Taylor Swift’s 25 Best Bonus Tracks, Ranked

Upon first hearing this as a Vault track appended to the first full re-recording Swift put out, most fans probably all shared the same thought: This was the prequel to “Clean,” written at least five years before the latter song showed up. The before-and-after songs nicely complement each other, and you can hear Swift grappling with the concept of feeling a little bit dirty in a way that might’ve almost felt a little too sensual and grown-up to release in 2009. It’s so easy to fixate on the “Clean” foreshadowing, anyway, that you can almost miss the fact that there is some classic Nashville-style wordplay inherent in the title. She’s got an ex whose scent remains all over her, but also, she’s still grappling with the uncomfortable fact that he’s “over” the relationship. Either way, here’s to long showers.

From “Fearless (Taylor’s Version)” (2021)

[Performed June 3 in Chicago, IL]

Has Swift ever sounded this tired, in any other song? “I could stand up and sing you a song / But I don’t wanna have to go that far” … wait, is this deep, lackadaisical ennui coming from the same Taylor Swift who sounds like she’d die for love in so many other songs? It is — and who knew she could make a creeping sense of romantic apathy as arresting, in its own way, as abject desire? This initially underwhelming ballad is a real grower, as you realize just how well she captures the idea of having longed for a romance to come to fruition so long and fruitlessly that she’s almost given up. But hey, if he should come to his senses, show some initiative and show up at her window, she still might not object. Helping drive this ballad are some kind of strange chord changes in the chorus melody — it keeps feeling like it’s not going to work, and then it does. (Probably unlike the unrequited love she’s describing.)

From “Fearless (Platinum Edition)” (2009) and “Fearless (Taylor’s Version)” (2021)

[Not yet performed on the Eras Tour]

The most danceable song in Swift’s entire catalog should not have stayed under wraps for a full decade. Reportedly, this was the first song she wrote with Max Martin and Shellback when they began their grand experiment to take her fully pop for a portion of the “Red” album. We may never know how good their original recording of the song was, wherever it is in the Big Machine vault, but it’s hard to imagine that it was better than what Swift, Shellback and Elvira Anderfjärd (stepping into Martin’s shoes) came up with for its official first-time issue as a Vault track last year. The one thing it has going against it, and that probably kept it off “Red” at the time, is that you can imagine almost any female pop star singing it; it doesn’t have those telling Swiftian lyrical idiosyncrasies you’ve come to expect even in her most light-hearted fare. But it would’ve been a No. 1 pop hit, or deserved to have been, for whoever sang it, whether it’s slightly generic by her standards or not. The track really did arrive as belatedly as a message in a bottle — and it’s an occasion for all kinds of uncorkings.

From “Red (Taylor’s Version)” (2022)

[Performed July 23 in Seattle, WA]

There is a history of Swift writing about her friends’ great loves, from “This Love” to the more recently unveiled “When Emma Falls in Love” — and she made it clear in this case that she was idealizing something she didn’t yet feel she’d experienced herself. Referring to having a lover who is also a best friend, Swift said at the time, “I’ve never had that, so I wrote that song about things that Lena Dunham has told me about her and Jack Antonoff.” And Dunham even tweeted at the time that this would be her “someday wedding song.” That was not to be, as the couple that inspired the tune broke up about four years after “You Are in Love” came out. Still, it remains a sweet testament to being aspirational about love through the proxy passions of friends. And it’s interesting that Swift, one of the most famously wordy lyricists of our time, avowed that this would be the ultimate sign that love is true: “You can hear it in the silence.”

