Full transcript
0:00It's still such a mystery to me.
0:01Even though I've been — I've been writing songs for so long,
0:06and I've started songs and finished songs so many different ways.
0:09They’ve gone through so many journeys.
0:11They've happened quickly. They've happened over time.
0:13They've been inspired by my life, by mythology, by fables, by books,
0:17by movies, by characters, by warnings, lessons.
0:22And they never quite happen exactly the same way.
0:25And I still don't quite understand how it works.
0:28I have this very strong opinion that when you're young,
0:30you feel things on such a intense and detailed
0:36level.
0:36There's an attention to detail
0:38when you are 17 to 22 years old, and you're longing,
0:43or you're reaching and grasping, but never holding
0:47someone's attention, or someone's love, or someone's dedication,
0:50and you're just —
0:52you can't understand why you spend all day thinking about it.
0:55You notice everything.
0:56You notice candle ash on the cuff of the shirt and the button,
1:00and it's everything that makes
1:03the mythology of those intense feelings that you have.
1:07And I've always tried to, like,
1:09without being a completely unhinged adult,
1:12keep that level of detail and intensity
1:15when it comes to trying to describe a feeling.
1:26I started writing songs when I was 12.
1:28As soon as my love for singing and picking up an instrument
1:33happened, songwriting just spontaneously
1:37started becoming the entire cornerstone of my life.
1:41I think the first songs
1:44that I like, fell in love with, was the type of songwriting
1:47that I think folk and country is really kind of known for.
1:51It's like that story time structure. Songs like “Harper Valley P.T.A.,”
1:55or “Goodbye Earl” by the Dixie Chicks, or like,
1:58you know, any amazing Kenny Chesney song where like,
2:02you know, a hypothetical structure would be, you know, first verse
2:06little girl, you know, learns a lesson that in the chorus
2:10her mom teaches her about.
2:11Then the little girl grows up, and now she's a teenager
2:13and she realizes, Oh, my God, my mom was right about this.
2:16Now, the second time you hear the hook, that
2:17same hook means something a little bit different because she's, like,
2:21grown up in her, in her life.
2:23Then the bridge, maybe she goes on in her life.
2:25She has a little girl.
2:26She imparts that wisdom on to her.
2:29And then if you really want to get me to cry, like, bring back
2:32that same first line of the song and end the song with it.
2:36So that was the first thing that made me think,
2:38It's got to be country music.
2:40[Take a deep breath as you walk through the doors.]
2:45That was the first type that I really fell in love with.
2:47But then lyricism,
2:49I was the most
2:50intensely impacted by emo music, right?
2:54Dashboard Confessional, Chris Carrabba,
2:57Fall Out Boy, Pete Wentz’s lyrics — how they take a common phrase
3:00and then they just twist the knife of it, right?
3:04Like, “I'm just a notch in your bedpost,
3:06but you're just a line in a song."
3:07"Drop a heart, break a name,” right?
3:10Like, it's “Drop a name, break a heart.”
3:12But they switched it, and I, like … those are the kind of lyrics where
3:16I would read the lyrics to those songs — or the specificity of
3:20“Hands Down” by Dashboard Confessional, where I'd be reading those lyrics
3:24and I'd just finish reading a line and just go,
3:28“Oh, my God.”
3:30I got a publishing deal when I was 14.
3:32I was signed by a guy named Arthur Buenahora
3:34at Sony, and he was just —
3:36he just believed that I had a perspective that mattered.
3:39And I actually asked him if he could please hold my songs
3:43from being pitched to other artists.
3:44I was like, just give me some time to try to get a record deal.
3:47I'm going to try so hard.
3:49I could almost compare it to the Brill Building.
3:51They have these offices on Music Row, or
3:55at least they had a lot of them then,
3:57that were like these small houses, these, like, cottages and bungalows.
4:01Now we have really tall buildings.
4:03Basically, you'd go there and there'd be three songwriters
4:06writing in this room, three songwriters
4:08in this room, four in this room, two in this room.
4:11And I would just go to school,
4:14then my mom would drive me downtown
4:1730 minutes, and I would go and I'd have a songwriting session
4:20with someone that I'd never met before.
