Love Story

Couples pick “Love Story” because it’s their song, or her song, or the song that played at the exact right moment in 2009. Fair enough. This is the fairytale one, the balcony one, the one where Romeo actually gets his act together. Nevermind it was written by a seventeen-year-old who was mad at her parents.

Start with the boy who inspired it, because he never even got a date out of the deal. Swift introduced a guy she liked to her family and friends, and as she told it later, every single one of them said they didn’t like him. (Come on, it was totally Joe Jonas).

She went home thinking about Romeo and Juliet, the original story of two kids whose families wanted them apart, and she landed on the thought that the only people who wanted those two together were the two of them. That became the emotional spine of the song.

But she had one big problem with ol’ Shakespeare: the ending. She loved the play and thought it could have been the best love story ever told, except Romeo and Juliet both die, which she found, in her words, too devastating to process. So the seventeen-year-old did what seventeen-year-olds do. She overruled Shakespeare. In her version nobody dies, Romeo talks to Juliet’s dad like an adult, and the whole thing ends with a proposal. She wrote it in roughly twenty minutes on her bedroom floor, feeling too inspired to stop, and recorded a rough demo the next day.

The finished song was recorded in March 2008 at Blackbird Studio in Nashville, produced by Swift with Nathan Chapman, and released that September as the lead single from her second album, Fearless, on Big Machine Records. Then it ate the world. It hit number one on the country chart, climbed to number four on the Billboard Hot 100, and became the first country song ever to top the pop radio chart.

Somewhere in there it also quietly became a wedding standard, which makes sense. It’s hard to beat a first dance song that ends with dad’s blessing and a white dress.

Then there’s the second act, the one with lawyers. In 2019, Swift’s old label sold the master recordings of her first six albums, and she announced she would re-record all of it and take her songs back. The very first re-recording she released, in February 2021, was this one: “Love Story (Taylor’s Version),” the lead single from Fearless (Taylor’s Version). It went to number one on the country chart too, making her only the second artist in history, after Dolly Parton, to top that chart with both the original and a re-recorded version of the same song. For your purposes, the useful part is that it’s the same tempo and nearly the same arrangement, played by the band that had been performing it live for a decade. Everything below works for either version, so dance to the one you like and don’t lose sleep over it.