After a very busy summer that included being inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame, releasing an original song for Toy Story 5 and, of course, getting married, Taylor Swift made a stop at the Grammy Museum in Los Angeles for a wide-ranging conversation about her career.
“The Icon Sessions with Taylor Swift: A 20-Year Retrospective” event, presented by the Recording Academy‘s Songwriters & Composers Wing, took place earlier this month and was released online on Monday, featuring Swift sitting down with Recording Academy CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
Early on in the chat, Mason Jr. asked the superstar how she learned to trust her instincts when sharing her music with the public, as Swift explained, “I’m making music because I’m playing for the fans. I’m putting this out for people who care about it and who look to music as a way to cope with their life in the way that I did; I think that if you can actually go through all those checkpoints, you realize that putting out music you’ve made that you love so much is not the path to universal validation. If you’re still doing it, then you love it for the right reasons.”
She added that dealing with the public perception and analysis of her lyrics “sometimes fuels [her songwriting]. Sometimes when people are mocking me, it’s really fun to mock them back. Sometimes I like to just use words that they have to look up in order to talk shit about.”
Swift also acknowledged that she has several “coping mechanisms” that she’s used throughout the years, and “one of them is saying, ‘You chose this. You chose this every day. You could have opted out of this any day before it got unmanageably big,’ and I decided not to because I love it that much. And that’s just where it begins and where it ends. Everything that comes with this ultimately is worth it, as long as I get to still make music.”
The discussion touched on a number of her albums, including her Reputation era, which she described as “a time in my life when — for the very first time, not the last — people had really actively tried to misunderstand me, just in general, and to misunderstand what I was trying to say and to purposely misinterpret it.” Reflecting now on the 2017 album, Swift said, “I’m very proud of it when I look back on it. I think the things that I look back on now is when I’ve gone through something that was sort of an attempt to drive me insane — when you when you don’t allow that to happen, and you use art and music as a way to like barrel roll out of that, those are the moments I’m the most proud of.”
Elsewhere in the conversation, Swift explained how she’s “not a big mood board artist” and usually decides on the aesthetics of an album as the last piece. She explained that she identifies as a “confessional songwriter,” but “I think it’s important to specify that not all shocking revelations you make about yourself are deep. Like just saying something dramatic, shocking and wild doesn’t make it something that’s going to help people, resonate with people, be an important story that sits in people’s minds, hearts and souls.”
“We have to be purposeful. You can’t just like scream something crazy and be like, ‘I’m a confessional songwriter,’” she continued. “Just for the same exact reason why details should not be strictly decorative. Like let’s not be haphazard with these things, let’s make them count.”
Swift also touched on the process of her Taylor’s Version album re-records, saying, “At first, it’s like when the dog actually did eat your homework, and you’re like, ‘Now I have to redo it all?’ And then I have to go in to the teacher and be like, ‘The dog ate my homework.’ The public and the media — since it hadn’t really been done before in that way and I guess on like such a big scale and so loudly and obnoxiously — the public kind of did a little bit side-eye me the way that a teacher would if you did say the dog had eaten your homework. That was an interesting place to start from and I had to sort of get myself from the place of being like everyone says this isn’t going to work and everyone’s saying like nobody’s gonna want to hear my new take on the same work.”
In closing, Swift gave an acknowledgement to her early days as a country star, noting, “I love my country roots more and more the further along this path I get. I want to honor them more and more, and I feel more and more tied and more loyal to them, the people that shaped who I am as an artist and as a writer. That all happened in Nashville.”
She finished with some advice to young songwriters in the audience, telling them, “I hope that you will show up to work even when the idea fairy doesn’t. I hope that you will not be the person who shoots down everyone’s ideas in the room, but has not brought any of your own. I hope that you will remember the ‘yes, and’ of the improv session that is your recording sessions and that is life as well. And I hope you remember that in the music industry, as wild and ever-changing as it is, enthusiasm can protect you from anything. I would know.”
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