make people laugh with it, and we wanted it to be sort of a drinking song, and I think that that’s what it ended up being."

[Lori McKenna Interview] “That song was about 11 years old,” she pauses before adding, “We think.” Swift happened to be in the Boston area playing two sold-out shows at Gillette Stadium not too far from McKenna’s house. On the day of the second show, she visited Mckenna, they ate lunch and then planned to write together. “She had this little nugget of a song which was ‘I Bet You Think About Me,’ she knew that was the hook.” Swift had asked her if she should lean in the folk direction (which they did) and after that, the rest flowed blissfully as McKenna recalls, “I don’t remember anything other than sitting here watching how incredible she is. She knows what she wants to say and when she says the right thing, she remembers it. She didn’t write anything down. There was no recording of the song.” McKenna was writing the lyrics on her computer but Swift never looked at her screen. “If the line is right, she knows it’s right, and she remembers what it is,” she says. Later that night, McKenna attended Swift’s show with her kids and when she was backstage, Swift played the song they had written together. “I’m like, how is this woman gonna get out there, do a completely choreographed show for 60 thousand people, and she’s singing the song that she just wrote two hours ago,” McKenna exclaims as she revisits the memory. For her to bring back something that was 10 or 11 years old and be true to a song that she had in her heart that long ago is pretty cool. It’s something that a lot of artists don’t get to do.”

[From Lori McKenna Twitter] @taylorswift13 came to my house to write 1 day before 2 sold out shows @Gillette. (My neighbors famously called police bc of the security) Still she was as sweet, human, unassuming & TALENTED as any writer who has ever been here.

June 30, 2011: [From MySpace] Lately, I've been writing a LOT. Like, all of a sudden, everything I've wanted to say, express, or just let out for the past several months has just recently become a song. I'm really excited about that. It's a freeing feeling when all of a sudden one day, you're able to verbalize exactly how you feel in a verse, chorus, verse, bridge, chorus pattern.

July 2011: Around this time, Taylor writes Starlight. Originally, the demo was more country.

This date is mostly based on this Rolling Stone article where Taylor says she has read a 900-page book about the Kennedys, called The Kennedy Women, and The Kennedy Heirs, the book on which Taylor is mentioned. She also visited JFK's grave on August 3th, and had a Robert Kennedy quote on her arm during the August 3th show. After reading the Rolling Stone article, Rory Kennedy, Ethel and Bob's daughter, reaches out to Taylor's camp to ask for tickets for the Speak Now tour and Taylor agrees.

[Washington Post] I get a lot of style inspiration from the 1960s, so I’ll go and look at black and white pictures, and look at photos from the ‘50s and '60s, and I came across this picture of these two kids dancing at a dance. It immediately made me think of like how much fun they must have had that night. It was back in the late '40s. I ended up reading underneath that it was Ethel Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy. And they were, like, 17. So I just kind of wrote that song from that place, not really knowing how they met or anything like that.

Description of the Starlight Studio Demo: "3:37 minutes long. This demo is much rougher sounding than the released version. The verses are acoustic guitar-driven, there are less spacey sounds, and there are much louder background vocals as the song builds."

[The Kennedy Heirs book] In the summer of 2011, upon reading that Taylor was a fan of her mother’s, Rory Kennedy reached out to her office to ask for concert tickets for her and her daughters. Swift’s office happily granted the request. After the show, the Kennedys went backstage to meet the pop star. An excited Taylor then told Rory about the song she’d written in honor of her parents.

August 26, 2011: Kuk Harrell tweets that Taylor and Justin Bieber wrote a song together, called Cannonball.

August 31, 2011: Cannonball is reworked. Tom Strahle, one of Justin Bieber's collaborators talked extensively about the song in these lives. Three demos of the songs exist, but only the second has leaked.

Note: This song was meant for Justin Bieber's album Believe, NOT RED.

September 8-9, 2011: [From Lover Journal 1] Taylor writes Red on a plane on her way to Nashville. Taylor and Nathan Chapman record the demo in the evening, at the Pain in the Art Studio.

[From a Lover Journal] "I was suppose to fly to LA after the show in Tacoma WA last night, but after talking to my brother on the phone and missing my mom and my town where I know my way around -- I got homesick and flew back to Nashville instead. It was a long flight but I'm so happy I chose to come home. Mostly because I wrote a song on the plane on the way home called 'Red'. I got in at 6am this morning slept til 10. [...] In the evening, I went to Nathan's studio to record. When I played Red for him, he lost it. He absolutely freaked over the lyrics. I was so happy. As we started recording it, it got more and more awesome with banjo, and this affected vocal part that runs under the chorus going "re - e - ee- e- d". I'd love to have my next album Red. Scott came over because I called him and he was still working at the office. He said the song takes it to the next level. He lost it over this song. My mom loves it too. It's so different than anything we've done. I can't even tell you how alive and worthwhile i feel when I'm writing a new song and I finish it and people like it. It's the most fulfilling feeling, like getting an A+ on your report card. Recording again tomorrow."

[VH1’s Storytellers] "This relationship that I had that was, like, the worst thing ever and the best thing ever at the same time. I was writing this song and I was thinking about correlating the colors to the different feelings I went through. You have the great part of red, like the red emotions that are daring and bold and passion and love and affection. And then you have on the other side of the spectrum, jealousy and anger and frustration and ‘you didn’t call me back’ and ‘I need space."

