Taylor Swift is finally revealing details about the rumored 10-minute version of a fan-favorite song.
The singer-songwriter opened up about “All Too Well,” a track off her fourth studio album Red, on Rolling Stone‘s 500 Greatest Albums podcast. The song, which details a gut-wrenching breakup, was an unexpected hit, as Swift never released it as a single because she thought it was "too dark, too sad, too intense.”
“I was just like a broken human walking into rehearsal just feeling terrible about what was going on in my personal life,” she admitted about writing the song, which is speculated to be about her relationship with Jake Gyllenhaal.
“When we got together, she had it all in her brain, and [the song] was probably 10, 12, or 15 minutes long! She had a story to get out, so we just sat down and started going through it piece by piece, and as she sang all these things, I just wrote down what I thought were the important pieces that hit,” Swift's collaborator Liz Rose revealed during an interview with Yahoo! in 2014.
On the RS podcast, the Folklore singer confirmed that track was originally much longer than the 5:28 version that appears on the Red album, and that she also dropped the F-bomb on the track.
“I just started singing and riffing and ad-libbing this song that basically was ‘All Too Well’… it literally just was that song, but it had probably seven extra verses. And it included the F-word, and basically I remember my sound guy was like, ‘Hey, I burned a CD of that thing you were doing in case you want it.’ And I was like ‘Sure.’ I ended up taking it home and listening to it, and I was like, ‘I actually really like this, but it definitely is like 10 minutes long and I need to pare it down, so I’m going to call Liz Rose.’”
“Not to be dramatic but I'd literally walk up Mount Everest if it meant we would get the 10 minute version of All Too Well,” a dedicated Swiftie tweeted following the reveal.
No word on when, or if, we will ever get to hear the extended version of “All Too Well,” but knowing T-Swift, and the surprises she constantly has up her sleeve, she’ll deliver it in the most perfect way… someday.