After a very busy summer that included being inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame, releasing an original song for Toy Story 5 and, of course, getting married, Taylor Swift made a stop at the Grammy Museum in Los Angeles for a wide-ranging conversation about her career.
“The Icon Sessions with Taylor Swift: A 20-Year Retrospective” event, presented by the Recording Academy‘s Songwriters & Composers Wing, took place earlier this month and was released online on Monday, featuring Swift sitting down with Recording Academy CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
Early on in the chat, Mason Jr. asked the superstar how she learned to trust her instincts when sharing her music with the public, as Swift explained, “I’m making music because I’m playing for the fans. I’m putting this out for people who care about it and who look to music as a way to cope with their life in the way that I did; I think that if you can actually go through all those checkpoints, you realize that putting out music you’ve made that you love so much is not the path to universal validation. If you’re still doing it, then you love it for the right reasons.”
She added that dealing with the public perception and analysis of her lyrics “sometimes fuels [her songwriting]. Sometimes when people are mocking me, it’s really fun to mock them back. Sometimes I like to just use words that they have to look up in order to talk shit about.”
