Taylor Swift’s New York Times Interview Revealed So Much About Her Songwriting
Taylor Swift sat down with The New York Times to talk about her songwriting, and ended up giving us one of the most revealing looks yet into how she thinks as a storyteller, lyricist, and artist.
In this unusually candid interview, Taylor opens up about how she finds inspiration, how her songwriting has evolved over time, how she handles the pressure of constantly being expected to do more, and what it was like growing up as a young woman in the music industry.
But beneath all of that is something even more interesting: the way Taylor thinks about stories. Character. Language. Perspective. Emotional detail. The tiny writing choices that make her songs hit as hard as they do.
So in this episode of the Swiftly Sung Stories podcast, we’re breaking down not just what Taylor said, but what it reveals about how her storytelling actually works.
✏️In this episode, we’ll discuss:
- The secrets behind some of her most iconic lyrics
- What really inspires her songwriting (and it’s not just her romantic relationships)
- How her love of language shapes her best lines
- The lyrical patterns and quirks she keeps returning to
- What she revealed about fame, pressure, and being a pathological people pleaser
- What it felt like entering the music industry as a teenager
- How competition and ambition have fueled her career
- Her important advice for artists, writers, and creatives
- And so much more
Listen to the Episode
⌛Timestamps
- 01:18 The NYT 30 Greatest Living American Songwriters List
- 02:46 The Juicy Bits
- 10:42 On What Inspires Her
- 18:37 On Storytelling
- 30:05 On Lyricism
- 39:08 On How Fans Influence (and Don’t Influence) Her Craft
- 47:06 On Vulnerability
- 54:33 On Being a Woman in the Music Industry
📖 Episode Resources
Full List of Taylor’s Literary References
Episode Transcript
[00:00]
“We just got one of the most revealing interviews Taylor Swift has ever given about her songwriting, and if you’re curious about her creative process, if you’re curious about the story behind the stories, this interview is a goldmine for people like you and me, because in this conversation with The New York Times, she’s not just sharing behind-the-scenes details; she’s really revealing how she thinks, what’s going on in her head when she comes up with these songs. She talks about how she builds characters, how thinks about narratives, how her storytelling has changed, and she even gets into this messy world of the music industry and how she’s managed to stay successful and stay inspired.
And yes, we also get the things fans really love: the origins of iconic songs, answers to long-running questions, we get to hear about those little lyrical quirks that feel so specific to her. But what’s really interesting is what sits underneath all of that: the patterns behind her writing, the instincts that lead her there, and these intentional storytelling choices that make her songs hit as hard as they do. She gave us all of that and more.
So today on the Swiftly Sung Stories Podcast, you and I aren’t just going to walk through what Taylor said. We’re going to unpack it, put it into context, and get to the heart of how her storytelling and how her artistry really works.
Let’s get into it.
NYT 30 Greatest Living American Songwriters List
[01:18]
This interview was for the New York Times series ‘The 30 Greatest Living American Songwriters,’ and this series has been incredible so far, we’ve had Lucinda Williams, Smokey Robinson, Dolly Parton, Bruce Springsteen, Stevie Wonder, Kendrick Lamar, Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson, Missy Elliot, Carole King, the list goes on.
And while Taylor Swift might not be the youngest on this list – I think that title goes to Bad Bunny – her career is just as prolific as some of these greats who have been around making music for 50 years. She’s just condensed it all into this 20 year, 12-plus album career, and outsold and outperformed them all.
Her interview is one of the most revealing of everyone on this list, though I enjoyed them all, and I love seeing her in the company of this list of greats because it reminds me that much like Willy Nelson or Bruce Springsteen or Dolly Parton, she’s going to be (hopefully) making music for a long time to come, and she’ll be on this lists like these for the rest of her career.
This interview took place in LA, and was conducted by Joe Coscarelli who is a culture reporter for the times, and host of their podcast called Popcast. You don’t get to hear his questions in this interview, it’s cut so that it feels like Taylor is spontaneously talking about these things, but credit where credit is due, because whatever he asked, he elicited some incredible responses, and got Taylor to reveal things she’s never revealed before.
So let’s get into those things that she revealed, starting off with the juicy bits that you want to know right off the bat: the things that everyone has been talking about.
The Juicy Bits
[02:46]
Number one, we got the answer to the Our Song lyric that never made sense!
She says,
“I don’t like to have a word end with the same letter that the next word starts with.
For example, in the song, our song, it was supposed to be when you’re on the phone and you talk real low. But I was like, I don’t like, I don’t like the real low. So it’s turned into when you talk real slow.”
That lyric has bothered me – and likely bothered all of you – for two decades. So to hear that it’s a writing quirk – that she doesn’t like that enunciation of the two L’s next to one another, that makes more sense. What she’s talking about is consonance, but consonance with l’s is very tricky to pronounce smoothly. Something like “last time” is much easier with the t sound.
Does “real slow” make the lyric make more sense? No, but it’s nice to hear why it doesn’t make sense, if that makes sense. Because why would someone talk slower instead of quieter if they’re hiding under the covers, trying not to be discovered? Anyway, we finally got closure.
And then we got another reveal about one of her earliest songs.
“I wrote the song Love Story when I was 17, sitting in my bedroom, mad at my parents.
Because they wouldn’t let me go on a date with a guy who was too old, so I shouldn’t have been on a date with ’em anyway.”
She wrote Love Story because she was mad at her parents, because her parents set boundaries. She wrote this iconic song, and imagined this date-that-never-was as this epic Shakespearean love story. She took those emotions and turned them into this incredible narrative with herself as Juliet, and this guy as Romeo, and in the end, she imagines, they end up together. Her parents will come around and they’ll get married.
She dove into this fantasy world because she didn’t like her reality. And that’s something that I think is so special about her writing, is her ability to turn emotions into stories that really take that core emotion, in this case, teenage rebellion, and turn them into universal emotions we all relate to.
The next juicy bit that will quiet a lot of speculation is that yes, Taylor is still friends with Jack Antonoff, and still considers him a collaborator. There was chatter that maybe they’re not friends anymore, they won’t work together anymore since he didn’t work on the life of a showgirl, but she just told us that’s rubbish. She very purposefully mentions Jack several times, and we’ll get into everyone’s favorite “rant bridge” moment as we go through her songwriting process.
I do think that it’s interesting that there was no chatter about ‘oh, she’s not friends with Max Martin and Shellback’ after 1989, or ‘she’s not friends with Liz Rose anymore’ after Red. We choose to assign meaning to specific relationships in Taylor’s life and work, and some we don’t. Which is interesting, what we do and don’t pay attention to in this parasocial world.
