It’s a love story! Taylor Swift offered another taste of her upcoming seventh album, Lover, on Friday, August 16, with the release of the romantic title track.
“Lover,” which Jack Antonoff coproduced, is a love letter to the Grammy winner’s boyfriend of three years, Joe Alwyn, and gives fans a rare glimpse inside the couple’s ultra-private romance.
“This has one of my favorite bridges,” she said of the song in her Vogue September 2019 cover story. “I love a bridge, and I was really able to go to Bridge City.”
The single opens with Swift, 29, singing about leaving “the Christmas lights up ’til January” because “this is our place, we make the rules.” After asking, “Have I known you 20 seconds or 20 years?” she kicks off the ethereal chorus: “Can I go where you go? Can we always be this close forever and ever? And ah, take me out, and take me home / You’re my, my, my, my lover.”
The pop star previously sang the lyric “take me home” in her hit “Style,” which had a very different theme. The 2014 single was widely rumored to be about her brief relationship with Harry Styles.
The second verse of “Lover” calls back to Swift’s 2017 album cut “New Year’s Day.” On the latter, she sings about friends leaving her place after celebrating New Year’s Eve — “There’s glitter on the floor after the party / Girls carrying their shoes down in the lobby” — but on the new track, she suggests those “friends crash in the living room” since “this is our place, we make the call.”
Perhaps the most intriguing lyric of all comes next: “I loved you three summers now, honey, but I want ‘em all.” The news of Swift’s romance with Alwyn, 28, did not break until May 2017, but she has hinted multiple times that they started dating the year prior, which “Lover” seems to confirm.
Additionally, the “three summers” lyric contrasts with the Pennsylvania native’s 2006 debut, “Tim McGraw,” in which she sang, “In a box beneath my bed / Is a letter that you never read / From three summers back.”
During the aforementioned bridge of the song, Swift hints that she and the British actor are ready to take the next step in their relationship. She asks the “ladies and gentlemen” in the room to “please stand” before singing, “I take this magnetic force of a man to be my lover / My heart’s been borrowed and yours has been blue / All’s well that ends well to end up with you.”
Similarly, in her 2017 tune “Gorgeous,” Swift sang, “You should think about the consequence / Of your magnetic field being a little too strong.” The “all’s well that ends well” line, on the other hand, is the title of a William Shakespeare play, and also possibly a reference to Swift’s 2012 fan favorite “All Too Well.”
Lover is out Friday, August 23.
