btw you will miss this in 5 or 10 years. memory will smooth these circumstances down like a river stone, and you will find yourself longing for a shade of light or a moment of this particular innocence. you don't know about what happens next, and one day that will be the most alluring thing of all. don't leave it all for nostalgia. have a nice night now, whatever night it happens to be.
signed my life away at 11 years old to a blond girl in a princess dress singing "romeo save me they're trying to tell me how to feel" and now look at us.
To my younger swiftie friends just take a moment to think about how completely over Taylor's life felt at 26 vs how full and gorgeous and joyful it is at 36 and then think about how people say it gets better and take a big deep breath and hang in there ❤️❤️❤️
"Hi. The quality of my speaking voice is the product of two things that I’m not sorry for. One is that I went to, I was lucky enough to go to a Knicks game last night. I screamed for 100% of it, and then I got home and I was like, ‘You gotta stop screaming. You’re screaming too much. You’re screaming instead of talking. You’re too excited.’ And I was like, ‘Okay, I’m not going to scream tonight.’ And then I got to witness the amazing performances that I saw tonight, and then I just kept screaming. I just never stopped screaming. And so this is what you get, and again, I make no apologies for that. I’ve had a blast. Tonight has been amazing.
I want to begin by thanking the person who introduced and inducted me tonight, and thinks this is the first time he has inducted me into something. But what he may not be taking into consideration is that through his decades of spellbinding storytelling, Steven Spielberg has unknowingly inducted me and countless others into his sacred club of expansive world-building. From the time he was a kid, every time he dreamed something up, he wanted to do anything humanly possible to be able to show it to you. I watched his films pivot between different genres, from action, to sci-fi, to historical epic, to drama, to comedy, romance, fantasy, to musical, and I watched him ace every single genre. And that kind of limitless creativity isn’t just inspiring to burgeoning filmmakers. Because of examples of Steven’s, I trusted my imagination, regardless of it was taking me somewhere new and uncharted, and then every time I dreamed something up, I wanted to do everything humanly possibly to be able to play it for you.
A few months ago when the Songwriters Hall of Fame asked me about my heroes and the creatives who shaped my storytelling and who I might want to present this award to me, I said Steven’s name. And about an hour later to my absolute delight, I ended up on the phone with him and his legendarily effervescent wife, Kate Capshaw, who is here tonight. And he was telling me, yes, absolutely, he would be thrilled to be here. I was completely blown away because the man has a massive film called Disclosure Day that’s coming out at midnight tonight, and he’s still going to agree and show up to do this for me a few hours before it comes out. Wouldn’t that be impossibly hard to balance? Wouldn’t that be too difficult, scheduling-wise? I’m trying to give him an out. At which point, Kate said something I’ll never forget. She said, ‘Good and true things are easy.’ And if I look back at my entire 23-year career in music: the ups and downs, the industry battles, the trials and tribulations, the tears and the cheers and the dogpiling of doubt, the criticisms, both fair and unfair, the complete loss of privacy, the world tours, and the ego wars, and the twists of fate, the absolute magical chaos of this path that I chose when I was too young to remember it ever being a choice at all. Songwriting was the easiest thing I ever did. Not because it didn’t take effort – it definitely did; not that it wasn’t frustrating at times, because it could be; and not that my songwriting didn’t haunt me relentlessly until I cracked the perfect internal rhyme scheme for the third line, the second verse of the book where my teachers called me out in class for not paying attention – because that definitely happened. But when I say that songwriting was the easiest part for me, I think what I mean is that it was instinctual. No one taught me how to do it. I had to be taught how to entertain a crowd, and learn choreography, and be less annoying, and navigate the industry, and fiercely protect my own sanity. I had to learn all of that over time, through difficult lessons and massive amounts of trial and error and chaos and calamity. But songwriting, for me, was pretty much the only thing I ever just naturally did.
My parents tell me stories about driving home from taking me to see Disney movies, and in the theaters, they were noticing I was singing the songs from the film on the way home, in the car, but I was changing the lyrics and the melodies to be about my own life. As a little kid, I loved to sing. I loved to do children’s theater performances. But everything came together when I learned to play guitar at 12. I wrote my first song after learning my first three chords. It felt easy to work incredibly hard at this. It felt easy to nurture something I loved so much, to watch calluses form on the tips of my tiny fingers and to become a constant observer of the human condition. Because people’s feelings, passions, and motivations always fascinated me, and it was easy to choose songwriting over everything else in my life. But it couldn’t have been easy for my parents and my brother—I’m good [crying]—to just pick up and move our entire family from Pennsylvania to relocate to Nashville so that I could hone my craft in the songwriting capital of the world. But after it became obvious that this was not even remotely a temporary phase their tween daughter was going through, they uprooted their entire lives to move me to Music City. And even though words are kind of supposed to be my thing, I will never be able to express my gratitude to you guys for doing that for me. You’re the reason I’m doing it.