[Billboard Interview] I turned in 20 songs and I had this immediate sinking feeling, this can’t be done, this can’t be it. I think the reason I said that was because I made the record exactly the same way I made the last three. I knew I hadn’t jumped out of my comfort zone, which at the time was writing alone and working with Nathan. “Red” the song was a real turning point for “Red” the album. When I wrote that song my mind started wandering to all the places we could go. If I were to think outside the box enough, go in with different people, I could learn from and have what they do rub off on me as well as have what I do rub off on them.

[Taylor, My Transcript] Red is a song that I wrote halfway through making this album and it changed what this album became.

September 16, 2011: Taylor does an interview with Vogue (published in January 2012) and likely references the problems with her relationship with Jake:

Swift is working on her fourth album: “There’s just been this earth-shattering, not recent, but absolute crash-and-burn heartbreak,” she says, “and that will turn out to be what the next album is about. The only way that I can feel better about myself—pull myself out of that awful pain of losing someone—is writing songs about it to get some sort of clarity.” Swift’s music is not exactly straight diary entry—it’s cleverer than that—but somehow the specifics of her past relationships continue to have a universal appeal. When I ask her if she can detail a few things she’s learned along the way, she seems delighted to play along. “I have red flags now,” she says. 1. “If someone doesn’t seem to want to get to know me as a person but instead seems to have kind of bought into the whole idea of me and he approves of my Wikipedia page? And falls in love based on zero hours spent with me? That’s maybe something to be aware of. That will fade fast. You can’t be in love with a Google search.” 2. “If a dude is threatened by the fact that I need security, if they make me feel like I am some sort of princessy diva—that’s a bad sign. I don’t have security to make myself look cool, or like I have an entourage. I have security because there’s a file of stalkers who want to take me home and chain me to a pipe in their basement.” 3. “If you need to put me down a lot in order to level the playing field or something? If you are threatened by some part of what I do and want to cut me down to size in order to make it even? That won’t work either.” 4. “Also, I can’t deal with someone who’s obsessed with privacy. People kind of care if there are two famous people dating. But no one cares that much. If you care about privacy to the point where we need to dig a tunnel under this restaurant so that we can leave? I can’t do that.”

September/October 2011: Around this time, Taylor re-records the vocals to Red and her and Nathan Chapman tweak the song due to Borchetta being unstatisfied, before calling Dann Huff to co-produce it.

[Scott Borchetta Interview] “The song [Red] was brilliant–great melody. But I told them that the way it was recorded, guys, the production just doesn’t match the song. It needs a pop sound.” So Chapman and Swift asked Borchetta if they could take another crack at it. They did and it was worse than the first pass. “And Taylor basically said, ‘All right, would you call Max [Martin]?'”

[Dann Huff] [My Transcript and Adaptation] The label or Taylor (whatever it was, I wasn't in the political sphere of that), they didn't feel like [the song Red] was happening, so they said, "We'd like Dann to do his take on it". [Nathan] gave me the vocal, and because the vocal was a good vocal, I kind of I just said, "Do you want me to do what I would do?". They said yes, so I cut it once. The song is really a long song, I think it still is, but it was longer so I just suggested to edit some things out and Taylor was cool with it. When I finished it I thought, "God this is a snoozer!" and so I recut the drums twice, I just added drums with Aaron Sterling, he was living on the West Coast at that time and he just happened to be in town for one more day. I didn't want to lose the first drum pass, because I thought it was great up to maybe two minutes, so I said, "Can we just add it another drum part?", and he said, "Yeah, great!". It was in the same studio, same everything and that was it.

[Dann Huff] [My Transcript] I think that [Red] was kind of in her transition era, and [the label wasn't] roping that. And so I think she'd already done the vocals and Scott Borchetta said, "I don't think she's gonna come in and re-sing it. I think you're gonna have to use that, but could you recut the track?" It was a little bit bizarre but it happens to all of us. This is tough thing, and it just happened to me just recently too. Sometimes you don't get it, you know, and the label and the artists really think that that this song is the deal. They gotta get it done. And sometimes you look at it like if you look at a painting too close. That's how it is to you. Her producer at that time was Nathan Chapman, this guy is genius-level. I think he's one of the best that we got here in Nashville, and he's one of the best people I know too. So it was a tough one for Nate, but he was so pro about it, so cool. He just sent me over the vocal and said, "Have a go at this thing, man. I'm looking at it and it's too close for me." And so I took it. I had a different take on it. [I worked mostly] on the voice that had been recorded. It was a while back, so I can't remember if I redid the harmony vocals or what. I remember that she came over to the house wanting to re-sing a couple of lines that I wanted to try. And that was that was basically it. She's great. I mean, she's Taylor Swift.

October 4, 2011: Taylor writes Sad Beautiful Tragic on her ukulele, while on her tour bus, while reminiscing about a relationship that had ended months ago. (credits for the find: @likeadevils)

[From Twitter] "Leaving Little Rock, headed to New Orleans. Writing a song on a moving bus."

