We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together

I was not expecting to write a post on here about Taylor Swift. I have nothing against her and wish her the best, I’m just not her target audience. But when you have kids, you find yourself in all kinds of new situations. Ever since my daughter started second grade, she has gone from mildly Taylor-curious to being a full-blown Swiftie. We’ve been listening to the greatest hits together, and so far, “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” is the one I like the best. It’s from Taylor’s 2012 album Red, and it was her first number one Billboard hit. She co-wrote and co-produced it with Max Martin and Shellback.

Taylor also released a version for country radio. It has the banjo mixed louder, it lacks the backwards guitar parts and synth swooshes, and the drums don’t have such a conspicuously electronic timbre. I think the pop version is better. 

In 2021, Taylor re-recorded the song and released it as “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together (Taylor’s Version)“. It’s mostly identical to the original, but the production is harder and brighter, and Taylor’s vocal is more controlled and polished. (There’s also a Taylor’s Version of the country mix, which is a slightly tighter and brighter version of the original country version.) To understand why she did this, you need some music industry background. First, you should know that artists on record labels usually don’t own their recordings; the labels do. Taylor released her first six albums on Big Machine Records. She owns the publishing rights to all the songs on those albums, but, as is the usual case, Big Machine owns the master recordings.

In 2019, the high-profile music manager Scooter Braun bought Big Machine, along with the copyrights to those six Taylor albums. Taylor and Braun immediately ran into conflict, some business-related, some personal. Taylor tried to buy her masters from him, but he offered unfavorable terms. So she decided to re-record the albums, and since she paid out of her own pocket, she owned the masters. This means that if you want to buy a vinyl or CD, or license a track for a movie or TV show or whatever, you have a choice: you can either pay Scooter Braun for the original version, or you can pay Taylor for her new version and cut him out of the loop. You can guess what her fans want you to do. (As a sign of her much greater present-day clout, Taylor’s deal with her current label, Republic, gives her ownership of all the recordings she makes with them.)

The copyright story is all very interesting, and it’s something we have been discussing in my Musical Borrowing class at the New School. But let’s get down to the actual music. Based on my crash immersion in Taylor’s songs, I am hearing some clear patterns. She likes four-chord loops, mostly on I, IV, V and vi. (In the key of G, that would be G, C, D and Em.) She sometimes also uses ii chords (Am in the key of G, as in “Shake It Off”.) Her melodies are almost always built on straightforward major scales, but those melodies don’t always pair with the underlying chords in obvious ways. We will get into that below.

“We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” is a loop of C, G, Dsus4, and Em. The melody is in G major. The chords seem on paper like they are in G major too, but when you hear the song, G is in the weakest position in the loop, acting almost like a passing chord between the stronger poles of C and Dsus4. The absence of the leading tone F-sharp from the Dsus4 further weakens the sense of G as the tonic. There are some F-sharps in the melody, but never on the D chord.

Here’s my chart of the chorus.

The most striking feature here is the syncopated rhythm of the words “never ever ever.” The first syllable in each word is a sixteenth note long, and the second syllable is an eighth note long, adding up to three sixteenth notes total. As the short-long pattern repeats, it goes in and out of sync with the underlying four-sixteenth-note pulse of the song. Here’s how it looks in the MIDI piano roll.

On the last line, there’s an extra “ever”, and its first syllable is long, not short, so as the line spills across into the next bar, each syllable lands on a very weak sixteenth note subdivision. It’s hip! I don’t hear Taylor doing a lot of this kind of thing, and would love to hear more of it.

I said above that Taylor likes simple diatonic chords and major scale melodies, but that they don’t always have the expected relationships with each other. Let’s take a close look at the chorus melody. Measure numbers refer to my chart.

