I’m not that complicated. My complications come out in my songs. All you need to do to be my friend is like me....and listen.

I love you, family. I love my friends. I love everyone who helped put this album together. I love my record label. I love the people who helped me get here.

I love everyone who's inspired me to write a song, whether you know it or not. I love anyone who has ever turned the volume up when my song comes on on the radio, anyone who has bought this album. Anyone who can sing along to my songs when I play them live. Anyone who's ever requested my song on the radio, or even remembered my name.

If you ever see me in public, I want to meet you. I will thank you myself. You have let me into your life, and I will never be able to thank you enough for that. I love YOU, and I love God for putting you in my life.

love love love -T-

PS: To all the boys who thought they would be cool and break my heart, guess what? Here are 11 songs written about you. HA. 

("Taylor Swift" Prologue)

Lead Single “Tim McGraw,” which Taylor wrote in her freshman math class, was her debut single and first-ever published song. It tells of Taylor's remembrance of a summer love, and how a song by country music artist Tim McGraw brings back memories of that love.

Taylor has said the song was about her and her boyfriend, when he was moving away to go to college, and they would eventually have to break up. "I started thinking of all the things that reminded me of him." She finished the song with Liz Rose. It was produced by Nathan Chapman. Before releasing the song Scott Borchetta, label president of Big Machine, told Taylor to shorten the original title "When You Think Tim McGraw" to simply "Tim McGraw".

"This song means so much to me, that’s why we wanted it to be the first track on the album. The idea for this song came to me in math class. I just started singing to myself `When you think Tim McGraw.‘ The concept for this song hit me, because I was dating a guy who moved away, and it was going to be over for us. So I started thinking of things that I knew would remind him of me. The first thing that came to mind was that my favorite song is by Tim McGraw. After school, I went downtown, sat down at the piano, and wrote this with Liz Rose in fifteen minutes. It may be the best fifteen minutes I’ve ever experienced. It deals with the haunting power of music and how hearing a song years after it was first popular can have such an emotional appeal." -- Taylor Swift

The Tim McGraw song in question was 2004’s “Can’t Tell Me Nothin'.” Taylor got to perform the song for a crowd Tim was in at the 2007 ACMs.

It was released on June 19, 2006 by Big Machine Records as Taylor's debut single and the lead single from her eponymous debut album. "Tim McGraw" performed well commercially. The track spent numbers of weeks upon both the Billboard Hot 100 and Hot Country Songs in the United States. It peaked at #40 on the former and #6 on the latter. 

The accompanying music video for "Tim McGraw", directed by Trey Fanjoy, comprises flashbacks by Taylor's love interest, among cut scenes that feature Taylor lying on a lake bed.

When the Big 98 [WSIX] in Nashville played "Tim McGraw" in a song challenge one evening, it was the first time that Taylor, 16 years old at the time, heard one of her songs on the radio. She recalled to The Boot:

"My high school friends and I all sat in my convertible with the top down in my driveway and blasted it. Then, listeners called in and said whether they liked it or not, and I remember being more nervous than I'd ever been. Thankfully, they said nice things. I'll never forget that feeling!" -- Taylor Swift

Seven years, Taylor and the actual Tim McGraw linked up when she provided harmony vocals for his "Two Lanes Of Freedom" track, "Highway Don't Care." In 2018, Taylor performed "Tim McGraw" with Tim McGraw and his wife Faith Hill at her "reputation Stadium Tour" at Nissan Stadium in Nashville, TN. It was a full circle moment for Taylor and the song.

“Picture to Burn” is an angsty breakup song. It was inspired by the narcissistic and cocky nature of her former high school classmate and ex-boyfriend Jordan Alford with whom Taylor never established a formal relationship.

