peace

“peace” is one of Taylor’s most personal songs on the album. In the documentary “folklore: the long pond studio sessions” her and producer Aaron Dessner talk about the meaning of the song in detail:

“When [Aaron]sent me this instrumental the first word that I thought was, ‘This is what peace sounds like’. It’s got this amazing bass line that just made feel like, ‘This is serenity, this is peace’. And then I was thinking, ‘Maybe you just start with the obvious and think about how that could be told in an interesting way that kind of goes against the title’. Like, ‘I could never give you peace’ over the most peaceful sounding instrumental track. I think this is a song that is extremely personal to me because there are times when I feel like with everything that’s in my control, I can make myself seem like someone who doesn’t have an abnormal life and I try that every day. It’s like, ‘How do I make my friends and family and my loved ones not see this big elephant that’s in the room for our normal life?’ Because I don’t want the elephant in the room. If you’re gonna be in my life I feel like there’s a certain amount that comes with it that I can’t stop from happening. I can’t stop from you getting a call in the morning that says, ‘The tabloids are writing this today’, I can’t help it if there’s a guy with a camera two miles away with a telescope lense taking pictures of you. I can’t stop those things from happening. And so this song was basically like, ‘Is it enough? Is the stuff that I can control enough to block out the things that I can’t? So it makes me really emotional to hear this song and to know that a lot of people related to it who aren’t talking about the same things that I’m talking about. They’re talking about human complexity. It’s about someone who you wanna provide with peace, someone you love, so you want them to have as much peace in their life as possible and reconciling the fact that you might not be their best option for that. But is it still a deal they wanna take?” — Taylor Swift

“peace” is Aaron Dessner’s favorite song on “folklore”, as he has said multiple times. With Taylor, he shared the following:

“I have in my life suffered from depression and I’m a hard person to be in a relationship with or be married to because I go up and down. And I can’t help this, it’s like a chemical thing that happens sometimes. And music is a way of dealing with that for me. And somehow this song captures the fragility of what’s that like, of being in a relationship with someone who may or may not have peace.” — Aaron Dessner

“peace” debuted at No. 58 on the Billboard Hot 100 during the chart week of August 8, 2020.