What Writers Can Learn From Taylor Swift’s Songwriting Styles
How a Forest can code like a Grassland
Taylor Swift is 100% a Forest.
What is a Forest? It’s one of the five ecosystems archetypes in the sales and marketing framework that
and I invented through combining our individual 15+ years in corporate sales and marketing + entrepreneurship.You can learn more about the Ecosystems here and about the Forest in particular here.
As Russell noted to me once, Swift’s Midnights album is basically just her old songs but again, and with more honesty and details. Forests write around their life and their core themes. They build a shared language of Easter eggs and inside jokes with their community. That remains a big part of Swift's success.
That said, to get to Swift's mega levels of success, you are probably using all five of the ecosystems we’ve outlined well. That's just a reality. You can only tell that Taylor Swift is a Forest because her primary instinct is to get more and more personal and write around the things that interest her.
Let's also note here that Taylor has a team, and that team likely has all five ecosystems on it. For example, an entire team of Aquatics likely invented the idea of the multi-format rollout that all big record labels use. They made vinyl happen! She didn’t come up with that, but it still helps her build her business and brand.
Taylor Swift Uses Grassland Strategies In Her Writing Sometimes.
For our purposes, I wanted to focus on baking the marketing into the work, as that is something that we as creatives can all control. Taylor Swift used a more Grassland-y technique on The Tortured Poets Department in her songwriting itself. As a Grassland, I thought it would be helpful to break it down because I do this too!
First, a little background on me. I’ve been a Swiftie since the Fearless era (which was her second album). Apparently this makes me an OG Swiftie, which is a cool flex! But more importantly gives me an extensive and organically built knowledge and history of her career because I lived it with her in so many ways.
Normally, Swift's songs are coded like a Forest would code. She puts specific details about her life into the songs. However, that is not entirely how she got to where she is, because that works much better as a marketing and sales tactic when you have a large enough fan base or community to make it work.
While many of the songs that built her fandom back then were still very Forest-coded, a lot of them weren’t as much. Her most popular songs from Fearless, “Love Story” and “You Belong With Me,” are inspired by other love stories. This is contrasted by more personal songs that built her fandom, like, “Fifteen” and “Hey Stephen”—songs that didn’t perform as well in the Fearless era but that have become fan favorites over time. And even these were not nearly as Forest-coded as the past few albums!
Long story short—or LSS as Swifties like to refer to the song titled the same on Evermore, my favorite album of hers—back then she needed to appeal to more people. She started her career at age 14 writing songs for other artists and was raised on Desert and Grassland writing techniques, as pretty much any successful musician and songwriter would have to be. And she has said this herself…That she is consistently surprised that she can write down the way she feels in such personal detail and others can still resonate with it.
Swift has now reached unprecedented levels of success. She could lose half her fandom and still have a chart-topping, record-breaking album every time she releases.
And even still, she still adds a few Grassland-y songs to her albums, sometimes even at the last minute. “The 1” from Folklore is a great example of this!
A Breakdown of “Down Bad”
The Grassland-y song in question on The Tortured Poet’s Department is called, “Down Bad.” It's one of my favorite songs on the double album because it was designed to be from the ground up. And other fellow Swifties have said as much too.
Now don’t get me wrong, it’s got a great hook, and there are a lot of other good things about this song. BUT it is a song that is clearly designed to be a single (at least, the clean version is), which needs to reach a larger audience.
This song, “Down Bad,” seems to be very purposely coded like a Grassland would code. You can tell because there aren't any specific details about Swift's life, rather there are just vibes.
#1 - Universal Slang
The first thing she does is she centers the song around a lesser known slang phrase. Swift does this frequently in her songwriting. Some examples are “lavender haze,” “bad blood,” “hits different,” and “champagne problems.”
Some of this slang feels familiar or we know what it means (depending on what decade we were born in). Plenty of it is very old, like “lavender haze,” or very young, like “down bad” or “champagne problems.” Some of it is in the middle, like “dear john, “cruel summer,” “message in a bottle,” and more. Really, if you look at her titles, there is probably slang that appeals to every decade (which makes her work relatable to Gen Z, Boomers, and everyone in between alike).