"The guy I wrote this song about, I didn't really ever 'officially' date. We almost dated. It really bothered me that he was so cocky and that's where that song came from. After school, I would come into downtown. I had a publishing deal with Sony, and I would write songs every single day, exactly what I felt. I found myself just sitting there with my guitar going, 'I hate his stupid truck that he doesn't let me drive. He's such a redneck! Oh my Gosh!' That actually became the chorus to the song, so that's one of the most honest songs I've ever written." -- Taylor Swift

Jordan Alford went on to date, and later marry, one of Taylor’s former friends named Chelsea. Ironically, he works as a  firefighter. Chelsea told Daily Mail:

"[Jordan and I] just thought it was funny. [Jordan] was like, ‘I’m not a redneck! She makes me look like some redneck!’ but other than that we just thought it was kind of funny. […] [After I began dating him, Taylor and I] exchanged a few words over a locker fight. We were 14, we were just being girly, snarky." -- Chelsea Alford

In retrospect, Taylor has stated that she has evolved on a personal level and as a songwriter, claiming she processed emotions differently since "Picture to Burn". When looking back at the song in 2011, she said:

"I had this song called ‘Picture to Burn,’ that’s talking about how ‘I hate your truck,’ and ‘I hate that you ignored me,’ ‘I hate you. Now, the way that I would say that and the way that I would feel that kind of pain is a lot different." -- Taylor Swift

Scott Borchetta never thought that the song was too harsh. He says it was the second or third song Taylor played for him when they first met. "That was the song where I pointed and said 'That's a hit song,'" he recounted. "I had her play it again; I heard the first line and said, 'Did you really just sing that?'"

The song was chosen as a single based on the audience's reaction to it in concert. The song is the fourth single from Swift’s debut album and peaked at #3 on Billboard’s US Hot Country Songs. 

The music video for "Picture to Burn" was directed by Trey Fanjoy and features Taylor fantasizing about taking revenge on her ex-boyfriend after she discovers him with another woman. The video also has Taylor and her band, The Agency (the came up with the name during this video shoot), performing with pyrotechnics as a backdrop. Taylor’s high school best friend Abigail Anderson Lucier, who she wrote “Fifteen” about, as well as her brother, Austin Swift, appear in the video as well.

“Teardrops On My Guitar” illustrates the unrequited love Taylor felt for classmate Drew Hardwick. Taylor told fans that Drew would often ask her for advice and date ideas for his girlfriend, and she would give him ideas to be a good friend.

Written by Taylor and Liz Rose, this song of unrequited love is based on a true experience during Taylor's schooldays when she had a crush on a boy she was friends with. However there was no chance of him reciprocating her feelings as he already had a girlfriend whom he was madly in love with and he used to tell Swift all about her. He was completely unaware of Taylor's feelings. She told fans during an acoustic performance:

"This is a song that I wrote about a guy who went to school with me, and I was that ‘friend,’ you know, that girl who’s your friend. And, you know, he had this awesome girlfriend who he would tell me about every single day. And, you know, I was that girl that he would go to and be like, ‘what should I get her for Valentine’s Day? I have to make this Valentine’s Day so awesome! It’s her birthday, what should I do? What would the perfect gift for a girl be?’ And of course I’d give him, like, the most awesome ideas, awesome plans, like, I would want them! And, you know, it didn’t end up, like, in the end of the chick-flick where they get together in the end. It didn’t happen like that. So I wrote a song and I put it out on the radio, and they’re still together! […] I think right under his driver’s license where it says ‘Drew Hardwick’ it says ‘Taylor wrote a song about me.’ But I haven’t talked to him in a while, I haven’t talked to him for probably a year and a half, but I’ve heard through the grape vine that he’s very well aware of [the song.] But, you know, it’s crazy how having a top five hit with a song won’t get you over somebody." -- Taylor Swift

Years afterwards, Drew appeared at Taylor's house, but she rejected him. She went on to explain what happened:

"About two years after the album came out in the States, he showed up in my driveway. Apparently he and his girlfriend had broken up so that was his first stop when he was back in town. I was like 'you are so late, y'know. If you'd stopped by right after the album came out then that would be one thing, but…I remember reading on his MySpace page one time 'My name's Drew and I have a famous song written about me. Email me and I'll give you details.' I was like, right, wow, note taken." -- Taylor Swift

In 2015, Drew and his wife, Joni, were arrested in Hendersonville, Tennessee, on charges of child abuse.