4:22But I really didn't want to
4:24come in unprepared. So I'd walk in with
4:28four to five nearly finished
4:30things, two half-finished things, 10 hooks.
4:34Because I just never wanted people
4:35to be like, “Yeah, there's this, like, little kid
4:38that thinks she can swan her way into Music Row,
4:42and just, like, write songs with these hit songwriters.”
4:44But I think one of my favorite things about
4:47the Nashville music scene, country music
4:50and the storytelling, where it was when I arrived there —
4:54there was almost this tradition of sort of breaking the fourth wall,
4:57making the song then a part of the song,
5:00or the writing of the song becomes a part of the song.
5:02And I did that in a song called “Tim McGraw,”
5:06where, you know, I'm singing about this,
5:08this kind of love lost and hoping that person thinks of me.
5:13And then in the bridge, it's revealed
5:14that I wrote this song, and I hope he hears it.
5:16The song “Our Song,” which I still love so much,
5:20it's all about this romance, and this relationship.
5:23And then in the end it says,
5:25"I grabbed a pen and an old napkin / And I wrote down our song.”
5:28So I loved doing that.
5:30I still kind of love doing that.
5:31That kind of just like — “And it was me!”
5:35[I grabbed a pen and an old napkin /
5:37and I wrote down our song.]
5:42My favorite end plot twist, I think, that I've done in
5:46songwriting is the ending of “The Last Great American Dynasty.”
5:50That's my favorite one.
5:51It is just so much fun to, like,
5:55to tell this story about this real woman who lived in history,
6:00and she defied the social norms, and she drove people crazy,
6:04and she had a marvelous time ruining everything.
6:07And you talk about the house she lived in on the coast.
6:10And basically then in the end, you're like,
6:12you know, she moved away from Holiday House.
6:16It sat quietly on that beach, free of women
6:18with madness, their men and bad habits,
6:20and then it was bought by me.
6:22And you're like — every time I get to that part,
6:25when I would sing it on tour, I just, like, have to kind of like —
6:29like I wanted my grin to go from here to here, but that looks crazy.
6:34So it's like I had to, like, taper down my own excitement
6:36that that — that that hook happened.
6:38[And then it was bought by me.]
6:43I learned you can't ever
6:44really tell if other people are going to like it.
6:46But oftentimes when I love it to a certain degree,
6:51that kind of tends to match up with people.
6:54And it could be that it doesn't
6:55match up with the way people feel until six, six years later.
6:59I loved the “Reputation” album.
7:00I was like, “You guys say what you want.
7:03I know what I did, I love it, like, go with God, sorry.
7:08Like, you can come around if you want.
7:10It's OK if you don't.”
7:11And then, you know, six or seven years later, people are like, “Oh, my God.”
7:16Like, “...Ready For It?”
7:17People slept on that song.
7:19[Are you ready for it?]
7:24When we were making that song, I just remember, like,
7:26I wanted to headbang myself through a wall.
7:29I felt that when it when we wrote “...Ready For It?”
7:31I felt that way during — writing “Getaway Car,”
7:33I felt that way.
7:35I think the first — I think the first time I felt like,
7:39“I don't care if people hate this because I love it
7:42so much,” was when I wrote the song “Love Story” when I was 17,
7:47sitting in my bedroom
7:49mad at my parents
7:52because they wouldn't let me go on a date. With a guy who was too old,
7:55so I shouldn't have been on a date with him anyway.
7:57And this is why you need to
7:58discipline your kids, because they might write songs.
8:02That go No. 1.
8:07When I wrote “Speak Now,”
8:09I was 18 and 19, and I was
8:13coming from this big, massive moment that I had with
8:18an album called “Fearless,” and it had won Album
8:19of the Year at the Grammys, and it was this big —
8:22It was the first time there was like,
8:23this big debate over whether I deserved to be there.
8:27There are always going to be little debates.
8:30Do you know what I mean?
8:30But this was, like, headline news.
8:33I was like,
8:34these discussions can lead to a really bad place
8:37if I don't do something to counteract them
8:39and to prove that, no,
8:40it wasn't my co-writers that did all this work.
8:43And yes, I am the author of
8:47this entire body of work that I was very proud of.
8:50I had written so many songs alone.
