Welcome To New York Meaning

"WELCOME TO NEW YORK" Song Meaning

‘Welcome To New York’ is the first track of the ‘1989’ album, which marks a turning point in Taylor’s career.
This songs is actually based on a personal experience of Taylor Alison Swift, when she moved to New York City from her home in Nashville, Tennessee. It was a big move that inspired her to focus more on her career. She says she is, was and will be ‘overwhelmed’ by New York forever. It has given her a new kind of inspiration to make he music. All of this should have influenced her music career to take a different path as well.

Taylor sings;

“Everybody here wanted something more
Searching for a sound we hadn’t heard before..”

New York City has something to offer for everybody. At least that’s what everyone says. People move to New York is hopes of greater things–things they never had in their grasp before.

“When we first dropped our bags on apartment floors
Took our broken hearts, put them in a drawer
Everybody here was someone else before
And you can want who you want
Boys and boys and girls and girls..”

Taylor says that past is the past when you move to these big cities. Your past heartbreaks are in the history. You keep them locked in a drawer when you are in NYC. And everyone who has been in the apartment before was someone else.

In her Youtube channel Taylor explains the inspiration for the song "Welcome to New York", "I wanted to start the album with this song because New York has been an important landscape and location for the story of my life in the last couple of years, I dreamt about moving to New York. I obsessed over moving to New York and then I did it. The inspiration that I found in that city is kind of hard to describe and hard to compare to any other force of inspiration I've ever experienced in my life. It's like an electric city. I approached moving there with such wide-eyed optimism and sort of saw it as a place of endless potential and possibilities. You can kind of hear that reflected in this music and this first song especially."