SPOILERS ahead for the movie “The Summer I Turned into a Beauty”, which is being broadcast now on an Amazon Prime subscription.
If you’ve already watched “The Summer I Turned into a Beauty”, you know that the series has an amazing soundtrack. The series includes hits by artists such as Olivia Rodrigo and Billy Eilish, but, most notably, Taylor Swift’s music repeatedly appears in the series after the artist used the trailer for the show to reissue “This Love” and actually make Swifties hope 1989 will be the next era to which she can return after sales of their masters. But there are a couple of Swift songs that are close to the author/showrunner Jenny Han.
When CinemaBlend was talking to the author of “The Summer I Turned into a Beauty” and co-creator of the Amazon Prime series, she shared one song by Taylor Swift that she really passionately wanted to perform at the right moment of the show. According to her:
I think in the fourth episode, when we used “False God”, I felt sorry for our poor music editor because I made him [add the song] literally eight times in different ways, and I thought: “Can we try to start this right now?” ? Can we put it here? Can we make it go to that?” As if I wanted to see it all in different ways to find the best way to really combine it with the scene.
Around the middle of the season, “The Summer I Turned into a Beauty” brings the heat when Lola Tung’s Belly and Christopher Briney’s Conrad almost kiss in episode 4. As Jenny Han told us, she spent a lot of time with the music editor making sure the song came out of Taylor. Swift’s 2019 album Lover came at just the right time.
In many ways, it seems that Taylor Swift’s musical drops are deliberately connected with Belle’s special feelings for her childhood friend Conrad, who is behaving completely differently this summer. She has been in love with him for a long time, as shown in the first scene when Conrad is shown playing “Lover”. Jenny Han also shared Swift’s second song, which has always been important to The Summer I Turned Pretty.
I make playlists for books, and I usually do this at the beginning of the writing process to help me get into the emotional vein of stories… “How I loved you”. This is what I was listening to when I wrote this originally. So the fact that we got it was just an incredible gift.
“How I Loved You” was released in 2008, when Jenny Khan first wrote a story, that is, her first novel for young people, before continuing the story of Belly with a trilogy, and then writing the books “All Boys”. The song is playing later in the season, and the author has talked more about including Swift’s music in streaming, saying the following:
I think that for me, as a fan, the opportunity to give fans of the book this moment is very important to me, because if you are a fan of “The Summer I became Beautiful”, I’m almost sure that you are a fan of Taylor Swift. And I know this because so many fans have asked me to include her music in the show, and I just never knew if we could do it or not. So when we were, I just, I couldn’t believe it. That’s probably what excited me the most for the whole process, and the fact that there are only five of us, and I’m really glad that the fans will see it, because it will be, I think, maybe sometimes unexpectedly at certain major events. moments.
Over the years, Taylor Swift’s songs have appeared in all kinds of films and TV shows, including the singer wrote an original melody for the upcoming book adaptation of “Where the Crayfish Sing”. Swift’s music has always been important to Jenny Han as an author, to her fans who read her books and attach them to their stories, and now for a new streaming series.
