This song is about Taylor Swift's best friend Abigail. Swift told The Los Angeles Times October 26, 2008 that for most of their time in high school, the two friends thought of themselves as ugly ducklings. She explained: "We kind of came to the conclusion in ninth grade that we were never going to be popular, so we should just stick together and have fun and not take ourselves too seriously. That's why I had so much fun in high school, because I didn't focus too much on the fact that I wasn't really in the clique."
Swift admitted to CMT Radio that she cried when she recorded this song. She explained: "I'm not likely to cry over something I've gone through, even if it's the worst breakup ever. Maybe I haven't had that breakup yet. Maybe there will be a breakup where I'll just cry every time I think of it. (laughs) But the things that make me cry are when the people I love have gone through pain and I've seen it. "Fifteen" talks about how my best friend, Abigail, got her heart broken when we were in ninth grade and singing about that absolutely gets me every time."
Swift told That's Country that she, "started everything with the line 'Abigail gave everything she had to a boy who changed his mind' and wrote everything else from that point, almost backwards."
Taylor swift performed this with Miley Cyrus at the 2009 Grammy awards. Cyrus was 16 at the time.
This almost-appropriately titled single was Swift's sixteenth entry on the Hot Country songs chart.
Abigail appears in the song's music video, in which the two friends go through various situations of teen life.
This was the 13th Top 40 hit on the Hot 100 from Fearless (including the set's "Platinum Edition" re-release) extending Swift's record for most such entries from one album. Prior to this, no act had achieved more seven Top 40 hits from one album.
Billboard magazine asked Taylor when she finds time to pen songs. She replied: "I actually am best writing on the road. I only have time to write the songs that hit me the hardest. Those are songs like 'Fifteen' - that's one I wrote on the road. It hits me and I needed to write it so I found time to write it, whether it's 15 minutes between meet-and-greets or at 4 a.m. If they haunt me throughout my meet-and-greets and interviews, and all I'm playing in my head is this song, then I know I've got something."
The song's music video was directed by You Belong With Me director, Roman White. He told MTV News that for the clip he wanted to capture the essence of the song without getting too literal. "Well, I think I really wanted this video to kind of be an evolution for Taylor," White said. "I mean, obviously it's a high school song, but the last thing I wanted to do was shoot it in a high school. So I wanted to try something different, and I actually said to her, 'I don't think we should shoot in a high school.' And I don't think she wanted to either.
I kind of came up with this idea like, let's take the literal meaning of this song and watch it evolve in front of us ... almost as a memory in your head," he added. "And create this world, so you walk in on this desolate desert and you start to sing about all these great memories you have ... of everything you love [blooming] around you, and so we literally grew this garden around her.
But also we added these surreal elements that came from the memory," he said. "It's kind of this cross between this surreal garden and this memory [and] she's at the heart of this memory."
I kind of came up with this idea like, let's take the literal meaning of this song and watch it evolve in front of us ... almost as a memory in your head," he added. "And create this world, so you walk in on this desolate desert and you start to sing about all these great memories you have ... of everything you love [blooming] around you, and so we literally grew this garden around her.
But also we added these surreal elements that came from the memory," he said. "It's kind of this cross between this surreal garden and this memory [and] she's at the heart of this memory."
Just about everything on the video, bar Swift herself, was created on a computer. "The rain was all digitally created. All the trees, all the flowers, everything was created by mouse, everything was created by computers," White explained. "The trees, the leaves, the rain, everything, the clouds. We had prop pieces of the desks and stuff, so even things we had actual props of we re-created in 3-D [on the computer]."