Taylor Swift dialled down the heartbreak during the extensive creative process for her song, My Boy Only Breaks His Favourite Toys.
Swifties noticed a tear-jerking lyric change when the international pop sensation, 34, announced on Instagram on Saturday, August 3, that she’s selling “First Draft phone Memo” versions of select tracks from her record-breaking new album, The Tortured Poets Department for a limited time.
Fans quickly caught on that an early version of MBOBHFT contains a lyric even more heartbreaking than the final release.
In the album version’s outro, Swift sings, “Just say when, I’d play again / He was my best friend down at the sandlot.” However, in the phone memo version, played acoustically on a piano with a slower tempo, she originally sang, “He was my best friend and that was the worst part."
The multi-Grammy winner explained the song’s meaning during a track down track breakdown on iHeartRadio back in April, revealing that the song is narrated from the perspective of a child’s toy.
Swift elaborated, “It’s about being somebody’s favourite toy until they break you and then don’t want to play with you anymore — which is how a lot of us feel in relationships where we are so valued by a person in the beginning, and then all of a sudden, they break us or devalue us."
The “First Draft Phone Memo” versions of Cassandra, The Black Dog, and Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me? are also available for a limited time on Swift’s website.
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