Taylor Swift may be pretty tight-lipped about her relationships in real life. (Who can blame her?) But when it comes to her songs, it's not always too tough to figure out when she's reminiscing about a former flame.
"Out of the Woods," off her 1989 album, is one such track. We've long suspected the lyrics are about Harry Styles, who Swift was seeing way back in 2012. And — though she hasn't admitted that she penned it with Styles in mind — she's pretty much dropped every hint imaginable without making that full disclosure.
The "Blank Space" singer — who is now happily dating Calvin Harris — recently shared a pared-down acoustic piano version of "Out of the Woods" with her Twitter followers. The performance itself is gorgeous and stirring, but it's her explanation of what the song is really about that piqued our curiosity:
"I'm going to play you a song that I wrote about a relationship that I was in, that the number-one feeling I felt in the whole relationship was anxiety, because it felt very fragile, it felt very tentative," she says while sitting on the piano bench.
"It always felt like, okay, what's the next roadblock? What's the next thing that's going to deter this? How long do we have before this turns into just an awful mess and we break up?" she continues.
"I think a lot of relationships can be very solid and that's kind of what you hope for — solid and healthy. But that's not always what you get. And it doesn't mean that it's not special and extraordinary just to have a relationship that's fragile and somehow meaningful in that fragility."
Well, that little speech plucked at all our heartstrings. Hear Taylor say it herself and listen to the full "Out of the Woods" performance in the video below.
To celebrate #HappyBirthday1989, here's something from me.
Out of the Woods (solo acoustic piano performance)
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https://t.co/C6dUjyYgw3
— Taylor Swift (@taylorswift13) October 27, 2015AdvertisementADVERTISEMENT