Another parasocial moment, for some of you, was when she mentions Sombr. We saw them out, I think it was to dinner or something, a while back, and there was speculation about a collaboration, but she explains it here. She supports Sombr because of his songwriting, and the vulnerability of his songwriting, which, as she explains, is only good for the female cause. If a male songwriter is “messy”, then maybe when female songwriters are confessional, they won’t get as much flack.
We also learned that she doesn’t have social media on her phone. Which, god we could all learn from that, but I guess she has a team who can take care of that and the rest of us have to promote ourselves if that’s part of our job.
But here’s my second favorite juicy bit: we got to hear more of the story behind all too well the 10 minute version. Now she’s told this story before, how on the speak now tour she just poured out all of her emotions into this 10 minute ad lib on the piano that was vicious and heartbroken and cathartic, and the sound guy just happened to be recording it. But now we get to hear the post-Taylor’s version recap, and we’ve never heard this bit before:
“I was like going back through diaries and finding like little fragments of it. And I didn’t have the like old thing anymore. So I was looking through safes, trying to find the cd, but I had to go back and piece together lyrics and stuff.
But it was, that was the most extensive restoration process I’ve ever done on a song.“
Why did she have to undergo this “extensive restoration” process? Here’s what I think she’s getting at: she didn’t own that recording anymore. Not just her masters, but even this ad-hoc, ad-lib sound check recording, that was also held in the vault by Scott Borchetta, because during the speak now tour, she was under contract with Big Machine.
And I both love and hate this moment. I love it because we’re hearing how she hopped in a time machine to restore that 10-minute version, this moment when she was so sad and angry and just letting it out in song.
But I hate it because it feels so raw. And – if she’s saying what I think she’s saying – it really feels like nothing she did, nothing she produced at this time, was her own. Because what do you mean I just sat down at the piano in a moment where I was sad, and had this catharsis mashed up with brilliance, and I can’t even go back to that memory? I can’t even know what I said?
We knew this before, that Big Machine owned everything from her music videos to her merch to her concert footage. But this feels different. This feels like they owned a private moment. And that hit me really hard, and it really made me understand, for the first time, what this must have felt like to have your art, your hard work, your blood sweat and tears yanked away, and to feel like you don’t even have authorship over your own work. And it also reminded me of why this moment a year ago, when she announced she had repurchased her masters after this long battle and the Taylor’s Version project, why that moment felt like a victory for all of us.
And the last juicy bit we’re going to cover, then go in depth into the interview, is this moment where she’s talking about her fans, and how her fans have latched onto her art in this really intense way.
“There’s corners of my fan base who are gonna take things to a really extreme place. There’s nothing I can do about that. There’s people who are gonna try to like, do detective work, figure out the details.When it gets a little bit weird for me is when people act like it’s sort of like a paternity test, like this song’s about that person, because I’m like, that dude didn’t write the song. I did.”
Now, she has said the paternity test line before, in the reputation prologue. But I love how she lays it out so clearly here. She finally said the quiet part out loud. And what she’s saying is, essentially, there is a line between the art and the artist. The purpose of art is expression, not reporting. We can’t look to the artist as a reporter, and we can’t expect art to be fact. But some corners of this fan base try to blur that line, and take things too far. Because really, what inspires her songs is emotion, not a single person. But when we try to say “this song is about Joe,” or “this song is definitely about Matty,” we’re acting as if this boyfriend was responsible for this incredible piece of art. But they’re not.
And this is what I’ve been saying all along, in nearly every episode that I make on this podcast, if we do that, if we paternity test her songs and make them about her personal life instead of her craft, we’re missing the point.
We treat her songs like they’re this confessional Instagram Live, like she says at another point in this interview, but they’re the opposite. They take craft, and skill.
So I love what she said and how she says it so clearly here. If you want to dive further into how this happens, and why this happens, I just did a whole episode called “The messy mythology of Taylor Swift,” on how we try to re-write the narratives of these songs, precisely because we mythologize Taylor’s romantic relationships. So go check that out after you’re done with this episode.
On Her Inspirations
[10:42]
Okay, now let’s go more carefully through this interview to see what Taylor says about her craft, and we’re going to start with what she says about inspiration. This is something we’ve all been curious about for as long as she’s been around, because it feels like she plucks these songs out of thin air. Like it just comes naturally to her.
As it turns out, sometimes it happens that way. But inspiration is everywhere for her, and not just in romantic relationships.
“It is still such a mystery to me. Even though I’ve, I’ve been, I’ve been writing songs for so long, and I’ve started songs and finished songs so many different ways. They’ve gone through so many journeys. They’ve happened quickly. They’ve happened over time. They’ve been been inspired by my life, by mythology, by fables, by books, by movies, by characters, by warnings, lessons, and, and they never quite happen exactly the same way, and I still don’t quite understand how it works.”
Notice that “my life,” or, in other words, my relationships and my heartbreak and my triumphs, is only a small part of that extensive list. She’s not just inspired by the people in her real life, she’s inspired by everything. And I think if you are an artist of any sort, a writer like me, a painter, a dancer, you find this to be true: you never know when something is going to strike a chord and inspire you to create your own interpretation of that emotion, or explore that emotion through your craft.
And some specific examples of these inspirations that she just listed are obvious, because she’s referenced them either lyrically or visually. Like in The Fate of Ophelia music video, she references Homer’s The Odyssey, this classic piece of mythology, in the ship scene in that video. For fables, she’s referenced the scorpion and the frog in Madwoman. For books, the list is endless, and I have a full list of all her literary references on my website that I’ll link in the show notes. Hamlet is a more recent one she references in The Fate of Ophelia, and she references a lot of Shakespeare, but she’s also referenced Dickens, and Fitzgerald, Lewis Carroll, Charlotte Bronte, and so many more.
So as she’s living her life, consuming media and just existing in the world, she’s taking inspiration from everything, which is what all great artists do, right? And sometimes, if we’re very lucky, and because we’re very nosy, we get to know what that particular inspiration is for her.
But sometimes it’s not as clear what inspires her songs. And when it’s not as clear, I think that’s when we can jump into this “paternity testing” role, because we’re looking for the why. She talks about this personal moment, riding in the car with Travis, and they were discussing Elizabeth Taylor and why she loves her so much. And then she says that all of a sudden this melody and these lyrics just pop into her head, and it’s the chorus of Elizabeth Taylor, and she scrambles to open her recording app.
“But that’s like one of those spontaneous places where it floats down like a cloud in front of you, and all you have to do is grab it and the song transpires from there, it comes as if from nowhere.”