8:52I love collaboration, I love co-writers,
8:55but it's not something that I needed.
8:57It’s when I started to trust myself as an editor, because a lot of
9:00what I'll do in a session even now,
9:04and one of the reasons why Liz Rose and Jack Antonoff
9:06became people that I loved to write with for
9:09albums and albums, is because
9:12I'll have this stream of consciousness pouring out,
9:14and Liz would sit there with a notepad.
9:17But when you take that away,
9:20I just started, you know, recording everything, right?
9:23Recording everything on a voice memo,
9:26because there will be times when I'm like,
9:28kind of in a zone, and I'm writing so fast
9:30that there's no chance I'm going
9:32to remember what that melody was that I did,
9:34you know, two minutes ago that I thought was cool for the
9:37the verse.
9:38That was a really important album for me in terms of —
9:41in terms of becoming a writer
9:44that knew I could trust my own intuition.
9:48I have little phonetic things.
9:50I love alliterations.
9:52I love, you know, two — two words that start with the same letter.
9:56Love that. I don't like to have a word end
10:00with the same letter that the next word starts with.
10:03For example, in the song “Our Song,” it was supposed to be
10:06“When you're on the phone and you talk real low.”
10:09But I was like,
10:11I don't like the ‘real low.’”
10:13So it turned into
10:14“When you talk real slow.” Certain words just fly for me.
10:18And I think one of the reasons I like to take
10:22either age-old, cautionary sort of phrases
10:27or things that you've heard in books, films,
10:32kind of these classic lines, and then repurpose them,
10:35inverting them, or redefining them in some way, is because
10:39I sort of love the combination of modern vernacular
10:44and sort of old world, or classic, timeless speak.
10:48So in the song “The Fate of Ophelia,”
10:50there's a lot of sort of modern terminology and speak
10:53and kind of common phrases from the way that we talk now.
10:57But there's also like in the bridge, it's — there's a line
11:00from “Hamlet” that I repurposed.
11:02[Locked inside my memory.
11:04And only you possess the key.]
11:06I really gravitate towards juxtaposition and polarity
11:09in a line, right.
11:10So, "Hey, what could you possibly get for the girl who has everything
11:13and nothing all at once?" "Our coming of age has come and gone."
11:16You take one word that's at the beginning of
11:18the phrase, and then you take its opposite.
11:20Because ultimately, like, we are all filled with
11:25polarity, hypocrisy, these kind of battling
11:29features and factors that make up our jagged personalities.
11:32I have my phone, and I have this file where
11:37I'll just be like, "I know I like that,” or
11:40“I know I like that word,” or “I know I like
11:43that question,”
11:44and then when I'll go into a session —
11:46I don't have social media on my phone.
11:48It looks like I'm just endlessly scrolling,
11:51but I'm scrolling through words — like, the words in my file.
11:54If we're in the middle of writing a song, I'm searching for
11:57a perfect line
11:58that I thought of four years ago at 3 in the morning.
12:02I think the importance for me of a bridge,
12:04it just feels like we're painting a picture, we're setting a scene.
12:09We have this opportunity as a songwriter to tell an entire story,
12:14an entire movie or or a very detailed description
12:18of one scene in a movie, or a very nuanced dynamic
12:21between people, or a complicated emotion,
12:24and we have only so long to do this.
12:27You know,
12:28I've written some really long songs in my life,
12:30but for the most part,
12:31they're between three and a half and four minutes.
12:32You can start painting the picture in the verse.
12:37You can get to the heart of it at the chorus.
12:40But then the bridge can be where you zoom back,
12:44you walk 20 feet back,
12:46and you see what this entire painting was supposed to be.
12:50You've seen brushstrokes, you've seen the color tones,
12:53but the bridge can be when you step back and you feel everything
12:57that that piece of art was supposed to make you feel.
12:59That's just how I feel about bridges.
13:01I came up as a songwriter in Nashville, where structure
13:05is a huge part of how you effectively tell a story, right?
13:09You go verse, chorus, second verse, chorus, bridge, chorus.
13:12Maybe you repeat that first verse if you want to —
13:15if you want to pull at some heartstrings, if it makes sense.
13:17Now, that's something that I absolutely subscribe to,
13:20that idea that it's — you know, structure is important.
