'The Summer I Turned Pretty': Taylor Swift Songs Explained

It’s the Taylor Swift effect! The Summer I Turned Pretty fans are obsessed with Conrad (Christopher Briney) and Belly’s (Lola Tung) relationship, but the songs featured on the show’s soundtrack are what makes their love story even better.

Ahead of the show’s June 2022 premiere, Taylor teased that her version of “This Love” from 1989 would be featured in the show. “Thank you @jennyhan for debuting my version of ‘This Love’ in the trailer for @thesummeriturnedpretty!!” the songstress shared on Instagram in May 2022. “I’ve always been so proud of this song and I’m very 🥺🥺🥺 about this turn of events.”

However, viewers were surprised when that wasn’t the only one of Taylor’s tunes that made it into the show.

“It’s really just that I’m a fan. It’s that the book fans are fans. And it’s a really perfect marriage of those two things,” The Summer I Turned Pretty author and showrunner, Jenny Han, told TVLine in June 2022. “The Venn diagram of Swifties and Summer fans, it’s like a circle. It’s, like, all overlap. And as we were telling the story, there’s just so many moments where I [was] like, ‘This could use a little bit of Taylor Swift.’ It was as simple as that. We have a lot of great music on the show, but I’ve always felt that her storytelling as a songwriter really matches up to the vibes of Summer.”

Ahead of the show’s Prime Video premiere, the cast spoke with J-14 exclusively about the show’s soundtrack. At the time, they hadn’t seen a final version of show with all the songs included, however, Gavin Casalegno — who plays Jeremiah on the show — teased the “pretty amazing music” in the show. He added, “Those songs just really hit the spot.”

As for the stars’ favorite song moments? Lola, of course, picked a Taylor moment!

“Absolutely ‘The Way I Loved You.’ Absolutely the debutante scene,” the actress told TVLine, referring to a moment in the show’s season 1 finale. “It’s so beautiful, and the song is so fitting. It was fun to film, too. I feel like I have a special connection to that song. It’s so magical.”

Scroll through our gallery for a breakdown of Taylor’s songs in The Summer I Turned Pretty.

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‘The Way I Loved You’

“That one was the one that I really, really, really could not do without. That was always what I was picturing,” Jenny told TVLine of the track. “I knew exactly what part of it I wanted. I knew exactly how I wanted the scene to go. So that, to me, was so major to get that needle drop for the show. That was the one that was like, ‘Please, please! We need it!’”

‘Invisible String’

“The moment is so joyful and almost childlike in the way that they make that run onto the beach,” showrunner Jenny told Entertainment Weekly in July 2023. “There’s something about that song in that moment. There’s a lightness to it. At the same time, if you really listen to those words, it just fits because we’re going back and forth in the present and the past, and it fits in both timelines.”