Taylor Swift’s work as a songwriter was celebrated last week by the Recording Academy’s Songwriters & Composers Wing at the Grammy Museum in Los Angeles.
In an event billed as “The Icon Sessions with Taylor Swift: A 20-Year Retrospective,” Swift sat down with Recording Academy CEO Harvey Mason jr. for a lengthy conversation about her career, followed by a performance.
At the age of ten, she says she began “obsessively thinking about and planning” her life as a singer-songwriter, and quickly began studying and analyzing the “structures and architecture” of her favourite songs.
“I figured maybe if I write enough of these, I might get decent at it,” Swift told Mason, adding, “I never turned to music to forget my human experience. I turn to music to remember it.”
She believes her first single, 2006’s “Tim McGraw,” which she released at the age of 16, gave her a glimpse into what she could achieve in the years ahead.
“If I look back at the song ‘Tim McGraw,’ there are actually sort of hints at everything that was gonna happen in the next 20 years,”
Swift proudly acknowledged her roots and getting her start in country music.
“I’ve loved — and I think this can happen as you grow up — my country roots more and more,” Swift explained. “The further along this path I get, I want to honour 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.”
She admits part of her success came from ignoring advice from industry executives who didn’t think she fit country music’s target audience.
“This is why this all worked,” Swift said. “It was because I didn’t listen to the people who said that I didn’t have a valid perspective on life because I didn’t fit into a certain demographic. I was 16 putting out an album in country music that was all about my life as a kid in high school. We’re dealing in emotional truths that either resonate or don’t.”
When asked by Mason about how her lyric-writing has changed over the two decades since she first emerged as a country artist, Swift said, “I think the main change would be, as a lyricist, just sort of he vernacular over the years that I would use. Because when it comes to writing different shades of my music, you can say the same thing many different ways.”
“You can say ‘I’m into you’ by saying, ‘Your Midas touch on the Chevy door, November flush and your flannel cure.’ Or you can say, ‘You got that James Dean daydream look in your eye.’ They mean exactly the same thing: ‘Everything that you touch glows. You are the most important thing in my world, and I just saw you for the first time, and I can’t believe it, and I don’t know what to do with these feelings,’ she explained. ”But you can just choose to say them different ways.”
“And I think that the way that I’ve chosen to express myself as a lyricist has changed over the years, and there are times when those contradictions will come up where fans will be like, ‘I can’t believe the same person who wrote this wrote this,’” she continued. “Because one will be very simplistic and silly, and one will be very detailed and deep and we’re doing tons of allegory, and we’re just in a whole other world of atmospheric speech. But I think that that human contradiction is fun. I think that it’s fun to make playful songs. I think it’s fun to make songs that are desolate and lonely and just bedraggled lyrically as well. And that it’s that human contradiction that I find interesting.”
Swift also shared one instance in which she took what she imagined to be a “sad piano ballad” to producers who then completely transformed it into the dubstep-influenced banger “I Knew You Were Trouble.”
What producers Max Martin and Shellback did to her song caught her off guard, but also taught her a lesson.
“It can either be compelling to make a song sound exactly how it feels or to flip it, which the people that really taught me the most about that are Max Martin and Shellback,” said Swift.
“I was really excited to bring it in and I played them this really, really sad ballad and I was like I think just no drums and they’re like, ‘What if it’s dubstep?’” she recalled. “I was like I don’t know, guys. Let’s give it a run. I don’t know.”
She now views that their decision “ended up being the best thing for it, and I think as a collaborator, my favourite people to be in the room with are ‘Yes, and?’ people. So why not try it. If they heard it and they thought dubstep, and I came to them specifically because I didn’t want to be making lateral moves creatively, why wouldn’t we go down that path? Why wouldn’t we? I really think that enthusiasm in the studio, it can really make or break what you end up creating.”
Watch the Q&A plus a performance of a medley featuring “I Knew It, I Knew You,” “August” and “All Too Well” below.