Taylor was 17 when the song was released (it was her second single, following "Tim McGraw"). She became the first teen country star to make a major crossover into the pop charts since LeAnn Rimes. This seemed like a pretty big deal at the time, but her pop breakout was just one step in Taylor's journey toward becoming one of the biggest stars of the following decade.

Critics received the track generally positively, complimenting Taylor's vocal delivery and songwriting style. The song is considered to be her breakthrough single, as it spread her popularity throughout the United States. It was commercially successful, peaking at #13 on the Billboard Hot 100, becoming the best-charting single from "Taylor Swift" on the chart, and being Taylor's debut entry on the Billboard Year-End Hot 100 charts.

Its music video was directed by Trey Fanjoy and features Taylor as she sees her love interest develop a relationship with another female. Two fans who won a contest to spend the day with Taylor got to see the video on her tour bus before it was released.

"Teardrops On My Guitar" won the prestigious "Song of the Year" award at the 2008 Annual BMI Country Awards. It was honored for receiving more airplay in the past year than any other country song.

Taylor was thirteen when she wrote "A Place In This World" in November 2003. During that time she was trying to get discovered in Nashville.

At the time, Taylor and her family still lived in Pennsylvania. She and her mom would travel back and forth between Wyomissing and Nashville. The two often made trips to Music City to meet with songwriters and record labels when Taylor was in middle school.

The Swift's finally made a permanent move in 2004 when Taylor got offered a "Development Deal" by RCA Records. When asked about the song Taylor said:

"It was tough trying to find out how I was going to get where I wanted to go. I knew where I wanted to be, but I just didn’t know how to get there. I’m really happy this is on the album, because I feel like I finally figured it out." -- Taylor Swift

If Taylor had given her first album a name, it would've been called "A Place In This World". This was technically the working title until she requested it to be self-titled.

“Cold as You” is a ballad that details Taylor's experience with an emotionally unavailable guy. Unlike Shakespeare who compares his lover to a summer’s day Taylor compares her lover to a cold, rainy day.

Taylor penned this song with her frequent collaborator Liz Rose. Nathan Chapman produced it with Taylor's aid. Taylor explained the meaning of "Cold As You" in publicity materials:

"I wrote this song with Liz, and I think the lyrics to this song are some of the best we’ve ever written. It’s about that moment where you realize someone isn’t at all who you thought they were, and that you’ve been trying to make excuses for someone who doesn’t deserve them. And that some people are just never going to love you. We were halfway through writing this when I started singing ‘And now that I’m sitting here thinking it through, I’ve never been anywhere cold as you’."

-- Taylor Swift

She told Rolling Stone that this is her favorite song on the album. In the interview, she said. "The hook is ‘I’ve never been anywhere cold as you.’ I love a line in a song where afterward you’re just like ‘burn.’"

Notably, “Cold As You” is responsible for beginning Taylor’s track record of the 5th song of each of her albums being “emotional vulnerable” ballads.

In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, she talked about this song:

"A lot of times back then when I was 12 or 13, I would write songs about relationships, when I wasn’t in relationships, because I would look at other people and try to observe what they were going through. But in the case of 'The Outside,' I was writing exactly what I saw. I was writing from pain. And I’ve always felt so lucky, because I’ve never needed an escape like drinking or drugs or anything like that to escape from the bad days. Music has always been that escape for me." -- Taylor Swift

“Tied Together With A Smile” is a song about a friend of Taylor’s who struggles with an eating disorder.

Taylor wrote the song in August 2005 together with Liz Rose. It's about one of her best friends in high school. The reason she wrote it is sad as it illustrates the struggles so many girls go through while growing up. On her website Taylor said:

"One of my best friends is absolutely beautiful. She goes to beauty pageants and wins everything. Girls want to be her and guys want to be with her. I wrote this song the day I found out about her eating disorder. It completely blew my mind, and this one was tough to write, because I wasn't just telling some sad story. This was real. This song is basically about the girls I know, and the difficult things I saw them go through. I've never seen this song as a lecture. It's really about how no matter what my friends go through, I'm always going to love them." -- Taylor Swift

The song's lyrics explain how her friend is doing this for a boy, and trying to fake her way through it. She's only "Tied Together With a Smile" and she's "coming undone" and cries, but doesn't "tell anyone". Taylor offers some comforting words to her friend at the beginning of the song. She says "Seems the only one who doesn't see your beauty/Is the face in the mirror looking back at you/You walk around here thinking you're not pretty/But that's not true, cause I know you..."

