In case you hadn’t heard, Taylor Swift recently released a slew of (sort of) new music. These songs, packaged together as an extended (very extended) album titled “Red (Taylor’s Version),” are a collection of material released earlier in her career, but which she wanted repackaged with her own spin, independent from the dictatorial influence of Big Music.
At the tail end of this 30-song collection comes a 10-minute rendition of “All Too Well,” one of her signature Very Sad Breakup Songs. The song, in its original form, was already viscerally heart-wrenching. We wanted to examine what happens when you make something viscerally heart-wrenching but twice as long. These are our stories.
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Ted Kluck
Our modern media environment—driven as it is by streaming platforms, binge-watching, binge-listening, and everything-at-everybody’s-fingertips-at-all-times—offers little in the way of communal water-cooler-the-next-day experiences.
Enter Taylor Swift’s freshly-released ten-minute version of “All Too Well,” which is a breakup song about her relationship with Jake Gyllenhaal circa a decade ago but is also a song about how awesome it is to fall in love. It’s a song that I love listening to both versions of, but the ten-minute version of which offered a Super-Bowl-esque communal-water-cooler-moment – the likes of which I hadn’t experienced in a long time.
Here’s some baseline Thinking About Taylor Swift Stuff, to me: First, she’s an incredible memoirist. She remembers and archives experiences really well. Second, her songs are all about concrete imagery, as opposed to being vague and opaque and “poetic” or whatever. In general, I think sounding “poetic” (or whatever) is just most of the time overrated. Third, she has preternatural gifts in the area of understanding innately what audiences want and then delivering that thing. Her career bears witness to all three of these things, despite the fact that I am the opposite of the “target demo” for any of her music. Regarding demographics and by way of caveat, I am a middle-aged man who only recently discovered Taylor Swift’s work, thanks to some very persistent students here at Union.
“All Too Well” might be the perfect song, due to the concreteness of the imagery and the fact that while it is “about” somebody else, it’s actually “about” you, the listener. As far as things that are magical about Taylor Swift’s music go, I think this might actually be the most magical thing. Because what do audiences in 2021 most want, if not to, ultimately, make everything about them?
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Keely Vaughn
“All Too Well (10-Minute Version) (Taylor’s Version) (From The Vault)”—a song as long and complex as its title—is a masterpiece. I don’t say that just because I’m a fan of Taylor Swift’s music; in fact, I think I could hate her and still recognize the song’s genius. It’s that powerful, and it’s that remarkable. Taylor Swift has done something that few artists, if any, have ever done: topping the charts with an unconventionally long version of a near decade-old song.
“All Too Well” has long been my favorite Taylor song, and I’ll admit I had doubts about a lengthier version. I wondered if something so good could really be improved upon—as it turns out, it can.
“All Too Well” (10-Minute Version) is a beautifully-crafted ballad that grips you from the first word and doesn’t let you go for the entire lengthy experience. The new lyrics perfectly meld with the old, magnifying a story I thought I knew into something even more jarringly, beautifully visceral. It’s burgeoning love and bitter heartbreak, joy and despair, pain and euphoria. It’s sometimes scathing and sometimes sad. It’s the words of a broken 20-year-old redefined by her own self, years later, matured and healed. It’s a story intertwined as much with the listener as with the artist herself. And it’s probably the best thing she’s ever created.
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Samuel Stettheimer
My experience with Taylor Swift’s music is more limited than that of the above assessments. I know little of her personal history and public life. I was thus surprised while listening to “All Too Well” to discover the natural viscerality of Swift’s descriptions. Note I don’t term this as “relatability,” which is too often applied to this music.
Swift accomplishes a really… weird… rhetorical effect: she generically describes specific experiences. Her anecdotes of this remembered past time are full of details—running red lights, dancing around a refrigerator, wearing plaid shirts and driving through the wind— those sort of tangible pictures that lend an easier grasp of the feeling she aims to convey. Even audiences who do not directly share the same experiences—such as myself who would never be so fiscally irresponsible as to wear out a refrigerator light—can plug into the bigger mood of the song. It’s almost a contradiction: by making the images of her experience more specific and thus less relatable, the meanings of the pictures become more impactful to a broader audience.
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Samantha Glas
Swift’s original classic “All Too Well” is rounded out with descriptive narrative. There is a reason it has become a staple in the music industry: “All Too Well” is a prime example of Swift’s storytelling ability. While the new 10-minute version does not feel as cohesive as its original release, the additional lyrics—for instance: “and I was never good at telling jokes / but the punchline goes / ‘I’ll get older, but your lovers stay my age'”—provide a gutting honesty that is one of Swift’s defining qualities in songwriting.
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Good talk. Let’s all go buy some Kleenex, and maybe listen to a shorter, happier song for a bit. Or, if you want, you can go listen to the other 29 songs from the album and be sad for a whole lot longer. Your call.