13:24But I think that when you write enough songs, at least in my case,
13:28the intuitive part of your songwriting brain
13:31can kind of create a new structure
13:35that's not as classically what you've been taught.
13:37Like, Jack Antonoff is a collaborator of mine
13:40and one of my best friends.
13:42We established this thing that we love to do
13:45and we call it the rant bridge.
13:47I could point to examples like, “Out of the Woods,” “Is It Over Now?”
13:52“Cruel Summer.”
13:53And oftentimes we love these rant bridges, where it's basically like,
13:57stream of consciousness, endless pouring-out of emotion,
14:02intrusive thoughts, blended with metaphor,
14:06with discussion, with shouting — you want this rant bridge
14:10to feel the most intense of what that feeling is that you're
14:14trying to,
14:15establish over the course of the song
14:17and you want it to kind of be a crescendo.
14:19[Ain't that the worst thing you ever heard?
14:21He looks up, grinnin' like a devil. It's new]
14:24We usually love those so much that we then bring them back.
14:27So we'll go, you know, verse, chorus, verse, chorus, rant bridge —
14:34sometimes, like, a
14:35little post-coda to that rant bridge —
14:38last chorus, bring the rant bridge back,
14:41maybe with the chorus chords underneath it. [sighs]
14:47The “Mirrorball” bridge, this was Jack sending me a track during Covid
14:52and me immediately knowing that it needed to be about how I felt
14:56as a performer and an entertainer,
14:58within this moment
15:00when entertainment and art has effectively shut down.
15:04I'm still going to stand on this tightrope,
15:07I'm still up on the trapeze,
15:08I'm still going to try
15:09to do tricks for you. But at the same time, you know,
15:13being a person in the public eye,
15:15I've really begun to realize that you are a mirror.
15:20Like, you are a mirror for your fans,
15:23for the media, for people on the internet, for just random —
15:28just people who don't even really care
15:29about your music, but they know who you are.
15:31However they feel about themselves and their life
15:35will be projected on to how they perceive you.
15:38[Spinning in my highest heels, love, shining just for you.]
15:43A public person who makes art
15:46is a mirror ball.
15:48And that's part of why I've been able to keep my wits
15:51about me through all of this.
15:52Because I know that, and I'm really kind of aware of that dynamic,
15:56but I'm still endlessly fascinated
15:58by people, by the human experience, by why people are the way they are,
16:01by the ways that they feel emotion.
16:04I think that's what keeps us connected, even though, you know,
16:07you can make these kind of, like, shockingly vulnerable confessions
16:12within a song by being like, “I've never been a natural.
16:14All I do is try, try, try,” and you say that at first,
16:19and I remember
16:19writing that and being like, “Oh, my God, this,
16:21this feels like — do you want to say this?”
16:24And I'm like, “Actually, I feel like a lot of people feel that way.”
16:26That always overrides my discomfort with if a line feels too true,
16:31because I don't really think that there's anything that's too true.
16:36The whole thing with “All Too Well”
16:38was that this was a very emotional rant
16:42that I did in, like, a soundcheck.
16:45We were rehearsing for the Speak Now tour.
16:48I was very sad, in a way that, you know, you're like,
16:52you're 21 years old and you're just excruciatingly —
16:55it's just, like, you are — sadness is you.
16:57You are sadness.
16:59I just — in a break,
17:00I just started playing the same four chords over and over again.
17:03It's basically the same four chords
17:04over and over again for the whole song,
17:06and it just became this thing where I just started
17:10rambling and this thing went on for a really, really long time.
17:15It was like more than 10 minutes that this rambling rant went on,
17:19and it wasn't cohesive, and it wasn't really
17:21that structured, but it felt afterward like —
17:24I think my mom or somebody went up to
17:26the sound guy and was like, “Did you, by any chance, record any of that?”
17:30And he was like, “Yeah, I did.”
17:31And I would have walked away from it
17:32if he didn't have a recording of it.
17:34So I went back and listened to it,
17:36and I was like, “Oh, here's this 10-minute, like, basically
17:40catharsis of intense emotion.”
17:44Like there's some really angry, scathing parts that I was like,
17:48“Kind of going to have to make this into a song that's a little
17:50bit more palatable,” because I already felt so like raw
17:55putting that song out, as detailed as it was.
