Song #29: "Wildest Dreams" by Taylor Swift

 

#29: “Wildest Dreams” — Taylor Swift (2015)

🎵 Today's Song

Taylor Swift — “Wildest Dreams”
2015
Random draw
Selected era bucket: 2010–2019
Verified remaining eligible population: 9,045 recordings
Selection method: Equal-probability era draw, then one uniform random draw from previously unselected eligible recordings in that era

Chart performance

Billboard Hot 100 peak: #5
Hot 100 weeks: 27
Weeks in Top 20: 16
Weeks in Top 10: 9
Weeks at peak: 1
Pop Airplay: #1
Adult Pop Airplay: #1
Adult Contemporary: #7
UK Singles Chart: #40

Taylor Swift at this point

Previous Top-20 hit: “Style”
Next Top-20 hit: “Bad Blood”

Chronology note: “Style,” “Wildest Dreams” and “Bad Blood” all first entered the Hot 100 during the November 2014 1989 album-release surge. Their later promotion as singles happened in a different order: “Style” → “Bad Blood” → “Wildest Dreams.”

Retrospective standing

GOAT overall rank: #3,179
GOAT points: 331,891
Among Taylor Swift charting songs: #13 of 277
Among Taylor Swift Top-20 hits: #13 of 113

Among the seven singles eventually promoted from 1989, “Wildest Dreams” ranks fourth by the project's retrospective GOAT measure, behind “Shake It Off,” “Blank Space” and “Bad Blood,” and just ahead of “Style.”

Record details

First Hot 100 appearance: November 15, 2014
Released as a single: August 31, 2015
Album: 1989
Songwriters: Taylor Swift, Max Martin, Shellback
Producers: Max Martin, Shellback
Lead vocal: Taylor Swift
Running time: approximately 3:40
Label: Big Machine
Recorded: MXM Studios, Stockholm, and Conway Recording Studios, Los Angeles; exact recording date not reliably established
Recording to use: Original 2014 1989 recording

Listen / watch / read

Recording: Original 1989 version
Video: 2015 Joseph Kahn film starring Taylor Swift and Scott Eastwood
Lyrics: Original 2014 recording

Versions & title history

“Wildest Dreams (Taylor's Version)” was released separately in 2021 and later included on 1989 (Taylor's Version) in 2023. Today's selection is specifically the original Big Machine recording from 1989.

Streaming note

Use the original 2014 recording, not “Wildest Dreams (Taylor's Version).”

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Yesterday, I got curious about the mechanics of my random song picker: which artist is actually most likely to come up on any given draw?

Because I select one of eight era buckets with equal probability before randomly selecting a song within that era, the answer isn't simply the artist with the most eligible songs. Drake currently has the highest probability of appearing, at 2.134 percent. Taylor Swift is second at 1.744 percent. Elvis Presley, despite having the third-highest probability, is way back at 0.753 percent.

In other words, on any given day, the randomizer is more than twice as likely to give me Taylor Swift as Elvis Presley.

The very next morning, it gave me Taylor Swift.

And with that, Taylor became the first repeat artist in this project. She previously appeared at #12 with “Blank Space (Taylor's Version).” Seventeen songs later, she's back with the original recording of “Wildest Dreams.”

As it happens, “Wildest Dreams” is a remarkably good song for understanding how quickly the music business was changing around Taylor Swift in the middle of the 2010s.

#76

When 1989 was released in October 2014, it was enormous. It sold more than 1.2 million copies in the United States in its first week.

But it did not produce what I call an Album Bomb.

Yesterday, while digging into Drake's chart history, I finally put a definition around something I've been noticing throughout this project: the Album Bomb. I defined it as at least four songs from the same newly released album simultaneously occupying the Billboard Hot 100 Top 20 during the album's release surge, then went back through the charts to see how often it had actually happened.

I found 48 of them since 2013.

Drake and Taylor Swift are tied for the most, with six apiece. It's become one of the defining chart phenomena of the streaming era.

The original 1989 didn't qualify.

