Taylor Swift reveals the heartbreaking lyric she left out of hit Tortured Poets Department song
Los Angeles, California - Taylor Swift is letting her fans in on her songwriting process once again with early draft audio for the song My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys off of her album The Tortured Poets Department (TTPD.)
On Saturday, the 34-year-old Fortnight singer announced the sale of limited-time "First Draft Phone Memo" versions of select TTPD tracks.
How long do fans have to grab the My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys voice memo, you ask? Only one day!
The $4.99 track is exclusive to the US and is only available to purchase until 11:59 AM ET on Sunday, August 4.
Eagle-eyed Swifties were quick to notice a lyric that got changed somewhere in the final song's production – and fans think the old version was even more heartwrenching than the one we got on the record.
The album version of the song features the words, "Just say when, I'd play again / He was my best friend down at the sandlot."
In the voice memo, however, Taylor instead sings, "He was my best friend and that was the worst part."
Ouch!
Taylor co-wrote every song on TTPD, but she has a solo writing credit for My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys.
In a special track-by-track explanation interview that she gave to iHeartRadio in April, the 14-time Grammy winner gave some more insight into the song.
A behind-the-scenes look at Taylor Swift's My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys
According to Taylor, the song is about "being somebody’s favorite toy until they break you and then don’t want to play with you anymore – which is how a lot of us are in relationships where we are so valued by a person in the beginning, and then all of the sudden, they break us or they devalue us in their mind."
She continued, saying, "We’re still clinging on to 'No no, no. You should’ve seen them the first time they saw me. They’ll come back to that. They’ll get back to that,'" adding that at its core, the song is "about denial... so that you can live in this world where there's still hope for a toxic broken relationship."
Other "First Draft Phone Memo" versions from Tortured Poets – including The Black Dog, Cassandra, and Who's Afraid of Little Old Me? – are also available for a limited time on Taylor Swift's website.
Cover photo: IMAGO / TT