Songfacts®:

• "Lover" is a romantic ballad in which Taylor Swift talks about her British actor boyfriend Joe Alwyn.
  
  Can I go where you go?
  Can we always be this close forever and ever?
  And ah, take me out, and take me home forever and ever
  You're my, my, my, my lover
  
  Swift's romantic relationships have always been at the center of her music and here she declares her joy at finding long-lasting love.
• Taylor Swift started dating Joe Alwyn in early 2017, and several songs on her Reputation album were about her British beau, including "Call It What You Want," "Dancing With Our Hands Tied" and "Gorgeous."
• Swift is the only credited songwriter on this one. She co-produced the waltzy track with frequent collaborator Jack Antonoff. "We wanted to make music that could've been played on a wedding reception stage in 1970," Swift said.
• Swift unveils some potential wedding vows during the serenade's bridge.
  
  Ladies and gentlemen, will you please stand?
  With every guitar string scar on my hand
  I take this magnetic force of a man to be my
  Lover.
  
  The songstress told Vogue that on "Lover," she was "really able to go to Bridge City."
• The song is the title track of Taylor Swift's seventh studio album. She revealed the record is "a love letter to love, in all of its maddening, passionate, exciting, enchanting, horrific, tragic, wonderful glory."
• "Lover" was produced entirely at New York City's Electric Lady Studios with only Swift and sound engineer Laura Sisk in the room.
  
  "Taylor wrote every stitch of this song and came in and played it for me – just a perfect moment to hear what she had done alone the night before," Jack Antonoff tweeted.
• Directed by Swift and Drew Kirsch ("You Need To Calm Down"), the video is a romantic fantasy involving Swift and her lover. The various scenes take place in a bright, colorful house within a snow globe.
  
  The inspiration behind the clip was a lyric from Swift's song "You Are In Love":
  
  And so it goes, you two are dancing in a snow globe 'round and 'round
  
  Swift's love interest is played by one of her tour dancers, Christian Owens, who also appeared in Normani's "Motivation" video.
• Swift made this song the title track because "it's a such perfect example of what I was trying to do with the album," she explained in a Spotify storyline. "I wanted to make music that in a lot of ways feels timeless and is really confessional."
• Taylor Swift performed a stripped-back version of the song on the October 5, 2019 episode of Saturday Night Live. She also sang "False God" on the show. No stranger to the program, this was Swift's fifth appearance on SNL.
• Swift said during a performance of the song at an intimate NPR Tiny Desk Concert that she's particularly proud of the lyric, "With every guitar string scar on my hand, I take this magnetic force of a man to be my lover."
  
  "Songwriting is just really a cathartic, therapeutic thing to me, so there are a lot of things I've written about in life that are the harder things I've had to go through. So I took that as a metaphor for the times I was learning to play guitar," she explained. "I'd play until my fingers bled when I was a kid, and I still have those marks from that; those times I'd be changing a string and it'd pop, and I still have those scars from that."
  
  Swift added that the lyrics also act as a bigger metaphor. "In life, you accumulate scars, you accumulate hurt, you accumulate moments of learning and disappointment and struggle and all that. And if someone's gonna take your hand, they better take your hand, scars and all."
• Swift came up with the idea for the track in the middle of the night. She told fans at the NPR concert that she stumbled to the piano in her pajamas to write it.
• Taylor Swift dropped a remix of "Lover" featuring Shawn Mendes on November 13, 2019. The makeover features a new verse by the Canadian pop star in which he attempts to woo the songstress with candles and a dance. Mendes also joins Swift on the swaying song's reworked chorus.
  
  "He has taken 'Lover' and he's rewritten parts of it, which I think is so important because I love him as a writer," Swift said of the "collaborashawn" in a social media video. "I also think that everybody would write a different love letter to their lover, and I think his take on it is so beautiful."
• Swift took to the piano to close out her set at the American Music Awards in 2019 when she was awarded Artist of the Decade. As Swift played, the ballet dancers Craig Hall and Misty Copeland performed.
• The song starts off with Swift appearing to suggest that we should all be taking our Christmas lights down before January 1.
  
  We could leave the Christmas lights up 'til January
  This is our place, we make the rules.
  
  Speaking to The New York Times for its "Diary of a Song" series, Swift said she had toyed with the lyric, "We could have the Christmas lights up 'til April," But she stuck with January to illustrate how even the dullest parts of a relationship can feel special when you've found love. "It's not about that being a crazy thing," she explained. "It's about how mundane it is. It's about, like, 'We could put a rug over there' (or) 'We could do wallpaper or we could do paint.'"