17:57So then it goes out into the world.
18:01It didn't make a lot of noise, that song
18:04for the first six months to a year, but then the fans,
18:08the fans just did a thing that they've done a few times
18:11where this song just keeps bubbling up.
18:13They did this with “Cruel Summer” too,
18:15where they're just like: “No, we like it.
18:17We don't care if a label wants to put it out.
18:18We love this one.”
18:20So I ended up playing it on the Grammys.
18:22[And you call me up again / Just to break me like a promise.]
18:26I made the mistake of kind of explaining how the song came to be
18:31in an interview.
18:32It ended up being a really fortuitous mistake that turned into being like,
18:36“Oh, I'm so glad that happened.”
18:37But for years the fans were like, “Give us the 10-minute version,
18:39give us the 10-minute version.”
18:42And I was going back
18:43through diaries and finding like little fragments of it.
18:46And I didn't have the old thing anymore.
18:51So I was looking through safes, trying to find the CD,
18:54but I had to go back and piece together lyrics and stuff.
18:56But it was — that was the most extensive
19:00restoration process I've ever done on a song.
19:03I don't think I'll ever experience anything like that again.
19:08There are so many different ways that a song begins in my world.
19:12I'll take an example, like,
19:14the song “Elizabeth Taylor.”
19:16I'm riding in the car with Travis.
19:18I go on and on and explaining to Travis, like,
19:21why I love Elizabeth Taylor so much.
19:22“She fought for artists' rights.
19:23She was exploited in so many ways, and yet she kept her humanity.
19:27She kept her humor.
19:27She kept her passion for life.” And I'm just going on and on.
19:31And like her eyes were violet. Some people said they were blue.
19:34Some people said they were violet. I think they were violet.
19:37And we arrive, we get home, he gets out of the car
19:40and I'm just in my head.
19:40I'm like this intrusive melody of like,
19:43"I'd cry my eyes violet, Elizabeth Taylor."
19:46And I'm just, like, scrambling to open my
19:50my record app on my phone.
19:53[I'd cry my eyes violet Elizabeth Taylor. Tell me for real]
19:57But that's like one of those spontaneous places
20:00where it floats down like a cloud in front of you,
20:02and all you have to do is grab it.
20:03And the song transpires from there.
20:06It comes as if from nowhere.
20:08That's a really fun way that songs come about.
20:10That's the way it happens, most of the time.
20:12Another way that a song could happen
20:14is that someone, a producer that I love to work
20:17with, like Aaron Dessner or Jack Antonoff,
20:20could make an instrumental,
20:23send it to me —
20:24and immediately I'll write what's called a topline on top of it.
20:28That's the vocal melody and the lyrics.
20:30Another way of writing songs
20:31is that you're in the room with your collaborator,
20:34and one of you starts playing something like, for example,
20:38Jack starts playing this piano part,
20:40and it turns into this song called “New Year's Day.” That piano part
20:44was just enough to springboard the entire song.
20:47[There’s glitter on the floor after the party.]
20:51Writing sessions is a way that I love to write,
20:53because you're all in the room,
20:55everyone's bringing ideas, everyone's chiming in.
20:57I always apply the rule “May the best idea win.”
21:00I don't care if it came from you, you or me —
21:02if it's better, that's what goes in the song.
21:04And I do kind of like it when people challenge me on something,
21:08because I never want to be in the room with creators
21:11who are afraid that if if they have a better idea,
21:15they can't, they can't argue with me,
21:16because it must be my idea that makes it through.
21:18I'm never going to grow that way.
21:21Well, I think that,
21:22you know, the 2010s was a time
21:25for women in the entertainment industry that, like,
21:28we don't need — we need — like, we'll talk about it later.
21:31We're all just still — we're all still limping away from that.
21:35And I think that conversations are much more healthy now around
21:40“There's a difference between art
21:42and like, going and ranting on an Instagram Live.”
21:45Like, there's a difference. This is a song.
21:48This takes craft, this takes skill, this takes expertise.
21:50But I also am really excited
21:54that, like, I'm a massive, Sombr fan, of his songwriting,
21:57and his lyrics are so intensely confessional.