From “1989 (Deluxe Edition)” (2014)

[Performed Aug. 4 in Los Angeles, CA]

Swift’s songwriting has never felt more fully mature — in its craftsmanship, but more importantly, emotionally — than in this anti-battlefield anthem that uses combat metaphors for a particularly fraught period in a lasting relationship. She’s often been stereotyped as always assuming the role of Wronged Woman, and God knows, nobody does aggrieved like Taylor Swift. But the idea that she’s always playing defense should’ve been shed around the time she released “Back to December,” if not before. And, lyrically, “The Great War” might represent the apex of Taylor Swift Taking Responsibility, a part of her catalog that deserves its own life as a trope. The WWI and II similes come fast and furious, but there’s nothing clumsy about them; you get the feeling the songwriter might actually have read up a little on trench warfare. What’s most important about it is how decisively Swift paints a picture of the ways holding onto past wrongs or passive-aggressive tendencies can create danger zones in a love affair that’s good and right… and how these realizations can lead to a beautiful treaty. Now, the relationship fans might assume the song is about has come to an end, so it’s possible that its writer won a battle but lost a war after all. But this is still a number that Swifties who grapple with their own fight-or-flight tendencies can hold onto and learn from. The tune’s most essential moment comes in the bridge, when the martial rhythms are stripped away and she sings plaintively: “I really thought I’d lost you.” Because she’s savvy enough to know when metaphors are no match for haunting, plain language.

From “Midnights (3am Edition)” (2022)

[Performed April 14 in Tampa, FL]

For a while, it seemed like last year’s “Anti-Hero” might be the most self-doubting song Swift had ever written about her own stardom. Then it turned out she’d been writing ’em far earlier in her career, but just not putting them out — in the form of “Nothing New,” which finally appeared as a Vault track last year on “Red (Taylor’s Version),” and the circa-2010 composition “Castles Crumbling,” off the brand new T.V. edition of “Speak Now.” This is a much more serious and arguably truly fear-riddled song than the other two, a number in which Swift actually seems to have some real dread of the prospect that the mass audience could turn against her. Whatever could have put that in her mind? Well, this came on the heels of the Kanye “Imma let you” finish VMAs moment, and even though she had the president of the United States calling West “a jackass,” Swift had good reason to fear not everyone would be on her side. (Flash forward to “Reputation.”) “People look at me like I’m a monster / Now they’re screamin’ at the palace front gates / Used to chant my name / Now they’re screaming that they hate me.” That’s quite a self-generated nightmare, for someone who was just coming out of her teens at the time of writing. And it’s no surprise she ultimately chose to not be quite so vulnerable in 2010 (instead letting her sole musical statement on the Kanye fiasco at the time be the strangely maternal “Innocent”). This makes for riveting listening in retrospect, although, as far as songs in which Swift refers to herself as a “monster” go, we’ll take the much funnier “Anti-Hero.” Extra points for enlisting Paramore’s Williams to hold her hand, a la the buddy system, as she ventures back to a frightened moment in her history.

From “Speak Now (Taylor’s Version)” (2023)

[Performed July 28 in Santa Clara, CA]

“Forever Winter” has such a breezy lilt to it, it takes a minute for it to kick in that it deals with the subject of suicidal tendencies. Or at least the narrator of the song, Swift, is worried that’s the dark direction her friend’s thoughts may be taking, even though what she actually quotes him as saying in their 3 a.m. phone calls (“He says ‘Why fall in love, just so you can watch it go away?’”; “It’s not just a phase I’m in”) sounds more casually fatalistic than imminently threatening. She’s not taking where she sees these trains of thought going lightly, in any case: “I pull at every thread trying to solve the puzzles in his head / Live my life scared to death he’ll decide to leave instead.” (The singer did have, in real life, a troubled high school friend who died around the time “Speak Now” came out, of an overdose.) It seems possible maybe this track got left on the cutting room floor at the time because it sounded too undramatic for its subject matter, but the 2023 production, at least, has a palpable bittersweetness to it — all the way down to Jack Antonoff’s recurring trumpet line — that adds up to real poignance. Better late than never: This is a song that can do some good out in the world, both for those who struggle with depression and those whose lot is to worry about the strugglers from afar. (If you or anyone you know is having thoughts of suicide, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline by dialing 988 or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources.)

