How Does Taylor Swift’s “Florida!!!” Stack Up Against Her Other Geographical Songs?

One of the greatest misconceptions about Taylor Swift is that she only knows how to write diaristic heartbreak songs. It's an easy — and lazy — claim her detractors often make to disempower the most successful female singer-songwriter working in music today. Sure, the subject matter has been her bread and butter since she broke out at the age of 16 with tales of unrequited high-school crushes on songs like "Teardrops on My Guitar," and her latest album, The Tortured Poets Department, is her most straight-forward breakup album in years. But her pandemic albums Folklore and Evermore showcased how strong a storyteller she can be when she looks outside herself and her romantic relationships. She'd hinted at those skills on earlier albums, too, starting with the delicate "Never Grow Up" from 2010's Speak Now.

But even the most ardent Swifties will admit their favorite songwriter has one unequivocal Achilles' heel — one subject area she can't tackle without flailing: geography songs. Without exception, if Swift includes the name of your city or state in a song title, the lyrics will undoubtedly be populated by a collection of clichés about that place.

Observers will note the phenomenon began in 2014 when Swift opened her album 1989 with the wide-eyed-white-girl anthem "Welcome to New York," a tribute to the city she'd recently moved to after spending her childhood in Pennsylvania and her teen breakout years in Nashville. "Small-town girl moves to the big city" was a recurring theme in her early albums, so when she achieved that dream, she naturally wrote about it. Unfortunately, she didn't have much to say beyond surface-level platitudes: "The lights are so bright, but they never blind me."

At least she alluded to Times Square without name-checking it and other landmarks in her ode to NYC. She saved that device for "London Boy," a silly love song on 2019's Lover, which was ostensibly written for her boyfriend at the time, British actor Joe Alwyn. It's a song about an American girl in love with a — you guessed it — London boy. In the song, Swift runs down a laundry list of classic American iconography. She loves Motown, SoCal, Springsteen, faded blue jeans, and Tennessee whiskey. But now that she's met her London boy, she's studied up on his city, and boy is she going to prove it. She's going to prove it by listing the name of every single tourist trap she can think of in London, from Camden Market to Highgate, the West End, Brixton, Shoreditch, Hackney, the Heath, and Soho. She also makes sure to mention she knows British things. These include high tea, stories from uni, the pub, watching rugby, and gray skies. Finally, she must note that she knows British slang. She meets his school friends, but she also meets his best mates. She loves her London boy, but she also fancies him.

She stuck with Europe for her worst geographic song, 2022's "Paris," a song so terrible she thought better of including it on the standard edition of Midnights. Instead, it appears on the 3am Edition of the album, a seven-track bonus EP released three hours after her tenth studio album. To be fair, "Paris" happens to sit alongside some of the most piercing lyrics in her discography, including those on "Would've, Could've, Should've" and "Bigger Than the Whole Sky." Perhaps that contrast makes "Paris" sound even worse in comparison, as it contains some of the cringiest lyrics Swift has ever put to paper. The most painful example? "Sit quiet by my side in the shade/And not the kind that's thrown/I mean, the kind under where a tree has grown." Oof. The writing is clunky, but at least she evades the pitfalls of "London Boy." There's no name-checking here, but she just can't help herself — she has to allude to the Eiffel Tower: "Let the only flashing lights be the tower at midnight." Damn it! You almost had it, Taylor!
Now, with Swift's latest studio album, it's Florida's turn. As if we don't have enough problems in this state — Ron DeSantis, abortion bans, an ex-president turned resident Florida man, a home insurance crisis, hurricanes, pool-invading gators — our embattled state gets the Swiftian geography song treatment on her latest album, The Tortured Poets Department. On "Florida!!!" a collaboration with Florence and the Machine, Swift takes the Mad Libs approach. She mentions the heat, drugs (Florida itself is "one hell of a drug"), crime, hurricanes (of course), the swamp, and most notably, a timeshare in Destin.

Despite the onslaught of clichés, as a Floridian, you have to appreciate the specificity of a reference to the Redneck Riviera.

Upon first listen, the track doesn't appear to fit the themes of heartache on the album. But as Swift explains, the song is ultimately about escapism, which tracks with the first mention of our state on the album, on lead single "Fortnight," on which she and collaborator Post Malone sing of moving to Florida and buying the car you want — another escapist fantasy.

Explaining the thought process behind "Florida!!!," Swift told iHeartRadio, "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?"

Apparently, watching countless Dateline episodes about murderers who skip town to reinvent themselves led her to one unmistakable answer: Florida.