Taylor Swift’s new song “Wood” has been making headlines for its spicy lyrics, but the pop star claims the track wasn’t originally meant to be so … forthright.
“I brought this into the studio and I was like, ‘I wanna do sort of like a throwback kind of timeless-sounding song,’” Swift, 35, explained during her Monday, October 6, appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. “And I had this idea about, ‘I ain’t gotta knock on wood,’ and I would knock on wood and it would be all these superstitions. And it really started out in a very innocent place.”
The Grammy winner added, “I don’t know what happened, man. I got in there, we started vibing and I don’t know, I don’t know how we got here. But I love the song so much.”
While the final version of “Wood” does include the line about not having to knock on wood and numerous references to other superstitions (stepping on a crack, bad pennies, black cats and more), there are also several double entendres about her sex life.
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“Forgive me, it sounds cocky / He ah-matized me and opened my еyes,” Swift sings in the post-chorus. “Redwood tree, it ain’t hard to see / His love was thе key that opened my thighs.”
The song also includes the lines, “Girls, I don’t need to catch the bouquet / To know a hard rock is on the way.”
“Wood” comes from Swift’s new album, The Life of a Showgirl, which dropped Friday, October 3. The “Anti-Hero” singer wrote her new batch of songs last year while on the European leg of her Eras Tour, amid her romance with Travis Kelce. She and the Kansas City Chiefs tight end, 36, announced their engagement in August.
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“It’s a love story,” Swift said of “Wood” in an Amazon Music explanation video shared on Friday. “[It’s] about using, as a plot device, popular superstitions [and] good luck charms, bad luck charms and all these different ways we have decided things are good luck or bad luck — like knocking on wood and seeing a black cat. That is the way I’ve decided to explore this very, very sentimental love song.”
Days later, Swift hinted that her mom, Andrea, hasn’t quite picked up on the steamier lines in the track.
“She thinks that the song is about superstitions, which it absolutely is,” Swift quipped during a Monday interview on SiriusXM’s Morning Mash Up. “That’s the joy of the double entendre. You can read that song for people, and it just goes right over their heads.”
She added, “You see in that song what you want to see in that song.”
Kelce, for his part, has not yet shared his public reaction to “Wood.” Hours before Swift’s Tonight Show interview, he appeared on Monday Night Countdown for an interview with his brother, Jason Kelce, who asked him about the possibility of retirement.
“Man, I’ll be fortunate to keep having fun with these guys year in year out, man,” Travis said. “I take it day by day, year by year. I just love coming into work with these guys.”