[Billboard Interview] "‘Sad Beautiful Tragic’ is really close to my heart. I remember it was after a show and I was on the bus thinking about this relationship that ended months and months before. The feeling wasn’t sadness and anger or those things anymore. It was wistful loss. And so I just got my guitar and I hit on the fact that I was thinking in terms of rhyming; I rhymed magic with tragic, changed a few things and ended it with what a sad beautiful tragic love affair. I wanted to tell the story in terms of a cloudy recollection of what went wrong. It’s kind of the murky gray, looking back on something you can’t change or get back."

[Track By Track] Sad Beautiful Tragic is a song that I wrote while I was on tour. I was on a tour bus that was moving and I just started playing this really haunting, sad chorus, and it was very simple, “What a sad, beautiful, tragic love affair.” It was just reflecting on something that was lost and you can’t get it back. I went home and I called Nathan Chapman and said, “Hey, I wrote a song. Please, please, please, can we record today?” and, of course he said yes and we used that original demo on the album, because it just kind of came across so pure and raw.

Speculation:

The secrete message is “While you were on a train” and it might be a reference to Jake Gyllenhaal joining Mumford & Sons in late April on their Railroad Revival Tour… on an actual train.

October 19, 2011: "I have written 25 songs so far."

Some of these 25 songs might include: State Of Grace, Red, All Too Well, I Almost Do, Stay Stay Stay, Sad Beautiful Tragic, The Moment I Knew, Better Man. All of them are solo written and produced only by Chapman, which resembles the process of Speak Now.

"The song ‘Stay Stay Stay’ is a song that I wrote based on what I’ve seen of real relationships, where it’s not perfect, there are moments where you’re just so sick of that person, you get into a stupid fight. It’s still worth it to stay in it. There’s something about it that you can’t live without. In the bridge it says, ‘I’d like to hang out with you for my whole life’ and I think that’s what probably the key to finding the one, you just want to hang out with them forever."

I think that Stay Stay Stay was written in January 2010 and reworked in the summer of 2011 with State Of Grace. My theory here.

October 21, 2011: Maya Thompson, Ronan's mother, is invited by Taylor to her concert in Glendale, AZ. She tells Maya that she has just written a song about her son Ronan.

[From Maya's blog, Rockstar Ronan] "My calmness soon turned to complete and utter frozen shock when these words came out of her mouth. 'I wrote a song for Ronan.'" Thompson added, addressing her late son, "'The tears started pouring down my cheeks as soon as I heard her say those words. But her words didn't stop there. Not only did she write a song for you, but she wanted to know if it would be alright to perform it on the nationally televised show.

October 2011: Taylor writes Eyes Open. This song was never intented for Red. During the Safe & Sound MV premiere, Taylor confirmes that Eyes Open was the first song made for the Hunger Games.

[MTV, My Transcript] I wrote [Safe & Sound] with and the Civil War and we all happened to be in the same studio. I was working with T Bone Burnett a lot on the soundtrack, just putting songs together. There's another song on the soundtrack that I did for it, so we were working on that song, and he said, "Do you think it would be good to call the Civil Wars and see if they want to come write?"

I wrote it about Katniss’ relationship with the Capitol. It basically serves as a warning for her not to trust anyone, in many ways it is the opposite of ‘Safe & Sound.'

November 9, 2011: During her award acceptance speech at the CMAs, Taylor says that she's recording demos: "The reason I obsess over [performing songs] so much is that I obsess over writing them so much… With this next album, I'm so excited because I've been writing so much. We're still in the first gear of making it, so as we finish songs and demo them in my producer's basement, I can picture them being played on the stage."

November 19, 2011: Taylor writes Safe & Sound with The Civil Wars (Joy Williams & John Paul White) and T Bone Burnett at Burnett's house in LA.

[Rolling Stone] The Civil Wars had a show that night in L.A., so they raced right over to T-Bone's house. There's so many things he could've done production-wise to make that song bigger sonically than it is, but I think that would have possibly been a mistake. For him to have left the song as a lullaby is brilliant.

We had this idea that we wanted the song to be about the empathy that goes into this film. And the undertones of like, sympathy and human compassion that go along with such an incredible film with all this action and fighting in it. We wanted to highlight the fact that there's a lot of heart beneath all that.

The Civil Wars post these two photos from the session on Instagram:

December 1, 2011: Taylor cuts her bangs and straightens her hair for the Vogue Magazine photoshoot.

December 2011: Taylor finishes Begin Again.

‘Begin Again is a song that I wrote about getting through a breakup, and still being sad about it, and feeling a little insecure about all the things that relationship made you feel are wrong with yourself. And after months, and months, and months, having the courage to stand back up, dust yourself off, and go on that first date. And it’s about, kind of, the vulnerability involved with that, and the idea that you realize that, 'wow, this could be great.’

The song is supposedly for Will Anderson from Parachute. On November 27th, they were photographed together eight months after Taylor had broken up with Jake for good. Additionally, the white dress she wears on the single cover is the same one she wore at his birthday party on May 5, 2012.

December 13, 2011: Taylor turns 22. She's at the Blackbird Studios to record, wearing a pair of bright red shoes. She's probably there for Red and Begin Again which have the same credits.

