Taylor Swift’s First Draft of ‘My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys’ Has a Heartbreaking Lyric Left Out of Final Version
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Taylor Swift’s First Draft of ‘My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys’ Has a Heartbreaking Lyric Left Out of Final Version

Taylor Swift is continuing to let people in on her creation process.

The 14-time Grammy winner, 34, announced on her Instagram Stories on Saturday, Aug. 3, she was selling the “First Draft Phone Memo” versions of some tracks from The Tortured Poets Department for a limited time.
Swifties have already noticed a lyric from an early version of “My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys.” This lyric is even more heartbreaking than the words that made it onto the final version of the song. The final version was released on April 19.

In the outro of the album version, Swift sings, “Just say when, I’d play again / He was my best friend down at the sandlot.”

But as heard in the phone memo version, which has a slower tempo and is played acoustically on a piano, Swift originally didn’t mention the sandlot. She opted to sing, “He was my best friend and that was the worst part.”

 

Taylor Swift
Taylor Swift in 2024.

 

When explaining the meaning of the song during her track-by-track explanations on iHeartRadio in April, Swift provided insight. She said the song is a story told from the perspective of a child’s toy.

Swift, who wrote or co-wrote every song on TTPD, has a solo writing credit on this track.

She said it is about “being somebody’s favorite toy until they break you and then don’t want to play with you anymore. This is how a lot of us are in relationships where we are so valued by a person in the beginning. Then all of a sudden, they break us or they devalue us in their mind.”

 

Taylor Swift
Taylor Swift arrives at 66th Grammy Awards in February 2024.

 

“We’re still clinging on to ‘No no, no. You should’ve seen them the first time they saw me. They’ll come back to that. They’ll get back to that.’ ” she added at the time. “So it’s kind of like a song about denial, really. So that you can live in this world where there’s still hope for a toxic broken relationship.”

“First Draft Phone Memo” versions of “Cassandra,” “The Black Dog,” and “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?” are also available. They are available for a limited time on Swift’s site.