Songfacts®:

• Taylor penned this hushed, intimate number when she was sitting on her tour bus after a show thinking about a relationship that ended several months previously. She explained to Billboard magazine: "The feeling wasn't sadness and anger or those things anymore. It was wistful loss. And so I just got my guitar and I hit on the fact that I was thinking in terms of rhyming; I rhymed magic with tragic, changed a few things and ended it with what a sad beautiful tragic love affair. I wanted to tell the story in terms of a cloudy recollection of what went wrong. It's kind of the murky gray, looking back on something you can't change or get back."
• Red covers the whole spectrum of emotions and this cut lies at one end of the range. "I'm 22," Swift told Billboard magazine. "I'm all over the place, so my record is all over the place. Part of this record is acknowledging [that] all these emotions are very loud and very different from one another. At one end of the spectrum you have 'Sad Beautiful Tragic,' which is a breakup song in the form of a funeral march, and you also have 'Never Ever Getting Back Together Again,' which is a breakup song in the form of a parade."