This Love Taylor Swift Lyrics (Taylor’s Version)

This Love (Taylor’s Version) is an airy, oceanic ballad that floats through 1989 (Taylor’s Version) like a tide returning to shore—gentle on the surface, deep with feeling underneath. Followers of Taylor Swift often cite it as proof that her pop era never abandoned the poetic precision she honed in earlier country-leaning work.

About This Love (Taylor’s Version)

The track appears on 1989 (Taylor’s Version), released October 27, 2023, as part of Swift’s ongoing project to re-record albums whose original masters changed hands amid the 2019 Big Machine sale to Scooter Braun’s Ithaca Holdings. Swift’s goal is to offer fans and sync partners versions she owns outright. Compared with the original 1989 landscape in 2014, “This Love” stood out as a solo-written outlier on a record largely shaped by powerhouse collaborators—an intimate breather between neon dance tracks. The re-recording preserves that mood while showcasing how Swift’s voice navigates softness and strength with more lived-in control.

Unlike many peers on the album, “This Love” credits Taylor Swift alone as writer, underscoring its personal, almost diary-like DNA. Production-wise, the original leaned into reverb-drenched guitars, spacious drums, and a vocal that seems to arrive from down a hallway of memory. Fans first heard This Love (Taylor’s Version) as a standalone preview when Swift released it in May 2022, well before the full 1989 re-record arrived—an early signal of the sonic continuity she wanted between the original album’s atmosphere and the Taylor’s Version era.

In contrast to the 2014 master, the 2023 take often strikes listeners as slightly more anchored in the vocal performance: consonants are smooth, breath control is meticulous, and the emotional arc feels deliberate. The lyrics still describe love as a force that leaves and returns, using maritime metaphors to suggest inevitability and renewal. Within Swift’s broader narrative, the song quietly parallels her career themes—loss, return, reinvention—without needing name-checks or gossip scaffolding. It is 1989 at its most translucent. The May 2022 preview gave longtime listeners an early taste of how Swift would handle the album’s softer textures in the Taylor’s Version era—long before the full October 2023 rollout confirmed the project’s scope.

Because Swift wrote it alone, “This Love” also serves as a useful study object for her melodic instincts: the way she lets lines float across bar lines, how she balances consonant-heavy phrases with open vowels on the hook, and how restraint becomes drama without extra production tricks. That songwriter-forward identity mattered in 2014, when critics were still adjusting to her pop pivot, and it still matters now, when her catalog spans multiple genres and personas.

This Love (Taylor’s Version) Lyrics

[Verse 1]
Clear blue water
High tide came and brought you in
And I could go on and on, on and on, and I will
Skies grew darker, currents swept you out again
And you were just gone and gone, gone and gone

[Pre-Chorus]
In silent screams and wildest dreams
I never dreamed of this

[Chorus]
This love is good
This love is bad
This love is alive, back from the dead, oh-oh
These hands had to let it go free
And this love came back to me, oh-oh

[Verse 2]
Tossing, turning, struggle through the night for someone new
Baby, I could go on and on, on and on
Lantern burning, flickered in my mind for only you
But you were still gone, gone, gone

[Pre-Chorus]
Been losing grip on sinking ships
You showed up just in time

[Chorus]
This love is good
This love is bad
This love is alive, back from the dead, oh-oh
These hands had to let it go free
And this love came back to me, oh-oh
This love left a permanent mark
This love is glowing in the dark, oh-oh
These hands had to let it go free
And this love came back to me, oh-oh

[Bridge]
Your kiss, my cheek
I watched you leave
Your smile, my ghost
I fell to my knees
When you’re young, you just run
But you come back to what you need

[Outro]
This love is good
This love is bad
This love is alive, back from the dead, oh-oh
These hands had to let it go free
And this love came back to me, oh-oh
(This love) this love left a permanent mark
(This love) this love is glowing in the dark, oh-oh
(This love) these hands had to let it go free
(This love) and this love came back to me, oh-oh

Meaning and Analysis

“This Love” treats romance as a natural cycle. Swift’s imagery—tides, skies clearing, flames going out and rekindling—frames the relationship as something larger than interpersonal drama. The narrator is less interested in assigning blame than in describing patterns: love arrives, love departs, love circles back when it is ready. That cyclical structure gives the song a mythic quality, as if the affair obeys lunar logic rather than calendar appointments. The ethereal production amplifies the effect; guitars wash instead of stab, and the vocal melody drifts across bar lines in ways that mimic water movement.

From a literary perspective, the song relies on metaphor chains that stay coherent. Water stands for emotion and time; light and dark suggest hope and uncertainty. Swift avoids over-explaining, letting repetition do emotional work—listeners hear key phrases return like waves, reinforcing the sense of inevitability. The simplicity of the hook is deceptive: it is easy to sing along to, yet difficult to write with this level of clarity without tipping into generic platitudes. The specificity of certain lines anchors the abstraction, reminding audiences that this is still a human story, not only a poetic conceit.

Emotionally, “This Love” offers comfort. It suggests that endings are not always permanent and that some bonds reshape rather than vanish. That message resonated in 2014 for fans who associated it with personal healing; in the Taylor’s Version era, it can also be read alongside Swift’s public journey of reclaiming her work. The song does not mention masters or contracts, yet its theme—something precious leaving and finding its way home—mirrors the emotional language fans use to describe the re-recordings. Whether heard as romance or metaphor, the track remains one of 1989’s most quietly devastating achievements. In concert contexts—when Swift revisits older albums—it often lands as a collective exhale, the moment the crowd stops jumping and sways instead.

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