Taylor Swift Reveals Her 3 ‘Secret’ Categories For Song Lyrics
Taylor Swift is the queen of Easter eggs, and her new Midnights album revealed one she tucked into a speech at a recent awards show. Here’s how the singer said she divides her lyrics into three categories, and how she spilled the words to one of her newest songs over a month before it came out.
Taylor Swift revealed she ‘secretly’ divided her lyrics into 3 categories
On Sept. 20, Taylor Swift was honored with the Songwriter-Artist of the Decade award by the Nashville Songwriters Association International. During her acceptance speech, the singer opened up about her songwriting process. As she told the audience, “I’ve never talked about this publicly before because, well, it’s dorky, but I have in my mind, secretly, established genre categories for lyrics I write. Three of them, to be exact.”
She continued to name the categories, saying, “They are affectionately titled quill lyrics, fountain pen lyrics, and glitter gel pen lyrics… I came up with these categories based on what writing tool I imagined having in my hand when I scribbled it down, figuratively.” Swift added, “I don’t actually have a quill anymore; I broke it once when I was mad.”
She described the quill style as “if the words and phrasings are antiquated.” “If my lyrics sound like a letter written by Emily Dickinson’s grandmother while sowing a lace curtain, that’s me writing in the quill genre,” Swift explained.
The singer said that most of her lyrics fall into category number two, the “fountain pen style.” “Fountain pen style means a modern storyline or references, with a poetic twist,” she said. “Placing yourself and whoever’s listening right into the room where it all happened: the love, the loss, everything. The songs I categorize in this style sound like confessions scribbled and sealed in an envelope, but too brutally honest to ever send.”
And the third category is called “glitter gel pen,” which Swift described as “frivolous, carefree, bouncy, syncopated perfectly to the beat.” According to Swift, glitter gel pen lyrics “don’t take themselves seriously” and “are the drunk girl at the party who tells you that you look like an angel in the bathroom.”
Taylor Swift gave examples of each category of her songs
Besides naming her secret lyrics categories, Taylor Swift also gave examples from her discography of each type of song.
For the “quill lyrics” category, Swift mentioned her song “ivy” from the 2020 album evermore. “How’s one to know / I’d meet you where the spirit meets the bones in a faith forgotten land / In from the snow, your touch brought forth an incandescent glow / Tarnished but so grand,” she recited.
For “fountain pen lyrics,” her most used category, Swift gave the example of her song “All Too Well.” “’Cause there we are again in the middle of the night / We’re dancing round the kitchen in the refrigerator light / Down the stairs, I was there / I remember it all too well / And there we are again when nobody had to know / You kept me like a secret but I kept you like an oath / Sacred prayer and we’d swear / To remember it all too well.”
And for “glitter gel pen lyrics,” Swift named her 2014 hit, “Shake It Off.” “My ex-man brought his new girlfriend / She’s like, ‘Oh my God!’ but I’m just gonna shake / And to the fella over there with the hella good hair / Won’t you come on over baby? / We can shake, shake, shake.”
Swift explained that glitter gel pen lyrics are “what we need every once in a while in these fraught times in which we live.”
The singer secretly dropped ‘Midnights’ lyrics into her speech about categories
When Taylor Swift described her three secret song categories, she described “fountain pen lyrics” as “basically trying to paint a vivid picture, a situation, down to the chipped paint on the doorframe and the incense dust on the vinyl shelf.”
She gave her speech one month before releasing her Midnights album, which contains lyrics almost exactly matching her words at the awards show. In the opening lines of the song “Maroon,” Swift croons, “When the morning came / We were cleaning incense off your vinyl shelf / ’Cause we lost track of time again.”
Fans know this was probably not a coincidence, as Swift is the queen of Easter eggs. She was likely teasing her new lyrics a month before they came out.
