The Taylor Swift Interview

The New York Times Magazine polled more than 250 music insiders and gathered six Times critics to choose the 30 Greatest Living American Songwriters. One artist who made the list was Taylor Swift. The writer Joe Coscarelli met with Swift in Los Angeles to talk about the craft of songwriting. In this 30-minute interview, Swift explains her process, the stories behind some of her biggest hits, her love of a “rant bridge” and how life in the public eye informs the stories she tells in her songs.

Who do you think are the greatest living American songwriters? Nominate up to 10 names here.

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The following is an edited text transcription of Swift’s interview with The Times.

It’s still such a mystery to me. Even though I’ve been writing songs for so long, and I’ve started songs and finished songs so many different ways. They’ve gone through so many journeys. They’ve happened quickly, they’ve happened over time, they’ve been inspired by my life, by mythology, by fables, by books, by movies, by characters, by warnings, lessons — and they never quite happen exactly the same way, and I still don’t quite understand how it works.

I have this very strong opinion that when you’re young, you feel things on such an intense and detailed level. There’s an attention to detail when you are 17 to 22 years old, and you’re longing, or you’re reaching and grasping but never holding — someone’s attention, or someone’s love, or someone’s dedication — and you just can’t understand why you spend all day thinking about it. You notice everything. You notice candle ash on the cuff of the shirt, and the button, and it’s everything that makes the mythology of those intense feelings that you have. And I’ve always tried to — without being a completely unhinged adult — keep that level of detail and intensity when it comes to trying to describe a feeling.

I started writing songs when I was 12. As soon as my love for singing and picking up an instrument happened, songwriting just spontaneously started becoming the entire cornerstone of my life.

I think the first songs that I fell in love with were the type of songwriting that folk and country is really known for. It’s that story-time structure — songs like “Harper Valley P.T.A.,” or “Goodbye Earl” by the Dixie Chicks, or any amazing Kenny Chesney song. A hypothetical structure would be: first verse, a little girl learns a lesson that, in the chorus, her mom teaches her about. Then the little girl grows up, and now she’s a teenager, and she realizes: “Oh my god, my mom was right about this.” Now, the second time you hear the hook, that same hook means something a little bit different, because she’s grown up in her life. Then the bridge, maybe she goes on in her life. She has a little girl. She imparts that wisdom to her. And then, if you really want to get me to cry, bring back that same first line of the song and end the song with it.

So that was the first thing that made me think, “It’s got to be country music.” That was the first type of song that I really fell in love with.

But then with lyricism, I was the most intensely impacted by emo music. Dashboard Confessional, Chris Carrabba, Fall Out Boy, Pete Wentz’s lyrics — how they take a common phrase and then they just twist the knife of it. “I’m just a notch in your bedpost, but you’re just a line in a song.” “Drop a heart, break a name.” It’s drop a name, break a heart, but they switched it. I would read the lyrics to those songs, or the specificity of “Hands Down” by Dashboard Confessional. I’d finish reading a line and just go, “oh my god.”

I got a publishing deal when I was 14. I was signed by a guy named Arthur Buenahora at Sony. He just believed that I had a perspective that mattered. And I actually asked him if he could please hold my songs from being pitched to other artists. I was like: “Just give me some time to try to get a record deal. I’m going to try so hard.”

I could almost compare it to the Brill Building. They have these offices on Music Row — or at least they had a lot of them then — that were small houses, cottages and bungalows. Now we have really tall buildings. Basically, you’d go there and there would be three songwriters writing in this room, three songwriters in this room, four in this room, two in this room.

I would go to school, then my mom would drive me downtown, 30 minutes, and I would go have a songwriting session with someone that I’d never met before. But I really didn’t want to come in unprepared, so I’d walk in with four to five nearly finished things, two half-finished things, 10 hooks. Because I never wanted people to be like, “Yeah, there’s this little kid that thinks she can swan her way into Music Row, and just write songs with these hit songwriters.”

I think one of my favorite things about the Nashville music scene — country music and its storytelling, when I arrived there — was that there was almost this tradition of breaking the fourth wall. Making the song a part of the song, or the writing of the song becomes a part of the song. And I did that in a song called “Tim McGraw,” where I’m singing about this love lost and hoping that person thinks of me. And then in the bridge it’s revealed that I wrote this song, and I hope he hears it.

The song “Our Song,” which I still love so much, is all about this romance, this relationship. And then in the end it says, “I grabbed a pen and an old napkin, and I wrote down our song.” So I loved doing that. I still kind of love doing that. Just, like: “And it was me!”