Taylor performed the song life for the first time in roughly 10 years on her "reputation Stadium Tour". Before she sang the song she shared some meaningful advice with her fans, reminding those in the crowd that they're not alone in whatever struggles they may encounter in their lives.

"One thing I have noticed in my life is you can never judge what somebody else is going through, even if they seem like they have it all together, they seem like, how can they ever have any problems? Somebody is maybe really beautiful or seems like they have it all together, maybe they have a life that you're really envious of. But I've learned that appearances aren't everything. Just because somebody looks happy doesn't mean they are. Just because somebody looks healthy doesn't mean they are. There's so much pressure on everyone these days to have it all together, to have a perfect body, a perfect life, to know exactly where they want to go with their life. I think the stress and the pressure of not being able to say that they're hurting has really taken a toll on a lot of people. So I'm just asking you, just try to be kind to yourself. Just know that there are so many people that are going through the exact same thing that you might be going through, whatever it is." -- Taylor Swift

“Stay Beautiful” is a cute, heartfelt song about a boy Taylor had a crush on in high school. It epitomizes high school relationships, acknowledging that things may not work out between the two, but still enjoying their present romance.

The boy moved away so she would never get to tell him that she liked him, so Taylor expressed it in a song and performed it at her school talent show. Similar to "Teardrops On My Guitar", she mentions the boy's name, Cory, in the song. Many other music artists find Taylor's courage to put a person's real name in a song is something that can be looked up to, and that also makes the listener feel closer to her personal life. Taylor said:

"After hearing my songs, a lot of people ask me, 'How many boyfriends have you HAD?' And I always tell them that more of my songs come from observation than actual experience. In other words, you don’t have to date someone to write a song about them. This is a song I wrote about a guy I never dated! Wow, right? [Laughs] This song is about a guy I thought was cute, and never really talked to him much. But something about him inspired this song, just watching him." -- Taylor Swift

Taylor clarified that the way the first lyrics of the song are supposed to read is:

Cory's eyes are like a jungle, he smiles

It's like the radio, he whispers songs into my window in words that nobody knows

Instead of the way that it sounds on the album, which has led to lots of confusion among fans.

The song "Should've Said No" is about Taylor addressing her former boyfriend who cheated on her.

Taylor wrote the song when she was sixteen years old. According to the song’s secret message in the album lyric booklet, the boy in question’s name is Sam. The first line that came to her was the title, and she wrote the chorus in five minutes. Taylor has also said that many of the lyrics were based on actual words that she used when confronting her then-boyfriend. She said:

"Just being a human being, I’ve realized that before every big problem you create for yourself, before every huge mess you have to clean up, there was a crucial moment where you could’ve just said no. This is a song I wrote about a guy who never should have cheated on me." -- Taylor Swift

“Should’ve Said No” was written and recorded on the very last day of studio recording for "Taylor Swift".  She explained: "I wrote this song by myself, and it literally took me just 20 minutes to write before we recorded it. I was living every line in this song at the time." Scott Borchetta says that  she called him and said she had just finished the song. He recalls that she asked first if he needed to hear it, but he told her no because she sounded so excited about it, allowing her to put it on the album right away. "That was a very real moment and I just trusted her higher instincts. For all our records I've left them open open until literally the last possible day because she's always writing," he remarked.

The song became Taylor's second #1 single on the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart,  and was a Top 40 hit on the Billboard Hot 100.

The song is included in the concert film "Jonas Brothers: The 3D Concert Experience", and in the soundtrack to the movie. An alternate version of the song was released on her extended play "Beautiful Eyes".

On the "reputation Stadium Tour" Taylor performed "Should've Said No" with a mashup of "Bad Blood".