So what inspired it was really this conversation with Travis that they were having, but then something else takes over. It’s like this epiphany, or a lightning bolt thundering down from the sky. And I just love, by the way, how she not only writes in simile and metaphor, but she speaks in simile and metaphor. “Floats down like a cloud” is a simile, comparing this melody to a cloud descending from the sky. And then she turns it into a metaphor, “then all you have to do is grab it.” My favorite moments in any interview with her is when we get to see how her brain works, and her brain obviously works in this literary way, and not just on paper. This cloud moment is yes, likely an easter egg for something, but it won’t make sense until it makes sense.
But this is one of my favorite moments from this entire interview, because I think it really reveals how engrained songwriting is in her character. Because inspiration like that, floating down like a cloud, doesn’t come if you’ve never done the thing before. You’re not just going to suddenly pull a Good Will Hunting on an unsolved math hypothesis unless you’re already really damn good at math. Unless you’re some kind of savant, it takes a whole lot of work and trial and error and years and years of practice to get to that place where it comes naturally to you.
So you can read this moment as, oh she’s just naturally gifted, which I think is true to an extent, but I read it as, oh she’s just so far into this craft, and she’s worked so hard on it, that those wheels are just always churning and she can’t turn it off. It’s become like muscle memory. It’s just who she is, because she’s practiced for so long that she’s now an expert. It floats down like a cloud because she’s built the sky.
But this moment also made me think of this paternity test dilemma, because some people are going to look at this moment and say, oh, Elizabeth Taylor was inspired by Travis, specifically because she told us that she was having a discussion with him right before she came up with the hook. And since the song is about finding your forever love, that’s an assumption that one could make if you take it, as she says, “to this extreme place.”
And this is just a small example of this larger phenomenon. Travis had nothing to do with this song, and she just told us that SHE was the one talking about Elizabeth Taylor and why she admires her, and she was the one who came up with that hook. So why are we factoring in the men in her life, when it all comes from her? Why are we assigning so much meaning to them in the art, when it’s the artist who creates it?
It’s the same if we say Elizabeth Taylor inspired the song. Yes, she’s drawing inspiration from her, but Elizabeth Taylor had nothing to do with the writing of the lyrics or the melody. It’s so perfectly clear, because she just made it so perfectly clear, that there’s a line between what inspires her and what she creates. There’s an ownership, or an authorship there, and when we try to attribute it to other people, we’re discrediting her own craft which takes an incredible amount of skill and practice and hard work.
So there’s this Elizabeth Taylor floating down like a cloud moment that kind of begins with a lyric, or the lyric and the melody emerge at the same time, as if from nowhere. But then she talks about another way in which songs come about, and it’s when someone else comes up with the melody, and she writes what is called a top line. She writes the lyrics on top of it.
And this can either happen virtually, where one of her collaborators sends her a melody, or it can happen in person, in a writing session. And the example she gives is from the reputation era, when she and Jack are in the studio.
“Jack starts playing this piano part. And it turns into this song called New Year’s Day. That piano part was just like enough to springboard the entire song.”
So in this case, the inspiration comes from the music itself. Jack is playing this melody, and she’s inspired to come up with lyrics that match. And the result was this soul-crushing song called New Years Day, with the gut punch lyrics: “please don’t ever become a stranger whose laugh I could recognize anywhere.”
And here’s where I really want to know more. Because when you’re in a situation like that, where you have this beautiful melody, is it the music that inspires you? Does the music tell you what emotion it wants to convey, and then you just give it a voice with your words? Or is it a combination of emotion, what you’re feeling, what you’re going through, and then you write lyrics that tie those emotions to the feeling of the music? My guess is that it’s a combination of both. And she reveals that she has this word bank in her phone, this huge long document where she stores ideas which probably helps when she’s trying to do this second type of songwriting, writing over the melody.
And even though she articulates this incredibly clearly, how songs come to her, she can only articulate what she can give a voice to. Because there’s still so much within this inspiration that we don’t get to see. And if you’re a creative, you can try to backtrack and explain how things came to you, but part of it is unexplainable. It just is what it is, and we don’t always know why we create what we do.
But we do get to find out a bit more about how her inspiration has evolved when she gets into talking about why she writes, and what inspired her to take up this craft in the first place.
On Storytelling
[18:37]
We’ve heard a lot of her perspective before in various interviews about what it was like growing up in the Nashville songwriting scene as a teenager, but this time around, we get to really hear about the storytelling aspect of songwriting and how her style came to be.
And she explains that she went into country music because the kind of songwriting she gravitated toward was this “tell me a story” kind of narrative that only, at the time, really existed in country. And the examples she gives of this type of narrative storytelling are great.
Goodbye Earl by the Dixie Chicks, which is about an abused wife who plots with her best friend to kill her husband, and they get away with it, and Harper Valley PTA, sung by Jeannie C. Riley in 1968, written by famous Nashville songwriter Tom T Hall.
Harper Valley PTA is this iconic piece of country music storytelling, about a widowed mom to a teenage girl who gets a letter from the school PTA that’s essentially calling her a hussy. They’re saying her skirts are too short, and she’s been spotted out drinking with men, and they’re calling her a bad mom for doing these “scandalous” things. Well, the mom marches into the next PTA meeting and calls them out by revealing all of these secrets about everyone: like this guy is banging his secretary, and this woman is always naked in her window, and this person is an alcoholic cheating on her husband. It’s hilarious. And then in the end of the song, it’s revealed that the person telling the story is the daughter, and the last line is, “The day my mama socked it to the Harper Valley PTA.”
And this leads Taylor into talking about these kind of breaking the fourth wall reveals in her own storytelling, and she tells us that she was influenced not only by the classic Nashville style, but by this tradition that was happening on music row at the time. And she talks about her favorite moments of breaking the fourth wall in Tim McGraw and Our Song and The Last Great American Dynasty, and she calls it the “and it was me” reveal.
What she’s talking about, really, is being a narrator, and how she plays with her storytelling perspective. Because in songs like these, the reason for telling the story is revealed in the end. She goes on to talk about how the reason for her storytelling, the reason she writes, has changed as she’s grown and evolved.
“I can only speak to me, but as I’ve grown up the intensity of the sort of, no pun intended, message in a bottle nature of my songwriting has shifted and changed into something else.
It used to be like, I can’t tell a person how I feel, so I’ll write it in this song. And that was really important for me at the time, that it was important for me.”
So this is how it all started for Taylor. And what she’s talking about is the diaristic nature of her songwriting that she’s been known for, but was especially key in the beginning of her career. She was being vulnerable and honest about things in song that maybe she couldn’t say in person. And that’s what really springboarded her career – we immediately related to her because she was telling these candid truths.
But as she grew, she says this kind of storytelling has morphed into something else. She now writes in different ways, still with that kind of vulnerability and this confessional nature and this visceral detail, but through a different lens.
“It was really more of just wanting to challenge myself as a writer. I really have always just thought it would be so amazing to write books, and it’s so exciting to have the challenge of, could I, could I get enough plot points in, in a three and a half minute song to where people felt like they read something after they heard it, or just take you back to that bedtime story, kind of tell me a story.”