My favorite end plot twist that I’ve done is the ending of “The Last Great American Dynasty.” That’s my favorite one. It’s just so much fun to tell this story about this real woman who lived in history, and she defied social norms, and she drove people crazy, and she had a marvelous time ruining everything. And you talk about the house she lived in on the coast. And in the end you’re like: “She moved away from Holiday House. It sat quietly on that beach, free of women with madness, their men and bad habits — and then it was bought by me.” Every time I get to that part, when I would sing it on tour, I wanted my grin to go from here to here. But that looks crazy, so I had to taper down my own excitement that that hook happened.

‘People Slept On That Song’

I’ve learned you can’t ever really tell if other people are going to like it. But oftentimes, when I love it to a certain degree, that kind of tends to match up with people. And it could be that it doesn’t match up with the way people feel until six years later. I loved the “Reputation” album. I was like: “You guys say what you want. I know what I did. I love it. Go with God, sorry. You can come around if you want. It’s OK if you don’t.” And then six or seven years later, people are like “oh my god.”

Like “ … Ready for It?” People slept on that song. We were making that song — I remember I wanted to headbang myself through a wall. I felt like that when we wrote “… Ready for It?” I felt that way writing “Getaway Car.”

I think the first time I felt like, “I don’t care if people hate this, because I love it so much,” was when I wrote the song “Love Story,” when I was 17. Sitting in my bedroom. Mad at my parents. Because they wouldn’t let me go on a date. With a guy who was too old, so I shouldn’t have been on a date with him anyway. And this is why you need to discipline your kids — because they might write songs. That go No. 1.

When I wrote “Speak Now,” I was 18 and 19, and I was coming from this big, massive moment that I had with an album called “Fearless.” It had won Album of the Year at the Grammys, and it was the first time there was this big debate over whether I deserved to be there. There are always going to be little debates, but this was like headline news. I was like: These discussions can lead to a really bad place if I don’t do something to counteract them, and to prove that no, it wasn’t my co-writers that did all this work. And yes, I am the author of this entire body of work that I was very proud of. I had written so many songs alone. I love collaboration, I love co-writers, but it’s not something that I needed.

It’s when I started to trust myself as an editor, because a lot of what I’ll do in a session, even now — and one of the reasons why Liz Rose and Jack Antonoff became people that I loved to write with for albums and albums — is because I’ll have this stream of consciousness pouring out, and Liz would sit there with a notepad. But when you take that away, I just started recording everything. Recording everything on a voice memo, because there will be times when I’m kind of in a zone, and I’m writing so fast that there’s no chance I’m going to remember what that melody was that I did two minutes ago, that I thought was cool for the verse.

That was a really important album for me, in terms of becoming a writer that knew I could trust my own intuition.

I have little phonetic things. I love alliterations — love two words that start with the same letter. Love that. I don’t like to have a word end with the same letter that the next word starts with. For example, in the song “Our Song,” it was supposed to be “when you’re on the phone and you talk real low.” But I don’t like the “real low.” So it turned into “when you talk real slow.”

Certain words just fly for me. And I think one of the reasons I like to take either age-old cautionary sorts of phrases — or things you’ve heard in books, films, these classic lines — and then repurpose them, inverting them, or redefining them in some way, is because I sort of love the combination of modern vernacular and old-world or classic, timeless speak. In the song “The Fate of Ophelia,” there’s a lot of modern terminology and common phrases from the way that we talk now. But there’s also, in the bridge, a line from “Hamlet” that I repurposed.

I really gravitate toward juxtaposition and polarity in a line. “Hey, what could you possibly get for the girl who has everything and nothing all at once.” “Our coming of age has come and gone.” You take one word that’s at the beginning of the phrase, and then you take its opposite. Because ultimately, we are all filled with polarity, hypocrisy, these battling features and factors that make up our jagged personalities.

I have my phone, and I have this file where I’ll just be like, I know I like that, or I know I like that word, or I know I like that question. Then when I’ll go into a session — I don’t have social media on my phone. It looks like I’m endlessly scrolling, but I’m scrolling through words, the words in my file. If we’re in the middle of writing a song, I’m searching for a perfect line that I thought of four years ago at 3 in the morning.

