Butch Walker Praises Taylor Swift's 'Perfect Pop' Songwriting

Posted on Dec 16th 2009 10:00AM by Emily Tan
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No one can doubt that 2009 was Taylor Swift's year. Her hit, 'You Belong With Me,' not only grabbed two Grammy nominations and landed on Spinner's Best Songs of 2009, but it's the tune that singer-producer Butch Walker dubs as 2009's perfect pop song.

"There's something great about the perfect pop song," Walker tells Spinner. "And every year there's one that comes along that I can't get off the radio, and I can't get out of my head, and I can't stop hear or listening to. That was the one."

He liked the song so much that he even recorded his own version of the track -- tweaking the lyrics a bit to give it the male perspective -- made a video and posted it on YouTube, which he later found out Swift watched and loved.

"I posted it on YouTube and it had 5,000 views right away," he says. "Then I woke up eight hours later in the morning, and someone had told me that Taylor Swift had already heard it and tweeted about it. I looked on there and it had 150,000 views. It became more popular than any song I've ever done of mine."

Producing hit albums for Katy Perry, Pink and Avril Lavgine, Walker knows the makings of a good pop song. While he admits that Swift's song has a theme that's been touched on by other songs, the way the song was written is what really made it so successful.

"I wrote a song with a similar lyric years ago called 'Mixtape,' which is about coveting someone they can't have because they're already taken," Walker says. "It's not an original concept, but I think the way that ['You Belong With Me'] is worded and the way that it's said, and then the melody that it's put to that you can't get out of your head that by the time it's over you don't want it to be done. And you're not sick of it. That's what makes the perfect pop song."