Taylor Swift Admitted This ‘1989’ Song Was an Updated Version of an Old Hit

Taylor Swift’s 2014 album 1989 marked her cross-over from country music to pop. She presented a more mature version of herself on the album. Still, she said she recycled some of the themes from old albums. She said one song from 1989 revisited the themes from a Speak Now song but with an updated perspective.

Taylor Swift said she revisited old subject matter on ‘1989’

On “Shake It Off,” the lead single from 1989, Swift sang about her critics. She said she did a similar thing on a previous song. She’d dealt with critics for years, so she expressed her feelings about them through song. Swift noted the way she wrote about facing hate changed greatly as she aged.

“With the song ‘Shake It Off,’ I really wanted to kind of take back the narrative, and have more of a sense of humor about people who kind of get under my skin — and not let them get under my skin,” she told NPR. “There’s a song that I wrote a couple years ago called ‘Mean,’ where I addressed the same issue but I addressed it very differently.”

She said “Shake It Off” showed the ways in which she matured. She no longer let her detractors bother her as much. 

“[In ‘Mean’] I said, ‘Why you gotta be so mean?’ from kind of a victimized perspective, which is how we all approach bullying or gossip when it happens to us for the first time,” she said. “But in the last few years I’ve gotten better at just kind of laughing off things that absolutely have no bearing on my real life. I think it’s important to be self-aware about what people are saying about you, but even more so, be very aware of who you actually are, and to have that be the main priority.”

This is a subject Swift has revisited in multiple songs.