If you look at the history of “down bad” (which this Millennial mom had not heard before, so I really did have to look it up), it starts gaining traction in early 2021 as something you would call someone who was openly thirsty in comments sections. It slowly morphs from a “desperate horny” connotation to a broader “unrequited feelings” connotation.
We know that unrequited love is one of Swift’s general themes, and we also know that unrequited love is only fairly generally what she felt with the two primary subjects of the album. Sure, she felt like the relationship with her ex-boyfriend Joe Alwyn had run its course toward the end of their relationship, and sure, her rebound Matty Healy rejected her in some way during their short six-week run. But do either of these relationships really fit the song at the end of the day? And are there any real details, compared to songs like “The Tortured Poets Department” or “So Long, London?”
Instead, this song satisfies Swift’s marketing prowess by appealing to three huge audiences that we creatives should all be trying to hit with every product:
Die-hards
Casuals
Infrequents
Here’s an excerpt from Editing For Marketability about these three types of listeners/readers:
When taught how to write-to-market, independent authors are told to be specific and go after just the die-hard fans. It’s not bad advice, as you can quickly build a profitable independent author business that way. (Monica’s Note: We now code this as a Desert strategy at Writer MBA.)
The only problem is, over the long-term your backlist catalog will not be worth nearly as much as if you incorporated all six of the Book Virality Stack factors. (Monica’s Note: We point this out all the time about challenges that Deserts frequently face!)
The real answer to the question, “Who are your readers and why do they want to read your book?” is that you have dozens upon dozens verticals of readers (multiple target audiences)—if and only if you write your book in a way that you can attract those different verticals.
How can you discover these verticals? First, you need to know the three different types of audiences (and how to get what they want into your book or series). Then, you can come up with a list of verticals in each of the different types of audiences and market to their specific problems!
The three types of audiences are:
The die-hard readers of your (sub)genre (who most authors write to when writing to market)
The casual readers of your genre who only read 10-20 books a year total
The infrequent readers who don’t know much about genres and only read the top few books of the year (think Gone Girl, Big Little Lies, The Martian, Ready Player One, Bridgerton)
These correspond with the first three factors in the Book Virality Stack.
Swift appeals to her fans who expect to be able to dissect her songs, while also appealing to modern dating culture with the phrase “down bad.” (Hint: this will do well on TikTok.)
Swift could have written a song called “unrequited love.” I think part of why she didn’t is because she has to be clever and reinvent her written ideas on a regular basis. But another reason might be that “unrequited love” is going to appeal more to grandparents than modern dating culture. So instead, she uses the phrase “down bad” as the title and creates a whole sonic hook around it.
#2 - Encoding Twin Flames Into the Song
What are twin flames? Think of them as a step up from soulmates, as they are your perfect partner, “the one,” or your person. Twin flames are not just soulmates, they are a person you are meant for as ordained by God or the universe or whatever you believe in.
The other thing about twin flames? Twin flames is a huge New Age spirituality subculture that only gets more and more relevant every year. The subReddit “twin flames” is in the top 3% of Reddit forums, and there are dozens of twin flame Facebook groups with well over 50k members. Recently, the term has also been in the news due to two cult documentaries titled, Escaping Twin Flames (Netflix) and Desperately Seeking Soulmate (Amazon Prime).
And a few years ago, shortly after Megan Fox and Machine Gun Kelly brought the term “twin flames” to mainstream pop culture, Swift embedded the phrase “twin flames” very subtly into her anthem song, “All Too Well (10-Minute Version) (Taylor’s Version),” as a nod to this community.
"Did the twin flame bruise paint you blue? Just between us, did the love affair maim you, too?"
But she hasn’t done much with “twin flames” since! Makes sense, because the term has been growing in popularity and reached its peak in November 2023 with the documentaries, so now is the perfect time for Swift to turn those new eyeballs into listeners by coding for it in April 2024.
A few more things you need to know if you are not familiar with twin flames:
It is a large community and there are people who, like myself, believe they are happily living with or in a relationship with their twin flame…
But the majority of the community (90% or so) is single people looking for love. A lot of times, they feel unrequited love toward a friend or ex-lover. In other words, this is a huge dating subculture community!
