“It was about something very personal to me.
Several people were already in tears — having burst into heaving, Beatlemania-style sobs as soon as Swift appeared in a regal purple pantsuit — but at this admission they cried audibly harder.
Few A-list musicians of this millennium have sustained a bond with their fans as intensely as Swift with her “Swifties.” To her credit, she feeds them well.
“All Too Well” got its start during a rehearsal soundcheck, when Swift began playing the same four chords and ad-libbing lines about a relationship that had recently ended.
Part of the reason Swift wrote her 2010 album, “Speak Now,” entirely on her own was to silence the skeptics who believed that Rose had a heavier hand in her music than Swift had admitted.
The 10-minute “All Too Well” illuminates this process: It is angrier, far less filtered and more explicit in every sense of the word.
In both its incarnations, “All Too Well” is a song about the weaponization of memory.
That was most apparent when Swift played the entire song this weekend on “Saturday Night Live.” During a transfixing performance, she moved through a cycle of feelings as elemental as the seasons: the springlike flutter of new romance, the summery heat of passion, the autumnal operatics of grief, and finally — as snow fell around her in the song’s last moments — the cooling relief of long-delayed acceptance.
Swift hasn’t written a breakup song nearly as scorching in the decade since “All Too Well,” and for the past several years she’s kept her seemingly less melodramatic relationship with her boyfriend Joe Alwyn as far from the public eye as she can.
It’s also about the fans, the depths they’d heard in it before anyone else, and whatever and whoever they still wished they could forget.