From “Speak Now (Taylor’s Version)” (2023)

[Not yet performed on the Eras Tour]

Alice escaped from her Wonderland unscathed, but in Taylor’s version of falling down the rabbit hole with the wrong partner, “we both went mad.” The lyrics for this “1989” bonus tune have some resonance, to be sure. But let’s face it, a lot of what makes the track great has to do with the synthy sonic boom that Max Martin and Shellback brought as co-producers, leaving the memory that she’d ever had a mandolin on a record as far off as the real world might’ve seemed to Lewis Carroll’s heroine once she met the Mad Hatter. “Wonderland” is also wonderful in part because of how distinct the different sections are — hook after hook after hook that could each be propelling their own song. I’m particularly partial to the bizarre syncopation of the pre-chorus, in which the emphasis never seems to land on the syllables it should, making the world seem even more upside-down. I do have a small complaint about the song: I can’t hear the “eh, eh” in the chorus without thinking of the “eh, eh, eh” in Rihanna’s “Umbrella” — but that’s just a personal problem. Like just about every other Swift listener, I’m still damn happy to get lost in it.

From “1989 (Deluxe Edition)” (2014)

[Performed April 21 in Houston, TX]

At a recent concert, Swift performed “Dear John” live for the first time in many years, as a surprise song, and prefaced it with an admonition that fans should not take the then-impending release of “Speak Now (Taylor’s Version)” as an opportunity to re-litigate whatever grievances they imagined she had with the real-life subject of that famous epic ballad. And far be it from Swifties to ignore her wishes and focus again on those age-old circumstances… except the singer kind of had just done that herself when she included “Would’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve” — a clear and direct sequel to “Dear John” — on a deluxe edition of her most recent album last fall. So were we getting a mixed message here? Maybe, but we’re kind of glad that Swift never really gets over her old relationships, as songwriting grist, even if she instructs her audience to move on. “Now that I’m grown, I’m scared of ghosts / Memories feel like weapons,” she declares. Not to get too literarily precious about it, but Swift seems like a firm believer in Faulkner’s famous maxim: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” That’s the takeaway we get from a freshly minted song in which she looks back on trauma she felt at 19 and, 13. years later, concludes: “The wound won’t close, I keep on waiting for a sign / I regret you all the time.” Millions of listeners who also have events in their lives they don’t think they’ve ever really healed from look at the seemingly steel-coated Swift singing this and love her all the more.

From “Midnights (3am Edition)” (2022)

[Performed May 7 in Nashville, TN]

“Invisible” seems like such quintessential Early Taylor that it’s hard to remember that it wasn’t on the original edition of her 2007 debut album. (Over time, the 2008 deluxe version has come to be treated as if it were the standard in the Big Machine catalog… which is also convenient for not keeping the original, un-woke version of “Picture to Burn” online.) It’s only slightly less difficult to recall a time when Swift could palpably make us believe that she was perennially overlooked, as she did in this, “You Belong With Me” and other underdog anthems that populated her first two albums. (Not that she’s forgotten; even on her latest release, she takes a moment aside to recall that “no one wanted to play with me as a little kid.”) Hebrews 13:2 says, “Be welcoming to strangers; many have entertained angels unawares.” Maybe there could be a new scripture for contemporary teenagers that goes: Look out for the invisible among your classmates, because you may be ignoring a Taylor in the making.

From “Taylor Swift (Deluxe Edition)” (2008)

[Performed May 20 in Foxborough, MA]

Swift’s songs are typically so specific to her that it’s almost unimaginable to think of anyone else covering them. And so in the few instances where someone else did have a hit with one of her compositions — a la Sugarland with “Babe” or Little Big Town with “Better Man,” both of whom scored country smashes before Swift belatedly released her own versions of those numbers as Vault tracks — your tendency might be to think: Did she go too generic, if it translates that easily to a country band’s sensibility? But this is the equivalent of the Beatles giving away “I Wanna Be Your Man” to the Stones before reclaiming it as their own: no harm done in writing something that could be farmed out before it was planted at home. “Better Man” certainly reads as pleasant, melodically, but it’s got a real dagger embedded in it: the thought that you are completely and fundamentally morally flawed — and other than that, a great guy.