In Nashville, I took meetings, and I played acoustic shows until I was able to secure a publishing deal. I got signed when I was 14—oh, thanks! And I got the chance to work with incredibly wise and experienced cowriters. People like Liz Rose, Troy Verges, Hillary Lindsey, Robert Ellis Orrall, Angelo, The Warren Brothers, and the late but so very loved Brett James. So I’d written over 100 songs on my own at that point, but this would be my first experience cowriting. My parents have raised me to be overprepared, show up early, never assume the world owes you anything. And I might have been 14 years old, but I didn’t want anyone in a professional setting to treat me like a baby, or for these songwriters to think that I expected them to write songs for me to slap my name on. So at this point, I started to approach songwriting like a full-time vocation. And that didn’t mean just showing up to my appointments and hoping the ideas would show up too. It meant spending nearly all of my free time writing ideas in preparation for my writing sessions, and then stopping myself at a certain point to allow my cowriters to later weigh in. So some of these ideas were fifty percent done, some were seventy-five percent done, some were just a hook with lyrics and a melody or a chorus. I stockpiled them, so that when I went into a writing session with a cowriter, I’d play them and sing them a few of these ideas, sort of like it was a pitch session, and whichever idea they liked the best is the one that we would finish together. I kept long lists of words that I loved, and I added to it every time I thought of a new one. I developed a serious fixation on alliterations and juxtaposition. And I wrote poems when I didn’t have the right melody yet.
When I was inspired by my own life, my curiosities about the world, or my very dramatic but extremely dire crushes on boys at school who had never even once talked to me, I wrote about that. And if I wasn’t inspired by my own life, I’d use other methods to spark my imagination. I figured, if the idea doesn’t come to you, you have to become your own search party and go find it. Oftentimes, I’d put a movie on. I’d pause a scene, and try to write a song from each character’s perspectives—even the villain. I’d explore what they were going through and try to say it in a vernacular that that character might use. And this is how I learned that every person has a self-constructed justification system that they live by, and we each get to decide what choices we’re willing to condone ourselves. We each decide what we see as good and true, fair and right. And so with my metaphorical Mary Poppins bag of hooks, choruses, and bridges, and my nonmetaphorical backpack from sophomore year of high school, I’d walk into my writing sessions on Music Row.
One of my favorite stories from this time in my life is when I got a chance to write with one of my favorite songwriters of all time, Craig Wiseman. Yep. Craig is an absolute savant of a writer, but he’s also one of the funniest people I’ve ever met too, so I know that I can tell this story. I brought in about five different semi-formed songs that I thought were really strong. Because it was Craig Wiseman, I led my pitch with a song I really thought was special. It was pretty much done except for a few lines in the bridge. So filled with nervous anticipation, I played it on guitar and sang it for him, and when I finished, he very kindly told me tht he thought it was good but he didn’t really get it, and he’d love to hear the other ideas I brought. A few songs later, we landed on one that resonated better with him, and we had a fantastic writing session. It turns out, you really can and should meet some of your heroes. But years later, we still look back on that session and we laugh about that first idea that I had played for him. I had ended up going home and finishing the song on my own later that night. It was called Love Story. Finishing that song that night was me trusting my instincts as a writer, regardless of any feedback or information I had about what other people’s take on it might be. I think now more than ever, in an industry that seems to be consumed by metrics, data, and analytics, and we’re all trying to predict whether something will trend or not, like, writers need to trust their human intuition. And I think the thousands of hours I’ve spent lovingly working at this craft have taught me to really be able to identify the ideas that jump out at me and sparkle and linger, the ones that matter to me the most.
I have to say thank you to Sombr for that perfect performance. And his writing is so exceptional that it makes me actually envious, and I love that feeling. He’s going to be the top of my Spotify Wrapped this year, guaranteed, like it’s locked, it’s in the bag. A lot of my late night debates with my friends about the state of the music industry involve me saying very loudly, ‘Sombr is the future and he does it all on his own and he doesn’t need AI. The kids are fine.’ And so obviously, Shane is a very well-adjusted person and artist, and doesn’t need any of my advice at all. There are so many incredible writers that I love who have come into their own recently, and if I had advice for young artists, though, who should perhaps be interested in it, I would say that you really have to prioritize what you love down to your very core, because you’ll need that if your song ever gets heard by the public, or the critics, or the haters posing as critics, or the people who are chronically online, or the robots posing as people who are chronically online. Songwriters have a real balancing act that they have to conduct every day, because inherently, we’re supposed to let it all in, feel deeply and sensitively to the point of near-delusion, and then reflect those feelings and delusions back to the world in the form of a three-and-a-half minute sonic landscape, or a ballad, or a folk tale, or a battle cry, or a 10-minute coming-of-age song about a scarf.