So what began as these more simple, confessional stories, like a diary entry, has morphed into this more elaborate narrative, like a book. It’s the same goal: to tell stories, to be a storyteller. But the style has changed. If you look at an earlier narrative like Love Story side by side next to a later one, like But Daddy I Love Him, there’s the same basic plot. Her family or the wider world disapproves of this romance, but our narrator defies their wishes because she thinks this person is the one. And in the end, they end up together.
Same basic story, but it’s the way she tells the story that’s changed and evolved. It’s still confessional, it’s still diaristic to a degree, but here’s what I think has changed: she’s gotten more comfortable as a narrator. The stories no longer have to be about her own life, from her own perspective. And that’s what really changed after folklore, when she experimented writing fictional stories. She can imagine herself as this character in this really visceral world, because she’s looking at it as building a novel or building a movie, and not as writing a diary entry for catharsis.
And she goes on to talk about how this perspective shift has changed her storytelling:
“I kind of like being a narrator. That’s not the person I, um, relate to.”
It gives her more freedom to write characters, is essentially what she’s saying. She’s not so constrained.
And she goes on to tell us about the narrator in the song Clara Bow, who is this studio executive. And intuitively, we knew this. But I love hearing her lay it out, and say explicitly, I am not the protagonist in this narrative. It’s not told from my perspective. Because I think given her earlier diaristic style of songwriting, we tend to just assume that all of her stories are told from her own perspective, but they’re not.
And this wasn’t just a shift within folklore and evermore, it’s not isolated to those two albums. She goes on to explain that folklore is where the shift happened, and it’s changed her songwriting ever since. She no longer has to be the protagonist of her songs, and I think that’s why her later albums have grown so intricate and hit so hard, because she’s not just writing about reality, she’s writing about fantasy.
It’s worldbuilding, is really what it is, and she talks about this when they get into discussing the bridge as the emotional apex of a song, and how song structure is a really important aspect of the storytelling.
“We have this opportunity as a songwriter to tell an entire story, an entire movie or, or a very detailed description of one scene in a movie, or a very nuanced dynamic between people or a complicated emotion…
You can start like painting the picture in the verse. You can get to the heart of it at the chorus, but then the bridge can be where you zoom back, you walk 20 feet back and you see what this entire painting was supposed to be like.
You’ve seen brush strokes, you’ve seen the color tones, but the bridge can be when you step back and you feel everything that that piece of art was supposed to make you feel.”
She’s talking about plot and pacing, right? Just like she’s writing a novel or a film. You start with backstory in the first verse, you give your sort of thesis statement in the chorus, and then in the bridge, you tell your reader why it really matters. You tell them WHY you’re telling the story in the first place.
She’s got this cinematic lens through which she builds her stories, which she’s always had but has been amplified after folklore. And it’s so interesting to hear her perspective not just on the importance of the bridge, but on how intentional it all is. She’s talking about how to make these stories, these songs, the most impactful and how to make them resonate; not just how to convey emotions, but to tell them in a certain way, in a certain order, so that they hit harder.
It’s her storytelling formula, essentially. And Taylor often does something really specific in her songs that makes her one of the most unique storytellers in pop music.
“We established this thing that we love to do and we call it the Rant bridge. I, I could point to examples like, um, out of the Woods, is it over Now, Cruel Summer And oftentimes we love. These rant bridges where it’s basically like stream of consciousness, endless pouring out of emotion, um, intrusive thoughts like, like blended with metaphor, with discussion, with shouting.
Like, you want this rant bridge to feel the most intense of what that feeling is that you’re trying to, uh, establish over the course of the song, and you want it to kind of be a crescendo.”
If you’ve ever wondered why Taylor’s bridges are so impactful, she just told us. It’s because she’s using them as the emotional heart of the song. You set it up with backstory, you fill in the details, you give your characters emotions and central conflicts, and then in the bridge you zoom in on why this all hurts so much, or why this is so exciting, or why you’re so angry. It’s a distillation of all of the song’s emotions into one piece, and it’s impactful both because of how you deliver it, and because of everything that came before.
And she’s talking about so many aspects of storytelling all at once here: plot, pacing, structure, emotion, catharsis, all distilled into a bridge. But I was thinking, is there one bridge where she hits all of these points, “stream of consciousness, endless pouring out of emotion, um, intrusive thoughts, blended with metaphor, with discussion, with shouting.” And the one that immediately came to mind was the bridge of illicit affairs. Epic bridge, and here’s why:
The first part of the song sets up this affair scenario where these two lovers are sneaking around, and it’s exciting and thrilling but dangerous and gives her this huge guilt complex. But our narrator keeps coming back, even though it’s ruining her, and we don’t know why, until the bridge.
“And you wanna scream
Don’t call me “kid,” don’t call me “baby”
Look at this godforsaken mess that you made me
You showed me colors you know I can’t see with anyone else
Don’t call me “kid,” don’t call me “baby”
Look at this idiotic fool that you made me
You taught me a secret language I can’t speak with anyone else.”
This contains all the things she was talking about in a rant bridge, but it’s the sum of these ingredients that matter. The intrusive thoughts and the shouting, “and you wanna scream,” expresses this intense frustration, but then the metaphors, “you showed me colors you know I can’t see with anyone else” and “you taught me a secret language” tells us exactly why this affair is so all consuming. Why this narrator keeps coming back for more, even though it will ruin her.
She’s painted this cinematic scene not just that we can imagine, but that we can feel, and the rant bridge is where it all comes crashing in and hits us. All that anger that was building up in encounter after encounter, every time he doesn’t leave his wife, it all comes exploding out in the bridge.
And when you tie this back into her sort of origin story, coming up in the country music tradition of narrative storytelling, we can see how she’s taken it to this new level both in her own writing, and in the pop music world as a whole. She’s cracked the code, not just to an impactful bridge, but for all of it. She’s figured out how to tell a novel’s worth of story in 3.5 minutes, but more importantly, she’s figured out how to make it relatable. How to make her emotions feel like universal emotions. That’s the heart of why her songs resonate so deeply. That’s why her stories feel so special to us, because she tells them, she builds them in this “sit down, let me tell you a story way”.
On Lyricism
[30:05]
So that’s her big picture on storytelling, but what about the details? She really gets down to the nitty gritty of her lyricism in this interview as well, and talks about what makes lyrics hit hard.
So while she was inspired by the narrative storytelling of Nashville, she drew lyrical inspiration elsewhere.
“I was the most intensely impacted by emo music, right? Dashboard, confessional, Chris Carrabba, uh, fallout Boy, Pete Wentz’s lyrics, how they take a common phrase and then they just twist the knife of it, right? Like, “I’m just a notch in your bed post, but you’re just a line in a song”.
