What every Taylor Swift song in The Summer I Turned Pretty says about the show’s love triangle

[Editor’s note: This piece contains spoilers for The Summer I Turned Pretty.]

What music would you use to score a coming-of-age story about a teenage girl caught in a love triangle between two brothers? You know the right answer: Taylor Swift. Longing, angst, love, heartbreak, romanticism … Swift is uniquely gifted at tapping into the universal experiences that have made her Eras Tour a record-breaking phenomenon.

The Summer I Turned Pretty traverses all those feelings, too, as its heroine Belly Conklin (Lola Tung) comes of age and finds herself torn between the affections of Conrad (Christopher Briney) and Jeremiah (Gavin Casalegno). Conrad has the edge as Belly’s longtime crush, but Jeremiah gets his foot in the door by being more emotionally available than his brooding older brother.

The show has used a whopping 13 Swift songs over its run, with two of them featured prominently in the season-two finale that dropped on August 18. When you add that the series’ most recent trailer boasted both “august” and “Back to December (Taylor’s Version),” it’s clear that the Swift and TSITP brands (and fandoms) are closely linked. And that’s not by accident. TSITP creator and showrunner Jenny Han may be the biggest Swiftie out there, and the connection between her story and Swift goes back more than a decade.

See, when Han was working on The Summer I Turned Pretty novel trilogy in the late aughts, Fearless was the soundtrack of her writing process. “When I write books, I like to listen to music to help me see the emotional vein of the story and her music really did that with me for the series,” she told E!.

Now, Swift’s songs are the soundtrack of some of Belly’s biggest moments. Every time the opening notes begin to play over a scene, you can feel the emotional stakes being raised. But as I watched the second season, I began to notice a pattern. Were all these emotional moments with Conrad? Was Han tipping her hand to the end game of the story by pairing her favorite love interest with her favorite artist? I decided to embark on a deep dive analysis to find out. (Please note: I have not read the books, so all of the arguments I make here are based purely in the world of the show. )

“Cruel Summer” (season 1, episode 1, “Summer House”)

How could we kick off a summer show without Swift’s summer anthem? Just two minutes into the series premiere, Belly is packing for her summer in Cousins while her best friend Taylor (Rain Spencer—not Swift) lounges on her bed. Playing ever-so-softly on the radio is “Cruel Summer.” It’s hard to catch the lyrics under Belly and Taylor’s conversation, which turns from clothes to Conrad when Taylor asks Belly to share her summer wish. “You want a hot makeout with Conrad Fisher!” she teases. “It doesn’t matter what I do, he doesn’t see me that way,” Belly replies, as the iconic bridge to the song begins: “I’m drunk in the back of the car / And I cried like a baby coming home from the bar / Said, ‘I’m fine,’ but it wasn’t true / I don’t wanna keep secrets just to keep you!” But Taylor pushes back. “Oh, he’ll see you, whether he wants to or not. You look a lot different than last summer.” She turned pretty!Already, Taylor Swift is connected to Conrad. And those lyrics, which pack an emotional and dizzying punch, foreshadow all the drama that’s to come between Belly and Conrad.