On the chart dated November 15, “Shake It Off” was #1 and the newly charting “Blank Space” was #18. Farther down the Hot 100 were three other tracks from the new album: “Style” at #60, “Wildest Dreams” at #76 and “Bad Blood” at #80.

And then “Wildest Dreams” disappeared.

For 43 consecutive chart weeks, it wasn't on the Hot 100 at all.

That #76 debut may be the most interesting number in the entire story.

People were already consuming an album in a way that could push an unpromoted individual track onto the singles chart. “Wildest Dreams” had not been released as a single. It didn't have its own radio campaign. But enough people were listening to the new Taylor Swift album that the song generated enough activity to briefly reach #76.

The mechanism that would eventually create the Album Bomb was already there.

It just wasn't powerful enough yet.

Nine years later, 1989 (Taylor's Version) arrived and put 12 songs in the Top 20 simultaneously.

In 2014, the original “Wildest Dreams” got to #76.

That's a pretty remarkable illustration of how much the Hot 100 changed in less than a decade.

And then it got its turn

What happened next feels almost quaint now.

Big Machine worked 1989 one single at a time.

“Shake It Off.”

Then “Blank Space.”

Then “Style.”

Then “Bad Blood.”

And finally, in August 2015, nearly ten months after the album had been released, “Wildest Dreams” got its turn.

It reentered the Hot 100 at #15.

A few weeks later it reached the Top 10. On the November 7 chart, almost exactly a year after its strange one-week appearance at #76, “Wildest Dreams” peaked at #5.

Same recording. Very different result.

In 2014, “Wildest Dreams” had been available to anyone who bought or streamed 1989, and its initial burst of activity carried it to #76 for one week.

In 2015, Big Machine gave that same song its own promotional window.

It became a major hit.

That's a distinction that feels increasingly important in the streaming era.

Release an album today and the audience can immediately listen to every track. Within hours, labels can see which songs are being streamed, saved, shared and added to playlists. The winners begin identifying themselves.

That's incredibly useful information.

But it also creates a feedback loop.

Song A gets the most streams, so Song A gets the promotion. The promotion generates even more streams, providing even more evidence that Song A was the right choice.

A song that doesn't immediately separate itself from the rest of the album may never get the opportunity that “Wildest Dreams” eventually received.

In 2015, there was still room to wait.

I don't think 1989 was literally the last album capable of doing this. Drake's Views still produced five Top-20 hits in 2016 without an Album Bomb creating those peaks on release week, and there have been occasional later examples. Justin Bieber's Justice and Doja Cat's Planet Her both managed it in 2021.

But 1989 arrived near the end of an era when a blockbuster album could be worked sequentially for well over a year, allowing songs buried deeper in the track list to receive their own genuine promotional campaigns months after everyone already owned the album.

The streaming model may be better at identifying immediate demand.

I'm not convinced that's exactly the same thing as identifying every song that could become a hit.

“Wildest Dreams” is a pretty good case study for the difference.

A lot of hits sitting on one album

There may also be a simpler explanation for why there was still a #5 hit waiting on 1989 nearly a year after its release:

The album was ridiculously deep.

“Wildest Dreams” was written by Swift with Max Martin and Shellback, who also produced it. Martin and Shellback were involved throughout 1989, so reaching track nine didn't mean reaching the part of the album where the obvious singles had run out and everybody else was filling space.

As a follow-up to “Bad Blood,” it was also an effective change of pace.

“Bad Blood” is perhaps the most aggressive record on 1989: pounding percussion, a confrontational lyric, a Kendrick Lamar remix and an enormous action-movie video stuffed with celebrity cameos.

“Wildest Dreams” goes almost completely the other direction.

The vocal is restrained rather than belted. The production is hazy and atmospheric. There are airy backing vocals, particularly the “ahhs” that become more noticeable toward the end of the first verse.

And underneath everything is a drum pattern that feels remarkably like a heartbeat.

That's not accidental. Swift's actual heartbeat was sampled and incorporated into the percussion, although what we're hearing is still very clearly a produced drum track rather than somebody simply recording a heartbeat and calling it a rhythm section.

I noticed the heartbeat quality before knowing that.

That's always a nice sign that a production choice worked.