“Drop a heart, break a name”, right? Like it’s ‘drop a name, break a heart’, but they switched it.’”
So she’s citing these early aughts emo songs, Sugar We’re Goin Down by Fall Out Boy, Hands Down by Dashboard Confessional. And if you grew up during this era of pop music, this makes so much sense to you. This genre was incredibly popular at the time Taylor was getting her first record deals, and the lyrics were always intensely confessional. So she took the storytelling inspiration from country music, but updated it with punchier lyrics.
Think of a song like You Belong With Me. She sets the scene, introduces us to her characters. “You’re on the phone with your girlfriend, she’s upset,” and “I’m in my room, it’s a typical Tuesday night.” That’s country music storytelling: setting the scene, giving backstory, hinting at these conflicts that are going to drive the plot forward.
But then she uses really specific details that are more emo-coded, like “she wears high heels, I wear sneakers”, “you say you’re fine I know you better than that, hey whatcha doin with a girl like that.” She’s kind of mashed up these genres, drawing inspiration from both, and the result is this confessional, diaristic songwriting that also tells a full story front to back.
One of the songs she gives as an example is Hands Down by Dashboard Confessional, from 2003, and here’s a few lyrics from that song that really remind me of Taylor’s Songwriting, or visa versa:
“I’ll always remember the sound
Of the stereo, the dim of the soft lights
The scent of your hair that you twirled in your fingers
And the time on the clock when we realized it’s so late.”
It has these specific pieces of imagery that really draw us into this scene and convey this mournful longing: the scent of your hair that you twirled in your fingers, the dim of the soft lights.
Now here’s the first verse of Sad, Beautiful Tragic by Taylor Swift, from her 2012 album Red:
“Long handwritten note deep in your pocket
Words, how little they mean when you’re a little too late
I stood right by the tracks, your face in a locket
Good girls, hopeful they’ll be and long they will wait.”
Both of these verses are painting such a vivid scene, and using these specific details to make this a visceral description. And what they’re both doing is conveying longing, conveying heartbreak, through these details. The note in the pocket, the time on the clock, face in a locket, scent of your hair. They’re using imagery to convey a feeling, and this is something Taylor does particularly well. And then she tells us why she does this:
“You notice everything. You notice candle ash on the cuff of the shirt and the button, and it’s everything that makes the mythology of, of those intense feelings that you have. And I’ve always tried to like, without being a completely unhinged adult, keep that level of detail and intensity when it comes to trying to describe a feeling.”
What she’s saying is essentially that she has this incredibly detailed and visceral memory, and when she’s going back to write about these feelings, she uses these tactile details to paint the full picture. It’s not just sadness, it’s not just longing, it’s a “long handwritten note deep in your pocket.”
And what she means about “the mythology of those intense feelings that you have” is the stories you tell yourself about your memories. We can have these really intense memories of things that have happened, but it’s always told through the lens of emotion. We’re not reliable narrators in our own lives, because we tell ourselves stories about our experiences. So it’s not just he left me, but it’s he left me because I’m worthless. It’s not just ‘that was such a beautiful romance’, but ‘that was the most in love I’ve ever been and I’m never going to fall in love again.’ And what Taylor’s trying to do is combine both the visceral memory, the candle ash on the shirt, and how she’s mythologized these emotions, the stories she tells herself about what happened.
And this is a big part of this sort of cinematic tone that her songwriting takes on, zooming in on small details, and zooming out to get the big picture. But she’s also not only focused on the effect of the words as they paint pictures in our minds. She’s also very focused on the language itself, and the sounds of the language.
And this is where she gets into her favorite literary and poetic devices.
“I have little phonetic things. I love alliterations. I love, you know, two, two words that start with the same letter. Love that…”
If you ever get a Taylor Swift line stuck in your head and you keep muting it to yourself all day long, like a vocal stim, it’s probably a line that has alliteration, because it feels really pleasing to say.
Alliteration is a poetic device that’s when two or more words in a line start with the same consonant: “It’s the first kiss, it’s flawless…it’s fearless” repeats the F sound, “Your Brooklyn broke my skin and bones” repeats the B sound, and “Roaring twenties, tossing pennies in the pool” repeats beginning ‘t’ and ‘p’ sounds.
Another related poetic device is consonance, where the repeated sound doesn’t have to be at the beginning or end, it’s just repeating the same sound anywhere in the line. And these are also really pleasing to repeat, like “Laughing with your feet in my lap, like you were my closest friend” in Maroon repeats ‘l’ and ‘f’ sounds, or “I replay my footsteps on each stepping stone” in evermore repeats the ‘st’ sound. These poetic devices create a musicality to the words themselves, so it’s almost music layered on top of music.
She clearly just loves language, and we learned that she collects words and phrases and keeps them in a gigantic list in her phone, so when she goes to a writing session, she has this huge collection of language she can deploy in her songwriting. I would give anything to see that list.
So she’s very intentional about specific words and phrases phonetically, but she also loves to play with meaning.
“…I like to take either age old cautionary sort of phrases or things that you’ve heard in books, films, kind of these classic lines, and then repurposing them, inverting them, or like redefining them in some ways because I sort of love the combination of modern vernacular and sort of old world or classic timeless speak…. “
Taylor does this twist of meaning particularly well, using these old classic phrases or idioms or proverbs, and slightly tweaking them so they mean something completely different.
Like with “the right place at the wrong time”, she says, “The wrong place at the right time”. Or “They say all’s well that ends well,” she uses this cliche Shakespearean phrase, but follows with, “but I’m in a new hell.” “If the shoe fits wear it,” vs “If the shoe fits, walk in it til your high heels break.” “Everytime you cross my mind,” vs. “Every time you double-cross my mind”. “Get off your high horse,” vs. “Too high a horse, For a simple girl to rise above it.” “Old habits die hard” vs. Old habits die screaming.
Old phrase, twisted into a brand new meaning. I love when she does this – it’s creative and witty and clever, and just adds so much depth and intelligence to her lyrics. Let me know your favorites in the comments.
But it’s not just old vs new, because she explains that she also likes to use juxtaposition in other ways.
“I really gravitate towards juxtaposition and polarity in a line, right? So, hey, what could you possibly get for the girl who has everything and nothing all at once? Our coming of age has come and gone. You take one word that’s at the beginning of the phrase and then you take, its opposite because ultimately, like we are all filled with polarity, hypocrisy, these kind of battling features and factors that make up our, our jagged personalities.”
Our jagged personalities. I love that. Hearing her articulate this so clearly, and why she does it, lends so much insight into her process. Because juxtaposition – comparing opposites – lends so much meaning just inherently. You’re highlighting the contrast, the difference between two things, so you can pack so much meaning into a short lyric or phrase.
