We Need to Calm Down: a Taylor Swift Podcast

On this Thursday episode, Taylor gives the WNTCD podcast a history lesson about a beautiful house and its legendary previous owner. Joe dives deep into the history of Holiday House, Rebekah Harkness and teaches Devon all about the “madness” she got up to and the legacy that Taylor carries on now that she owns Holiday House. Also, thanks to Taylor dropping ‘the lakes’ on Spotify, we introduce a new segment to the show “Should’ve Said So” where we address new content we might have missed (like the launch of this song two days ago). We look forward to more of this segment and other new segments with glorious Taylor Swift puns.

Devon and Joe have launched a new type of episode: Between the Lines. Some of the songs on folklore are way too lyrically dense to just pick a couple lines to dissect, so we're dedicating a whole episode to picking apart every line in some of the songs. Our first episode pores over cardigan, the first single, and the first song in the folklore "love triangle". Join us as we dive deeper than ever into every single line of this wonderfully written song.

We’ve employed a new strategy for this album. We have removed the lyrical dive from this breakdown and will be releasing a new episode “Between the Lines” where we go extremely in depth on certain songs line-by-line. So look out for that!

Devon and Joe take turns going off on some of our favorite things about the first “single” from folklore. We go over some of the context around this focus track, Devon teaches Joe some incredible things about the production of the song, while Joe pops off an English class research paper on the music video. We really like this song.

On a typical Thursday night, we’re breaking down our first track from folklore! Yes we’re moving to a different posting schedule where we will be breaking down a track every other Thursday, in addition to our usual Tuesday episodes.

On this episode we break down the very first song on folklore, the 1. We dive into the production and music behind the track, some of the lyrics that jumped out at us, and try really hard to make Devon love this great song. We also try a new segment called End Games towards the end of the show!

folklore has been out for over a week now, we took a week off to fully digest the album, feel the lyrics, and bath in the melodies. Usually we take a deep dive into lyrics in our individual song breakdowns, but we thought it was important to do a high level run at all of the lyrics that immediately jumped out to us at the beginning. From lines we can't help but scream, to lines that absolutely break us, join us on a journey through arguably the most lyrically dense album Taylor Alison Swift has ever graced us with.

Now that we've had a full day to marinate and resonate and ruminate and contemplat- we've been listening to folklore non-stop for 24 hours. We've been dissecting the lyrics, the grooves, the beats, the music. We decide to pour out everything we felt in our first 24 hours with this truly remarkable record. We go track by track and discuss all 16 tracks, our overall thoughts about the themes of the album and give our (finalized) initial rankings for the songs.

Taylor Swift sent our world into disarray this morning by announcing a brand new album dropping tonight (7/24) at midnight. Devon and Joe took as much time researching, reading, and compiling everything they could about this completely out of the blue release and put it into one long reaction emergency episode. Join us as we make guesses, propose theories and discuss everything about our new era: folklore.

Thanks to the most meta event in the history of pop culture, Taylor Swift's music has inspired a movie, a movie that later went on to inspire a Taylor Swift song. In the business we call that a Full Circle. Someone Great is that movie. Devon and Joe grab the tissues and endure a movie inspired by Taylor Swift’s Clean, and a couple of nine years going through a break up. Between sobbing, we tell you our thoughts about the film, talk about its references to Taylor (and Taylor’s references to the movie), and gush over a beautifully directed rom-com.

Every Taylor Swift song is the best song ever made. But thanks to the power of data, numbers, and spreadsheets, Devon and Joe were able to mathematically determine Taylor Swift's (relatively) least popular songs across her seven albums. Using this data, we pick our absolute favorite Taylor songs that get the least amount of love and explain what we like so much about these loveless tracks.

Taylor has officially come out saying she is straight, that doesn’t stop us from reading into the conspiracy theory of Gaylor Swift. Devon compiled TWO slideshows and presents her findings and theories from the internet to attempt to convince Joe that Taylor might, possibly, just maybe, be just a little gay.