From “Red (Taylor’s Version)” (2022)

[Performed May 19 in Foxborough, MA]

If you like to think of Swift as triumphant and content in a lasting relationship, then “Mastermind” makes for a great closing song for the “Midnights” album. But if you identify with her more as a kind of wise and sage but never really satisfied loner, then “Dear Reader” is the album-closer for you. Fortunately, between the standard edition and deluxe editions, we get to choose the true finale, or, better yet, alternate between them. This particular capper is a lush, mellow, gauzy number that contains multitudes, as Walt Whitman would say. For starters, is Swift thinking of advice columnists or Charlotte Brontë and “Jane Eyre” with that promising title? Can it be both? She spends the first half of the song doling out what are actually pretty solid tips and life lessons, from a wisened elder stateswoman: “Bend when you can, snap when you have to.” “You don’t have to answer, just ’cause they asked you.” “When you aim at the devil, make sure you don’t miss.” (Oh boy, has she gotten good at that last one.) And then she spends the back half recommending that you disregard anything she has to say, because she’s that fucked up. You can appreciate the humility in that extended mea culpa, but the woman doth protest too much. As egocentric pop superstars go, she’s about as reliable a narrator as they come.

From “Midnights (3 am Edition)” (2022)

[Not yet performed on the Eras Tour]

It’s maybe the most truly diaristic song Swift ever wrote… which, God knows, is saying something. “The Moment I Knew” is the completely linear companion piece to the completely non-linear “All Too Well.” And although she probably wasn’t thinking of it exactly as such, it’s like an exhaustively annotated sequel to Lesley Gore’s “It’s My Party”: You would cry, too, if Jake Gyllenhaal not showing up for your 21st (or even checking in via phone to say he couldn’t make it) happened to you. “The Moment I Knew” is a good example of the idea that the more specific a song is, the more universal it can actually be. On first listen, obviously, you’re honed in on her audacity, and/or vulnerability, in including telltale real-life detail after detail. By the second, or at least the third, surely you’re fixing on that moment in one of your most prized relationships in which, well short of any actual formal breakup, it became all too crystal-clear: He’s just not that into you.

From “Red (Deluxe Edition)” (2012) and “Red (Taylor’s Version)” (2022)

[Performed June 3 in Chicago, IL]

“I know places we won’t be found, and they’ll be chasing their tails trying to track us down,” Swift sang back on the “1989” album, assuring a paramour she knows just how and where to hide. Years later, in “The Lakes,” she actually names the places! Doesn’t that defeat the purpose? But seriously… This is one of Swift’s most intensely romantic numbers, as (at least in one mix) she and Jack Antonoff even use an uncharacteristic swell of Hollywood strings to embellish the travelogue that has her and her lover escaping to the “Windermere peaks” “where all the poets went to die.” When she sings, “I want to watch wisteria grow right over my bare feet, ’cause I haven’t moved in years,” we know we are deep into a fantasy land for the most constantly prolific artist of the 21st century. Anyway, any Swifties who permanently decamped to the Lake District in England in hopes of catching a sighting probably haven’t had much luck, but they’re probably having a nice life anyway.

From “Folklore (Deluxe Edition)” (2020)

[Performed May 20 in Foxborough, MA]

Swift rarely gives the kinds of in-depth interviews anymore where she talks about the meaning or intent of especially personal songs, but this was a case in which sheer timing said just about everything. With her latest album having been out for months and the Eras Tour already underway, Swift announced that she would be releasing very limited CD and digital editions of “Midnights” that included one exclusive new song, “You’re Losing Me.” That this happened right after it was revealed her relationship of six years had broken up was even less coincidental than just about anything else in her Easter-egg-mastermind world. It’s one of her most raw songs, even though no metaphorical expense was spared on the lyrics’ medical symbolism or the heartbeat rhythm that drives the tune. Having already established in another recent song, “High Infidelity,” that “the slowest way to kill someone you love is not loving them enough,” she takes that idea and runs with it here all the way to the emergency room. It’s an EKG chart veritably ripped from today’s headlines. And she made damn sure that “I wouldn’t marry me, either” would become 2023’s most quoted lyric, even as she was also making sure that the song was kept off streaming sites where people could widely hear it.