22:01“I don't want another man's child
22:03to have the eyes of the girl I can't forget.”
22:05Are you kidding me?
22:07Having a male artist say stuff like that is really good
22:11for the cause of women to be able to say stuff.
22:13If there's any way we can make confessional
22:15songwriting a little bit more of something that isn't like —
22:18people take that as sort of like you were being messy or whatever.
22:23You have to be fair
22:24to everyone, then. Are rap beefs messy,
22:27or are they confessional?
22:28Like, we've got to just —
22:30let's make it a music conversation rather than just ganging up
22:33on the female artists.
22:35And I think the more male artists that are messy,
22:39or emotionally complex, or confessional, or upset,
22:44the happier I am.
22:47I can only speak to me,
22:48but as I've grown up, the intensity of the sort of no-pun-
22:51intended “message in a bottle” nature of my songwriting has shifted
22:56and changed into something else.
22:57It used to be like,
23:00“I can't tell a person how I feel, so I'll write it in this song.”
23:03And that was really important for me at the time
23:06that it was important for me.
23:07It's also, you know, important when you're in your early 20s,
23:11and there's someone
23:12you shouldn't talk to, and you don't want to call them,
23:14because they're bad for you, and it's toxic. So you just —
23:16you write it in the song, and that's where it lives.
23:19Like almost as a method of self-control,
23:22or self-preservation, or something. But,
23:25for the “Folklore” album and everything like that, it was really —
23:28it wasn't as a response to having a public life
23:32and the intrusions that come with that.
23:34It was really more of just wanting to challenge myself as a writer.
23:37I really have always just thought it would be so amazing
23:41to write books,
23:42and it's so exciting to have the challenge of, could I —
23:47could I get enough plot points in a 3-and-a-half minute song
23:50to where people felt like they read something after they heard it,
23:54or just take you back to that bedtime story kind of —
23:58“Tell me a story."
24:00I want to be able to put my own image on these characters.
24:03And it was really amazing when — it opened up my world.
24:07I don't think my songwriting has ever been the same after “Folklore.”
24:10I have always had a little bit of that sort of character
24:14play in my songwriting since.
24:17And I hope it never goes anywhere, because it's really fun.
24:22[You heard the rumors from Inez / You can't believe a word she says / Most times,
24:28but this time, it was true.]
24:30I kind of like being a narrator
24:31that's not the person I relate to.
24:34So the narrator in “Clara Bow” is either a studio —
24:39like a Hollywood studio person, or a label
24:41executive who's sitting in my mind behind a desk and meeting
24:44with a brand-new starlet who has just come to town.
24:46The exec says: “You look like Clara Bow in this light.
24:49It's remarkable.
24:50You're so special. You're amazing.
24:51We're going to make you just like her.”
24:53In my mind, that girl was Stevie Nicks, right?
24:57So Stevie Nicks sits down.
24:59They tell her she looks like Clara Bow.
25:00She's got those big moon eyes.
25:02And, "We're going to make you just like her.
25:04Don't worry.
25:05We're going to put you through this machine and you'll be a god.”
25:07The second verse says, “You look like Stevie Nicks
25:10in this light, the hair and lips.”
25:11So in my mind, that was me that sat down opposite that desk, right?
25:16I sit down at a record label and they're like:
25:18“You look like Stevie Nicks. we’ll make you the next Stevie Nicks.”
25:20And basically you learn that like, you're in this machine and they're
25:24trying to make you into a woman that they just idealized
25:28and then discarded.
25:29Like, the entertainment industry love-bombs women, right?
25:33“We love you.”
25:35“We don't know who you are. Why are you even here?”
25:36And so in the last verse, in my mind, it's a new artist
25:41that sits down across from a record-label desk
25:43and they say: “You look like Taylor Swift in this light.
25:46We're loving it. You've got edge. She never did.
25:49The future is bright, dazzling.”
25:50And because that's also another thing that you get
25:52when you're a female in the music or the entertainment industry,
25:55movies, whatever.
25:56It's like,
25:57“Oh, you're like, you're like this person that we” —
26:00they name a big name, and they're like, “Oh, but
26:02you're going to be so much better.
26:03It's gonna be so, no, no, no, it's gonna be cooler.
