Taylor Swift’s documentary, Miss Americana, hit Netflix on January 31, and it features the original song, “Only the Young.” In the past few years, the pop star has opened up about her political leanings—and it turns out that she wrote her latest track after the midterm elections.
She spoke about the songwriting process in an interview with Variety. “I wrote it after the midterm elections, when there were so many young people who rallied for their candidate, whether it was a senator or congressman or congresswoman,” Swift said. “It was hard to see so many people feel like they had canvassed and done everything and tried so hard.”
The Lover artist opens the track by painting a vignette of post-election loss:
It keeps me awake, the look on your face
The moment you heard the news
You’re screaming inside and frozen in time
You did all that you could do
The game was rigged, the ref got tricked
The wrong ones think they’re right
You were outnumbered this time
“I saw a lot of young people’s hopes dashed,” she continued. “And I found that to be particularly tragic, because young people are the people who feel the worst effects of gun violence, and student loans and trying to figure out how to start their lives and how to pay their bills, and climate change, and are we going to war—all these horrific situations that we find ourselves facing right now.”
On the second verse, she alludes to school shootings:
So every day now
You brace for the sound you’ve only heard on TV
You go to class, scared
Wondering where the best hiding spot would be
And the big bad man and his big bad clan
Their hands are stained with red
Oh, how quickly they forget
Back in 2018, the pop star voiced her support for gun control in an Instagram post. No one should have to go to school in fear of gun violence,” she wrote in a caption. “I’ve made a donation to show my support for the students, for the March For Our Lives campaign, for everyone affected by these tragedies, and to support gun reform.”
In the past, Swift has been criticized for her silence on political issues. In October 2018, she ended up endorsing former Democratic Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen in the midterm elections. “In the past I’ve been reluctant to publicly voice my political opinions, but due to several events in my life and in the world in the past two years, I feel very differently about that now,” she wrote in an Instagram post.
Last year, she voiced her support for the LGBTQ community on “You Need to Calm Down”:
You are somebody that we don’t know
But you’re comin' at my friends like a missile
Why are you mad when you could be GLAAD? (You could be GLAAD)
Sunshine on the street at the parade
But you would rather be in the dark ages
Makin' that sign must’ve taken all night
Her seventh album, Lover, hit No. 1 on the Billboard 200 last year. It earned 867,000 equivalent album units in its first week, notching the biggest sales week for an album since her 2017 album, reputation.
Listen to the song above, and read the lyrics to Taylor Swift’s “Only the Young” on Genius now.
