It was rare, I was there, I remember it.
We dive into "All Too Well (10 Minute Version) to kick off Season 2 of AP Taylor Swift Podcast
To kick off our second year (sophomore year?) of AP Taylor Swift, we’re tackling a song we have wanted to tackle since the very beginning: “All Too Well (10 Minute Version).” And to stay consistent with our Show & Tell format, we’re each bringing you a different lens through which we analyzed this song! Join us as we introduce you to narratology, revisit ecocriticism, and look for poetic repetition in this song to understand what makes it the epic favorite we all know and love.
Looking for a little more insight into this week’s topic? Scroll down to learn about Maansi’s extra credit this week about the writing process. Our Substack extra credit is completely free, and we’re doing the homework so you don’t have to!
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🎒This Week’s Extra Credit - Brought to You by Maansi
In this week’s episode, we tackle one of my favorite songs, “All Too Well - 10 Minute Version.” While applying my lens of poetic repetition, I talk about how this song actually contains so many different kinds of rhetorical devices. I recently wrote a substack post about rhetorical devices so I encourage you to bump these lyrics against the Rice Rhetorical Strategies to see how many you can identify within the song. But since we recently covered this topic in a previous post, today I want to talk about something else. I want to focus on the “10-minute version” aspect of this song.
One of my favorite aspects of the song is how easily Taylor Swift expands on a song that we already loved - adding in new melodies and lyrics so seamlessly, that it’s as if they’d been there all along. Indeed she mentioned in interviews how the original song she wrote was the 10-minute long version and had to be significantly reduced to be on the original Red album. This highlights something that we often don’t get to see: how drastically different the final product can be from the original creative output. Because we were fortunate to get two versions of this song, the original and the 10-minute version, we can start to understand just how much of a song can actually be on the chopping block before it makes it onto an album.
The reason I want to discuss this “chopping block” is because as an aspiring writer, I often find that the fear of not writing something good enough can stop me from writing anything at all. We have a tendency to compare our raw first drafts to the final drafts of writers we admire because we never really see their first drafts, nor get the chance to fully understand how much written works can evolve through the editing process. And yet “All Too Well - 10 Minute Version” gives us this glimpse.
Whereas the originally released version of the song had a length of only 5:29, the 10-minute version comes in at 10:13. That means that upon its first release, only 50% of the song made the cut to be on the album. Perhaps if the 10-minute version had been released from the start, it wouldn’t have taken off the same way. The original release was incredibly tight in its storytelling and melody, which likely contributed to its success. Once the song had already become a favorite, Taylor could release the full, original song to an audience she knew would be receptive.
How does this translate to writing?
A mentor once told me that in poetry, the first version of your poem is never the final version. It’s the first. Write it out. Pick the one, most essential word that you think best captures the essence of the poem, and lean into that, build on that, and write around that. I have found this to be very sage advice that applies not only to creative writing but also to marketing! Think you have an idea? Maybe you do, but tease it out, make it better, take it from good to great.
It’s important to remember that editors exist for a reason. That you can write out your feelings and your thoughts and even hire professionals to help you leave a vast majority of it on the chopping block as you really brush it up and take it to 100%. And then who knows, maybe one day, when your work is a hit and the fans want more, you can drop a ten-minute version that will blow the world away.