“Mary’s Song (Oh My My My)” was inspired by Taylor’s next-door neighbors, an old couple that had known each other since they were just kids. They were talking with Taylor one night about how they met, and she was touched by the story.

Taylor explained the background to this tune, which she penned with Liz Rose and Brian Maher:

"I wrote this song about a couple who lived next door to us. They’d been married forever and they came over one night for dinner, and were just so cute. They were talking about how they fell in love and got married, and how they met when they were just little kids. I thought it was so sweet, because you can go to the grocery store and read the tabloids, and see who’s breaking up and cheating on each other, or just listen to some of my songs, haha. But it was really comforting to know that all I had to do was go home and look next door to see a perfect example of forever." -- Taylor Swift

Taylor solely composed "Our Song" for the talent show of her freshman year in high school, about a boyfriend who she did not have a song with. It was included on "Taylor Swift" as she recalled its popularity with her classmates. It closes the standard edition of the album.

The writing process, as with "Tim McGraw", took place in approximately twenty minutes. In an interview, Taylor said that this song was written about the same guy as in "Tim McGraw." She actually did write the words to the song on a napkin, according to Scott Borchetta. She never assumed it would even be on an album. She talked about the story behind the song:

"I wrote this song in my freshman year of high school, for my ninth grade talent show. So I was sitting there thinking, “I’ve gotta write a song that’s gonna relate to everyone in the talent show, and it’s gotta be upbeat.” And at that time, I was dating a guy, and we didn’t have a song. So I went ahead and wrote us one, and I played it at the talent show at the end of the year." -- Taylor Swift

The uptempo track is musically driven mainly by banjo and lyrically describes a young couple who use the events in their lives in place of a regular song.

"I just sat down one day with my guitar and got in a groove, and went with it. I like to write about how music affects people, and this was fun to write because it’s about a couple who DOESN’T have a song. I like the banjo and you really can’t go wrong with banjo. I wanted it to be last on the album, because the last line of the chorus is `play it again'. Let’s hope people take it as a hint to go ahead and play the album again!" -- Taylor Swift

"Our Song" was met with highly positive reviews from contemporary critics, some who deemed it one of Taylor's best singles, and commercial success. In the United States, it became her first #1 single on the Hot Country Songs Chart, maintaining the position for six consecutive weeks. When "Our Song" reached #1 on the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart on the chart week of December 22, 2007, Taylor became the youngest performer ever to write and sing a chart-topping Country single.

A music video accompanying "Our Song" was directed by Trey Fanjoy and features Taylor performing in various settings, including a front porch. The video won both awards for "Video of the Year" and "Female Video of the Year" at the 2008 CMT Music Awards.

“I’m Only Me When I’m With You” is about Taylor and her best friend Abigail. It speaks volumes of how they know each other so well and feel free to be themselves when they are together.

The song is about Taylor and her best friend Abigail Anderson. She wrote it when she was fifteen and trying to get discovered. It speaks volumes of how well they know each other and feel free to be themselves when they are together.

The video features Abigail and other of Taylor’s friends and family. It has a laid-back setting and shows a more family-oriented side of her. Taylor edited the video herself on her Macbook.

The song was released on the Deluxe Edition of her album "Taylor Swift".

"Invisible" is the thirteenth track on Taylor's eponymous debut album. It finds her lamenting on someone who doesn’t even notice her.

It has never been confirmed, but in an email exchange about her summer days at Jersey Shore, she said that she was inspired to write this song as she looked back on one of the summers she spent there. She frequented the Shore until she was about fourteen years old. She wrote the song when she was fifteen. Taylor said:

"Then there’s the song 'Invisible,' which is about the son of my parents' friends. They were always at my house and their son was my age, and he would always tell me about other girls he liked. I felt, well, invisible. Obviously. So I wrote that song about it, and it was a bonus track on my first album." -- Taylor Swift

“A Perfectly Good Heart” is one of Taylor's first breakup songs. In it, she describes her very first heartbreak, yet also hints there are more to come in her future.

Taylor wrote the song with Troy Verges and Brett James when she was fifteen. The song appears as the fourteenth track on her eponymous debut album, and is only available on the Deluxe Edition.