Late December 2011: Taylor reworks Starlight. While Red and Begin Again have the same credits, Starlight has others mixers, musicians and so on. My guess is that Dann Huff was called to work on Red because Borchetta didn't like the two demos, then he worked on Begin Again, likely on the same session as Red, and shortly after on Starlight. I bet that the guitar in the Starlight Demo was played by Chapman because in the Starlight credits you see "Electric Guitar Solo - Conceived by Nathan Chapman, Played by Dann Huff", which I think confirms Huff's involvement at a later date. I think after this recording session Borchetta was satisfied and wanted to wrap up the album.

December 2011/January 2012: Taylor writes Girl At Home. This song is a demo. For my own sanity, I'm gonna assume that this pic shared by Nathan Chapman in 2024 is from the Girl At Home session. This date is solely based on the fact that on the US Copyright Registry, it's credited as being written in 2012. This picture could also be them working on Better Man, since the Original File that leaked in October 2021 has January 13th as its exportation date. Please note that it might not be correct.

January 19 & 21, 2012: Taylor meets Rory and Ethel Kennedy, at the Sundance Film Festival, where a documentary about Ethel Kennedy premiered. Taylor and Ethel had firstly met around November 2011. At the Sundance, Taylor reveals that she has written a song about the Kennedys (aka Starlight).

[Vogue Interview] “When asked how the odd-couple friendship came to be, Swift said her acquaintance with the daughter led to an introduction to the mother. “I had read up on Robert F. Kennedy and his wife, and I asked Rory if it would ever be possible for me to meet her mother. She said, ‘Here’s her number.’ Ethel was kind enough to have lunch and spend a few hours talking with me, and ever since then I’ve been so inspired by how full of life she is and the way she tells her story.’’

January 2012: “With Red, [Scott Borchetta] came to me in January and said, 'I think the album's finished.' This time, I said, 'No, it's not -- I need to keep writing.' At that point, she went to Chapman and told him she wanted to work with other producers, too.”

This secret sessioner who was at the Red Announcement Session in August 2012, reported that Scott Swift said: "She basically had a new album done by January. This album is about a relationship from the beginning to end."

January 2012: Shortly after hiring Max Martin and Shellback, Taylor starts writing a sad piano ballad called 'Trouble', that will become I Knew You Were Trouble. She emails Max Martin about it, but they have to put the song on hold for 6 months.

February 7, 2012: During the Lorax press Conference, Taylor says to ExtraTV that she has written around 30 songs.

February 1-17, 2012: [From a Lover Journal] Somewhere between February 1st and February 17th, Taylor writes Holy Ground.

“The song ‘Holy Ground’ was a song that I wrote about the feeling I got after years had gone by and I finally appreciated a past relationship for what it was, rather than being bitter about what it didn’t end up being. And I was sitting there thinking about it after I’d just seen him and I just, I was just like, “You know what, that was good.” It was, it was good, having that in my life, and I wrote the song and I immediately heard Jeff Bhasker’s production. I hadn’t ever worked with Jeff, but he has done some amazing work. I love what he’s done on Fun’s record, and I love his diversity. He’s just so talented, and so I called him and I said “I wrote this song. I really want you to work on it with me.” And I played it for him and he was like, “Let’s go! This is great!” And, and he did such an amazing job on it.”

February 17, 2012: Jeff Bhasker and recording engineer Tyler Johnson, approach guitar player Anders Mouridsen at a show in Los Angeles, asking him to play on Holy Ground.

February 2012: While Taylor is in LA promoting the Lorax, she and Pat Mohanan from the band Train team up to write Babe. This is speculation, but it's mostly based on Train's timeline for their album California 37.

[Pat Monahan, 2013] “When [Pat] told Taylor that he wanted to collaborate with her on a song for Train's next album, she asked him to write a song with her for her album, Red. "It's a song called 'Babe,'" continues Pat. "So it's her song; I was just lucky enough to be a part of it with her, and I'm gonna ask the same of her in the future. She's very talented, she's a no-nonsense young kid. I'm not going through different relationships and breakups and all the stuff that young people do, so her perspective is very fresh," he says. "And I think that that's what I admire the most [about her].”

Scott Borchetta mentioned the song on September 24, 2012.

Babe was copyrighted in January 2013.

February 2012: This is rampant speculation but Espionage, who co-wrote The Very First Night, know Pat Monahan very well, since they wrote a few songs for Train, including their then-latest single Drive By. So I think that it's possible that The Very First Night was also written in February.

[Taylor on Amazon Music] “'The Very First Night' is a song that I made with a production group called Espionage, and they're so cool, so talented. This is actually the first time anybody gets to hear the work we did together because this didn't end up on the album, even though I loved it so much and told myself that someday it would come out. It's a song about a common theme on the RED album, which is reminiscing. Reminiscing about something that's over now, and reminiscing about the good times, and how powerful memories can be.”

March 2, 2012: [From a Lover Journal] Taylor writes Nothing New. While still in Australia, she also writes The Lucky One. They have similar themes and were allegedly inspired by Joni Mitchell and Kim Wilde.