She does this so well, like “I’ve been Miss Misery since your goodbye / And you’re Mr Perfectly Fine”, or “The rest of the world was black and white / And we were in screaming color”, “hot take is cold as ice”, “a one-night or a wife,” “I’ll stare directly at the sun, but never in the mirror,” “hiding in plain sight.” There’s so much meaning packed into these lines because the entire spectrum of the contrast is implied without using a ton of words.
How Fans Influence (And Don’t Influence) Her Craft
[39:08]
So she has these very specific, intentional uses of language, and we can see that she just loves words and loves twisting them into new configurations. But then she goes on to explain the sort of long game that she has to think about when writing. Because Taylor Swift, after all, is not just a person but a corporation. She has to be incredibly careful about what she puts out into the world, and I’ve often wondered if that leads her to censor herself.
Here’s what she says about that.
“You can make these kind of like shockingly vulnerable confessions within a song by being like, I’ve never been a natural. All I do is try, try, try. And you say that at first. And I remember writing that and being like, oh my God, this, this feels like, like, do you wanna say this?
And I’m like, actually, I feel like a lot of people feel that way. That always overrides my discomfort with if a line feels too true, because I don’t really think that there’s anything that’s too true.”
There’s a couple of layers here. There’s something that’s too true, like something you know but don’t want to admit to yourself. And then there’s something that’s too vulnerable. Something you don’t want to admit to the wider world.
So to me it sounds like she’s saying not ‘is this too true’, but ‘would this cause a scandal,’ or would this cause a kerfuffle within the Swifties. Because she’s definitely had lyrics that have sent shockwaves through the fan base, especially within TTPD, but that line in mirrorball isn’t one of them.
But for Taylor, is there anything that would be too vulnerable to write about? Probably. There are things we keep close to the vest, and that’s especially true for a person as public and famous as Taylor. I’m sure there are a ton of lines or a ton of songs she’ll never release because they’re quote unquote “too true”. But I think what she’s really getting at here is, how confessional is too confessional? How much does she want to let her fans and the wider world see her real inner dialogue and inner world?
And I think the answer to that has changed drastically as her career has grown and evolved, she’s had to insulate herself more and more as she’s grown more popular. She went from naming names in the liner notes to doing away with secret messages altogether. And though she’s told us explicitly that she doesn’t easter egg her personal life, that won’t stop parts of her fanbase from digging.
So as she’s drawn more into this protective bubble to keep her peace, she calls it keeping her art dear to her, her fans have kind of done the opposite, and try to claw their way in. And Taylor has some really interesting things to say about how she draws the line between herself and her art, because there’s this messy, jagged line between being vulnerable and being a moving target.
“There’s corners of my fan base who are gonna take things to a really extreme place. There’s nothing I can do about that. There’s people who are gonna try to like. Do detective work, figure out the details. Who is that about? What is this? When it gets a little bit weird for me is when people act like it’s sort of like a paternity test, like this song’s about that person, because I’m like, that dude didn’t write the song. I did.”
When you say, “this song is about Joe,” or “this song is obviously about Matty,” that’s the paternity test she’s talking about. And not only is this a weird, parasocial thing to do, but sometimes it goes into a really unproductive and harmful place. And I say harmful because when you attribute a song written by a woman to a man, you’re devaluing and dismissing both the woman, and the artistry.
She writes these beautiful, confessional stories with imagery and metaphor and these raw emotions, but then a portion of her listeners are going to disregard all that and look for the muse. Does it matter who the muse is? Maybe, sometimes. But if it really matters, we need that information to understand the full context of the song, she’ll usually tell us in interviews or in the prologue.
But this entire interview, really, is telling us everything she’s inspired by, and exactly how she writes her songs, and not once has she said, “I’m inspired by my boyfriends.” But she has said that she’s inspired by emotions, and there’s a million things in our lives that can cause us to have big feelings, and our romantic relationships are just a small part of that. Even if the man caused the emotion that in turn inspired the song, those are still her words, her creativity, her artistry. As she says, “that dude didn’t write the song, I did.”
So Taylor is hyper-aware during the whole process of songwriting that her songs will have a larger effect than she may intend, for better or for worse. It will send a percentage of us into this weird parasocial place. And she can’t foresee all of the consequences, but she tells us how she has come to terms with that.
“You have to hold tight to your perception of your art. Your art and your relationship with it, and then you just kinda have to like. There it goes. Hope you like it. If you don’t now, hope you do in five years. And it like, and if you never do, then I was doing it for me anyway.”
I love her take on this, just like letting go and stop trying to control the world’s perception of her art. She’s got a whole PR team for that, so she can just write and create. And also just seeing how much she’s grown and changed in this regard, because if you think back to other interviews, like in Miss Americana, where she says that she was doing it all to be liked. She was doing it for praise. Now, the prize is something different. And the prize is creation and expression. She just loves doing it, and you can tell from this interview just how much she just loves songwriting for the sake of songwriting.
She controls what she can control, and the rest is out of her hands. Which is a beautiful outlook not just for her, but something all of us would be better off if we adopted. Other people’s reactions to you are not your job to manage.
But just because she’s learned to let go doesn’t mean that she doesn’t fight back when it’s appropriate, because she’s always fought back in her own way. And she goes on to talk about how she used her songwriting to fight back against these public narratives, like with Blank Space and Anti-Hero. They’re calling me a slut, calling me a maneater, calling me annoying, so I’m going to lean it and exaggerate this narrative to call it out so it loses its power.
And she talks about how she encourages other artists to have this boundary within their own careers where they keep their art dear to them, and don’t listen to the haters.
“My, my favorite thing when I sit down with new artists or songwriters, I’m like. Why are you reading your comments? Like, that’s too much of it. Like that’s, you’re, you are inundating yourself with too much criticism that doesn’t really have a focus…. If it’s an interesting point to you to kind of respond to, then that’s a, that’s a gift for you to be able to write something. …
Write, make art about this. Don’t respond to like trolls in your comments. That’s not. That’s not what we want from you. We want your art.”
She’s talking about the difference between constructive criticism and just noise that the internet makes, right? There’s a big difference, and you can both listen to that constructive criticism, and take it in, and think on it, and write about it, let it fuel you, let it inspire your art, like she did with Anti-Hero and Blank Space.
But be selective about what you let in, because if you read everything, it’s going to consume you. Is it worth fighting in the comments? Is it worth letting it ruin your self-esteem? Because it’s not your job to respond to everyone and make everyone like you. That’s not it. You’re an artist, your job is to make art, not to police everyone’s reactions to it.
