Recommendations of the Editorial team
Taylor Swift truly finds inspiration everywhere. In the past, she has shared how her neighbors’ love stories and films shaped her early songwriting. Now the superstar spoke in detail about it in a new interview with the New York Times Magazine. how her songwriting process has changed in two decades in the music industry.
“There are so many different ways a song comes to me,” Swift said. She cited the current single “Elizabeth Taylor” from her latest album “The Life of a Showgirl” as an example of a song that “comes out of nowhere.”
While her tribute to the Hollywood star may sound like a track years in the making, Swift revealed how a car ride with fiancé Travis Kelce made her pick up pen and paper – or rather, open the voice memo app.
Car ride with Travis Kelce
“I’m in the car with Travis. I keep explaining to Travis why I love Elizabeth Taylor so much,” she recalled. “She fought for artists’ rights. She was exploited in so many ways, and yet she kept her humanity, her humor, her passion for life – and I just kept talking.”
Swift continued, “I tell him her eyes were purple. Some said blue. Some said purple. I think they were purple. And then we get there, we’re at home, he’s getting out of the car, and I’m completely lost in my thoughts. And then this intrusive tune: ‘I cry my eyes violet, Elizabeth Taylor’ – and I’m frantically fumbling to open the recording app on my phone.”
Such spontaneous experiences, “where it floats down in front of you like a cloud and all you have to do is grab it and the song unfolds from there,” are not that rare, said Swift. “That’s what happens most of the time.”
The story behind “All Too Well”
Elsewhere in the 30-minute interview, the renowned songwriter shared the genesis of some of her most ambitious and personal songs – including the fan favorite “All Too Well (10 Minute Version)”.
According to Swift, the original five-minute version came from “a very emotional rant I did at a sound check when we were rehearsing for the Speak Now tour.” Luckily, a sound engineer recorded that session – it became 2012’s “Red” track. But almost ten years later, when she assembled the Vault tracks for her re-recording of the album, “Taylor’s Version,” that original version of the cathartic rant was gone.
“I went through diaries and found little fragments of it, I didn’t have the old material anymore, so I went through safes and tried to find the CD,” she said – confirming that the ten-minute version is not directly from that legendary tour moment. “I had to piece together lyrics and stuff. It was the most extensive restoration process I’ve ever gone through on a song.”
Praise for Sombr
Swift also used the interview to highlight some of her favorite songwriters, including Sombr. “I’m a huge fan of his songwriting, his lyrics are so intensely confessional,” she said, emphasizing that “when a male artist says things like that, it’s really good for the cause of women.”
At the end of the interview, the pop star reflected on how criticism of her art has motivated her. “It was a huge starting point, like a creative writing assignment… So many songs in my career wouldn’t exist. ‘Blank Space’ wouldn’t exist,” she said. Then Swift gave new songwriters something else to say when dealing with harsh online backlash: “Don’t respond to trolls in your comments. That’s not what we want from you. We want your art.”