“The song 'Nothing New' is a song that I wrote when I was 22 and tour. I was on the New Zealand/Australia leg of a tour, I wrote a little bit in each of those places. It was during a phase of my career when I was on my fourth album, and even though I was only 22 I just felt like old news, I really did. I think that new artists don't realize that when they put out their first or second album that they're in this shiny, new phase where everything you do is interesting and exciting to people. And it's only when you get to the moment after your breakthrough where you realize that you're gonna have to figure out some other shade of yourself to show people. Because people are not responding the same way they did when you were brand new. And I think I was writing from that place, even though I was a very young person in terms of years. Being on my fourth album I felt like, 'Is anybody still interested? Are they even excited by what I do anymore? What happens to me after they're not anymore? What do I do then?' Because you get so attached to the idea of novelty.”

“The ‘Lucky One’ is a song I wrote while I was in Australia. It kind of talks about some of my fears through telling the story of other people that I was inspired by. More than their stories being told, I’m pretty much singing about what I’m scared of in that song, ending up kind of caught up in this whole thing and lonely and feeling misunderstood and feeling like when people think you’re lucky that you’re really not. It kind of expresses my greatest fear of having this not end up being fun anymore, having it end up being a scary place. Some people get there, some people end up there. It’s a story song and it’s something I’m really proud of because it kind of goes to a place that I’m terrified of. [...] There’s the microscope that’s always on you. The camera flashes, the fear that something you say will be taken the wrong way and you’ll let your fans down. You’re scared of a lot of things for a lot of the time, but the trade-off of being able to get on a big stage and sing your songs — it’s worth it.”

March 18, 2012: End of the Speak Now Tour.

"Before the tour wrapped in March [2012], Swift already had an album's worth of material in the can. Only about half those recordings made the final version of Red." (X)

Last week of March 2012: Taylor confirms that she was in the studio the previous week. Possibilities include: Recording The Lucky One and Nothing New, or working with Espionage on The Very First Night.

April 1, 2012: The Business Inquirer publishes this interview done in March, which contains a line from Message In A Bottle.

When you meet someone that you’re attracted to, do you go, “Here’s a song”? That can happen. I get inspired by the smallest or the biggest things. You meet someone and you wonder if you’ll ever see them again. I could write so many songs about that. I have written so many songs about that. Wait till you hear my next record, it’s all about that.

April 11, 2012: Taylor has a writing session in LA with Dan Wilson. The first song they write is Treacherous. Taylor posts a picture on Instagram with the caption "Recording for the next album. So happy."

They are at Dan Wilson's house, recording the demo for Treacherous, the only song where Taylor has a guitar credit.

[Taste Of Country] “I wrote ‘Treacherous’ with Dan Wilson, and we came up with a way to say, you know, ‘This is dangerous and I realize that I might get hurt if I go through with this, if I move forward with you. But… but I want to.’ You know? It’s like that kind of conflicted feeling of it being a risk every time you fall in love — especially with certain types of people. [Laughs] That was a song that I’m really proud of, because it’s got this bridge that sounds like a second chorus. It’s got all these big vocals, and it’s kind of the intensity of that moment when you’re deciding to let yourself fall in love with someone.”

[From a Dan Wilson Interview] “With Taylor, we had been kind of circling around, very much aware of each other’s work for a while. We figured out these two days to work together and she came to my studio super excited and said, “I had an idea in the car.” And she sang me the first three or four lines of it and said, “I want to call it ‘Treacherous’ and maybe the chorus can go like this.” And we were writing the song in 10 minutes and she was just so full of excitement.”

The drums are credited to Wilson in the Treacherous Demo, not to Aaron Sterling like in the final version.

April 12, 2012: Taylor and Dan Wilson write and Come Back... Be Here.

[Red Release Party] “It’s a song I wrote about this guy that I met. You know, you meet someone and then they just kinda happen to go away and it’s, like, long distance all of a sudden. And you’re, like, ‘b-b-but, but, come back, be here!’ So it’s a song that I wrote about having distance separate you, which is something I face constantly.”

A description of Come Back... Be Here Studio Demo (not in circulation): "3:55 minutes long. A gorgeous bare-bones studio demo with drums, acoustic guitar, and Taylor's rough vocals with a few pretty harmonies added." I bet this demo was recorded like the Treacherous one, just Taylor and Dan.

April 22, 2012: Taylor meets Max Martin and Shellback. The first song they write is Message In A Bottle. Before starting the session, a friend of an ex walks in the studio asking if Taylor and his friend were getting back together. Taylor goes on a rant about how she'll never get back together with her ex.

Taylor also tweets: "Mon Apr 23 01:21:26 AM: Sitting in my kitchen. Listening to music. Don't want to go to bed. Was in the studio tonight. Writing tomorrow. Should go to bed. Ok I will."

[Taylor for Amazon Music] “'Message In A Bottle' is such a fun song! It is so catchy and the melody is really contagious. Max Martin, Shellback and I...that was the first song we ever wrote together. We went on to write songs like 'We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together,' 'I Knew You Were Trouble.' and '22' and we felt like those songs really represented what we were doing on RED. We kept saying that somewhere down the line we'd put out 'Message In A Bottle' because we loved it so much and this is the first opportunity that we have to show it to the world. We're all really excited about it!”

Speculation:

"It is not confirmed but the friend of the ex seems to be Adam Levine from Maroon 5, a very old friend of Jake. Maroon 5 were in the same studio in LA (Conway Studios) to wrap up their album Overexposed.

April 23, 2012: Taylor, Max Martin and Shellback write We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together.

