Taylor Swift Dives Deep Into Her Process & Delights Fans With New Mashup

Taylor Swift recently sat down for a lengthy discussion about her songwriting process and delivered a surprise performance at the end!

The video was just released after Swift’s sit-down at the Grammy Museum as part of its Icon Sessions. The Recording Academy released the video, filmed in the museum’s Clive Davis Theater.

Swift talks with Recording Academy chief Harvey Mason Jr. in a wide-ranging discussion about her songwriting and the feelings she experienced while working on her albums.

Then, at the end, she sits at a piano that was on the Eras Tour with her and introduces her surprise performance. “This is the piano that I brought with me all around the world on the Eras Tour, and one of my favorite things that I would do on the Eras Tour and something that really became something the fans paid a lot of attention to and would make a lot of guesses about every night was, I had this section called the acoustic section. I would do different songs every night, one on guitar and one on piano, and I started to really have a blast with creating medleys towards the middle/end part of the tour. And I’d really just think about different songs I could mash up with other songs (as) kind of a surprise and delight moment for fans. And a way that I would pick the songs is, I’d find some sort of through line, whether that was rhythmically or these are all about a similar emotion. And I prepared one for you today that, if I was still on the Eras Tour, I would do this one. And it’s songs that are connected to each other by the common theme of being about memory and reliving certain detailed memories of your life and the significance of those memories,” Swift said.

She then performs her new song for “Toy Story 5,” “I Knew It, I Knew You,” along with “August” and “All Too Well.” She weaves them together in a sweet six-minute performance. Fans, take note of Swift’s brand-new, very sparkling, very large diamond engagement ring and wedding band!

Some other highlights from the discussion:

On her third album, Speak Now, Swift said: “On that album, I really learned how to take a feeling I was feeling and then craft that on my own into a sound and kind of world-build the music around my feeling for it…. The song ‘Enchanted’ is about falling in love and that sort of glittery, twinkly fairy lights feeling. And that’s exactly how the song sounds. There’s a song called ‘Never Grow Up’ that is a song to a little kid who’s asleep in a crib, and it sounds exactly like a lullaby. There’s a song called ‘Mean,’ which was about criticism. And at that time, one of the criticisms I was facing was, ‘She’s not country enough.’ So I was like, ‘Put just as much banjo on this as we can possibly.’”

Referencing her album Reputation, Swift said: “It was 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. And it felt very stifling, as a person, as a human being, but ultimately as a writer. It gave me this really, when I look back on it, this really sort of gnarled bite when I would write my lyrics… This is when I learned, like, when people are in like a hate frenzy about a public figure or really anyone — it could be your daughter in her middle school class — when people decide we’re all gonna stand around someone and point and mock them, you can’t respond with outward sincerity. Any attempts you make to explain yourself earnestly or sincerely will just be mocked even worse. And so it was an interesting challenge as a writer to say, ‘What can you possibly say when everything you say is being returned to you in this sort of distorted… like, they overreact rather than react to anything that you say or do, any position you take?’”

Swift also talked about how her songwriting has evolved over the years: “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 like those contradictions will come up where fans will be like, ‘I can’t believe the same person who wrote this wrote this.’ Because one will be very simplistic and silly, and one will be very detailed and deep andwe’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.”

Check out the full video below! (The performance begins about 42 minutes in.)