Songfacts®:

• Here, Taylor Swift delves into the murky depths of location stalking. It seems a former flame forgot to turn off location sharing on his phone, allowing our intrepid songstress to paint a vivid picture of his every move.
• The title is believed to refer to a London pub called The Black Dog in Vauxhall, South London.
  
  "Just don't understand. How you don't miss me in The Black Dog," Swift wails in the chorus. Many Swifties have already pinned this tune on her former boyfriend, English actor Joe Alwyn, who resides in the same neck of the woods as this canine-monikered drinking establishment.
• "Black Dog" is the 17th track on The Anthology, the double-album edition of Swift's 11th studio album, The Tortured Poets Department. The release of the album unleashed a wave of Swifties on a pilgrimage to Vauxhall in search of this pub and, perhaps, a whiff of heartbreak-infused ambiance.
• When someone plays The Starting Line
  And you jump up, but she's too young
  To know this song that was intertwined
  In the magic fabric of our dreaming
  
  Some fans are convinced this lament is actually a veiled swipe at The 1975's Matty Healy, Swift's summer fling of 2023. The evidence? Swift is referencing 2000s emo band The Starting Line, best known for their song "The Best of Me." Healy was such a fan of The Starting Line that he covered "Best of Me." Swift, with a signature dose of her Swiftian shade, suggests Healy's current squeeze might be a tad deficient in the musical knowledge department, seeing as said song debuted in 2003.
• The second verse finds Swift wading through the emotional wasteland of her two discarded romances. "Black dog" takes on a whole new meaning here, morphing from pub name to a metaphor for depression, a nod to the medieval association of black dogs with the devil himself.
• Swift wrote "The Black Dog" alone. She co-produced it with her regular collaborator, Jack Antonoff, who is also the lead vocalist of the rock band Bleachers. Antonoff recruited his Bleachers bandmate Sean Hutchinson to play drums on the track. The song joins five other tracks on The Tortured Poets Department that Hutchinson contributed to.
• Asked by The London Times in a June 2024 interview about The Black Dog pub in Vauxhall, Alwyn said with a smile, "I've never been to Vauxhall."
• Taylor Swift played "The Black Dog" live for the first time on June 21, 2024 when she performed it during her The Eras Tour stop at Wembley Stadium, London, as a mash-up with Red Deluxe edition bonus track, "Come Back... Be Here," and "Maroon," off Midnights.