Song: ‘Wood’
Artist: Taylor Swift
US chart peak: 5 (so far)
Release date: October 3, 2025
Writers: Taylor Swift, Max Martin, Shellback
Producers: Taylor Swift, Max Martin, Shellback
Quintessential Max moment: The second verse only being two lines long allowing the pre-chorus to arrive sooner.
Video synopsis: It’s a ‘visualizer’, apols.

Taylor Swift is 35 years old. Now I don’t usually care about a pop star’s age, but it feels pertinent in the context of ‘Wood’, a song that sounds like the Jackson 5 and features myriad euphemism for a penis. It’s a Kidz Bop take on Sabrina Carpenter’s more nuanced and musically interesting nudge-nudge wink-wink pop, and makes the act of shagging feel about as sexy as returning a library card.

Like a few of the other songs on ‘The Life of a Showgirl’, ‘Wood’ seems to start as one thing before merging into something else. Its bolted on extras suggests more speed, less haste. The first verse is quite a neat, if infantile, play on various superstitions and ways Taylor approached love – “Penny’s unlucky, I took him back / And then stepped on a crack” – but that all flies out of the window in favour of what amounts to Carry On Cock. By the time we reach the post-chorus, Taylor’s suddenly morphed into Babs Windsor: “Forgive me, it sounds cocky / He ah-matized me and opened my еyes / Redwood tree, it ain’t hard to see / His love was thе key that opened my thighs.”

She’s talking about Travis Kelce’s big, thick, tree-like penis and how it helped her realise, somehow, that actually superstition doesn’t have anything to do with love. She has no need to catch a bouquet now, because “a hard rock” (Kelce’s penis) is on its way (into her vagina). Next she crowbars the name of Kelce’s podcast, New Heights, into a line about, you guessed it, Kelce’s big, thick, tree-like penis.

It’s exhausting to be honest and feels like it should have been one of her ‘vault tracks’, even though she doesn’t need to them anymore. Obviously fair play to you, Taylor Swift, for getting some lovely penis, but this isn’t high school or a Jonah Hill film from the late naughties.