A hint of Lana

Contemporary critics repeatedly compared “Wildest Dreams” to Lana Del Rey.

Once someone tells me to listen for it, I can understand the comparison. The restrained vocal, dreamy production, cinematic atmosphere and doomed-romance premise all occupy territory that had become closely associated with Lana by 2014.

I don't think that makes “Wildest Dreams” a Lana Del Rey ripoff.

There is dangerous territory in assigning ownership of an entire sound to one artist. Taylor Swift is allowed to sing more softly. She's allowed to make an atmospheric record about a doomed romance. Musical influence and resemblance aren't the same thing as imitation.

And underneath the different production, this remains a very tightly constructed Taylor Swift song.

Nostalgia for something that hasn't ended yet

I don't think I'd ever paid much attention to the lyrics before today.

My first reaction was that “Wildest Dreams” was a nostalgic song about a past relationship.

It isn't.

That's what makes the premise interesting.

The relationship is happening now, but Taylor is already imagining it as a memory.

She knows—or at least believes—this thing isn't going to last.

“I can see the end as it begins.”

Initially, that struck me as almost bizarrely defeatist. If you already know this relationship is doomed, why are you doing it? It even seemed slightly selfish: you're knowingly entering something you expect to end badly.

But the lyric doesn't actually say that she intends to end it.

The implication is closer to the opposite.

The guy is impossibly attractive—“so tall and handsome as hell”—and she seems to assume he's not the kind of person who's going to stick around forever. She's choosing to have the experience anyway, while already imagining the day when he leaves.

What she wants is to remain important in his memory.

That's a much more sympathetic premise than the one I initially heard, although I still can't particularly relate to it. There's something fatalistic about beginning a relationship while mentally composing its nostalgia.

But it gives the song something to chew on.

A film

And then there's the video.

It doesn't open by identifying itself as a music video.

It calls itself “A Film by Joseph Kahn.”

That's not empty branding.

Taylor and Scott Eastwood play actors making an old-Hollywood movie in Africa, and the scale kept surprising me: Is that Scott Eastwood? They're actually in Africa? Is that a real biplane? Wait—is that lion real?

Yes, yes, yes and yes.

The film also gives the lyrics a different framing. Taylor and Eastwood are actors playing lovers, and her character appears to develop feelings for him while they're making the movie. At the premiere, she discovers that he has a wife.

It doesn't change how I hear the song itself. The recording still sounds to me like a woman knowingly entering a real relationship that she expects the man will eventually leave.

But the film takes the same basic ideas—temporary intimacy, an ending that seems inevitable, and the desire to remain in somebody's memory—and places them into a completely different story.

Mostly, though, I couldn't get over the scale of the thing.

Nearly a year after 1989 was released, Big Machine was still willing to hire Joseph Kahn, cast Scott Eastwood, go to Africa and give another song from the album a lavish promotional film.

They were still willing to make another song from 1989 an event.

That may be the part of this entire story that feels most distant now.

56/100

“Wildest Dreams” is fine.

That's damning it with faint praise, but I don't mean it as an insult. Taylor Swift songs are almost always well written, and Max Martin is one of the most reliable pop producers who has ever lived. The floor here is extremely high.

The restrained vocal isn't especially my thing. I wouldn't have immediately described the song as “breathy” without being prompted to listen for it, but it certainly isn't belted, and the airy quality becomes more obvious in places.

I like “Blank Space” considerably more. I gave “Blank Space (Taylor's Version)” a 66 when it came up earlier in the project.

“Wildest Dreams” lands at 56/100.

It's a well-made pop song with an interesting lyrical premise that gave me more to think about than I expected, even if I don't connect particularly strongly with the premise or the sound.

But the record itself may not be the most interesting thing about today's draw.

“Wildest Dreams” first appeared on the Hot 100 at #76 because people were beginning to consume albums in a way that allowed an unpromoted track to register on the singles chart. Then it vanished for 43 weeks. Almost a year later, the traditional music-business machinery selected that same song, gave it radio promotion, an extravagant film and its own moment in the spotlight.

It went to #5.

The #76 debut showed where the music business was going.

The #5 peak showed how it still worked.