I just realized that the only possible month in which Taylor and Pat Monahan could have written Babe is February 2012. I will probably update the writing of Red timeline soon with this, but hear me out.
January 10th - Train releases Drive By. The mastering code is from 2011, and it makes sense because its release was scheduled for January.
February - Taylor spends the whole month in LA during the promo for the Lorax. I think this is when Pat contacts Taylor to ask her to write a song for their album California 37, which they don't end up doing, but they write Babe instead (source: Pat's interview in 2013)
February 28th to March 18th - Taylor tours in Australia, so she couldn't write with Pat.
March 19th to March 31st - she's in LA again, but it's too late for Babe because California 37 is about to be released.
April 13th - California 37 is released. The rest of the songs were mastered in 2012, so it means that there was still time to add songs after the release of Drive By.
Taylor literally put me into words, how painful it is to stop loving someone not because you want to but because of what they did. You still have all this love for them but they no longer deserve it. The worst part is that their literally no one else you would wanna give that love to but them. Like how do you even move on from that
the drama and intensity during Babe’s bridge is actually so well written: the (oh oh)s sound like when you’re watching a tense scene and you feel things are turning wrong because of the characters’ action and you go “oh oh- they shouldn’t have done that- something’s terrible is coming”, but then the (oh oh) is not repeated after “i hate that because of you” because she articulates the outcome: she can’t love him anymore, and that indeed, is terrible