26:05You're going to be so much better.”
26:08Like, to offset the comparison.
26:10On “Red,” there was a song that I wrote alone in a hotel room
26:15when I was 22 years old called “Nothing New,” where I'm —
26:19it sounds ridiculous,
26:20but at 22 years old, I felt completely washed up.
26:23I felt like maybe the only thing that made me special
26:26was that I was this, like, “teen phenom,”
26:29whatever I was looked at as.
26:32So I wrote this song, and it includes lines like
26:36“How can a person know everything at 18 and nothing at 22?”
26:39Because when I was 18,
26:41I had the “Fearless” album come out, and I had my first international
26:45No. 1s, and everybody was like:
26:46“Oh, this writing it, it's so true.
26:48It's so honest.
26:49She feels like she deserves to be here.”
26:51And then there was this big upheaval of: “No, she doesn't.
26:55No, she doesn't.
26:57She sucks, actually.”
26:58And it was,
26:58it was like, it really turned the tables on my perception of, of —
27:04like, love can be so
27:05quickly handed to you and then taken away, and it's this
27:09kind of strange thing with fame,
27:13and that was the first time I ever grappled with that.
27:15Somebody was like, “Oh, you're 22 years old, and you're saying:
27:18’Are you tired of me?
27:21If you're not yet, are you going to get tired of me?’”
27:24Because it's usually something
27:25that you would sing about later in life.
27:27But the entertainment industry, I'll tell you, there's 10 years
27:30for every year you're in it, but it’s fun.
27:35Songwriting is something that,
27:37it’s a very intimate, tiny little thing, for me.
27:42I have a lot of things I like to do.
27:44I like to bake.
27:45I like to make art, I like to paint,
27:47I like to sew, I like to write songs, and I try to keep it as
27:52dear to me as those other things I just named.
27:56I have to know that there's certain things that we have as
27:59a tradition between me and my fans.
28:00They love for an emotional song to be Track 5.
28:03There's like special things like that, but at the same time
28:06there's sort of
28:10so many of them now, which is great,
28:13but there's corners of my fan base
28:15who are going to take things to a really extreme place.
28:18There's nothing I can do about that.
28:20There's people who are going to try to like,
28:23do detective work, figure out the details.
28:25“Who is that about? What is this?”
28:26When it gets a little bit weird for me is
28:28when people act like it's sort of a paternity test,
28:30like, “This song's about that person.” Because I'm like,
28:34“That dude didn't write the song,
28:36I did.” But that's part of it.
28:39You have to hold tight to your perception of your art
28:44and your relationship with it,
28:45and then you just kind of have to, like — [blows] “There it goes.
28:48Hope you like it.
28:49If you don't now, hope you do in five years,” and it, like —
28:51and if you never do, then I was doing it for me anyway.
28:54Yeah, criticism has been a huge fuel for me.
28:57It's been a huge jumping-off point, like a creative-writing prompt
29:00or something.
29:01There are so many songs
29:02in my career that would not exist, like “Blank Space,” would not exist
29:06if I hadn't had people being like, “Here's a slideshow
29:08of all her boyfriends.”
29:10And then “Anti-Hero” is a song that I'm so proud of, still.
29:14Like, that song doesn't exist
29:16if I don't get criticized for every aspect of my personality
29:20that people have a problem with or whatever.
29:23[Did you hear my covert narcissism I disguise as altruism]
29:29My favorite thing when I sit down with new artists
29:32or songwriters is, I'm like: Why are you reading your comments?
29:35Like, that's too much of it.
29:37Like,
29:38that's — you're inundating yourself with too much criticism
29:42that doesn't really have a focus.
29:44But I think a little bit of it,
29:45you got to just be like, This is part of it.
29:47Like, don't make this make you stop writing
29:51or make you edit yourself or whatever.
29:53If it's an interesting point to you to kind of respond to, then
29:57that's a gift for you to be able to write something —
30:00maybe you wouldn't have written something that day.
30:02But don't, like, God.
30:04Don't go to the, like, Notes app
30:06and post it. Like, write about it.
30:08Make art about this.
30:09Don't respond to trolls in your comments.
30:12That's not what we want from you.
30:14We want your art.