Swift released an early version of the song on Aug. 3
Taylor Swift is continuing to let people in on her creation process.
The 14-time Grammy winner, 34, announced on her Instagram Stories on Saturday, Aug. 3, she was selling the “First Draft Phone Memo” versions of some tracks from The Tortured Poets Department for a limited time.
Swifties have already noticed a lyric from an early version of “My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys” is even more heartbreaking than the words that made it onto the final version of the song, which was released April 19.
In the outro of the album version, Swift sings, “Just say when, I’d play again / He was my best friend down at the sandlot.”
But as heard in the phone memo version, which has a slower tempo and is played acoustically on a piano, Swift originally didn’t mention the sandlot, opting to sing, “He was my best friend and that was the worst part.”
When explaining the meaning of the song when her track-by-track explanations premiered on iHeartRadio in April, Swift said the song is a story told from the perspective of a child’s toy.
Swift, who wrote or co-wrote every song on TTPD, has a solo writing credit on this track, which she said 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.”
“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.’ ” she added at the time. “So it’s kind of like a song about denial, really. So that you can live in this world where there’s still hope for a toxic broken relationship.”
“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 site.
Source people.com