This is a fairly cishet community seeking M/F relationships and about 90% identify as female. There is a lot of literature about the masculine and the feminine embedded into twin flames. This means that a gendered line like, “f*ck it if I can’t have him” is going to resonate with this community.
The community can also be quite…Dramatic. The core of twin flames is around God and spiritual principles, but like any belief system or religion, you have casual consumers. You know, the people who attend church on major holidays like Christmas and Easter only? Well, a lot of people want a twin flame without really practicing twin flame principles. This doesn't really work and then people feel angry or sad, which goes well with the general sentiment of the song. Wander into any twin flame community and you will find posts that echo the dramatics of this song almost exactly.
Gen Z knows a lot about twin flames (and are also likely the largest group in dating subculture). Between the TikTok and Instagram twin flame coaches, the astrology love matches, and the tarot love readings, this generation has grown up on this kind of “love and light” spirituality.
Some lines that code twin flames into the song include:
“Like I lost my twin”
“For a moment, I knew cosmic love”
“For a moment, I was heavenstruck”
“F*ck it if I can't have him/us”
“I might just die it would make no difference”
“Everything comes out teenage petulance”
#3 - Encoding Aliens Into the Song
Did you know there is also a huge alien subculture in spirituality too? It's not as big as the religious mythology that is embedded in modern culture (for example, people who believe in angel numbers or play with tarot cards) but there is a sub-sect of New Age that basically believes that they are not from this planet. They may even believe that they are sent here on a mission (for example, they are “indigo children” or “starseeds”) and in the twin flame community, there is even a question of who is truly a twin flame and how many twin flames exist. Both subcultures play heavily into the individual or the “chosen one” archetype, which fits the unrequited love purposes nicely.
Further, aliens are considered to be on the “love and light” side of spirituality, same as twin flames and crystals and divination and angel numbers. Other sects like witchcraft are considered to be darker and more mysterious forms of magic. But the alien sect organically crosses over into the twin flames sect.
In “Down Bad,” Swift uses a more overt metaphor about essentially being (willingly) abducted by a spaceship, shown a cosmic love, and then dropped back onto earth alone. She can't share that love with anyone because no one believes her.
(Sidenote: the language around all this is much more like a music video treatment than Swift's usual songwriting fare, or the poetry of the rest of the album.)
She almost writes this narrative over the rest of it…Kind of like a layer of blanket to cover her overt trendy coding, and then her twin flame coding.
And honestly, if you pull out all the alien adventure references, the song is very generalized content with little detail around her own life or situation. Is this about her ex-boyfriend Joe Alwyn or her short-lived romance with Matty Healy? The lyrics support both and neither.
“Down Bad” is a Catchy Vibe, Not a Confessional
In other words, she's building a vibe, not a confessional…With enough of the ruse of a confessional to keep her die-hard Swifties happy. She does this by revisiting a core recurring theme in her work, which is a smart strategy for a Forest trying to borrow Grassland strategies.
She also includes enough hooks into a larger conversation + clear and connected sub communities to become an anthem of sorts for these communities. In the process, she creates new Swifties because she has a huge back catalog of romance and breakup songs. A community looking for romantic partnership will have a lot to enjoy in her backlist!
This song is going to do well across so many social media outlets for numerous reasons. It’s got a good beat. It’s got an angry anthem. It’s got a lot of trendy, relevant hooks. It taps into these subcultures that are hugely populated on social. It’s going to make a good music video.
And…
Taylor Swift is still doing what Taylor Swift does best, which is making people feel seen. This song makes a huge and incredibly active and engaged subculture feel seen, in the same way her Lover song “You Need To Calm Down” made people feel seen.
Plausible Deniability and Reaching a Wider Audience
Swift is a clever business woman. She did not even put the phrase “twin flame” into this song, despite ironclad evidence that she knows it. Instead she subtly writes, “like I lost my twin” into the outtro. And bunch of my friends in the twin flame community messaged me that the song was “so twin flame-y” over the weekend. The coding worked!
But there is also plausible deniability. Does she mean biological twin, like a twin sister or brother that you would have grown up with? Is “twin” yet another reference to Karlie Kloss, her supposed sister from another mother that many believe she had a secret romantic relationship and nasty split with?