So it’s hard to harden yourself to certain brutal elements of this world, but allow me to now make a hard pivot and pull out a quote I love from the show Yellowstone: ‘When a father says to his son, it’s the one constant in life, son. You build something worth having; somebody’s gonna try to take it.’ Thank you, thank you very much, thank you. So, John Dutton was talking about a ranch, but I’m using this quote to refer to your self-worth, your peace of mind, and your singular vision as a creator. Positive feedback and people loving what you wrote feels incredible, and I hope you get lots of it. But you need to be ready to receive negative feedback, whether you seek it out or not. It’s no longer a shock that this is how things work, but sometimes it feels like I have this conversation with a young writer every other week. If you make anything awesome, someone out there is going to say horrible things about it, or twist what you meant into something completely unrecognizable to you. What I hope you discover is this: You can be sensitive, but also durable. And you can accept that feedback, and skepticism, and criticism are inevitable. You can take what’s useful or constructive from that information, and leave out what’s simply damaging to your creativity. No one does or should make art that appeals to everyone, everywhere, all the time. My favorite art is detailed and singular in its voice, therefore it can’t be digested and metabolized by everyone who experiences it in the same way. I’m very frequently told by people how they feel about my music, that they never really got my music until they got their heart broken, or started driving their daughter to school every day, or until I made an alternative album in the pandemic called folklore, or that they only like the hits, or that they only liked the ones that weren’t hits, or that they don’t like any of it at all. But it doesn’t feel uncomfortable for me to get feedback of all sorts because I know where I stand regarding the work I’ve made.
As writers, we can only hope to meet people where they are in their lives, but you can’t ever orchestrate or force the encounter. You just have to hope that in some exquisite happenstance, you bump into them on the same path at the same time, that somehow, amidst the noise of life, a line we wrote or a melody that we crafted cuts through, and they hear it and they feel something, that they get chills or feel lighter or think of someone they love. Our goal is to elicit that glint of recognition in another human being, because something that felt good and true to us feels good and true to them in the same time. And in that moment, when someone blurts out, ‘I love this song,’ it was easy.
Before I go, there are so many people who helped me get to this podium, who vouched for my writing and cared about my perspective before anyone cared about my name. And then the fans came along, and they wanted to hear my stories, my prose, my hooks, my heartache, and nothing, nothing delights and surprises me more than the fact that 20 years after my first song came out, they still want to read the next chapter. Nothing makes me happier than when someone tells me that they used to listen to my music with their parent, and now, decades later, they listen to it with their own child. [crying] I’m good. Or that they listen to it with their best friend, or when a couple tells me that Love Story is their song, or somebody does a cute little dance to The Fate of Ophelia, or I hear people in different countries singing Opalite in their own accents, or someone tells me that the song Enchanted gets their baby to stop crying. It’s, I’m humbled by the ways that fans have immortalized my songs in their own individual ways, allowing them to be the underscore of some of their real life expeditions on this Earth, the magnificent moments, as important to me as the seemingly mundane. Lastly, I know that when it comes to legacy, there are so many songwriters who have had such remarkable careers before me, and I know that the Songwriters Hall of Fame could have chosen any of these deserving and brilliant writers to receive this honor this year, but you chose to include me in this group of exemplary songwriters to be inducted into the Hall of Fame, class of 2026 tonight. So I want to thank the voters for celebrating and honoring the best and trust parts of my life. I will be forever grateful. Have a good night guys! Thank you!"
— Taylor's induction speech into the Songwriters Hall of Fame on June 11, 2026 (x)
5 years ago Taylor started her journey to reclaim her work with Fearless (Taylor's Version) and now these both belong with her 🫶🫶🫶🫶🫶
📷: Beth Garrabrant
taylor.lnk.to/FearlessTaylorsVersion
"I just want to say first of all, to receive this award from Alysa, who, you brought me so much happiness and everyone else so much happiness with your performances. And I was so inspired by how much diligence and work and effort and love you have for what you do, and to be receiving Artist of the Year, which is—I love being an artist. I love writing songs more than anything in the world. And I didn't think I was an artist when I first started doing it. It was a hobby. It was a hobby, and then it was my favorite hobby, and then it was what I would rush home from school to do, just, 'I can't wait to get back to my guitar, in my room, and write a song.' And I just want to say like, when I was 12 years old, I had the luxury of spending thousands of hours working at my craft, practicing, making mistakes through trial and error, and that was all completely unobserved, right? That was just me and my craft. And I'm looking out into this crowd, and I'm seeing so many ambitious, cool, smart, awesome people who have dreams, and we live in this world where there's so much immediate feedback constantly. You get feedback for everything you share with the world now. Everything you post, you get feedback, whether it's good or bad or whatever. I just want to say, if I had one hope for you, I would say I hope that you get to nurture your hobby and your passion just between you and that craft, and you give yourself time. Give yourself time to make mistakes, give yourself time to hone your craft. I'm a firm believer that anything you feed your mind, it will internalize; anything you feed the internet, it will attempt to kill. And I don't want that for your dreams. So just, thank you for allowing me to turn my hobby into a love, into a passion, into a dream, into a career. Thank you for allowing me to have it this long. And I wish you the best with everything you do. Thank you so much for this amazing, amazing night."