“I came in and they played a track that they had made in preparation for this. And I wrote something over the track. And then I think after that, I was telling them a story about what I was going through. And then I started just kind of singing, ‘We are never ever ever’…and Max was like, ‘That's great! We're writing that. Like we've got to write that!’ And then Johan was like, ‘And we-eee could be like little kids on a playground!’ And that was the first time that I realized these people think in a way that is so mystical and magical, and the way that you could hear a hook that's not really musical notes. It's a sound, or these kind of pop wizards. I remember being so challenged by writing with them.”

“It’s a definitive portrait of how I felt when I finally stopped caring what my ex thought of me. He made me feel like I wasn’t as good or as relevant as these hipster bands he listened to… So I made a song that I knew would absolutely drive him crazy when he heard it on the radio. Not only would it hopefully be played a lot, so that he’d have to hear it, but it’s the opposite of the kind of music that he was trying to make me feel inferior to.”

[Max Martin Interview, transcribed & adapted by me] “Me and Johan [Shellback] had our first date with her at Conway Studios. I was a little nervous, you know, the good kind of nervous. Maroon 5 was recording in the studio next door. This guy shows up, a friend of theirs. We literally haven't started the session yet. The guy says, "I heard the Taylor Swift's here. I gotta say hello". I was like, "Really?" and the guy says, "I totally know her, it's fine, we're friends". He walks in and it turns out that he didn't know her. And I started sweating cause I was vouching for that guy. He started talking about some ex-boyfriend of hers. It was really messy. He leaves and I apologize, but she was super cool, no problem at all. Then I asked what that was all about and she told me the story about this guy that she was dating. I can't remember exactly what she said, but she said, "One thing's for sure, we are never ever getting back together", and I said, "That's pretty harsh". She said, "No no, we are never ever ever getting back together". And we're laughing about it, saying, "That sounds like a song title". Then we started on something else [Message In A Bottle]. The next day, she said, "I thought about what you said", and she played us this idea that became 'We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together'. I was so mad at that guy who ruined our session, but it turned into love, cause it never would've happened if he hadn't walked in.”

May 9, 2012: Taylor, Sarah Barlow and her husband Stephen Schofield shoot the Red Photoshoot, inspired by one of Liz Huett's photoshoots.

[Sarah Barlow Interview] Taylor is a mutual friend of ours. Stephen and his brother were friends with her years before, and I became friends with her separately. What ended up happening was one of her background singers needed headshots. When Taylor saw them a few months later, she came to me and was like, “Liz showed me the shots you took of her, and I need my album to look exactly like that.” Clearly, this was a no-brainer. I said, “OK!” Before then, I’d been kind of burned out on music photography. A lot of the shoots were super controlling. I needed a new perspective on the field itself and wanted future shoots to be very free-flowing — just the artist and a minimum crew. Luckily for Stephen and me, that’s exactly how Taylor presented the Red album shoot. So it was just the three of us shooting everything together. She wanted everybody else to remain off set, allowing for a more personal and intimate experience.

May 15, 2012: Taylor meets Ed Sheeran for the first time, after his concert in Phoenix, Arizona, at the Ritz Hotel: they write Run, their first song ever.

"I met up with him at one of his shows and we wrote some songs that day."

[Taylor on Amazon Music] “The song ‘Run’ is really special to me because it marks the first song that I ever wrote with Ed Sheeran and it kind of also marks the first day of our friendship. He’s been someone who has been so important in my life, like just one of my closest friends, he’s always been there for me. It’s a song about the escapism of falling in love and how you don’t really care what anyone else says when you feel this way – you just wanna run away with someone. And all the little secrets that you establish with this person, this secret world you create together.”

[Ed Sheeran Interview] “We wrote 'Run' and then we wrote 'Everything Has Changed' maybe like a week later. And I remember always thinking, 'Well, 'Run' is the one that’s gonna make the album.' It was always my favorite. But 'Everything Has Changed' just ended up sounding better because we produced them differently or whatever. So 'Run' has just been there for years and years. I’ve never really wanted to nudge Taylor about it – because it’s her song. But I’ve always been secretly hoping that one day she’d be like, 'Hey, this song was cool!' And so we recorded that and it’s really great! I’m so happy it’s seeing the light of day.”

It looks like they wrote another unfinished song that day, according to this Ed Sheeran interview: "We went in a hotel room, had some burgers, had a guitar and we wrote this Run song and I think like part of another song."

They both tweet about Run:

May 17, 2012: Taylor has lunch with Mark Foster from Foster The People in Beverly Hills, CA. They write Forever Winter.

[Mark Foster Interview] “We wrote a song that day. It’s a really cool song. We kind of just went into it casually and something really cool came out of it. We’ll see what happens with it. She’s been writing a lot for her next record.”

[Taylor on Amazon Music] “The song 'Forever Winter' is about being in a moment in your life where you love someone, or someone is such a good friend of yours, or you feel really close to someone, and you realize all at once that they've been struggling for a very long time. And you feel so guilty that you didn't see it sooner, and you wish you would've checked in on them more. That person means so much to you, but you didn't necessarily pick up on the signs that maybe they weren't okay. So, that's 'Forever Winter'.”

May 18, 2012: Aaron Sterling tweets that he had recently played drums in Treacherous and Come Back... Be Here.

In November 2012, Dan Wilson confirms that the songs were recorded a few weeks after being written.

