"Delicate"

"There's an effect that you may hear on the vocals throughout the vocals on the rest of the album that is recurring, and it's a vocoder. It's a vocal effect where you sing, and the vocoder splits your voice into chords, and you can play your voice on a keyboard, in chords. So basically, if you're singing the notes of a piano, and you could play your own voice. So that's what you'll hear in the beginning, and throughout the song, and then you'll hear it several times. We tried it in the studio, and I thought it sounded really emotional, and really vulnerable, and really kind of, like, sad but beautiful. The idea of your reputation is definitely something that I play on for the entire album, but when the album starts off it's much more bombastic. It's more like, 'Oh, I don't care what you say about me, I don't care what you say about my reputation, it doesn't matter.' But then it hits this point, on track five, where it's like, oh god, what happens when you meet somebody that you really want in your life and then you start worrying about what they've heard before they met you. And you start to wonder, could something fake, like your reputation, affect something real, like somebody getting to know you? And you start to wonder, how much does all that matter? And this is the first point of vulnerability in the record where you're like, oh maybe this does actually matter a little bit. And how does that factor in, kind of questioning the reality and the perception of a reputation, and how much weight it actually has."

"Look What You Made Me Do"

"It actually started with just a poem that I wrote about my feelings, and it's basically about realizing that you couldn't trust certain people, but realizing you appreciate the people you can trust. Realizing that you can't just let everyone in, but the ones you can let in, you need to cherish. And it had all the verses in it, just basically as is. When the beat hit, we were like 'Ooh, look what you made me do, look what you made me do,' and we were just like, 'Oh my god, we've gotta edit out the rest of the words, and just do that. I would just like to play the most important part of the song, 'I don't trust nobody, and nobody trusts me, I'll be the actress starring in your bad dreams. Oh, I'm sorry, the old Taylor can't come to the phone right now. Why? Oh, 'cause she's dead.'"