Taylor Swift looked back on her earliest days crafting songs in Music City as she was inducted Monday into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame, becoming its youngest member at 36. Swift was inducted by former tourmate Brad Paisley, whom she teased, and serenaded by Lainey Wilson, whom she praised, before launching into a lengthy speech about what she learned in the trenches of Music Row as a teenager.
“I was lucky enough to get a publishing deal with Sony Publishing when I was 14, and I just hit the ground running,” she told the audience at the Music City Center ceremony. “I was like a sponge, and I have really curly hair and it was yellow, so I kind of looked like a sponge too,” she quipped.
Praising the town that she said raised her, Swift said, per Rolling Stone, “There is no music community like this music community. I know. I checked all the communities.”
Swift was being inducted alongside Lyle Lovett, Bruce Channel, Shawn Camp and Lee Thomas Miller (plus the late J.I. Allison, of Buddy Holly and the Crickets). Also being honored with a special award at the ceremony was country superstar George Strait, who was getting the Career Maker Award, something only one other artist has received, in honor of what he has accomplished for others performing their material.
The tradition at Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame ceremonies is for the inductees not to sing or play themselves but rather to enjoy a performance of one of their songs by another notable star or major figure. In this case it was Lainey Wilson doing a stripped-back version of “Love Story,” to which Swift offered some reciprocal support by getting in a plug for Wilson’s new single.
“You know, I first of all want to say thank you to Lainey Wilson, who I just think is one of the coolest people in the world,” Swift said, “for saying yes and doing that. And I’ve had her new single on repeat. It just puts me in the best mood. It’s called ‘Kinda Love It.’ Check it out.”
Paisley gave an introduction in which he recalled marveling at how she went from proving she was a star with her first two albums and proving once and for all that she was a songwriting all-timer with her entirely self-penned third album. “All of us were like, ‘How is this teenager doing this? How is she so brilliant?’ And then she goes off and really put her feelings into something that is 100% hers and writes the ‘Speak Now’ album all by herself,” he reminisced. “It’s an amazing thing to watch her evolution from somebody who realized this all starts with a song to (being able to) take that exact thing and change the world with it.”
In turn, Swift turned the laudatory mood more light-hearted as she recalled the days when she opened for Paisley on a summer amphitheater tour between her first and second albums. He and his band and his opening acts would always famously play prans on each other, and Swift suggested it might have gone a bit too next-level by the end.
“Brad Paisley, thank you so much for that induction. I’m really surprised to see you here, actually,” she said, “because we’ve been estranged since 2007. I think you know why. Crickets. He took a tour prank too far. Filled my entire tour bus with live crickets. Thousands of them. Oh my God. For months, I couldn’t sleep. Just chirp… chirp… chirp.” A pause, and then, again: “Chirp — all night. I considered buying a pet lizard to eradicate the problem. It was a dark time. But you know what? You did such an amazing job with that introduction, I think we can let bygones be bygones. Thank you. Yeah, I think we’re good now.”
Getting into the serious grist of her speech, Swift focused on the three words that make up the primary name of her honor — “Nashville,” “Songwriters” and “Fame” — and devoted individual time to each of them.
She said that even as a young child, songwriting was “what I centered my entire life around,” and Nashville became “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. … And it ended up being all of that and more. It ended up being everything.”
As for the fame part, Swift described that as almost incidental, yet also almost all-consuming, as “a byproduct of my love for music. … It’s why a lot of people know the words to my music, which is awesome. It’s also why there’s 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 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 she suggested that “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” are from her early years in Nashville.
Swift credited songwriting sessions as a kid as places where she “learned which ideas are worth fighting for (and) which ideas are worth letting go of… 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. One thing that I did learn is that songwriters, although they possess the superhuman ability to understand and interpret the human condition and have insane levels of empathy — they re just people too. And they are people who in a lot of ways raised me and guided me through my formative years.”
Swift did a bit of name-dropping, like how she got to know not just Catherine, the woman who worked the front desk at the Jody Williams Music publishing company, but her boyfriend and future husband, Eric Church. She mentioned running up the stairs to the writing room to meet up with frequent collaborator Liz Rose, where she would say, “Liz, this happened at school today…” And then she would run to the garden shed behind the building that was the one-person studio for Nathan Chapman, who played every instrument on her demos and “interpreted my music so intuitively that later on I would fight for him to produce my entire first album. It was our first album, for both of us. And I am shocked and stunned to say that as of a couple days ago, that album is 20 years old.”
In summary, Swift said, “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… It just feels like one of those amazing Nashville moments I’m going to revisit on a rainy day.”
Swift, who was wearing a burgundy floral Raina Vanessa minidress to the ceremony, was getting the honor just four months after she received a similar accolade. She was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in New York in June; she was also the youngest writer to receive that honor.