Taylor Swift was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame on Monday night (Oct. 26), using her acceptance speech to revisit the Music Row writing rooms, publishers and collaborators who shaped her earliest years as a songwriter. Explore Taylor Swift See latest videos, charts and news
Brad Paisley inducted the 14-time Grammy winner at the organization’s 56th annual gala at Nashville’s Music City Center, prompting an opening joke about a tour prank that apparently still hadn’t been forgotten. Related Lana Del Rey Helps Stranger 'Trying to Stay Out of an Abusive Relationship' While Listening to Tate McRae Sharon Osbourne Visits Late Husband Ozzy's Grave Every Day: 'You Never Get Over It' Cedella Marley Still Believes in the 'Reggae Girlz': 'I Wanted the Music to Reflect the Journey of These Women'
“I’m really surprised to see you here, actually, because we’ve been estranged since 2007,” Swift joked.
The singer-songwriter recalled Paisley filling her tour bus with thousands of live crickets during their time on the road together. “For months, I couldn’t sleep. Just chirp, chirp, chirp, chirp all night,” she remembered, before deciding his introduction had been good enough to let “bygones be bygones.”
From there, Swift broke the Hall of Fame honor down into three words: Nashville, songwriters and fame.
“I knew from the time I wrote my first song that even if it couldn’t be my career, it would be my passion,” she told the room. “It would be what I centered my entire life around.”
Nashville, meanwhile, was “the place that I went to in my middle school daydreams” — somewhere the young songwriter imagined all of the lessons and wisdom she wanted to acquire existed in one place.
“Fame, you know, that’s sort of a byproduct of my love for music,” the pop superstar explained. “It’s kind of like songwriter plus Nashville equals fame.”
With that success came what she described as “daily random doses of chaos.” When life starts to feel strange, Swift returns mentally to her earliest memories of arriving in Nashville, signing a publishing deal at 14 and writing songs every day.
“I was like a sponge,” she joked. “And I had really curly hair and it was yellow, so I kind of looked like a sponge too.”
Those formative years taught her that songwriting was a craft built through repetition.
“I think you truly learn a craft when you do it over and over and over,” the songwriter reflected. “And that is what the magnificent songwriters that work in this amazing town do.”
“There is no music community like this music community,” she added. “I know, I checked all the communities.”
Swift also credited Nashville’s writing community with teaching her some of the less glamorous realities of collaboration: how to push through creative blocks, which ideas are worth fighting for and when to let something go.
“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,” she joked.
Those writers, the newly inducted Hall of Famer explained, “in a lot of ways, raised me and guided me thr…