1989 is home to Taylor Swift‘s most upbeat, glittering tracks to date. Swift set out to make hits with this record and succeeded tenfold. One of the lesser-known, yet just as enticing, tracks is “How You Get The Girl.”
Videos by American Songwriter
Swift has covered relationship follies from almost every angle, but with this track, she found a deeply unique angle that few songwriters have traversed. Uncover the meaning behind the song, below.
[RELATED: The Seething Meaning Behind Taylor Swift’s “Is It Over Now?”]
Behind the Meaning
“A recurring theme in my music is that I love to explain to men how to apologize,” Swift told the crowd in Glendale, Arizona during her Eras Tour. “How You Get The Girl” is one such song.
Swift offers a road map for reconciliation with these lyrics. Though we’re sure she had some specific inspiration when writing this song back in 2014, it’s meritable advice for anyone looking to make amends.
Stand there like a ghost / Shaking come the rain / She’ll open up the door / And say, are you insane, she sings in the opening verse.
The lyrics follow a distinct chronology. There is no guesswork in the advice she lays out here. She tells the listener to leave their pride at home, walk up to their ex-lover’s doorstep, and hope they answer.
In the chorus, she cuts to the core of the apology. She writes out cue cards for the regretful boyfriend to read aloud. Then you say / I want you for worse or for better / I would wait for ever and ever / Broke your heart, I’ll put it back together / I would wait for ever and ever, the refrain reads.
While one could take the advice in this song, for Swift’s purposes, it seems like a personal assuage from her own, less amendable, relationships. If they only had this advice when they were breaking Swift’s heart…
“‘How You Get The Girl’ is a song that I wrote about how when we’re young, which most of my friends and most of my peers are, a lot of the time, we take for granted a really good relationship and let go of it and go out into the world and then realize that you want it back,” Swift once said of the track.
“This song is kind of an instruction manual for a guy who has broken up with his girlfriend and lets six months go by and the lengths he will need to go to to get her back,” she continued. “It’s not gonna be as simple as just sending a text message, it’s like ”Sup? Miss you,’ it’s not gonna work. He will need to do all the things in this song.”
Photo by Rich Polk/Getty Images for iHeartRadio / Turner
