The dream stayed with her! Taylor Swift explained what led to her writing the 1989 track “All You Had to Do Was Stay” during a recent interview with Ryan Adams for GQ magazine.
“I had a dream that my ex showed up at my door, knocked on my door, and I opened it up, and I was about ready to launch into the perfect thing to say,” Swift, 25, recalled, without naming the ex in question. “And instead, all that would come out of my mouth was that high-pitched chorus of people singing, ‘Stay.'”
She continued: “You go to say something else, and it’s just like, ‘Stay, stay, stay.’ And I woke up and I was like, ‘Oh, that was mortifying, but that’s kind of a cool vocal part.'”
Swift gave the same explanation to Us Weekly in October 2014. “It was one of those dreams where you have sort of [have a] social embarrassment happen and you can’t stop it cause you’re in a sleep state. Basically this dream was how I was trying to talk to someone, a very important person to me at the time,” she said. “I woke up incredibly weirded out and decided that I was going to write it into a song. I’d already kind of been working on this one song so it ended up being the perfect kind of weird vocal part that really completed this song.”
As previously reported, Adams, 40, was so taken by Swift’s fifth studio album that he released his own version of the record last month. During their one-on-one chat, Swift discussed how her version of “All You Had to Do Was Stay” compared to his.
“My version of it is like, ‘All you had to do was stay. Sorry about it. I don’t miss you. And now you’re back,'” Swift said. “[Yours was] all you had to do was stay. You broke my heart. That’s all you had to do.”
Swift has previously penned hits about exes Jake Gyllenhaal, John Mayer, Taylor Lautner, Harry Styles, and Joe Jonas.
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