Because being a person in the public eye, the public will always want a piece of you. But don’t let them take your art. Don’t let them steal that spark that lets you create. Don’t let them make you too afraid or too guarded or make you censor yourself. She’s learned this the hard way, because as a woman in the public eye, Taylor’s criticism is harsher than most. She’s always been a lightning rod for controversy, for better or for worse. She always has been and always will be. So we have to listen to her when she tells us how to deal with it.
On Vulnerability
[47:06]
She’s had a long time, and so much experience, that has taught her, sometimes really harshly, how to deal with being this mirrorball in the public eye. What to listen to, who to listen to, who to ignore, what to keep dear to yourself, these are things she has a lot of experience honing and crafting and learning about through trial and error.
But in the beginning, it wasn’t that easy – she was learning these lessons the hard way. In this next part of the interview, she’s talking about her very first professional songwriting experiences on music row in Nashville.
She’s just 14 years old at this point. And she says she’ll be going to school all day, then her mom will drive her to these bungalows where all of these professional songwriters are just working away. And in walks this 14 year old, mop of blonde curly hair, shockingly tall, gorgeous. And she talks about feeling like – from the very beginning – she needed to prove herself before she even walked in the door.
“I didn’t wanna come in unprepared, so I’d walk in with four to five, nearly finished things, two half finished things, 10 hooks, because I just never wanted people to be like, ‘yeah, there’s this like little kid that thinks she can swan her way into music row and just like write songs with these hit songwriters’.”
She comes in so overprepared that she can blow them all away. And what she’s trying to do is head off the criticism and the doubt at the pass before it can get to her. She never wanted that question of, does this girl belong here, so she overgave, overperformed so there would be no chance for them to doubt her.
And this is an incredibly relatable experience if you’re a woman, an eldest daughter, or pathological people pleaser especially – we have to be all the things. And we have to be perfect, we have to be the best, or in our minds, we’re worthless. We have no value if we can’t be perfect.
She’s worried that the adults in the room will write her off immediately because she’s young, and because she’s a young girl. You know, maybe she got here because of her looks, or because of who her father is, or for some other unknown reason that doesn’t have to do with merit. So to get out in front of this potential narrative, she overworks herself. And this is a pattern we’ll see again and again in the early parts of her career: she never felt good enough so she always had to be the best.
She goes on to discuss the expectations she set for herself in writing Speak Now. Because after the massive success of Fearless, there was also so much critical commentary. Everyone was questioning, how did this teenager come out of nowhere and write this number one album and win all the awards? Surely she didn’t write it on her own, surely it’s just her name in the liner notes but someone else really wrote these songs.
And type of chatter, especially when it’s about her songwriting, this sows some really deep self-doubt within Taylor. And during this earlier part of her career, there was also the Kanye mic-grab heard round the world, there was the less-than-perfect performance with Stevie Nicks that was widely criticized. So when she’s writing her next album, she says, there’s a lot going on internally. She’s got a lot of scores to settle.
“It was the first time there was like this big debate over whether I deserved to be there. There, there are always gonna be like little debates, do you know what I mean?
But this was like headline news. I was like, these discussions can lead to a really bad place if I don’t do something to counteract them and to prove that, no, it wasn’t my co-writers that did all this work.”
Remember that line that might be too true? I’ve never been a natural, all I do is try, try, try? It’s never been more true that at this moment for Taylor. She decides that since everyone is doubting whether she really wrote these songs, she will write her next album all on her own. Solo writing credits on every track. And the result is this incredible album Speak Now, and on that album, she writes a little song called “Mean,” clapping back at those who are being hypercritical of this young girl who is just starting out.
This sets up Taylor’s clapback pattern that will continue into the present day: criticism gets really loud and overwhelming, the narrative starts running away from her, so she flips the script, writes a song about it, or writes an album about it, and turns all that pain into art that counteracts the narrative. She’ll do it again, over and over. But something has changed between then and now, because as we just saw in our discussion of her mentorship of other artists, you know, don’t read the comments, she’s learned to let go of the really loud voices that are always shouting about her.
“Being a person in the public eye, I’ve. I’ve really begun to realize that you are a mirror, like you are a mirror for your fans, for the media, for people on the internet, for just random, just people who don’t even really care about your music, but they know who you are, however they feel about themselves and their life will be projected onto how they perceive you.
A public person who makes art. Is a mirror ball. And, and that’s part of why I’ve been able to keep my wits about me through all this because I know that, and I’m really kind of aware of that dynamic, but I’m still endlessly fascinated by people, by the human experience, by why people are the way they are, by the, the, the ways that they feel emotion”.
She stopped taking it so personally. Somewhere along the way, she stopped seeing herself as a shop window, on display through transparent glass for the world to see, and started seeing herself as a mirror. What people believe about themselves is how they will see her. If someone feels inadequate in their career, they’re going to tell her she doesn’t deserve hers. She’s not good enough.If someone doesn’t like aspects of their personality, they’re going to hone in on things they don’t like about hers. It’s projection, not reality.
So now as she’s older, looking back on these really painful career moments, she can see, oh, I was overcompensating, I was taking all those negative feelings personally. It fueled my art, it fueled my career, but I don’t have to listen to all that shit anymore. And part of this is just that she’s so successful that she doesn’t have to listen to it anymore. But all that chatter is still going to happen, so how do you deal with a million people talking shit about you everyday and still stay sane?
This is the other major shift that she articulates so well in this interview: she’s started observing instead of consuming. She’s looking at it almost like a character study; if someone’s being hateful, she can look at it from a distance, from an observational standpoint. Why do they do this? What are they trying to gain? What are they feeling? Not trying to fix it, not trying to change herself to be more likeable, but just saying, “huh, I wonder…” and move on.
And that’s really what the heart of her songwriting is, and always has been, is trying to make meaning within herself and within relationships. Trying to make sense of humans who are inherently messy. But now she can be observational instead of reactive, and this is the confidence that comes with age and experience: you can look at things and instead of being hurt or dejected or depressed, you can say, “huh, that’s interesting.” and go about your day.
People are still going to talk. You can’t stop that. For Taylor it’s louder than most. And part of why the hate is so much louder for Taylor than it is for someone like Harry Styles is because she’s a woman. When a woman says something confessional, or something “too true,” it’s labeled messy. But when a man does it, it’s bold or vulnerable.
On Being a Woman in the Music Industry
[54:33]
And Taylor has a really interesting take on how we got here, and how it might start to change. And she uses an example of a really confessional lyric in a Sombr song called Undressed: “I don’t like want another man’s child to have the eyes of the girl I can’t forget”. That hits hard, that line. Essentially he’s saying, I don’t want you to have babies with anyone else, that would break me. We look at it as a man being vulnerable, like oh, look, he’s so in love, he’s so heartbroken, poor dude. He’s longing.