— Taylor accepting the 2026 iHeart Radio Award for Artist of the Year
folklore is the pivot point between Taylor Swift the pop star and Taylor Swift the legend. Before folklore her career had been in an objective "decline", much in line with consumption changes in the industry, with her seeing slowly diminishing success with each successive single and album she'd released after 1989, and that trend halted and reversed with folklore. US pop radio was increasingly reluctant to engage with her singles unless they were perfectly suited to the zeitgeist of the time, like Delicate was in 2018. Her streaming numbers were not terrible, but she was consistently getting out-streamed by the top new names in the industry, much of which was due to her catalogue being absent from platforms which put her on the backfoot. If she had been following a normal pop star path, then that would've been fine and it would've the beginning of her fade from the A-list. Instead, she took a hard left turn and put out folklore. It did unexpectedly massive numbers (including setting the record for the most streamed female album in the first 24 hours, which she broke two more times after that), sure, but what made folklore different was the entire narrative surrounding it. Taylor was no longer just a 'pop star', she was an indie rocker, and for the first time in a very long time, she was at the center of the celebrity discussion because of her music, and not just as a very famous person taking swings at Kanye or jet-setting with Tom. The pitchfork-indie rock dad demographic, who are the ones in the position of deciding which music is legitimate art and not just "pop music" fawned over folklore, and shifted the narrative from 'Taylor makes pop songs' to 'Taylor makes good songs' in communities that would've never seen the light otherwise. Folklore gave Taylor a massive career-jolting shock, and it set her on the path she's currently following.
In the years since, Taylor has clawed her way back to the very very top of the music industry, and with each release she widens the gap between her and everyone below her. Yes, evermore and Fearless TV didn't have the most stellar numbers, they did continue to develop her career arc in an incredibly positive way. Evermore proved to everyone with a toe in the industry that folklore wasn't a fluke, that she was capable of making "artful" music that would satisfy both pretentious indie rockers and her own fans at the same time. Fearless TV proved that Scooter had royally fucked up in his calculus when buying Big Machine, and that Scott Borchetta had royally fucked up when he assumed Taylor's career had peaked and he'd made all the money there was. It proved to executives that the re-recording project could be a success and that she could convince people to seek out the new versions, which is something we take for granted now (just look at the daily streams of each original album versus its re-recording), but was not a guarantee back then. Plus, it was Fearless TV that really lit the match and set the fire under her back catalogue, and got tens of thousands of people who probably had never listened to the original Fearless to go back and listen to her other albums from that era. The numbers weren't huge then, but that was when casual fans and locals started to re-evaluate the depths of her back catalogue. Obviously, Red TV was another step in her career progression, where she proved that a re-recording could be more than just new versions of songs for people to stream in place of the originals. She turned Red TV into a full-fledged era with videos and talk shows, and that a re-recording was able to spawn a ten minute #1 hit that wasn't just driven by fan consumption. Red TV did also act as a catalyst for her massive catalogue growth, but it wasn't the start of it. Finally, Midnights and the Eras Tour have been the true peak of Taylor's career. She's outstreaming the next 4 most popular female acts on Spotify combined. She got an album debut so ludicrously large that it exceeded even the most optimistic of predictions by a significant degree. She was even able to repair her relationship with US radio and turned Anti-Hero into her biggest and most successful song on the Hot 100 since Shake It Off. Taylor can play the pop star game and get the pop star hits and have the pop star tour, but Taylor writes lyrics that appeal to indie rock dads, wields significant power on the indie/alt music charts, and is playing stadiums with crowds so big they're more in line the biggest rocker performances ever than they are with any other pop girl stadium tour. Taylor has moved so far beyond the pop star that she was at the start of the Lover era, thanks to the pivot that happened with folklore. She can be the pop star on the micro-scale, which is seen in how well Midnights is holding up as a current pop album, but she can also be the music legend on the macro-scale, as is seen by the 14 million+ people in line for her concert presale or the immense, immense popularity of her back catalogue that complements the demand for her new music. There's a reason people have started calling this Taylor/SwiftMania 😉
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