There are great songs throughout the history of pop music, including Bob Dylan’s “Visions of Johanna” and Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” where the imagery is so rich and dense that fans and critics have spent decades trying to decipher their true meanings. And then there’s Taylor Swift‘s “Wood” where she compares a certain part of Travis Kelce’s anatomy to a redwood tree and there’s no other possible way to interpret it.
That made it one of the most polarizing songs of the 2025. And with just 10 minutes left in the year, Anderson Cooper attempted to get through a dramatic reading of the lyrics while a very tipsy Andy Cohen did his best to maintain a straight face. “Forgive me, it sounds cocky,” Cooper reads, as if coming across these words for the very first time. “He ah-matized me and opened my еyes.” The next part gave him a bit of pause, but Cohen urged him to keep going. “Redwood tree, it ain’t hard to see/His love was thе key that opened my thighs.” That last word clearly left Cooper a bit stunned, but he soldiered on, “Girls, I don’t need to catch the bouquet, mm,” he read. “To know…”
If Cooper kept going, he would have read “a hard rock is on the way,” but he was simply unable to do it as millions of Americans looked on from their homes. He instead squealed with giggles like a small child, did his best to maintain his composure, repeated “I get it” a couple of times, and moved on with the evening. Cohen, meanwhile, couldn’t remove a satisfied smirk from his face. From his perspective, this couldn’t have gone better.
In an interview with Jimmy Fallon, Swift insisted that the song was originally quite different. “I brought this into the studio and I was like, ‘I wanna do sort of like a throwback kind of timeless-sounding song,’” she said. “And I had this idea about, ‘I ain’t gotta knock on wood,’ and I would knock on wood and it would be all these superstitions. And it really started out in a very innocent place…I don’t know what happened, man. I got in there, we started vibing and I don’t know, I don’t know how we got here. But I love the song so much.”
On New Heights, a podcast hosted by Travis Kielce and his brother Jason Kielce, the song naturally came up. “Do you feel cocky about the song?” Jason asked his brother. “No,” Travis replied. “Any song that references me is a very…I love that girl.” Jason pointed out that the song referenced his “appendage,” but Travis feigned confusion. “What?” he said. “I think you’re not understanding the song.”
He understood perfectly well. The same goes for Cooper, Cohen, and just about everyone else on the planet who listened to it even a single time. The sole exception may be Andrea Swift, who simply wouldn’t allow herself to process lyrics that concerned her daughter and future son-in-law engaging in intimate relations.
“I think that she thinks that that song is about superstitions, popular superstitions, which, which it absolutely is,” Taylor said on SiriusXM. “That’s the joy of the double entendre. That song, you could read that song for people and it just goes right over their head. That song…you see in that song what you wanna see in that song.”