But if a woman wrote that line, “I don’t want another woman’s child to have the eyes of the man I can’t forget,” it would be considered messy. Could you imagine the uproar that would happen if Taylor wrote that line? It would be a disaster and fuel months worth of speculation online. But Taylor is just glad that there are male songwriters using this confessional, diaristic style.
“Like having a male artist say stuff like that is really good for the cause of women to be able to say stuff. If there’s any way we can make confessional songwriting a little bit more of something that isn’t like people take that as sort of like you were being messy or whatever. You, you have to be fair to everyone.
Then, then are like, are rap beefs messy or are they confessional? Like we’ve gotta just like, let’s make it a music conversation rather than just like ganging up on the female artists. And I think the more male artists that are messy or emotionally complex or confessional or upset, um, the happier I am.“
‘Normalize being messy,’ is essentially what she’s saying. Let’s take the stigma out of being messy and let’s call it confessional or diaristic or being vulnerable or telling the truth. And I love her point about rap beefs, because where is the line between what’s messy and what’s just the truth? Like look at Kendrick Lamar, who is also on this NYT list of greatest living songwriters. He did this incredible piece of performance art at the superbowl halftime show, and the most viewed segment, the thing that got stuck in everyone’s heads, was his song calling out Drake. We don’t call him messy. We call him bold.
Imagine if Taylor performed Thank you Aimee or Cancelled in the same way. She’d be messy. And I think this is one of her best points in this interview, and it’s about how the industry, and the public at large, treats men and women very differently when it comes to vulnerability.
But they also treat women in the entertainment industry very differently in some nastier ways, and Taylor had to learn this the hard way.
“You learn that like you’re in this machine and they’re, they’re trying to make you into a woman that they just idealized and then discarded, like the, the entertainment industry.
Love bombs. Women, right? We love you. We don’t know who you are. Why are you even here?“
This is something she learned really early on, that she had to walk this tightrope of fame, when there’s people lined up below just to watch her fall. But she’s always been interested in the long game, and I think this is why she’s managed to stay at the top of the industry for so long, for much, much longer than her counterparts.
She’s always been keenly aware that there is an expiration date applied to female pop stars, she’s watched it happen to her cohorts, and she’s written about it for a long time. She goes on to give the example of writing Nothing New for the Red album, which is this incredible song grappling with her identity as this starlet, this phenom, and this song is asking, like how long will this last? How long is the public going to tolerate me?
And we can see this question pop into her mind over and over again in song: there’s Long Live from Speak Now, The Lucky One, also on Red, Look What you made me do from reputation, mirrorball from folklore, Dear Reader on Midnights, Clara Bow from TTPD, and most recently Elizabeth Taylor and the title track from The Life of a Showgirl. They’re all circling this same question: how long will this last, how long will the public allow me to be in the spotlight before they start throwing rotten tomatoes? And if or when it ends, will they yank it away, will I get cancelled again, or will it kind of fade out on its own?
And she reflects on this, and being hyper-aware of this, from the get go.
“You’re 22 years old. And you’re saying like, are you, like, are you tired of me?
If you’re not yet, are you going to get tired of me? Because it’s usually something that you would sing about later in life. But the entertainment industry, I’ll tell you, there’s 10 years for every year you’re in it. But it’s fun.”
She’s saying she had to grow up incredibly fast and stay on her toes on this tightrope. And this quip about 10 years for every year you’re in it, is so interesting to me because compressing all of this into a short span of time, shoving this massive career and massive success into two decades, something that would take other artists a lifetime to achieve, that’s why she’s been able to remain successful and remain in the spotlight for so long. Because she does treat every year like it’s 10 years. Not just the massive amount of music she’s put out, but how she grows and changes before our eyes.
She’s cracked the code on how to extend the expiration date of the life of a pop star, or get rid of the expiration date altogether. And the code is: become a completely different person every 2 years. Give the public something new to latch on to so they never get bored. You can’t get sick of me if I’m always switching up my look and my vibe and my style of music and my lyricism, and if I’m always growing and changing at this incredibly rapid pace. If I’m constantly giving you something new, there’s no chance to get bored. And there’s only opportunity for career growth, not career death.
And this is a question I’ve always wondered, and I think she covertly reveals the answer here: are her eras intentional, and were they planned? Was going from heartbroken ballads in Red to pop synth dance bops in 1989 just a natural succession, or was it intentional? I think the answer is yes, these distinct eras are intentional and they were planned, but not just from a marketing standpoint.
“’Cause that’s also another thing that you get when you’re a female in the, in the music or the entertainment industry, movies, whatever.
It’s like, oh, you, you’re like, you’re like this person that we, like, they name a big name and they’re like, oh, but like, you’re gonna be so much better. It’s gonna be so, no, no, no. It’s gonna be cooler. You’re gonna be, you’re so much better. Like to offset the comparison”.
She feels the competition nipping at her heels. She knows that those meetings are happening right now, “you’re going to be the next Taylor Swift, but better”. She knows she’s replaceable, that another pop star can come out of the woodwork and take the crown. And remembering that she’s a perfectionist, even when she was 14 years old just starting out, I think her solution to this was, instead of them replacing me with a different person, I’ll replace myself. I’ll become someone else before someone else becomes me.
She can’t be nothing new, but she can be a new version of herself. And this, in my opinion, is the reason she stays on top and the reason she stays relevant. Because of this perfectionism, this relentless drive to be the best, and also this threat of, “you’re replaceable”, she grows and changes and reaches farther.
And where we stand now, 20 years into her career, she’s no longer replaceable. There is only one Taylor Swift. They can try, but this woman has done so much in two decades, she’s created so much and added so much value to the industry and to the artistry and to pop culture, that she is firmly on that pedestal. There’s no one nipping at her heels anymore. They’re not even close. Because as she says in I Can Do it With a Broken Heart, “try to come for my job.” You can’t.
Outro
[1:02:57]
So what was your favorite part of this interview, you guys? What was the nugget that surprised you the most or made you laugh or made you really think critically about everything she just gave us? Because it was a lot. There was so much there. It was tightly packed into this 30 minutes, but we got so many little nuggets of just brilliance behind the scenes, writing, storytelling. I love it. I love it. I could watch 10 hours of this and I would never be bored.
Thank you so much for joining me here at the Swiftly Sung Stories podcast. If you’re watching me on YouTube, you can also find me wherever you get your podcasts. And if you are listening on podcast apps, come find me on YouTube.
I’m also on TikTok and Instagram, same username everywhere at Swiftly Sung Stories. And make sure to visit my website, swiftlysungstories.com. And if you go to the podcast page, you can fill out a survey that helps me know what you want next.
Thank you so much for being here. I hope you have a great week, and I’ll see you next time.”
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