Taylor Swift gave an emotional, 20-minute speech during her induction into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in New York on Thursday evening, expressing her life-long passion for crafting songs, the sacrifices her family made to let her follow her dreams as a young girl and her advice for the next generation of hitmakers.
“If I look back at my entire 23-year career in music, the ups and downs, the industry battles, the trials and tribulations, the tears and the cheers, and the dog piling of doubt, the criticisms of fair and unfair, the complete loss of privacy, the world tours and the ego wars and the twists of fate, the absolute magical chaos of this path that I chose when I was too young to remember it ever being a choice at all: songwriting was the easiest thing I ever did,” Swift told the crowd on Thursday.
Expanding on that statement, Swift said that writing was easy because it was “instinctual.”
”No one taught me how to do it,” Swift said, adding that she had to learn over “massive amounts of trial and error” and that “everything came together when I learned to play guitar at 12.”
“It was easy to choose songwriting over everything else in my life, but it couldn’t have been easy for my parents and my brother,” Swift said, fighting back tears, “to pick up and move our entire family from Pennsylvania to relocate to Nashville, so that I could hone my craft in the songwriting capital of the world… they uprooted their entire lives to move me to music city. Even though words are kind of supposed to be my thing, I’ll never be able to express my gratitude to you guys for doing that for me. You’re the reason I’m here tonight.”
