The records Taylor Swift has broken in her career as a multi-talented singer/songwriter speak for themselves. Taylor believes every music artist has a specific attribute that sets them apart from other artists in the industry. For her, it is her storytelling. Throughout her 10 original studio albums, Taylor has brought her listeners on a roller coaster of emotions through her depictions of love, heartbreak, loss, jealousy, guilt, lust, regret, and so many more. Taylor’s gift of storytelling allows her to beautifully layer a song with metaphors and niche scenarios while still making all of her music, in my opinion, the most relatable in the industry.

Interpreting a song can be tricky when listening to lyrics that are deeper than the surface level of what you hear on the radio. Sometimes these lyrics are even hard to understand, but Taylor does an amazing job at making the majority of her works appeal to all demographics. Whether your age, gender, or education Taylor Swift’s work will statistically relate to you. What I mean by this is when first hearing a song by Taylor Swift you catch onto her simple choruses and the imagery she uses to set the story of her track. The catchiness and excitement lure the majority of Taylor’s fanbase to stream her songs over again, but her seemingly simple yet beautifully complicated lyricism allows for her songs to be interpreted in an extreme number of different ways. 

One of Taylor’s more popular songs, “Out Of The Woods,” off of her 2020 track, “1989,” uses catchy repetition and simple yet exciting imagery in her chorus that allows her listeners to picture something simple enough for younger or more uneducated audiences to understand, but at the same time incorporating it into a more elaborate story that everyone can relate to in some way. “Out of the Woods” is about a relationship gone bad that Taylor Swift didn’t think she could leave and that she felt she had to keep pushing through with. Taylor does not want to end the relationship because she is scared of what will come after, but in the end, discovers it was inside the relationship that she needed to leave to find herself. When listening to a Taylor Swift song the lyrics do not need to be studied and memorized, after a few listens the song will naturally just become a part of you.

 In the song “Out Of The Woods,” Yes, the woods represent arguments and difficulties of attempting to make a relationship work, but because the lyrics are calculated to relate to other scenarios, her fans who aren’t necessarily experiencing a toxic relationship could interpret this metaphor as something completely different. For listeners, the “woods” could represent any bad event that happened in their life such as a loss, addiction, or even that one person actually lost in a forest trying to get out. 

Taylor’s lyrics are just extremely interpretive and at the simplest level everyone knows what a forest is sure of, but it is about what it means to every one of her million listeners that makes her music special. She can write and produce a song that can be seen as happy or the exact opposite and this is why she is proven to be so relatable amongst everyone.