Taylor Swift and Jimmy Fallon gave fans a guided tour through the tracks on her latest album, sharing the inspirations behind early fan-favorites like “The Life of Ophelia,” “Opalite,” “Father Figure,” and “Wood.”
Taylor Swift is riding high at number one on the charts with her latest album, The Life of a Showgirl. Bigger and bolder than ever, she basically took over The Tonight Show on Monday night, with one segment debunking some of the biggest rumors about her, which you can read about here, and another taking a deep dive into the album.
At hear heart, Taylor Swift is a storyteller, with many fans enjoying how each album is a snapshot of a period in her life. This snapshot, as she’s explained, is a lot about her life as the titular “Showgirl” when she was on her record-breaking Eras Tour. But it’s also about her relationship with Travis Kelce — ahem — and this joyous chapter in her life.
Taylor Swift Addresses Selena Gomez Wedding Speech & Super Bowl Rumors: ‘It’s False!’ – Click image for related story
As Taylor told Jimmy Fallon, so much of this music and this particular era for her is about having fun with her fans. They were certainly loving every moment of this — and surprising both Taylor and Jimmy by knowing every single lyric to every song played.
Taking the format of a podcast, with Taylor joking this was only her second podcast appearance after she announced this album on New Heights with her now-fiancée, she talked about why Sabrina Carpenter was the only star for the title track and shared the inspirations behind some of the album’s most notable tracks like “Opalite,” “Father Figure,” “Elizabeth Taylor,” “The Fate of Ophelia” and — of course — “Wood.”
“Opalite”
“You guys had like six minutes to learn all the words and you know them,” Taylor marveled as the audience started singing along to this — and every track. “That’s unbelievable.”
When Jimmy asked what even opalite is, Taylor explained it’s a “man-made opal … and I thought it was interesting imagery and a cool metaphor for [how] life isn’t always going to give you what you want, you’re not always going to get your way.”
“You’re going to get your heart broken, things are gonna happen, chaos will ensue, but you have to pick your own happiness. You choose it,” she continued. “It doesn’t always choose you — it doesn’t show up knocking on your door — you have to sometimes make your own happiness, just like man-made opalite.”
“How do you write this?” Jimmy asked. “Do you just wake up in the middle of the night and go, ‘Opalite’ and you write it down?”
“Yeah, that’s literally how it happens,” Taylor explained, only it’s not just at night — it’s at any given moment when inspirations trikes.
Who Is Taylor Swift’s CANCELLED! About? See Full Lyrics and Speculation! – Click image for related story
“Wish List”
As it turns out, sometimes Taylor gets inspiration from some of the most unexpected places. “Just, like, go with me here,” she told Jimmy and the audience as she explained the surprising inspiration for this track.
“You know in Happy Gilmore when he has his happy place and that’s where he goes when he’s stressed out or the world’s really getting him down?” she asked. “And he’s really like going through it and he just, like, goes to this place in his mind and that’s his happy place?”
“I just wanted a chorus that basically shows you what mine is and sounds exactly like mine would sound,” she explained. “It’s like, this is utopia for me. That’s where I go when I’m stressed out is that fantasy.”
“Wood”
An instant fan-favorite, and perhaps the track that stirred up the most speculation and interest from the moment its name was revealed, Taylor managed to say without saying that it is exactly what fans think it is. But it wasn’t always that way! Honestly!
“I brought this into the studio and I was like, I wanna do sort of like, I wanna like do a throwback kind of timeless sounding song and I have this idea about, ‘I ain’t gotta knock on wood’ and we would knock on wood and it would be all these superstitions,” she explained. “It really started out in a very innocent place.”
“It started out like– I don’t know what happened, man,” she finally said with a wry smile.” I got in there, we started vibing and, I don’t know, I don’t know how we got here — but I love the song so much!”
She’s not alone in that.
Taylor Swift Reveals Mom’s Reaction to Wood — as She Explains Her Raunchy Lyrics – Click image for related story
“The Life of a Showgirl” (featuring Sabrina Carpenter)
“I’ve been writing this album to be around the themes of show business and a public life, because honestly, we all have a public life now. We all are mandating our relationship with social media and social circles and gossip,” Taylor said of the inspiration behind the title track — and the whole album.
“We’d been dealing with kind of themes like that and sprinkling it throughout the record, but I had it in my notes, ‘you don’t know the life of a showgirl,'” she continued. “I was just like, I’ve gotta figure out how this fits in and all of a sudden this song comes together and the first thought I had was, Sabrina Carpenter.”
As for why the young star immediately came to mind, Taylor calls her the “quintessential showgirl. She is such a funny person, she’s so tough in the right ways and soft and vulnerable in the right ways to be an artist that’s dealing with the kind of just absolute mayhem that these artists get subjected to when you’re putting out art publicly.”