From “Midnights (The Late Night Edition)” (2023)

[Not yet performed on the Eras Tour]

What was it Lou Grant famously said about the heroine in the pilot of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show”? “You’ve got spunk… I hate spunk.” Well, “Ours” may count as Swift’s spunkiest song — but good luck hating its cheerful winsomeness. As the opening to the bonus tracks on the deluxe version of “Speak Now,” “Ours” was kind of parallel to “Mine,” the song that opens the album proper, and not just because of the similarity of their titles. Both have Swift deviating from her semi-tragic songs about known real-life relationships to indulge in an imagined fiction about what it might be like to find romance with a normie. Even in conjuring up a kind of generic scenario, though, Swift has to throw it very specific details, like the promise that “any snide remarks from my father about your tattoos will be ignored.” The fact that you can hear her grinning as she sings that line helps render the whole song irresistible. But it also contains one of her most-quoted aphorisms: “Don’t you worry your pretty little mind / People throw rocks at things that shine.” How many millions of times do you suppose a Swiftie has sung that couplet to themselves at a moment when someone was being particularly mean?

From “Speak Now (Deluxe Edition)” (2010) and “Speak Now (Taylor’s Version)” (2023)

[Performed March 31 in Arlington, TX]

Back in the mid-2000s, in the song “Better Man,” Swift wrote the lyric: “The bravest thing I ever did was run.” She took that particular sentiment and expanded it to full song length with “It’s Time to Go,” one of the most searing and moving compositions she’s written in recent years, even if she slightly buried its brilliance as an “Evermore” bonus track. The first two verses presents an anecdotal series of situations in which people might realize it’s high past time to hit the road, down to that moment when someone who needs to leave a marriage is realizing that staying together for the kids is not reason enough to wither. And then the final verse is, without naming any names, unabashedly a goodbye letter to Big Machine and Scott Borchetta: “Fifteen years, 15 million tears / Beggin’ till my knees bled… / Now he sits on this throne in his palace of bones… / He’s got my past frozen behind glass / But I’ve got me.” Even though it ends so specifically with Swift’s label situation, it’s clear she feels like that severance really counts as her first divorce. And it may all count as inspirational for anyone who, in a marriage or business relationship, is seeking the final courage to push themself to a tipping point.

From “Evermore (Deluxe Edition)” (2020)

[Not yet performed on the Eras Tour]

Swift is not one to do the kinds of interviews where she goes in depth into the meanings of her hit songs, much less the ones she has marked for what counts as semi-obscurity in her catalog, as bonus material. So we may never get an accounting from her of what “Bigger Than the Whole Sky” is about or was prompted by. But we don’t really need a delineation from her to find it one of the most profoundly moving pieces she’s ever written. On a casual listen, it appears to describe a breakup, a death, or a breakup that felt like a death. But the most obvious interpretation that most fans have taken away after closer inspection is that it describes a miscarriage, and it’s pretty hard to hear it any other way once you’ve considered that take. Looking at the comments beneath the lyrics video on YouTube (click above), you see reaction after reaction from women who have suffered that particular loss in their lives, about how the ballad spoke to them — but also responses from people who’ve experienced the deaths of older children or had to say “Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye” in the face of other unexpected voids. I can just vouch that, along with “Ronan,” this is one of two numbers in the Swift catalog that can make me well up just from a sighting of the title, let alone basking in its full desolation. It wouldn’t be surprising if Swift feels the same way — she has yet to perform the song live, and it’ll be quite an occasion if she ever feels so bold.

