Taylor Swift reveals what her song ‘Florida!!!’ is really about
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TAMPA, Fla. (WFLA) — Taylor Swift continues to dominate the music world following the release of her newest album “The Tortured Poets Department,” which broke Spotify’s single-day streaming record with 300 million streams on its release day, April 19.
The long-awaited album initially consisted of just 16 songs, but at 2 a.m., Swift released 15 additional tracks for “The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology,” which left fans stunned.
Taylor Swift course coming to USF this fall
With 31 songs in total, music enthusiasts, reporters, and even Swift’s most loyal fans “Swifties” began to dissect each of her melodies to try and piece together what each song meant or who it was supposedly about.
However, for Floridians, one song stood out among the rest: “Florida!!! (feat. Florence + the Machine)”
As soon as you press play, the song takes you through a journey of wanting to reinvent yourself, find someplace new, and bury the hatchets that are weighing you down. A sunny place that shelters “shady people” — Florida.
While music is open to anyone’s personal interpretation, Swift revealed what her collaboration with Florence + the Machine is really about in an exclusive track-by-track experience on Amazon Music.
Swift admitted the inspiration for “Florida!!!” came from watching true crime shows, noticing that criminals often flock to the Sunshine State to disappear and forget what had occurred in their past.
“Florida is a song I wrote with Florida + the Machine and I think I was coming up with this idea of what happens when your life doesn’t fit or the choices you’ve made catch up to you and you’re surrounded by these harsh consequences and judgment and circumstances did not lead you to where you thought you would be and you just wanna escape from everything you’ve ever known. Is there a place you could go?
“I’m always watching ‘Dateline.’ People you know, have these crimes that they commit where they immediately skip town and go to Florida. They try to reinvent themselves, have a new identity, blend in and I think when you go through a heartbreak there’s a part of you that thinks ‘I want a new name, I want a new life, I don’t want anyone to know where I’ve been or know me at all’ and that was kind of what that was. The jumping-off point behind where you go to reinvent yourself and blend in. Florida!” she explained.
Ahead of her 11th album release, Swifties speculated that the three exclamation marks in the song title symbolize her three stops in Florida during her “Eras Tour.”
Swift performed three sold-out shows at Raymond James Stadium in April 2023, with her bringing out musician and friend Aaron Dessner for her surprise song portion of the concert. Swift and Dessner famously co-wrote songs in the past. The two also worked together on 14 songs for “The Tortured Poets Department.”
The 14-time Grammy Award winner will return to the Sunshine State for the second U.S. leg of her “Eras Tour” in October, where she’ll perform one show at the Hard Rock Stadium in Miami.
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