Taylor Swift Explained Why She Wrote Breakup Songs For The “Lover” Album

On Wednesday, we were finally blessed with the full video of Taylor Swift’s Tiny Desk concert — part of an NPR series in which musicians play a few acoustic versions of their songs in the public radio network’s office.

She sang piano versions of “Lover” and “All Too Well” and acoustic guitar versions of “The Man” and “Death by a Thousand Cuts”. It was fantastic.

In between songs, Taylor had little chats with the (extremely lucky — like, I can’t get over how lucky) audience about her songwriting process and her love for writing breakup songs, amongst other things.

“I’ve spent quite a bit of time writing breakup songs,” she joked. “Songwriting is really just a cathartic, therapeutic thing for me, and so there are a lot of things I’ve written about in my life that were the harder things I’ve had to go through.”

So, yes, it’s safe to say Taylor has earned a reputation over the last 13 years for writing songs about love and breakups — although that’s by no means all she writes about.

And during her Tiny Desk concert, she said that she felt some interview questions about this could be detrimental to her mental health.

Introducing “Death by a Thousand Cuts”, Taylor said that throughout her career she has often been asked what would happen if she ever “got happy”.

“I’ve got a question over and over again that I think has the potential to seriously deteriorate my mental health,” she said. “The question is: ‘What will you ever do if you get happy? Like, what will you write about? Will you just never be able to write a song again?'”

And while she’d always respond with the same answer — that she would get inspiration from things like movies and books — the question would follow her.

“I woke up one day with all these heartbreak lyrics in my head, and I was like, ‘It’s still here! Yes!'” she joked. “This song is my proof that I don’t have to stop writing songs about heartache and misery. Which, for me, is incredible news.”