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NEW YORK TIMES

The Taylor Swift Interview

Taylor：It's still such a mystery to me, even though 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 inspired by my life, by mythology, by fables, by books, by movies, by characters, by warnings, lessons. And they never quite happen exactly the same way. And I still don't quite understand how it works. 

Swift：I have this very strong opinion that when you're young, you feel things on such a intense and detailed level. There's an attention to detail when you are like 17 to 22 years old and you're longing or you're reaching and grasping but never holding someone's attention or someone's love or someone's dedication and you're just... You can't understand why you spend all day thinking about it. 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 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. 

01:18

Taylor：I started writing songs when I was 12. As soon as my love for singing and picking up an instrument happened, songwriting just spontaneously started becoming the entire cornerstone of my life. 

Swift：I think the first songs that I fell in love with was the type of songwriting that I think folk and country is really kind of... known for. It's like that story time structure. Songs like Harper Valley PTA or "Goodbye Earl" by the Dixie Chicks or like, you know, any amazing Kenny Chesney song where like, you know, a hypothetical structure would be, you know, first verse, little girl, you know, learns a lesson that in the chorus her mom teaches her about. Then the little girl grows up and now she's a teenager and she realizes, "Oh my God, my mom was right about this." Now the second time you hear the hook, that same hook means something a little bit different because she's like grown up in her life. Then the bridge, maybe she goes on in her life. She has a little girl. She imparts that wisdom onto her. And then if you really want to get me to cry, like bring back that same first line of the song and end the song with it. So that was the first thing that made me think, it's got to be country music. 

   02:40

Taylor：That was the first type that I really fell in love with. But then lyricism, I was the most intensely impacted by EMO music, right? Dashboard Confessional, Chris Carraba, Fall Out 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 bedpost, 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. And I'd like, those are the kind of lyrics where I would read the lyrics to those songs or the specificity of "Hands Down" by Dashboard Confessional, where I'd be reading those lyrics and I'd just finish reading a line and just go, "Oh, my God." 

Swift：I got a publishing deal when I was 14. I was signed by a guy named Arthur Buenahora at Sony. And he just believed that I had a perspective that mattered. And I actually asked him if he could please hold my songs from being pitched to other artists. I was like, "Just give me some time to try to get a record deal. I'm going to try so hard." I could almost compare it to the Brill Building. They have these offices on Music Row, or at least they had a lot of them then, that were like these small houses, these cottages and bungalows. Now we have really tall buildings. 

Taylor：Basically, you'd go there, and there'd be three songwriters writing in this room, three songwriters in this room, four in this room, two in this room. And I would just go to school. Then my mom would drive me downtown, 30 minutes. And I would go, and I'd have a songwriting session with someone that I'd never met before. But I really didn't want to 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." 

Swift：But I think one of my favorite things about the Nashville music scene, country music and the storytelling where it was when I arrived there, There was almost this tradition of sort of breaking the fourth wall, making the song then a part of the song, or the writing of the song becomes a part of the song. And I did that in a song called "Tim McGraw", where I'm singing about this kind of love lost and hoping that person thinks of me. And then in the bridge, it's revealed that I wrote this song, and I hope he hears it. The song "Our Song", which I still love so much. It's all about this romance and this relationship. And then in the end it says, "I grabbed a pen and an old napkin and I wrote down our song." So I loved doing that. I still kind of love doing that. The kind of just like, "And it was me." 

05:36

Taylor：My favorite end plot twist I think that I've done in songwriting is the ending of "The Last Great American Dynasty". That's my favorite one. It is just so much fun to tell this story about this real woman who lived in history, and she defied the social norms, and she drove people crazy, and she had a marvelous time ruining everything. And you talk about the house she lived in on the coast, and basically then in the end, you're like, you know, she... moved away from Holiday House, it sat quietly on that beach, free of women with madness, their men and bad habits, and then it was bought by me. And you're like, every time I get to that part when I would sing it on tour, I just like have to kind of like, like I wanted my grin to go from here to here, but that looks crazy. So it's like I had to like taper down my own excitement that that hook happened.