Not every eldest daughter felt totally seen by Taylor Swift’s “Eldest Daughter,” a track off of The Life of a Showgirl. In fact, disappointed eldest daughters have begun rewriting the lyrics to the song themselves and sharing their versions on TikTok—which is a very eldest daughter thing to do.
Part of the problem seems to be that Swift’s lyrics focus more on how she is perceived by strangers on the internet than how she is perceived by family as the eldest daughter. In the first verse, Swift sings, “Everybody’s so punk on the internet,” and “Everybody’s cutthroat in the comments / Every single hot take is cold as ice.” In the chorus, Swift sings, “But I’m not a bad bitch / And this isn’t savage.” In fact, Swift only uses the phrase “eldest daughter” once in the whole song, when she says, “Every eldest daughter / Was the first lamb to the slaughter.” This is probably the track’s most poignant lyric, but it is immediately undone by the following line: “So we all dressed up as wolves and we looked fire.”
Unsurprisingly, many of the eldest daughters who listened to the song felt like the eldest-daughter experience could have been more movingly described—and so took it upon themselves to fix the problem. One such creator focused on small changes, singing in her version, “We all dressed up as wolves just to survive,” and changing the “bad bitch” line to “I’m not a bad kid / Just got a habit.”
Others made even bigger changes to the chorus. One sang, “I’m not an actress / I’ll burst into ashes.” Another creator’s version goes, “I’ve tried to bury / This pain that I’ve carried.” Yet another sings, “But I’m not as strong as / The narrative’s plot plans.” Each of these versions keeps to Swift’s general theme of vulnerability, but with slightly more sophisticated language that brings the song back to the titular “eldest daughter.”
Most of the new iterations keep some version of Swift’s original chorus, in which she says, “Never gonna let you down.” But one creator decided instead to reference an earlier Swift era, singing, “They’re moving the goal posts / Can’t tell which one hurts most / That I’m back on the bleachers again / Or that they don’t trust me with my pen.” One of the most popular rewrites has a chorus focused on the romantic element of the song, singing, “My heart has been ravaged / Still I’d let you have it.”
The lyrical changes aren’t even necessarily personal to the creators (although some of them definitely are). For the most part, these rewrites are just trying to clarify Swift’s original message. Some changes smooth some of the more awkward turns of phrase. For instance, many people tweaked the original, “I have been afflicted / by terminal uniqueness.” In the other new versions, “So many traitors / Smooth operators” becomes “So many traitors / Promised me favors,” or, “Sudden displacement / High expectations.”