I think the importance, for me, of a bridge — it just feels like we’re painting a picture, we’re setting a scene. We have this opportunity as a songwriter to tell an entire story, an entire movie or a very detailed description of one scene in a movie, or a very nuanced dynamic between people, or a complicated emotion, and we have only so long to do this. You know, I’ve written some really long songs in my life, but for the most part they’re between three and a half and four minutes.

You can start painting the picture in the verse. You can get to the heart of it at the chorus. But then the bridge can be where you zoom back, walk 20 feet back, and you see what this entire painting was supposed to be. You’ve seen brushstrokes, you’ve seen the color tones, but the bridge can be when you step back and you feel everything that that piece of art was supposed to make you feel. That’s just how I feel about bridges.

I came up as a songwriter in Nashville, where structure is a huge part of how you effectively tell a story. You go verse, chorus, second verse, chorus, bridge, chorus. Maybe you repeat that first verse if you want to pull at some heartstrings, if it makes sense. Now, that’s something that I absolutely subscribe to, that idea that 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.

Jack Antonoff is a collaborator of mine and one of my best friends. We established this thing that we love to do and we call it the rant bridge. I could point to examples like “Out of the Woods,” “Is It Over Now?,” “Cruel Summer.” And oftentimes we love these rant bridges where it’s basically stream-of-consciousness — endless pouring-out of emotion, intrusive thoughts, blended with metaphor, with discussion, with shouting.

You want this rant bridge to feel the most intense of what that feeling is that you’re trying to establish over the course of the song, and you want it to kind of be a crescendo. We usually love those so much that we then bring them back. So we’ll go verse, chorus, verse, chorus, rant bridge — sometimes a little post-coda to that rant bridge — last chorus, bring the rant bridge back, maybe with the chorus chords underneath it.

The “Mirrorball” bridge, this was Jack sending me a track during Covid and me immediately knowing that it needed to be about how I felt as a performer and an entertainer within this moment when entertainment and art has effectively shut down. I’m still going to stand on this tightrope, I’m still up on the trapeze, I’m still going to try to do tricks for you.

But at the same time, being a person in the public eye, I’ve really begun to realize that you are a mirror. You are a mirror for your fans, for the media, for people on the internet, for just random people who don’t even really care about your music, but they know who you are. However they feel about themselves and their life will be projected onto how they perceive you.

A public person who makes art is a mirror ball. And that’s part of why I’ve been able to keep my wits about me through all of this. Because I know that, and I’m really aware of that dynamic. But I’m still endlessly fascinated by people, by the human experience, by why people are the way they are, by the ways that they feel emotion. I think that’s what keeps us connected.

You can make these shockingly vulnerable confessions within a song, like “I’ve never been a natural. All I do is try, try, try.” I remember writing that and being like, Oh, my God, this, this feels like — do you want to say this? And I’m like, Actually, I feel like a lot of people feel that way. That always overrides my discomfort with if a line feels too true, because I don’t really think that there’s anything that’s too true.

‘A Very Emotional Rant’

The whole thing with “All Too Well” was that this was a very emotional rant that I did in a soundcheck. We were rehearsing for the Speak Now tour. I was very sad, in a way that you’re 21 years old and you’re just excruciatingly — sadness is you. You are sadness. In a break, I just started playing the same four chords over and over again. It’s basically the same four chords over and over again for the whole song, and I just started rambling and this thing went on for a really, really long time. It was more than 10 minutes that this rambling rant went on, and it wasn’t cohesive, and it wasn’t really that structured.

But afterward, I think my mom or somebody went up to the sound guy and was like, “Did you, by any chance, record any of that?” And he was like, “Yeah, I did.” And I would have walked away from it if he didn’t have a recording of it.

So I went back and listened to it, and I was like, Oh, here’s this 10-minute, basically, catharsis of intense emotion. There’s some really angry, scathing parts that I was like, Kind of going to have to make this into a song that’s a little bit more palatable. Because I already felt so raw putting that song out, as detailed as it was.

So then it goes out into the world. It didn’t make a lot of noise for the first six months to a year. But then the fans did a thing that they’ve done a few times, where this song just keeps bubbling up. They did this with “Cruel Summer” too, where they’re just like: “No, we like it. We don’t care if a label wants to put it out. We love this one.” So I ended up playing it on the Grammys.

I made the mistake of explaining how the song came to be in an interview. It ended up being a really fortuitous mistake that turned into being like, Oh, I’m so glad that happened. But for years the fans were like, “Give us the 10-minute version, give us the 10-minute version.” And I was going back through diaries and finding little fragments of it. I didn’t have the old thing anymore. So I was looking through safes, trying to find the CD, but I had to go back and piece together lyrics and stuff.