Swift admitted in her documentary Miss Americana that she is Christian, while also implying in her most vulnerable songs, “Soon You’ll Get Better” and “Bigger Than the Whole Sky,” that her faith is not traditional or devout.
“Desperate people find faith, so now I pray to Jesus too”
And…
“Did some bird flap its wings over in Asia?
Did some force take you because I didn't pray?”
She doesn’t outright say she believes in twin flames, or New Age spirituality. She has to keep her “wine moms” happy too, after all.
But she would definitely like all of us to relate and feel seen, still.
What All Writers Can Take From This Lesson
Most of what “works” on Substack for is what Russell calls Forest stuff. These are things that make people feel seen. Others on Substack will describe it as “being human” or “making a human connection.”
Substack and all subscriptions and memberships tend to be focused on the deeper parts of the sales funnel, which we call the flywheel. So a lot of Forests start coding in a way that turns readers to fans.
Unfortunately, they can sometimes do that before they really even have enough readers, or have really even developed their core themes. And this is where I think Forests can benefit from channeling their inner Grassland every once in a while.
What does it take?
#1 - Write For Three Layers of Audience
There are three types of people that Grasslands reach extremely well: die-hard consumers, casual consumers, and infrequent consumers or strangers. To explain how this is done, I’m going to attempt to use Forest language for how to do this:
Die Hard Consumers (Fans)
To reach your die-hard consumers, also known as your fans, use shared language over personal detail.
Another way this point can be summarized as being useful to others first, then layering in your own Easter eggs and “inside baseball.”
For example, in this post:
There’s not much personal detail at all about me.
I changed the title from “How a Forest Can Code Like a Grassland” to “What Writers Can Learn From Taylor Swift’s Songwriting Styles” so that I could capitalize on a popular news item.
I changed “authors” to “writers” in the headline to give it broader reach.
I made sure to mention what works on Substack since many on here are writers on Substack.
I still left personable clues for my regular readers:
Friends and followers on Facebook know that I'm a huge Swiftie and regularly write and talk about her marketing.
The Substack audience knows who Russell is so I refer to him pretty regularly on here.
I coded our central sales and marketing thesis about ecosystem archetypes into the post.
A small but engaged group of readers here regularly email me about twin flames because they know I wrote six books on the topic.
I even managed to tie the topic back to a book that is part of my Kickstarter campaign, which I’ve been pounding on about here for a few weeks!
But all of that is secondary to the topic, and those function more like hidden Easter eggs than anything else.
Casual Consumers (Readers)
To reach your casual consumers, also known as your readers, use breadcrumbs back to previous works.
For every Forest-y thing I embedded in this post, I left a trail of breadcrumbs to go deeper down the rabbit holes, if someone should so choose to do so.
In contrast, Forests tend to make the Forest-y thing the thing of every single post.
But writing a Grassland post for every 4-6 Forest posts allows you to leave a bunch of breadcrumbs back to your deeper Forest-y stuff.
You can, in some ways, think of this as a chapter summary or a roundup. Grasslands are known for weaving, which is truly just making connections backward in their writing to make and keep the larger body of work relevant again.
Infrequent Consumers (Strangers or Passerbys)
To reach your infrequent consumers, also known as your people you are trying to attract but not technically connected with, create accessibility and context.
In this post, every time I bring up a Forest-y thing, I explain and catch people up on the most necessary details that they might not understand in brief, skimmable paragraphs of a few sentences. Think of this as writing down the definition of something like your a 3rd grade teacher.
Grasslands write a bit more like journalists and make sure that strangers can read their work.
Another way to think about this (especially for fiction) is giving people a brand new entry point to your work.
To give a fiction example of how I do this, All my series are set in the same larger world (and the stories intertwine, not unlike Terry Pratchett or Cassandra Clare). Even within my books, I write from multiple points-of-view, which is basically like starting a story three or four times instead of just once. George R.R. Martin is probably the king of this, and in A Song of Ice and Fire, he certainly starts far more stories than he seems to finish.
Forests tend to write only to their die-hard fans in their marketing copy. If Forests and other types simply considered these three different audiences in everything they write, they would pick up far more readers and subscribers. In fact, this was my number one piece of feedback when I was teaching people how to do Kickstarter campaigns!