May 24, 2012: Taylor records a voice memo of the chorus to Everything Has Changed, while she's in the car with her friend Claire Winter.

May 27, 2012: Taylor and Ed finish Everything Has Changed.

Original lyrics: "All I feel in my stomach is butterflies for a Gemini / who’d never tell a lie / The beautiful kind saying “This feels right" / Making me feel like falling for a Gemini / This feels right / Making me feel like I just want to know you better, grow old together, hold you forever / When you caught my eye / The look said you’d missed me all this time / Meet me there tonight / So I can know that it’s not all in my mind."

[MTV News] "We, for real, were sitting on my trampoline in my backyard 'cause we had been writing a song and I was like, ‘Hey, I just got a trampoline. You want to see it?’ And so, he brought the guitar for some reason. We ended up writing an entire song out there. For portions of the song, we were bouncing around, ‘cause it’s a trampoline and it’s fun, and the combined maturity level of both of us is 8 years."

[Ed Sheeran Interview] "She pretty much had the verse, bridge and chorus done but we argued about that one chord. She didn’t like that but I forced it upon her!"

May 28, 2012: Taylor and Ed arrive in Santa Monica, CA. They start recording Everything Has Changed and Run at Ruby Red Productions with Butch Walker and Jake Sinclair.

[Butch Walker Interview] We did [Everything Has Changed] in my studio and of course, a lot of the way I work is I’ll be building a track quickly to put the song together, whether it’s a demo or a final recording. It’s usually “to be determined,” but I try to make it sound as much as I want it to in my head and like a record from the get-go, and that was essentially just the raw version of the demo that I did. I would go back in and spruce things up and replace sounds with other things, but she felt like the magic was in the initial recording, which I respected and loved her for that. So that’s the version that’s on the first record.

May 29, 2012: Gary Lightbody joins Taylor in the studio thanks to Ed. The two of them plus Jacknife Lee write and record The Last Time in less than 9 hours, produced by Lee in his studio in Topanga, CA. The album version is the very first attempt. Gary will also provide background vocals for Everything Has Changed.

[Taylor to NPR] The idea was based on this experience I had with someone who was kind of this unreliable guy. You never know when he’s going to leave, you never know when he’s going to come back, but he always does come back. My visual for this song is, there’s a guy on his knees sitting on the ground outside of a door. And on the other side of the door is his girlfriend, who he keeps on leaving — and he keeps coming back to her, but then he leaves again. He’s saying, ‘This is the last time I’m going to do this to you.’ And she’s saying, ‘This is the last time I’m asking you this: Don’t do this again.’ And she’s wondering whether to let him in, and he just wants her to give him another chance, but she doesn’t know if he’s going to break her heart again. It’s a really fragile emotion you’re dealing with when you want to love someone, but you don’t know if it’s smart to.

[Gary Lightbody to Rolling Stone] It was so fast. She works really fast. She’s extraordinary. We actually did that song, wrote it and recorded it in a day. And that was the version of it on the record, which is very rare. Normally you write and record something with somebody and then down the line they’ll record it, if you’re lucky. With her, the whole thing was done in nine hours. I hope we can do it again sometime!

[Jacknife Lee Interview] “We met through Gary’s [Lightbody] friendship with Ed Sheeran. Taylor was a fan of Ed’s. They were on tour I think. Taylor came to Topanga. Body guards, big black car. We wrote a song in a couple of hours and sang it sitting on the sofa. She had a handheld microphone. Then we had pasta for dinner and hung around with my kids. She left and I finished the song off. Owen Pallett [Arcade Fire/Final Fantasy] did some strings very quickly. It was out of my field of expertise and interest, but I was intrigued and my girls were thrilled. Taylor was nice and very professional. She knew what she wanted and there was no fucking about.”

May 30, 2012: Taylor is back in Nashville to shoot the Both Of Us Music Video and visits Scott Borchetta, who tweets: "She is writing like crazy... I know it's hard to wait but I promise it will be worth it..."

June 1, 2012: [From a Lover Journal] After the Walmart Shareholders Concert held in Arkansas, Taylor returns to LA and while on the plane she writes 22, which she brings to a writing session with Max Martin and Shellback.

[Interview with Ryan Seacrest] "I wrote that about my friends, like finally I’ve got this amazing group of girlfriends and we tell each other everything, we’re together all the time. And I think that was kind of the marker of me being 22, like having all these friends and there’s all these question marks in your life, but the one thing that you have is that you have each other."

"For me, being 22 has been my favorite year of my life. I like all the possibilities of how you're still learning, but you know enough. You still know nothing, but you know that you know nothing. You're old enough to start planning your life, but you're young enough to know there are so many unanswered questions. That brings about a carefree feeling that is sort of based on indecision and fear and a the same time letting lose. Being 22 has taught me so much."

"'22' is a song I wrote about exactly how I was feeling when I was 22 years old; I felt happy, free, confused, and lonely at the same time, which I think is the way a lot of 22-year-olds feel, you know? We all feel that way all the time. So I brought this song to Max Martin and Shellback, and I had written in on a plane ride and they loved the idea. And it just happened really fast! They were like, 'Oh my God, we get exactly where you wanna go with this.' I just wanted the most infectuous chorus and I feel it really does that."

