Songfacts®:

• Taylor Swift's Lover album is imbued with the warm, fuzzy feelings she has for her boyfriend, the Englishman Joe Alwyn. But there is also an overarching theme of leaving the past behind to make positive changes.
  
  "Daylight" is the last song on the album, symbolic of Swift coming into the light after the vitriol that inspired some of her previous album, Reputation. In a Spotify storyline, Swift said: "I chose 'Daylight' as the last song on the album because it recognizes past damage and pain but shows that it doesn't have to define you. For me, the Reputation album seemed like nighttime. The Lover album feels completely sunlit. I wrote this one alone."
• Swift used several co-writers on the album, but "Daylight" is one of three songs on the set she wrote by herself. She produced it with Jack Antonoff.
• This song closes with a spoken statement by Swift to conclude the album:
  
  "I want to be defined by the things that I love. Not the things I hate, not the things I'm afraid of, the things that haunt me in the middle of the night. I just think that... you are what you love."
• Swift foreshadowed this song (or at least the title) in a piece she wrote for Elle magazine published in March 2019. She wrote: "I've come to a realization that I need to be able to forgive myself for making the wrong choice, trusting the wrong person, or figuratively falling on my face in front of everyone. Step into the daylight and let it go."
• "Daylight" was almost the album's title track. Swift told Rolling Stone she decided "it might be a little bit too sentimental," so she named the record after "Lover" instead.
• There are so many lines that I've crossed, unforgiven
  
  Swift's inability to forgive herself for past mistakes is something that has haunted her for a long time. She told Rolling Stone: "That's something that does bother me, looking back at life and realizing that no matter what, you screw things up. Sometimes there are people that were in your life and they're not anymore - and there's nothing you can do about it. You can't fix it, you can't change it."
  
  Swift added that the pile of old selves fighting each other in her "Look What You Made Me Do" video references this struggle to deal with her failures.