Taylor Swift Thanks Family, Quotes ‘Yellowstone’ In Songwriters Speech
Taylor Swift is now the youngest female artist to be inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame!
Swift delivered a heartfelt, 21-minute acceptance speech at the ceremony last night in New York City.
She was joined by her parents, brother, fiancé Travis Kelce, and Kelce’s mother, and had special words of appreciation for her family.
“It couldn’t have been easy for my parents and brother to 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. Even though words are supposed to kind of 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 here tonight,” Swift said.
Swift told the crowd that songwriting was the “easiest thing I ever did. Not because it didn’t take effort, it definitely did,” she explained. “Not that it wasn’t frustrating at times, because it could be. Not that my songwriting didn’t haunt me relentlessly until I cracked the perfect internal rhyme scheme for the third line of the second verse, the point where my teachers called me out in class without paying attention, because that definitely happened. But when I say this 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 the 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.”
She also addressed young artists: “I would say 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 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 sensitive to the point of your 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 bop or a folktale or a battle cry or a 10-minute-coming-of-age-song about a scarf.” She then asked the audience to “allow me to now make a hard pivot and pull out a quote I love from the show Yellowstone.” She shifted into an accent to quote John Dutton, “It’s the one constant in life, son. You build something worth having, somebody’s gonna try to take it.”
She continued: “If you make anything awesome, someone out there is bound 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. As writers, we can hope to meet people where they are in their lives. 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.”
Swift submitted five songs for consideration to the Hall of Fame: “All Too Well (10 Minute Version),” “Blank Space,” “Anti-Hero,” “Love Story,” and “The Last Great American Dynasty.”
While Swift is the youngest female to be inducted, Stevie Wonder remains the youngest-ever inductee, at the age of 32 in 1983.