That was the most extensive restoration process I’ve ever done on a song. I don’t think I’ll ever experience anything like that again.

There are so many different ways that a song begins in my world. I’ll take an example like the song “Elizabeth Taylor.” I’m riding in the car with Travis. I go on and on explaining to Travis why I love Elizabeth Taylor so much. She fought for artists’ rights. She was exploited in so many ways, and yet she kept her humanity. She kept her humor. She kept her passion for life. And I’m just going on and on. Her eyes were violet. Some people said they were blue. Some people said they were violet. I think they were violet.

And we arrive, we get home, he gets out of the car, and I’m just in my head — this intrusive melody of “I’d cry my eyes violet, Elizabeth Taylor.” And I’m just scrambling to open my record app on my phone.

But that’s one of those spontaneous places where it floats down like a cloud in front of you, and all you have to do is grab it, and the song transpires from there. It comes as if from nowhere. That’s a really fun way that songs come about. That’s the way it happens most of the time.

Another way that a song could happen is that someone — a producer that I love to work with, like Aaron Dessner or Jack Antonoff — could make an instrumental and send it to me, and immediately I’ll write what’s called a topline on top of it. That’s the vocal melody and the lyrics.

Another way of writing songs is that you’re in the room with your collaborator, and one of you starts playing something. For example, Jack starts playing this piano part and it turns into this song called “New Year’s Day.” That piano part was just enough to springboard the entire song.

Writing sessions is a way that I love to write, because you’re all in the room, everyone’s bringing ideas, everyone’s chiming in. I always apply the rule “may the best idea win.” I don’t care if it came from you or me — if it’s better, that’s what goes in the song. And I do kind of like it when people challenge me on something, because I never want to be in the room with creators who are afraid that if they have a better idea they can’t argue with me, because it must be my idea that makes it through. I’m never going to grow that way.

Well, I think that the 2010s was a time for women in the entertainment industry that we’ll talk about later. We’re all still limping away from that. And I think that conversations are much more healthy now around “There’s a difference between art and going and ranting on an Instagram Live.” There’s a difference. This is a song. This takes craft, this takes skill, this takes expertise.

But I also am really excited — I’m a massive Sombr fan, of his songwriting, and his lyrics are so intensely confessional. “I don’t want another man’s child to have the eyes of the girl I can’t forget.” Are you kidding me? Having a male artist say stuff like that is really good for the cause of women to be able to say stuff.

If there’s any way we can make confessional songwriting a little bit more of something that isn’t — people take that as sort of like you were being messy. You have to be fair to everyone, then. Are rap beefs messy, or are they confessional? Let’s make it a music conversation, rather than just ganging up on the female artists. And I think the more male artists that are messy, or emotionally complex, or confessional, or upset, the happier I am.

I can only speak to me, but as I’ve grown up, the intensity of the sort of no-pun-intended “message in a bottle” nature of my songwriting has shifted and changed into something else. It used to be like, “I can’t tell a person how I feel, so I’ll write it in this song.” And that was really important for me at the time that it was important for me. It’s also important when you’re in your early 20s, and there’s someone you shouldn’t talk to, and you don’t want to call them, because they’re bad for you, and it’s toxic. So you just write it in the song, and that’s where it lives. Almost as a method of self-control, or self-preservation.

But for the “Folklore” album and everything like that, it wasn’t as a response to having a public life and the intrusions that come with that. It was really more just wanting to challenge myself as a writer. I really have always thought it would be so amazing to write books, and it’s so exciting to have the challenge: Could I get enough plot points in a three-and-a-half-minute song to where people felt like they read something after they heard it? Or just take you back to that bedtime story, “Tell me a story.” I want to be able to put my own image on these characters.

And it was really amazing when it opened up my world. I don’t think my songwriting has ever been the same after “Folklore.” I have always had a little bit of that character play in my songwriting since. And I hope it never goes anywhere, because it’s really fun.

I kind of like being a narrator that’s not the person I relate to. So the narrator in “Clara Bow” is either a Hollywood studio person or a label executive who’s sitting, in my mind, behind a desk and meeting with a brand-new starlet who has just come to town. The exec says: “You look like Clara Bow in this light. It’s remarkable. You’re so special. You’re amazing. We’re going to make you just like her.”

