Taylor Swift Makes History With Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame Induction
3 min readTHE RUNDOWN
- Taylor Swift will be inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame this fall.
- She is the youngest writer to receive the honor at age 36.
- Earlier this year, Swift became the youngest woman to ever be inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame.
Taylor Swift has a knack for making history, having done so earlier this year when she became the youngest woman to ever be inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame at age 36. Now, she’s breaking barriers again.
This afternoon, the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame announced that Swift will be inducted into its hall this fall. She is the youngest writer to join its ranks.
Swift reflected on the honor in a statement, touching on her history as a Nashville songwriter. She began her career there as a teenager.
“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.”
In her speech for New York’s Songwriters Hall of Fame induction ceremony in June, Swift spoke in depth about her time in Nashville, which she called the “songwriting capital of the world.”
“In Nashville, 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, so that when I went into a writing session with a co-writer, I’d play them and sing them a few of these ideas, sort of like it was a pitch session, and whichever idea they liked the best was the one that we would finish together.”