From “Midnights (3am Edition)” (2022)

[Not yet performed on the Eras Tour]

Anyone who feels brave enough to indulge in a workplace romance has a new soundtrack for their inter-office danger now. When this song emerged from hiding this spring, some of us felt glad that it didn’t actually come out on the original “Speak Now” album, because as solid a job as her original producer, Nathan Chapman, might have done with it circa 2010, there’s just no chance it would have sounded half as cool as what Jack Antonoff did with it circa 2023. And by that we’re speaking specifically of that echoey, slightly off-the-beat electric guitar riff that makes it one of the slinky bops of this year, and of her career. No wonder it’s turned into one of the most popular Vault tracks she’s put out so far, among the bonuses on her three re-recorded Big Machine albums to date. (The elaborately produced, “Mission: Impossible”-styled music video with Taylor Lautner didn’t hurt.) But after I initially considered it as a less-than-peak composition that got elevated by virtue of the modern Antonoff touch, I was in the audience when she performed it live for the first time at L.A.’s SoFi Stadium, as a surprise song, and damn if it didn’t feel just as fun played on her acoustic, without that electric riff. So maybe we really have been deprived all these 13 years.

From “Speak Now (Taylor’s Version)” (2023)

[Performed Aug. 3 in Los Angeles, CA]

This was basically Swift’s version of the Eagles’ “New Kid in Town” — foreseeing and commenting upon the inevitability of being replaced, as a younger and hotter new guard comes in to do the supplanting that is part of the pop-culture cycle. Only, a funny thing happened on the way to obsolescence: the Eagles are still selling out shows almost 50 years after releasing “New Kid,” and Swift is the hottest artist in the business 11 years after putting out “Red,” the album that “Nothing New” was considered for. It’s as if prophesying her own over-ness somehow had the magical effect of warding it off, instead. We can probably be thankful that this song was left on the cutting-room floor at the time, because it’s hard to imagine it as anything other than a duet with Phoebe Bridgers. Although she’s only the superstar’s junior by four years in age, Bridgers is next-gen to Swift by most measures, and in a world that was less loyal to the senior artist might really have stood as a successor. So there are all sorts of ironies going on here — including the oft-noted notion that this sounds more like a Bridgers track than a Swift one — but there’s a happy ending for everybody, new kids and old ones alike.

From “Red (Taylor’s Version)” (2022)

[Performed with Phoebe Bridgers on 12 nights of the Eras Tour]

In thinking about why this might have been rejected for the “Red” album 11 years prior, it’s easy to come up with some possible reasons: (1) It was an outright country song at a time when Swift was edging her way out from that umbrella. (2) Considering some of the other songs that did make the album or its deluxe version, it might have been considered too much overt Jake content. (3) Chris Stapleton had not been invented yet. Whatever the true rationale was, its emergence as a fresh single and video in 2022 felt like a forgotten Christmas present that suddenly turned up around Easter. Not only is it a hardcore country song of the sort that Swift wasn’t much recording even when she was considered a country artist, but it’s the closest she ever came or will come to having her own equivalent to Garth Brooks’ “Friends in Low Places.” It takes a slight stretch of imagination to think of Swift as the unwanted hick at a party, but apparently that’s how she felt while dating a guy who came from some serious breeding, and all those feelings explode in a takedown that feels a little more injurious maybe even than “All Too Well,” in its much more comical way. If she were going to have only one song on “Red” that specifically called out an ex’s indie-music snobbery, “We Are Never Getting Back Together” was the route to go, but in the present day this makes for some excellent C&W bonus vengeance.

From “Red (Taylor’s Version)” (2022)

[Performed April 30 in Atlanta, GA]

This marked the very beginning of the bonus track phenomenon for Swift — the leadoff to the deluxe part of the debut album’s deluxe edition. And what a start it was: In a career full of literally hundreds of hooky choruses, “I’m Only Me When I’m With You” has one of the hookiest. One thing that’s unique about it is how the last part of the chorus lands on an instrumental guitar-and-fiddle riff, not a vocal climax — not the usual way to go, but Swift has never been one for playing exactly by the rules. Remarkably, this wasn’t even released as a single, and it didn’t last for long in her live sets (although she did, thankfully, pull it out once on the Eras Tour). For almost any other country artist, this would have been the encore in their live show for the next 20 or 30 years; for Swift, it’s more like an asterisk or after-thought, but one that’ll bring a full-on dose of exhilaration when you remember to go back to it.

