Taylor Swift’s ‘Wood’ is her horniest song yet – here’s what the lyrics mean
Taylor Swift’s new song ‘Wood’ is raising eyebrows. (Mert Alas & Marcus Piggot)
Taylor Swift's new song 'Wood' is raising eyebrows. (Mert Alas & Marcus Piggot)
If you ever find yourself in a penis metaphor contest and your opponent is Taylor Swift, know this: you will lose.
On her 12th studio album The Life of a Showgirl, released today (3 October), Swift is doing what she does best: lashing her rivals, reminiscing about childhood crushes, and declaring her erupting love for her famous fiancé, NFL player Travis Kelce.
On one particular track though, track nine entitled “Wood”, Swift is letting her Swifties in on a very intimate facet of her relationship with Kelce: that fact that he’s packing more meat than a Richmond sausage factory.
“Wood”, dubbed by some as her “raunchiest” track to date, sees the singer-songwriter reflect on her lovers past through a superstition motif: she took an ex back, and stepped on a crack. As she did so, the black cat laughed. She’s been keeping her fingers crossed waiting for a man worthy of her time, and so on.
The light that Travis Kelce has brought to her life now means that luck doesn’t really come into play anymore. Everything’s rosy. That’s thanks specifically to Kelce’s, um, “magic wand”, which broke the lovelorn “curse” she was put under. As she explains in the lyrics, she ain’t gotta knock on wood. Instead, she can admire it.
“Forgive me, it sounds cocky,” she teases. “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.”
What’s the meaning of “Ah-matized”?
On the funky post-chorus of “Wood”, Taylor Swift confesses to being “ah-matized” by Kelce’s impressive manhood. The term stems from social media parlance of the early 2020s, with the word “dickmatized” essentially meaning romantically hypnotised by the quality of your partner’s penis.
Or, as writer Whitney Mallett put in 2023: “The best dick haunts.”
On “Wood” it appears that our newly coquettish pop queen can’t yet bring herself to say the word “dick” (despite doing so on track four, the George Michael interpolating “Father Figure”), and so substitutes the term for a kittenish moan.
Is “Wood” referencing a 2021 meme?
It appears that “dickmatized” isn’t the only viral social media fodder Swift is evoking on “Wood”, as she appears to be subtly throwing back to a viral 2021 Tweet about her.
In June 2021, an Ariana Grande fan account seemed to mock the flowery poetry Swift had adopted on her Folklore and Evermore albums, contrasting it to the way Grande sings about her own lovers.
“Swifties when Ariana sings about sex and doesn’t write it like ‘he stuck his long wood into my redwood forest and let his sap ferment my roots,’” the post reads, alongside a GIF of Viola Davis weeping as Annalise Keating in How To Get Away With Murder.
On “Wood”, Swift goes on to whimsically refer to male genitalia as a “redwood tree” among other colourful descriptors, seemingly referencing the post.
“Girls, I don’t need to catch the bouquet, to know a hard rock is on the way,” she continues, while later referencing Kelce’s New Heights podcast, which she announced the record on.
“The curse on me was broken by your magic wand / Seems to be that you and me, we make our own luck / New Heights of manhood / I ain’t gotta knock on wood.”
While Swift is clearly having a bit of provocative fun, “Wood” is apparently a “sentimental love song”.
“The song ‘Wood’ is about, it’s a love story about, you know, kind of using as a plot device superstitions, popular superstitions, good luck charms, bad luck charms, all these different ways that we have decided things are good luck or bad luck, like knocking on wood and seeing a black cat,” Swift said in a voice note accompanying the album.
“And that is kind of the way that I’ve decided to explore this very, very sentimental love song.”
Regardless, “Wood” makes it clear that Swift has fallen for Kelce hard.
The Life of a Showgirl is out now.
Share your thoughts! Let us know in the comments below, and remember to keep the conversation respectful.
