Stephen Barker Liles is living proof that not all of Taylor Swift’s songs are about heartbreak.
The Love and Theft singer, 39, took a trip down memory lane during the latest episode of “The Bobby Bones Show” podcast, opening up about Swift, 33, writing the track “Hey Stephen” about the pair after they got close while touring together in 2008.
“[Taylor put us on the first tour we ever did,” Liles said after being asked if the song was actually about him. “It was like, she was just about to release the Fearless album so we went on our first tour and [she] wrote a song about me. We got close and it was cool.”
The song was rereleased in April 2021 when Swift dropped Fearless (Taylor’s Version) in an effort to reclaim her masters after they were bought and sold by Scooter Braun in June 2019. Fearless marked her first rerecording followed by Red (Taylor’s Version) and Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) in October 2021 and July 2023, respectively. Her fifth studio album, 1989 (Taylor’s Version), is set to drop later this month.
While Swift has had to fight against the narrative that all her songs are venomous tunes about ex-boyfriends since her career began, “Hey Stephen” — with lyrics like “I can’t help it if you look like an angel” and “I can’t help if I want to kiss you in the rain slow” — prove that Swift’s discography is filled with a full range of emotions when it comes to matters of the heart.
“It’s a nice song,” Liles said of the track. “It’s like the nicest song you could write about somebody, so that was cool.”
Swift has a history of never naming the subjects of her music — but her first five albums included secret liner notes that provided a glimpse into her inspiration. When Fearless was released, eagle-eyed fans quickly discovered that “Hey Stephen’s” code spelled out “Love and Theft.”
In a 2008 interview with CMT Radio Live, Swift played coy about the track but revealed that she wrote “Hey Stephen” as a way to express her admiration for “Stephen,” saying, “It’s just like a little musical wink to the guy that I thought was cute … I think that guy’s really cute.”
Liles later confirmed the song was penned about him — and that he heard the track before the Fearless release.
“Me and Taylor really hit it off and became really close when we were on tour together,” Liles told Taste of Country in 2011. “We had a real emotional relationship. We talked on the phone a lot. She was really cool. One day she called me up and was like, ‘Hey, I wrote a song about you.’”
The musician recalled finding the news “funny” because he had written a song about Swift the week prior.
“She was like, ‘Really!’ She asked how it went and I told her about some of the lines,” he recalled. “I didn’t tell her too much, but I told her about the main tag of the song. She was like, ‘I want to hear it!'”
Love and Theft’s hectic tour schedule kept Liles from recording and sending the song to Swift at the time — “I never really did anything with it,” he told Taste of Country — but the band laid down a raw version of the song, titled “Try to Make It Anyway,” while writing their self-titled fourth album in 2011.
“This is actually one of my favorite songs that I’ve ever written,” Liles shared at the time. “[Taylor] is awesome. I really dig Taylor. I dig what her and her family have done with her career, and I dig the person she is. I hope she’s flattered by it. As far as I know, none of the other dudes she’s been hanging out with have written a song about her.”
