All Too Much
I went to the Taylor Swift vault and all I got was this stupid scarf
Fans and critics have devoted a lot of energy, over the last decade and a half, to charting the Taylor Swift songbook, to the point that they have rendered cliche most discussion of her lyrical motifs (the infatuation with fairy-tale imagery and pre-Nixon glamor; the retellings of her tabloid romances) and her structural habits (a knack for killer bridges, a shift in point of view during the final verse or chorus). They tend to overlook her facility in describing the quality of light, which has been just as much a definite, if not so sui generis, throughline amid her stylistic evolution. Consider the shimmering wet asphalt on “Fearless,” the knifelike swipe of high beams in “Treacherous,” the broken reflection spinning above her most vulnerable song, “Mirrorball”: Swift knows that the lighting of a scene sublimates its meaning just as powerfully as its score does.
For my money, the best of these moments is in the second chorus of “All Too Well,” when Swift’s narrator flashes back to a moment “in the middle of the night / We dance around the kitchen in the refrigerator light.” In 15 words, Swift evokes intimacy, spontaneity, desire — the out-of-time magnetism of a relationship’s honeymoon phase, flanked by mossy shadows and bathed in a soft yellow glow. It is as instantly career-defining a cinematic image as “Screen door slams, Mary’s dress waves” or “It’s coming on Christmas, they’re cutting down trees.” And here is the amazing thing: When you picture it, don’t you imagine the kitchen being the one in the house you grew up in, or the place where you felt most at home?
Nearly a decade after its release, “All Too Well” is generally considered Swift’s masterpiece, though this particular line doesn’t get as much attention as the climax that follows it, when the narrator accuses her ex-lover of being “so casually cruel in the name of being honest.” That moment is as heart-on-its-sleeve as “All Too Well” gets, which is part of what makes the song work. It’s not about a particular relationship so much as it is one about the potency of memory, the way it can swaddle and strangle at once. It’s through the vivid, tactile scenes preceding the climax, and through a denouement revealing those memories’ weight on the narrator’s ex, that the song earns its catharsis.
Its power is somewhat diminished in the newer version of the song, recently re-released and re-litigated, presumably at the behest of Big Parenthesis, as “All Too Well (10 Minute Version) (Taylor’s Version) (From the Vault).” This longer version, we’re meant to understand, is much closer to the unfinished draft of the song that Swift wrote with Liz Rose before the two worked it into its final form for Red. Rose has said that she was more of an editor on the song, and the difference between the two versions should be obvious to anyone who’s ever handed a too-long draft to their editor, especially a draft of something emotionally exhausting to write. Everything great about the song is there in the longer version, but it took a fresh set of eyes to cut everything that didn’t work.
Not that all of these darlings would have been easy to kill. “You kept me like a secret, but I kept you like an oath” is a particularly great line — had Swift and Rose kept it in rather than the “casually cruel” quip, it would probably be just as beloved. A scene in which the ex fails to show up for the narrator’s birthday party is effectively cutting, too, and with some trimming could slot into a version of the song that’s still tighter than the vault rendition but with a slower, queasier build-up than the original.
The 10-minute “All Too Well” is also laden with definite first-draftisms, though — clumsy wordplay (“every time you double-cross my mind”), cliches with only the barest attempt at subversion (“they say all’s well that ends well, but I’m in a new hell”). There’s a goofy, possibly anachronistic line about a “fuck the patriarchy” keychain that telegraphs the ex as the type of guy who puts “male feminist” in his Tinder bio. And where the original lands perfectly, the extended version sails by its resolution, tacking on a farther-in-the-future epilogue with a shot at the ex’s predilection for younger women and a maudlin fourth-wall break: “Just between us, did the love affair maim you too?” The climax hits before the song is even halfway over.
Some of these lyrics seem more likely to have been added in 2021 than 2011, and it strikes me as normal and human for Swift to have evolving feelings on a relationship she had more than a decade ago, especially one with a much older man. Perhaps she now feels inclined to be straightforward about the relationship in a way that she didn’t feel then. There’s a good argument to be made, too, for the artistic merits of revisiting such an explosive song with a more mature perspective. In practice, though, the additions undercut the emotional ambiguity that made the song so memorable. In a great New York Times piece, Lindsay Zoladz wrote that both versions of the song are about “the weaponization of memory.” I’d argue that the longer version also weaponizes the song itself: It turns a photo album into an instrument of blunt-force trauma.
Whether the 10-minute “All Too Well” is better than the original, or even whether it’s good, may for many people be beside the point. Hand-wringing over the parasocial relationships fans have with indie stars like Phoebe Bridgers and Mitski seems quaint next to Swift’s career; many devoted fans, clamoring for any scrap of autobiography Swift is willing to dispense, clearly relish the additional verses for content alone. The space between Taylor Swift the real-life pop-star and Taylor Swift the best friend/confidante/underdog heroine fans imagine her as has always been precariously narrow, in large part because so many of them grew up alongside her music — beginning with an album that had four hits and made her an instant celebrity as a twang-affecting teenager. Though she’s one of the most successful musicians in the world, she has cultivated an image of accessibility, writing directly to fans on social media and releasing diary excerpts alongside Lover. The central tension of her career is the question of how many of these gestures are the work of a painfully earnest person and how many are part of the Big Business Of Being Taylor Swift.
Maybe that’s what I find a little tragic about the “All Too Well” director’s cut. Because Swift has lived so much of her life in public, fans have suspected for years that “All Too Well” concerned a certain ex. But the song itself could be a discrete thing, separate from the flashbulb stills of Swift’s personal entanglements, if you wanted it to be — nothing but a fucking great song by a generational songwriter. In being bold enough to let her listeners live in those scenes, Swift made something more expansive, even if at half the length of her original vision. For all the original’s visual force, it’s ironic that the extended version gets the 15-minute short-film treatment. It’s also appropriate, though, in how that video begins, with a senior quote-worthy Pablo Neruda epigraph. The original “All Too Well” shows everything it has to say through a careful series of scenes. The 10-minute version splashes the text across the screen.