The song originally had a different bridge that can be seen in the handwritten lyrics:

Sometimes it hits me / We’re moving quickly / Toward something hazy / A future I can’t see / Let’s break the old rules / While we’re still 22 / You look like bad news / I gotta have you

June 2, 2012: [From a Lover Journal] Taylor brings the chorus of I Knew You Were Trouble to Max Martin e Shellback. Both 22 and I Knew You Were Trouble are recorded during this week.

[MTV Interview] "It’s about knowing the second you see someone like, ‘Oh, this is going to be interesting. It’s going to be dangerous, but look at me going in there anyway.' I think that for me, it was the first time I ever kind of noticed that in myself, like when you are curious about something you know might be bad for you, but you know that you are going to go for it anyway because if you don’t, you’ll have greater regrets about not seeing where that would go."

[Taylor on Amazon Music] "'I Knew You Were Trouble.' is a song that I think really made me expand my horizon of what kind of music I wanted to make, and what kind of music I was allowed to make. At this point in my career I was a completely straight forward country artist that sort of toyed around with pop melodies every once in a while. But when I had gotten this idea, I brought it to Shellback and Max Martin. It was a piano ballad and I thought it was just gonna be a really sad, down tempo song. And I remember Shellback going, 'What if we do like a dubstep bass drop?' And I was like, 'Um, yeah! Let's do that.' It was one of the most shocking moments that we had in the studio, making RED. I think the whole time we were making the song we were all like, 'Can we really do this?' And I love moments like that! Because that means you're pushing boundaries, you're going for it. I've learned that since. I felt that when I was making folklore like, 'Am I allowed to make an alternative album?' You just gotta listen to that feeling sometimes."

[Taylor to Rolling Stone] "I remember bringing in this slow, sad thing that I had written, called ‘I Knew You Were Trouble.’ I had originally called it ‘Trouble’. I was like, ‘I don't know if we could have some kind of intense bass drop or something, like dubstep is really awesome…’ And they were just like, ‘Yes, absolutely!’ And then Shellback was like, ‘In the verse, let's do this really frantic drum beat.’ And it just was something I would never have thought of; to make the beat of the verse really up-tempo, and then make the intensity drop off the chorus, and then have it build back up, and then have a production explosion at the end of the chorus. It was so thrilling! I couldn't believe the song started where it started and then their added ideas with production. They ended up seeping into my brain and I started thinking the way that I would hope they would think. I would write a verse and Max would be like, ‘This is this many syllables, can you shorten it and make it more succinct, but convey the same message?’ And I would just go off into a corner and I felt like I had like this amazing assignment. So the challenge of it was so thrilling for me."

August 11, 2012: Taylor Nation posts this picture of Taylor working at the Blackbird Studios in Nashville.

Billboard shared also this picture of Taylor, which judging from the Red wall, was also taken at the Blackbird:

Somewhere around August 2012: Taylor records State Of Grace Acoustic.

[Taylor to Yahoo!] This one wasn't a demo, but a careful afterthought. When I wanted to do an alternate version of it for the Target bonus tracks, Nathan (Chapman) and I went back into the studio and we did just a completely acoustic version of it. It's really sweet and slowed down and it completely changes the song.

September 22, 2012: Scott Borchetta reveals the collaborators Taylor worked with on Red: "Max Martin and Shellback on "Never Ever" as well as Jackknife Lee (U2, R.E.M.), Train's Pat Monahan, UK singer-songwriter Ed Sheeran, producer Jeff Bhasker (fun.'s "We Are Young") and Semisonic's Dan Wilson (Adele's "Someone Like You"), as well as continued work with longtime producer Nathan Chapman and a first-time team-up with Nashville mainstay Dann Huff, who pitched in for a few songs and re-worked "Never Ever" for country radio."

September 30, 2012: Taylor sends Ed the final version of Eveything Has Changed.

[Ed] I remember when I did a song with her for her album, I was in San Francisco and they sent someone with a locked briefcase with an iPad and one song on it, and they flew to San Francisco and played the song I’ve done with her. And they asked if I like it, and I was like, ‘Yeah,’ and then they took it back. That’s how I hear it.

Somewhere during the writing process: Unknown Song with Ryan Adams, Unknown Song with T-Pain (I can't find the source), Unknown Song written in New Zealand (mid-March 2012, mentioned by herself on Amazon Music).

2012: Somewhere in 2012, Taylor called Harry Styles to ask him to write a few bombastic songs with her, as requested by the label, as Jacknife Lee revealed. From the ambigous way Lee phrased it, there's no way of understanding the exact period of time.

[Jacknife Lee Interview] “She was seeing Harry Styles at the time, so he came to Topanga on her recommendation. She wrote a few songs with him, and it was the same thing – quick. But this time it was more directed by the management and label. They were after something specific. I wanted more acoustic and gentle, almost Americana, and they wanted bombast. They got what they wanted, and that was the extent of my foray into teen-pop territory. It was fun.”

Other Songs: Both Of Us, Safe & Sound, Eyes Open, they were all written and recorded in 2011. None of them were meant for Red.

End of the writing process: "The singer also revealed that she wrote "30 to 35?" songs for the album and but whittled it down to 16 tracks."

RED SPOTIFY PLAYLIST in chronological order

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