#2 - Create Solid Thematic Vibes
Forests tend to write about a set of related themes, often without realizing it.
It is smart for Forests to unpack what these themes are and find the themes that are most universal.
Swift is very good at sticking to her largest themes around love—finding it, having it, losing it. She has other themes she writes about frequently, like petty revenge, bullying, settling scores, the fame monster, and how women are chewed up and spit out in the entertainment industry, and even her opulent lifestyle, but she knows those are far less relatable than the universal themes around love.
If you are a Forest, ask yourself:
What themes you find across all your work?
What is the biggest, more popular, most universal theme? (See T. Taylor’s Substack
or her book 7-Figure Fiction if you are struggling with this.)Where might these themes connect to an umbrella theme?
What subcultures deeply resonate with your themes?
A great example of someone who does this for fiction (besides Theodora Taylor, of course!) is Emily Kimelman. I’ve also heard this author describe her marketing efforts as figuring out what emotions people feel in her books and then making marketing content that matches those same emotions.
#3 - Offer Deep Insight
I read so many Forest posts where I think, “hmmm…That's nice.” Or, “That was well written.” Or, “Yes! This has happened to me too.” I might even leave a comment of appreciation on their work saying such.
But I do not often think, “I am going to buy something from this person” or “I am going to become a paid subscriber” because 9 times out of 10 they did not prove to me that there is a transformation on the other end of my money. The thing I put my money down for is deep insight that is going to change me.
Here’s the rub: Forests sometimes tell campfire stories that are accessible but basic. Surface level insight and telling people things they already know or could figure out on their own simply doesn't create sales. It creates comments and engagement, but it doesn't make people want to become your customer.
This is true in songwriting. Taylor Swift is a Forest but she does not offer any surface level insights in her work. She offers deep insights on her main theme, love, and her secondary themes around her love life and her fame. I buy Taylor Swift instead of everyone else because I want to emote the way she helps me emote. It is ultimately my transformation, not hers, that brings out my wallet. Don’t get me wrong—she got there through her transformation, but that is not what I am buying from her.
This is true even in fiction! For example, I am a huge fan of Lucy Score. Her romance books have all the same themes:
Immersive, small town feel
Vivid protagonists
Girl gang
Large secondary cast of colorful characters
Emotional depth
Social Liberal-lite
There is nothing surface level about a Lucy Score book. She fleshes out every scene and every character until you start to believe that you are living in a town called Knockemout. I will buy a Lucy Score book because I know it will seep into my being and transform me.
#4 - Invent Your Own Arbitrage
As Russell likes to say, Deserts find an attention arbitrage where they can get in and get out quickly, while the other four types create an attention arbitrage.
Grasslands create an arbitrage at the cross-section of multiple topics. For example, no one else is going to write a post like this. I've combined three areas that I know a ton about—Taylor Swift, twin flames, and writing things that are more marketable—into a one-of-a-kind post. I've also laced the post with psychological triggers around secrets and double (or triple) meanings in wordplay.
In contrast, Forests create an arbitrage at the cross-section of multiple themes. Swift has created an arbitrage because there are few people at her level of success, and even fewer who can write about it the way she can. She is a fantastic person for writers to learn from because of it!
Now It’s Your Turn
What do you think? Does this post give you a better sense of how to think and write like a Grassland, aka embrace your inner Grassland?
I got a few good insights from this post, but they're probably not the ones you were hoping for.
For a while, I've considered myself a casual Swift fan. But the songs I like are the singles, and the thing that has always kept me from really getting deeper into the fandom, aside from the fact that I never seem to be capable of getting deeply into any fandom, is the fact that none of the songs on any album ever sound enough like the singles to hold my interest.
And for what it's worth, I find bullying and getting chewed up and spit out to be much more relatable themes than true love.
Overall, I'd say the post made me feel less like I now have the tools to incorporate where grassland like tendencies than It does make me feel exhausted thinking about even trying. And it has nothing to do with how you or Russell or Michael present the material, but all the material from WriterMBA or Subscriptions for Authors Just makes me wonder why I'm even bothering When I'm very clearly not cut out for this
I understood this more than any other post. I’m a Swiftie and a Forest. I’m an indie author and poet. Thank you for making this accessible to me.