Songfacts®:

• This song finds Taylor describing the difficulties in carrying on a relationship when the paparazzi ("the vultures") start follow them around. However, in her next relationship, the songstress states that she intends to spend romantic time with her man outside of the view of the photographers as she knows "places we won't be found." Taylor's liner note message for this song is "And Everyone Was Watching."
• Taylor wrote the song with Ryan Tedder. The OneRepublic frontman is the guy behind such pop hits as "Apologize" "Bleeding Love," "Halo" and "Counting Stars." Swift's partnership with Tedder, (they also worked together on "Welcome to New York") was significant in her musical departure on 1989 from the country pop styles of her earlier work. However, according to an interview with UK newspaper The Sun she faced an uphill battle making the switch to pop music. "The decision came directly from me. I had to plead my case with everyone and certain people at the record label. I had to really campaign and get everyone on my side," she said.
  
  "I had to convince my Nashville record label president it was right for me," Taylor continued. "I presented the album to him and he said, 'It's great, it's the best thing you've ever done but can you put two country songs on it?'"
  
  Taylor refused and her persistence paid off, with the all-pop 1989 producing huge sales.
• There are three bonus tracks on the deluxe edition of 1989 that are actually voice memos recorded to Taylor's phone that were later turned into songs. (This cut, "I Wish You Would" and "Blank Space").
  
  Taylor explained: "I sent this voice memo to Ryan Tedder because I'd always wanted to work with him, and finally we scheduled some studio time. So I always wanna be prepared. I wanted to send him the idea that I was working on before we went into the studio just in case he wrote back and said 'I can't stand that, I wanna work on something else, think of something else.'"
  
  "So I just sat down with the piano, put my phone on top of the piano and just kind of explained to him where I wanted to go with the song, how I saw the melody sitting in and we ended up recording the song the next day and it ended up being on the record called 'I Know Places'. So this was the voice memo I sent to him the night before we ended up finishing the song."
• Taylor Swift detailed her writing process for this song during an interview with Grammy Pro. "I had this idea of like, you know, when you're in love - along the lines of 'Out Of The Woods' - it's very precious, it's fragile," she said. "As soon as the world gets ahold of it, whether it's your friends or people around town hear about it … it's kind of like the first thing people want to do when they hear that people are in love is just kind of try to ruin it, if they're not the greatest human beings."
  
  "I kind of was in a place where I was like, 'No one is gonna sign up for this. There are just too many cameras pointed at me. There are too many ridiculous elaborations on my life. It's just not ever gonna work,'" Swift continued. "But I decided to write a love song, just kind of like, 'What would I say if I met someone really awesome and they were like, hey, I'm worried about all this attention you get?' So I wrote this song called 'I Know Places' about, like, 'Hey, I know places we can hide. We could outrun them.'"
  
  "I'm so happy that it sounds like the urgency that it sings about," she concluded.