Taylor wants us to remember her grandmother, Marjorie, with as much emotion as she does. So, she uses one of the most powerful and memorable of all the viral storytelling secrets, which everyone should learn. And you won’t want to miss Toni’s emotional rendition of Marjorie and her personal connection to the song.

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Willow is Swift’s mythic masterpiece from Evermore. But is she singing about a good relationship or a toxic one? Joe and Toni take a deep dive into the lyrics and music video to reveal Willow’s deep connection to Cardigan and what that implies about the song’s meaning

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‘Tis the Damn Season is one of Taylor’s most emotionally complex songs. But the song repeatedly refers to Robert Frost’s famous poem The Road Not Taken, which has been called “The Most Misread Poem in America.” So, Joe and Toni decode both to reveal the devastating meaning of her song and how it connects to another poignant masterpiece from 2020, Cardigan. 

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How Swift’s bonkers Love Story reveals her Shakespearean imagination and ambition. It remains one of her most popular songs because, embedded in this bonkers fantasy-romance, is a deep understanding of the art of storytelling that is as layered as Christopher Nolan’s masterfully memorable movie.

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You Belong With Me is Taylor’s classic song about frustration in the friend zone, which hit #2 on the Billboard Hot 100. But the music video, with its fantasy happy ending, has 1.8 billion views. Joe and Toni do a deep dive to show that this song is not as simple as it seems. And they explore the deeper meaning of Swift playing both the friend-zoned girl next door and the mean girlfriend.

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Fearless is Taylor’s monster hit second studio album—and the second album she covers on the Era’s Tour. The title song is Swift’s fantasy of the perfect first date, showing how skilled a writer she was even at 17. But it also foreshadows her even greater songs to come, diving into themes she would return to again and again, as Joe and Toni discuss.

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A must-see episode as Toni sings a Taylor Swift song for the first time! She and Joe discuss why the The Archer lyrics are so brilliant, and the essential storytelling tricks you can learn from them. Finally, they debate the meaning of the sudden, ambiguous ending where the final line repeats the first line. Toni thinks it’s a happy ending, but Joe isn’t so sure.

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The title track on the Lover album turns out to mean something quite opposite to what it seems. But Joe and Toni reveal just how brilliant and bizarre the fifth song on Era’s Tour set list is, by decoding both the song and the bonkers music video. And along the way, they reveal one of Taylor’s greatest storytelling strategies, one every writer and speaker needs to embrace.

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You Need To Calm Down is Taylor Swift’s buoyant pride anthem and the fourth song on the Era’s Tour set list. But it also uses one of the most important storytelling tricks, used by everyone from Dickens to Churchill to Martin Luther King, Jr. Indeed, as Joe and Toni reveal, the song contains most of the tricks you need to know to be a memorable speaker and writer. And if people don’t remember what you say, it doesn’t matter what you say.

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The Man is one of Taylor’s most ironically meta songs. But it also repeatedly uses one of Lincoln’s favorite literary devices: a storytelling tool that you can use too to make your content go viral. The third song on the Era’s Tour set list is Taylor’s most iconically feminist song, which inspires some hilarious rants by Toni you won’t want to miss.

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