Taylor Swift explains the meaning behind the song ‘Down Bad’

A lot of the songs on TTPD deal with the idea of heartbreak or loss in a metaphor of something else.

The metaphor in ‘Down Bad’ is that I was comparing the idea of being love bombed, where someone rocks your world and dazzles you and then just kind of abandons you as a alien obduction where you were abducted by aliens, like, this girl is abducted by aliens, but she wanted to stay with them.. and when they drop her off back in her hometown she said ‘wait, no, where are you going? I liked it there. It was weird, but it was cool, come back. and so the girl, the

character in the song, felt like, l’ve just been exposed to a whole different galaxy and universe I didn’t know was possible. How can you just put me back where I was before?”

Taylor Swift talking about her song ‘Florida!!!’

”Florida is a song I wrote with Florence + The Machine and I think I was coming up with this idea of what happens when your life doesn’t fit, or your choices you’ve made catch up to you and you’re surrounded by these harsh consequences and judgement and circumstances did not lead you to where you thought you would be and you just wanna escape from everything you’ve ever known, is there a place you could go? Haha, I’m always watching Dateline, people have these crimes that they commit where they immediately skip town and go to and they go to Florida. They try to reinvent themselves, have a new indetity, blend in. And I think when you go through a heartbreak there’s a part of you that thinks ‘I want a new name, I want a new life, I don’t want anyone to know where I’ve been or know me at all.’ So that was kind of what that was, the jumping off point behind ‘Where would you go to reinvent yourself and blend in?’ Florida!’

When I was writing the Fortnight music video, I wanted to show you the worlds I saw in my head that served as the backdrop for making this music. Pretty much everything in it is a metaphor or a reference to one corner of the album or another. For me, this video turned out to be the perfect visual representation of this record and the stories I tell in it. Post Malone blew me away on set as our tortured tragic hero and I’m so grateful to him for everything he put into this collaboration. I’m still laughing from getting to work with the coolest guys on earth, Ethan Hawke and Josh Charles (tortured poets, meet your colleagues from down the hall, the dead poets). I still can’t believe I get to work with the unfathomably brilliant Rodrigo Prieto on cinematography and my team of dream collaborators: Ethan Tobman (production design), Chancler Haynes (editor), Anthony Dimino (1st AD), Jil Hardin (producer) and Dom Thomas (executive producer). Parliament aced the VFX as always. Joseph Cassell, Lorrie Turk and Jemma Muradian made these tortured looks come to life. The entire crew made this a dream to shoot. Thank you to everyone involved and everyone who has watched it!!