Every Word of Taylor Swift’s History-Making Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame Speech

8 min read

THE RUNDOWN

• Taylor Swift was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame this evening.
• In her speech, she discussed how Nashville—and the musicians she worked with there—shaped her career.
• She also touched on the 20th anniversary of her debut album’s release.

Months after being the youngest woman inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame, Taylor Swift made history again tonight. She became the youngest writer ever inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame. In her speech, she discussed how the city shaped her life and career. She touched on the 20th anniversary of her debut album, which just took place this Saturday.

“I am shocked and stunned to say that as of a couple days ago, that album is 20 years old,” she said of her self-titled album, which she made in Nashville in 2006. “I’ve been very fortunate I’ve gotten to genre-hop and travel the world and write with so many different people and in so many different ways. And the only reason that I’ve been able to have that kind of dexterity in my creative process is because of the fundamentals and the foundation that I learned here in Nashville. And I never forget that for a single second when I tell every single person I know about what we have here. And I’m so incredibly honored to be inducted into this sacred club, especially at this point in my life.”

She also spoke about fame and a truth she learned when she was younger, while working with other songwriters in Nashville. “Songwriters, although they possess the superhuman ability to understand and interpret the human condition and insane levels of empathy, they are just people too,” she said. “And they are people who in a lot of ways raised me and guided me through my formative years.”

Read her full speech below, via Rolling Stone:

So I am so honored to be inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame. I got the news and I was just kind of staring at the words. I was staring at Nashville. I was just like, “Wow, this is crazy.” And then I kind of zeroed in on a few words that have had a particularly intense impact on my life. The first one being “Nashville,” the second “songwriters.” And the last one, “fame.” I’d like to start with songwriters and expanding upon the impact that word has had on my life.

I started writing songs when I was a little kid and I knew from the time I wrote my first song that even if it couldn’t be my career, it would be my passion. It would be what I centered my entire life around. Nashville is the place that I went to in my middle school daydreams. It was the place where all the wisdom that I wished to acquire existed in one place. All the lessons that I wished to learn existed in this magical place for me. And it ended up being all of that and more. It ended up being everything.

Fame, that’s sort of a byproduct of my love for music. It’s kind of like songwriter plus Nashville equals fame. It’s why a lot of people know the words to my music, which is awesome. It’s also why there’s sort of like these daily random doses of chaos that just pop up in my life every once in a while, every couple of hours. That can be kind of weird, but I have tools in place in my mind that help me navigate that and get back to true north when life feels so bizarre.

Those tools are my memories and the memories that I visit most frequently when I need to return back to some semblance of remembering what normalcy is and why I do this. I think back to when I first got to Nashville and I started writing on Music Row. I was lucky enough to get a publishing deal with Sony Publishing when I was 14, and I just hit the ground running. I started writing every single day. I learned so much. I was like a sponge and I have really curly hair and it was yellow, so I kind of looked like a sponge too. But I learned by repetition. I think you truly learn a craft when you do it over and over and over, and that is what the magnificent songwriters that work in this amazing town do. There is no music community like this music community. I know. I checked all the communities. There’s no one doing it.

I learned so much. I learned how to push through a creative block when you’re in the middle of a session. Are we going to tunnel under this? Are we going to burgle over it? I learned which ideas are worth fighting for, which ideas are worth letting go of and move on to the next one. I learned how to accommodate when your co-writer has a hangover or when they’re going to need to talk about their divorce for a really long time before we write anything. Because one thing that I did learn is that songwriters, although they possess the superhuman ability to understand and interpret the human condition and insane levels of empathy, they are just people too. And they are people who in a lot of ways raised me and guided me through my formative years.

One of the memories I revisit a lot on good days and bad because it just makes me feel cozy is that I used to write a lot in two favorite buildings. I had two favorite places that I loved to write the most. The first one being the Sony Fire Hall because you could hear the other writers through the walls and I just kind of liked to pretend that I was in the Brill Building. And then my most favorite was a place called Jody Williams Music, an independent publishing company that was located in a little craftsman house. Let’s say the year is like 2005 in this memory. My mom would pick me up from Hendersonville High School, drive me downtown and drop me off, and I’d stamper in the front of Jody Williams Music, and I’d say “Hi” to Catherine who worked at the front and sometimes her boyfriend Eric would be there visiting. Things have gone great for them. They’ve got a couple kids, married like 20 years now. His full name is Eric Church, just for clarity.

But then I’d run up the stairs and I would plop down on the couch in front of Liz Rose in this room that was painted red. And I’d be like, “Liz, this happened at school today. I’ve got a hook that I wanna like, you know, you got to write this thing.” And she’d get her notebook and we’d just write so fast. When we finished with the song, I kind of jog out the back of this house to the backyard where there was a garden shed. And in that garden shed was a one-person studio where Jody Williams Music’s favorite demo producer, Nathan Chapman, was making demos.

I would run in and Nathan would play every single instrument on these demos and he interpreted my music so intuitively that later on I would fight for him to produce my entire first album. And it was our first album, both of us. And I am shocked and stunned to say that as of a couple days ago, that album is 20 years old. I’ve been very fortunate I’ve gotten to genre-hop and travel the world and write with so many different people and in so many different ways. And the only reason that I’ve been able to have that kind of dexterity in my creative process is because of the fundamentals and the foundation that I learned here in Nashville. And I never forget that for a single second when I tell every single person I know about what we have here. And I’m so incredibly honored to be inducted into this sacred club, especially at this point in my life.

It’s not lost on me how crazy this is. I will cherish it forever because Nashville is the place that honed and polished the thing about myself and the thing about my life that I am the most proud of and the most passionate about. So to be here with you and to be getting to have this moment, I am truly grateful, and it just feels like one of those amazing Nashville moments I’m going to revisit on a rainy day. Thank you so much.

In August, when the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame first revealed Swift would be inducted, the singer released a statement. She revealed how much the honor meant to her: “From the time I started writing songs as a child, I fixated on Nashville as the perfect place to be,” she said. “I wanted to learn with and from the best and get to immerse myself in a community of storytellers, and thankfully Nashville turned out to be exactly what I’d dreamed of. A town that validated and prioritized hard work, determination, and imagination. Where the writers show up to work every day even when the mysterious muses and the magic don’t. To be honored by this city I love so much is a beautiful thing, and I’m very grateful.”

Swift also discussed Nashville in her Songwriters Hall of Fame induction speech in June. She got her start there as a tween: “I took meetings and I played acoustic shows until I was able to secure a publishing deal,” she said. “I got signed when I was 14. Oh, thanks [for the applause]. And I got the chance to work with incredibly wise and experienced co-writers, people like Liz Rose, Troy Burgess, Hillary Lindsey, Robert Ellis Orrall, Angelo [Petraglia], the Warren brothers, and the late but so very loved Brett James. So I’d written over 100 songs on my own at that point. But this would be my first experience co-writing.

“My parents had raised me to be overprepared, show up early, never assume the world owes you anything,” she continued. “And I might have been 14 years old, but I didn’t want anyone in a professional setting to treat me like a baby, or for these songwriters to think that I expected them to write songs for me to slap my name on, so at this point I started to approach songwriting like a full-time vocation. And that didn’t mean just showing up to my appointments and hoping that the ideas would show up, too. It meant spending nearly all of my free time writing ideas in preparation for my writing sessions, and then stopping myself at a certain point to allow my co-writers to later weigh in, so some of these ideas were 50 percent done, some were 75 percent done, some were just a hook with lyrics and a melody or a chorus. I stockpiled them.”