In my mind, that girl was Stevie Nicks. So Stevie Nicks sits down. They tell her she looks like Clara Bow. She’s got those big moon eyes. And: “We’re going to make you just like her. Don’t worry. We’re going to put you through this machine and you’ll be a god.”

The second verse says, “You look like Stevie Nicks in this light, the hair and lips.” In my mind, that was me that sat down opposite that desk. I sit down at a record label and they’re like: “You look like Stevie Nicks. We’ll make you the next Stevie Nicks.” And basically you learn that you’re in this machine and they’re trying to make you into a woman that they just idealized and then discarded.

The entertainment industry love-bombs women, right? “We love you.” “We don’t know who you are. Why are you even here?” And so in the last verse, in my mind, it’s a new artist that sits down across from a record-label desk and they say: “You look like Taylor Swift in this light. We’re loving it. You’ve got edge. She never did. The future is bright, dazzling.” Because that’s another thing that you get when you’re a female in the music or the entertainment industry. “Oh, you’re like, you’re like this person” — they name a big name, and they’re like, “Oh, but you’re going to be so much better. It’s gonna be so — no, no, it’s gonna be cooler. You’re going to be so much better.” To offset the comparison.

On “Red,” there was a song that I wrote alone in a hotel room when I was 22 years old called “Nothing New.” It sounds ridiculous, but at 22 years old, I felt completely washed up. I felt like maybe the only thing that made me special was that I was this “teen phenom,” whatever I was looked at as. So I wrote this song, and it includes lines like “How can a person know everything at 18 and nothing at 22?” Because when I was 18, I had the “Fearless” album come out, and I had my first international No. 1s, and everybody was like: “Oh, this writing, it’s so true. It’s so honest. She feels like she deserves to be here.” And then there was this big upheaval of: “No, she doesn’t. She sucks, actually.” It really turned the tables on my perception of — love can be so quickly handed to you and then taken away. It’s this strange thing with fame, and that was the first time I ever grappled with that.

Somebody was like: “Oh, you’re 22 years old, and you’re saying: ‘Are you tired of me? If you’re not yet, are you going to get tired of me?’” Because it’s usually something that you would sing about later in life. But the entertainment industry — I’ll tell you, there’s 10 years for every year you’re in it. But it’s fun.

‘We Want Your Art’

Songwriting is something that is a very intimate, tiny little thing for me. I have a lot of things I like to do. I like to bake. I like to make art, I like to paint, I like to sew, I like to write songs. And I try to keep it as dear to me as those other things I just named.

I have to know that there’s certain things that we have as a tradition between me and my fans. They love for an emotional song to be Track 5. There’s special things like that. But at the same time, there’s so many of them now — which is great — but there’s corners of my fan base who are going to take things to a really extreme place. There’s nothing I can do about that. There’s people who are going to try to do detective work, figure out the details. “Who is that about? What is this?”

When it gets a little bit weird for me is when people act like it’s a paternity test — “this song’s about that person.” Because I’m like, “That dude didn’t write the song, I did.” But that’s part of it. You have to hold tight to your perception of your art and your relationship with it, and then you just have to, like: “There it goes. Hope you like it. If you don’t now, hope you do in five years. And if you never do, then I was doing it for me anyway.”

Yeah, criticism has been a huge fuel for me. It’s been a huge jumping-off point, like a creative-writing prompt or something. There are so many songs in my career that would not exist — “Blank Space” would not exist if I hadn’t had people being like, “Here’s a slideshow of all her boyfriends.” And then “Anti-Hero” is a song that I’m so proud of, still. That song doesn’t exist if I don’t get criticized for every aspect of my personality that people have a problem with.

My favorite thing, when I sit down with new artists or songwriters, is: Why are you reading your comments? That’s too much of it. You’re inundating yourself with too much criticism that doesn’t really have a focus. But I think a little bit of it, you’ve got to just be like, this is part of it. Don’t make this make you stop writing, or make you edit yourself, or whatever. If it’s an interesting point to you, to respond to, then that’s a gift for you to be able to write something — maybe you wouldn’t have written something that day.

But god, don’t go to the Notes app and post it. Write about it. Make art about this. Don’t respond to trolls in your comments. That’s not what we want from you. We want your art.

Interview by Joe CoscarelliDirected by Joshua CharowVideo CreditsCamera Operator: Jackson MontemayorSound Mixer: Tessa MurphyGaffer: Michael TellupEditor: Abraham HowardColorist: Stephen DerluguianPost Sound Mixer: Bobb BaritoArchival Image CreditsVideos: YouTube