From “Taylor Swift (Deluxe Edition)” (2008)

[Performed June 30 in Cincinnati, OH]

While it lasted, the career-reshaping teaming of Swift with co-writer/producers Max Martin and Shellback — which made up swaths of three key albums (“Red,” “1989” and “Reputation” — fell into the can-do-no-wrong category. But for all the signature songs they created together, from “We Are Never Getting Back Together” to “Style,” the peak of their collaboration in terms of sheer ear candy might have been a number that for whatever reason got delegated to bonus track: “New Romantics.” That moment when the backing track drops out and all we hear is Swift’s multi-tracked “Ah ah ah ah ah ah“? It’s not exactly Swift’s most meaningful moment on record, but it probably is her greatest five-second sheer sugar rush. (Individual bits and pieces of her current chart smash, “Cruel Summer,” would come in a close second.) When she does get back to using her words, they’re good ones — an evocation of a free-and-easy group lifestyle that comes off as part social critique, full embrace. When Swift sang “The best people in life are free,” it came off as almost the antithesis of the “Love Story” ethos… definitely the new Taylor coming to the phone.

From “1989 (Deluxe Edition)” (2014)

[Not yet performed on the Eras Tour]

If I had to pick just one song to demonstrate Swift’s songwriting genius to a non-believer, it would be “Right Where You Left Me,” the rare bonus track that is arguably better than any of the standard songs on the album in question — and “Evermore” is not just one of her best albums but one of the greatest records of our time, so this isn’t a small compliment. It’s in the same rough vein as “All Too Well,” as a portrait of obsession, but completely different in the manner of writing; whereas that one revels in a stream of consciousness, this is the picture of writerly discipline, with not a note or word in place where anything else would do. With its tightly wound wordiness beginning right at the cold opening — no wonder she had to do some stops and restarts when she performed this in July on the Eras Tour — Swift is assuring us that she is the most loquacious ghost who ever lived. Not literally dead, just frozen in spirit at the exact moment when she got dumped. It’s not one of her strictly confessional songs; she’s an Everywoman, or Everyspectre, in this one, singing a sad anthem for anyone who’s ever fixated on the exact moment when the One That Got Away made an unexpected formal exit. Her picture of herself haunting the restaurant where things went wrong is nearly comical: “Dust collected on my pinned-up hair / ‘m sure that you got a wife out there / Kids and Christmas, but I’m unaware / ‘Cause I’m right where I cause no harm…” The imagery should make you laugh, unless you relate, in which case this figurative ghost story will send a chill down your spine every time.

From “Evermore (Deluxe Edition)” (2020)

[Performed July 28 in Santa Clara, CA]

It feels a bit like cheating to pit this particular bonus track, which has its basis in a shorter version that’s been a fan favorite forever, against all the deluxe or Vault songs that really never saw the light of day on a standard album. But a Vault track this is, in its unexpurgated form, which is the only form that will matter to fans for the rest of recorded history. Part of the genius of the full-length expansion is how, besides additional verses, it adds what seem to be a series of codas at the end, without ever changing its essential melody so much that it feels like a bridge or even basic verse/chorus structure is interrupting the spell of what feels like an angry 10-minute mantra. Her evocation of a “sacred prayer” in this epic version somehow seems fitting, if your worldview includes cursing heartbreakers out as part of a spiritual practice. It’s always implicit in Swift’s work that upsetting feelings are something to indulge in, not avoid — and here, with room to spread out and entertain each last bitter thought, indulgent form meets function. Who’d ever want to get over a split when you could have this tune running on cyclical replay, forever? Swift may be a mastermind, but even she couldn’t have calculated how reconstructing the scraps of this messy confessional would turn a cult favorite into the oddet, most essential “pop” song of the 2020s.

From “Red (Taylor’s Version)” (2022)

[Performed every night on the Eras Tour]