Taylor Swift started writing songs when she was 12. Today, at 36, she is one of the most successful pop stars of her generation.
In a rare interview for The New York Times’s unranked list of the 30 greatest living American songwriters, Swift sat down with the reporter Joe Coscarelli to talk about the craft of songwriting, the stories behind some of her biggest songs and why having confessional songwriting from male artists makes everyone’s songwriting stronger.
Here are some takeaways from the interview.
What happens when the music industry ‘love-bombs’ women?
Swift released her debut album when she was 16, had her first international hit album with “Fearless” at 18. By 22, she was already feeling “washed up.”
“I felt like maybe the only thing that made me special was that I was this, like, ‘teen phenom,’” she said.
The warm reception to “Fearless” as a songwriting feat quickly faded, Swift said, and changed her perception of how “love can be so quickly handed to you and then taken away.”
“The entertainment industry love-bombs women,” she said, placing them on a pedestal with high praise and compares them to other artists. The experience inspired her to write “Clara Bow” for her 2024 album “The Tortured Poets Department,” about how women in the entertainment industry are built up and then quickly cast aside for the next big thing.
Swift changed the original lyrics to ‘Our Song.’
Swift’s fans are familiar with her fondness for language quirks and tricks. She loves alliteration, juxtaposing opposites and repurposing familiar lines from books and movies.
One thing she avoids is having a word end with the same letter that the next word starts with. That was a problem in the original version of “Our Song,” off her 2006 debut album.
Swift originally wrote, “when you’re on the phone and you talk real low.” But the double-L made her cringe, so she changed it to “when you talk real slow.”
An emotional soundcheck produced a hit.
Swift was rehearsing for her 2011-12 “Speak Now” tour and was in a very sad state at a soundcheck. She started playing the same four chords over and over and started rambling for 10 minutes.
“It wasn’t cohesive and it wasn’t really that structured,” she recalled. Afterward, someone asked the sound engineer if he had recorded it.
“I would have walked away from it if he didn’t have a recording of it,” Swift said.
It would turn into “All Too Well” off her 2012 album, “Red.”
It’s just one way Swift finds inspiration. Take “Elizabeth Taylor.” Swift was in a car with her fiancé, Travis Kelce, when she delivered a soliloquy about how much she loved Taylor, the actress. As soon as they got home, an “intrusive melody” popped into her head and she immediately opened the voice memo app on her phone.
Other times she is inspired by life events. Swift recalled sitting in her bedroom when she was 17, mad at her parents because they wouldn’t let her go on a date with an older man. She wrote “Love Story.”
“This is why you need to discipline your kids,” she said, “because they might write songs that go No. 1.”
Fans ‘slept on’ ‘Reputation.’ Swift knew they’d come around.
Usually when Swift loves a song or album, there’s a good chance her fans will love it, too. That wasn’t immediately the case with her album “Reputation,” which was released to mixed reviews in 2017.
“I know what I did, I love it,” she said. “You can come around if you want. It’s OK if you don’t.”
Six or seven years later, “people are like, oh my God.”
When Swift was recording one of the album’s singles (“ … Ready For It?”), she remembers wanting to “headbang myself through a wall,” she said, but people “slept on that song.” She felt similarly about another “Reputation” single, “Getaway Car.”
The ‘rant bridge’ became a signature Swift tool.
Verse. Chorus. Verse. Chorus. Rant bridge.
It’s a tool Swift and her longtime collaborator and friend Jack Antonoff return to again and again. The rant bridge, as they call it, is a kitchen sink of emotions, complete with a “stream of consciousness, endless pouring out of emotion,” “intrusive thoughts” and metaphors.
“Structure is important but I think that when you write enough songs, at least in my case, the intuitive part of your songwriting brain can kind of create a new structure that’s not as classically what you’ve been taught,” Swift said.
The rant bridge becomes “a crescendo,” one that the duo sometimes returns to twice within one song, as with “Cruel Summer.”
Confessional songwriting by male artists helps female artists.
As a songwriter, Swift is often credited for her deeply personal musings on life and love. That frequently makes her a prime target for critics. But more and more she is seeing and appreciating male artists who approach songwriting in a similar vein. Artists like Sombr, for example, are “really good for the cause of women to be able to say stuff” in their own voice.
“Let’s make it a music conversation rather than just ganging up on the female artists,” she said. “The more male artists that are messy, or emotionally complex, or confessional, or upset, the happier I am.”
Remy Tumin is a reporter for The Times covering breaking news and other topics.
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