Judging your own work is tricky - far better just to put it out there and let other people decide how they feel about it. So we have some sympathy for Taylor Swift, who’s just been put on the spot and asked to name her top 5 Taylor Swift songs.
The question was put to her by Stephen Colbert on The Late Show. “This is so much pressure,” began a flustered Swift, before admitting that “I’m going to need little time to get back to you on all the five.”
A disappointed Colbert, who’d been preparing to write the list down, was forced to put his pen and paper away, but Swift did throw him a pretty meaty bone by choosing her absolute favourite.
“Number 1 is All Too Well, the 10-minute version,” said Swift, and she sounded pretty sure about that. This originally appeared as a five-and-a-half minute edit on the star’s 2012 album, Red, but when Swift re-recorded the record as part of her ‘Taylor’s Version’ project, she served up the full thing, too.
That said, it could have been even longer. Speaking in 2020, Liz Rose, the song’s co-writer, said: “For All Too Well, she called me, said she had an idea and she really wanted me to help her sort it out. It was a 20-minute long song at the time so I had to help her look at the pieces and say, ‘This needs to go here, this is important’, listen to her and grab the important lines.
“We had a really good day sorting the song out. It’s a great memory to have watched her dig that out. It’s the best song we did together.”
Swift also gave Colbert another song that will probably be in her top 5 somewhere: Mirrorball, from her 2020 album, Folklore. “It came on the other day; a friend sent it to me and she was talking about it, and I put it on and I was like, mmmmmm.”
(That was a ‘mmmmmm’ of appreciation, in case you were wondering.)
Two down, three to go then, but Swift does say that she plans to complete her top 5 at some point in the future. “We could do an update at some point,” she told Colbert, who wryly pointed out that she has until next May, when his show is being taken off air. The clock’s ticking.