Sabrina joins Taylor on the track, singing the second verse, which Taylor admitted she “kind of wrote” for the “Manchild” singer. She explained that the character was “a menace, the baby of the family and Lennox, her father, whored her out like all men did, her mother took pills and played tennis.” Of Sabrina, she though, “I just know she’s gonna have fun singing this, I know it’s her type of lyric, she just loves to write like a clever little jab at — men.”
Who Is Taylor Swift’s ‘Ruin the Friendship’ About? It’s Emotional — And Not About Blake Lively – Click image for related story
When Jimmy argued that Taylor and Sabrina are among the few people who might be able to relate to one another on their level of fame, Taylor countered that it’s both true and not true at all.
“I can’t really relate to the pressure that Travis is under out there on the field, you know. I’ve never had 300-pound men running at me trying to hurt me, you know what I mean?” she said. “And the same way with Sabrina, I’ve never come up as a new artist in the moment that she’s coming up where she’s had social media. I remember when someone told me about Instagram and it was on my second or third record.”
“So I’ll never be able to relate to their experience,” she continued. “We’ll never be able to have identical experiences, but as sort of entertainers, one of our main jobs, I think, is to be a mirror for people. You look into the art we make, you see yourself back. The way you feel about our art has a lot to do with the life experience you’re having at this point in time.”
“I definitely think that Sabrina and every other artist out there doing this can relate to that, so in that way, I do feel like we all can relate to each other,” she said.
Everything Taylor Swift Said About Travis Kelce Proposal & Wedding in UK Interviews – Click image for related story
“Father Figure”
“That song was so much fun to write,” Swift said of the track inspired by George Michael’s song of the same name. She explained, “It’s like a protege-mentor and the relationship between the two. And the power dynamics and sort of the idea that the power could flip, and somebody could betray somebody.”
“And this is written from the perspective of the mentor to the protege,” she added, sharing another unexpected inspiration. “I kept thinking about that scene in Succession where Logan looks at his kids and says, ‘I love you but you are not serious people.'”
“I think about that scene constantly,” Taylor continued. “I just think it’s one of the coolest scenes ever. And I was like, I wanna write a song that has that energy of Logan Roy being like, ‘You bit the hand that fed you and you do not possess the vernacular to be doing this.'”
“But I also have really related to the protege perspective in so many of these situations, right?” she said. “Like, I relate to the younger one when I’m listening to this song, even though it’s from the perspective of the father figure character. That’s why I like this song so much.”
As for the dropping of another risqué word, in the chorus of this track, Jimmy couldn’t help alluding to it, laughing, “Did she just say that?”
“Yes, you know, it’s entertainment. It’s my one job,” Taylor said dramatically, admitting with a cheeky grin, “The spice level on this album high … It is what it is, you know?”
Best Reactions to Taylor Swift’s ‘The Life of a Showgirl’ Album, Travis Kelce References & Charli xcx Speculation – Click image for related story
“Elizabeth Taylor”
“Why Elizabeth Taylor? What is the connection?” Jimmy asked. After all, she’s not just mentioned on the track, but her name is the title. But in Taylor’s mind, she’s more than earned that title honor just by being so fearlessly herself in the face of everything.
Taylor described her as “the ultimate icon role model when I look to somebody who had immense pressure on them, was extremely scrutinized, [and] she kept making more and more daring art.”
“It’s almost like the more polarizing people were about her, the more she just kept doing even more challenging roles, taking bigger risks,” she continued. “She’s out here at the height of whatever scrutiny she may have been under at the height of her fame, [and] she’s winning Oscars and not letting anything stop her from doing it for the reasons that she’d always done it.”
She went on to heap praise on the screen icon for using humor as a weapon, saying that she did much the same when she was being criticized as a “serial dater.” Enter “Blank Space”: “Let me write a song about that, that’s hilarious,” Taylor quipped.
“I think you have to be able to combat negativity with humor. That’s my favorite thing about her,” Taylor explained. “I just wanted to make a song that felt like as luxurious and glamorous as she was in sort of the verses and the bridge. We had a harp, we pulled out all the stops for her. Everybody should be obsessed with Elizabeth Taylor.”
How KPOPPED Made Billlie Realize They Can ‘Really Grow Further’ as a Group (Exclusive) – Click image for related story
“The Fate of Ophelia”
For her debut single from the album, Taylor explained that the language of the song was very particular and intentional. “We wanted to take just like different just different tones of speaking like almost different time periods of the way that people used to speak.”
“Like, there’s certain like Shakespearean ways of phrasing things and terminology, like, ‘Tis locked inside my memory and only you possess the key,'” she explained. “But there’s also like, ‘Pledge allegiance to your hands, your team, your vibes.’ We wanted to kind of blend like now and then and try to juxtapose those together in a way that hopefully works.”
For Taylor, the whole experience of making the album and the video and “just this whole process of this song coming out into the world — I see people, like, dancing to it online and they’re absolutely crushing it — It is unbelievable. It’s so fun to have fun, and I really appreciate you guys having fun with me.”
For all about how she turned “The Fate of Ophelia” into an Eras Tour reunion extravaganza, check out the video below.