• Measure one: The word “we” is a G on top of the C chord. The word “are” is a D, which sounds odd over the C chord, but maybe it really belongs to the following G chord. “Never ever ever” alternates between B and A over the G chord. This is strange, because while B is part of the chord, A is not, but A feels like the destination note in this figure. So maybe this all belongs to the following D chord? But I thought G was the tonic? But maybe we’ve been in D Mixolydian this whole time? It’s ambiguous.
• Measure two: The end of the word “ever” is an A on the Dsus4 chord, and “getting” is on D. The word “back” is an A on the Em chord, which is a non-chord tone. The word “together” shows that the line is an E minor pentatonic figure ending on E, so that is less surprising, but still, “back” hits that non-chord-tone hard. Also, by the time we get to the end of the word “together” on E, the bass has dropped to D, setting up the return to C on the next measure.
• Measure three: The word “we-e” is B and D on the C chord, the major seventh and ninth. That is wild! Taylor is arpeggiating the tonic G chord, which makes sense in the context of the global G major feel, but it’s a surprising choice above the local C chord.
• The second half of measure three and measure four repeat the first two measures.
• In measure five, the word “you” is an F-sharp over the C chord. It resolves to G on “go”, but you get a definite Lydian vibe first. The words “talk to” are on G and D, which would be part of a straightforward G chord arpeggio, but we are still on the C chord, so D is yet another accented non-chord tone. The words “your friends, talk to” are the same notes as the beginning of the bar, but over the G chord, where they make more conventional sense.
• In measure six, the words “my friends” repeat the F-sharp to G movement from the previous measure, but now we’re over the Dsus4 chord. That’s cool, because it sounds like the G is the “resolved” note, even though it’s the unresolved sus4 of D. The words “talk to me” are on G, A and G, further reinforcing the sense of the fourth of D as the destination note (though the “me” really belongs to the Em chord.)
• Measure seven is the same as measure three.
• Measure eight has the extra “ever”, on B and A over the Dsus4 chord. The note B sounds extra smooth and creamy over that chord, you can see why Taylor holds it out a little longer than the pattern calls for. The words “getting back together” are an embellished jump from D up to G via A and B to resolve the phrase on the tonic… except that this all happens over an Em chord, and “-gether” lands on the C chord from the beginning of the next loop, so it never actually resolves at all.

David Temperley has a term for this kind of writing: “melodic-harmonic divorce“. The term refers to a melody that stays within the global key or mode, but that emphasizes surprising non-chord tones at the local level. Temperley coined the term to describe classic rock songs, not current/recent pop. In Temperley’s corpus of rock songs, you see melodic-harmonic divorce in the verses, but the chorus melodies stick closer to the chord tones. Temperley sees a metaphorical resonance here: the verses are where songwriters show more idiosyncrasy and individuality, while the choruses are more about coming together around musical conventions as a group. In “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together”, however, the verses have more conventional agreement between melody notes and chords, while the chorus has all of the exciting melodic friction. What does it mean that Taylor is at her most harmonically unconventional in the big singalong part?

There is another crucial difference between classic rock and Taylor’s song. Temperley points out that the melodic-harmonic divorce in rock originates in the blues, where the relationships between melody and harmony follow very different conventions than they do in Western European music. But Taylor’s music hardly shows any blues influence, except whatever she picked up indirectly from listening to classic rock. (Taylor does listen to classic rock; she has spoken a lot about her admiration for Paul McCartney, and in the documentary Miss Americana, she jokingly compares her vocal delivery in one song to Bob Dylan.) In her early country material, you hear lots of blues riffs in the instrumental parts played by her session musicians, but not in the songs themselves. Max Martin and Shellback show absolutely no blues influence whatsoever.

Do I want to get into Taylor’s fanbase here? Aside from my daughter and her friends, I encounter plenty of Swifties among my students. I also know plenty of people who feel equally strong negative feelings about her. Most of these people are men my age, though not all. I have no problem with people disliking Taylor, but there does seem to be a gendered edge to the vitriol that she inspires. Imagine Dragons are way more boring than Taylor, and at least as ubiquitous, and people seem to be able to just screen them out. I feel more warmly toward the Swifties because the ones in my classes have a sense of humor about her, and they make better and more nuanced criticism too. One college-aged fan described her songs as “coming from a world with no problems in it.” Miss Americana does show Taylor beginning to voice a political consciousness, and she has always been a feminist. In her Tiny Desk concert, she does a witty song about how she wouldn’t receive nearly as much pushback if she was a man.

Hopefully my daughter will come through her Taylor fandom with an appreciation for this kind of thing.