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Taylor Swift was officially inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame<\/a> last night\u2014and she marked the career milestone with a candid speech reflecting on her decades of writing music. She called songwriting \u201cthe easiest thing I ever did,\u201d adding that it was \u201cinstinctual. No one taught me how to do it.\u201d<\/p>\n She recounted how she discovered her passion for it at age 12 when she got her first guitar, saying, \u201cIt felt easy to nurture something I loved so much, to watch calluses form on the tips of my tiny fingers, and to become a constant observer of the human condition, because people\u2019s feelings, passions, and motivations have always fascinated me.\u201d<\/p>\n She then became emotional discussing her move to Nashville and her parents\u2019<\/a> and brother\u2019s<\/a> support: \u201cThey uprooted their entire lives to move me to Music City, and even though words are supposed to kind of be my thing, I will never be able to express my gratitude to you guys for doing that for me. You\u2019re the reason I\u2019m here tonight.\u201d<\/p>\n She shared her advice to younger writers and expressed gratitude for her mentors and fans. Swift spoke for 21 minutes, delivering one of the most heartfelt and candid reflections of her career as she made history as the youngest woman<\/a> to be inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame at age 36.<\/p>\n Tonight has been amazing. I want to begin by thanking the person who introduced and inducted me tonight. He thinks that this is the first time he has inducted me into something, but what he may not be taking into consideration is that through his decades of spellbinding storytelling, Steven Spielberg has unknowingly inducted me and countless others into his sacred club of expansive world-building. From the time he was a kid, every time he dreamed something up, he wanted to do anything humanly possible to be able to show it to you. I watched his films pivot between different genres, action to sci-fi, to historical epic to drama, to comedy, romance, fantasy, to musical, and I watched him ace every single genre, and that kind of limitless creativity isn\u2019t just inspiring to burgeoning filmmakers. Because of examples like Steven\u2019s, I trusted my imagination, regardless of if it was taking me somewhere new and uncharted, and then every time I dreamed something up, I wanted to do everything humanly possible to be able to play it for you.<\/p>\n A few months ago, when the Songwriters Hall of Fame asked me about my heroes and the creatives who shaped my storytelling and who I might want to present this award to me, I said Steven\u2019s name. And about an hour later, to my absolute delight, I ended up on the phone with him and his legendarily effervescent wife, Kate Capshaw, who is here tonight. And he was telling me that yes, absolutely, he would be thrilled to be here. I was completely blown away, because I mean, the man has a massive film called Disclosure Day that\u2019s coming out at midnight tonight, and he\u2019s still gonna agree to show up and do this for me a few hours before it comes out. Wouldn\u2019t that be impossibly hard to balance? Wouldn\u2019t that be too difficult scheduling-wise? I\u2019m trying to give him an out, at which point Kate said something I\u2019ll never forget. She said, \u201cGood and true things are easy.\u201d <\/p>\n And if I look back at my entire 23-year career in music\u2014the ups and downs, the industry battles, the trials and tribulations, the tears and the cheers, and the dogpiling of doubt, the criticisms\u2014both fair and unfair\u2014the 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. Not because it didn\u2019t take effort; it definitely did. Not that it wasn\u2019t frustrating at times, because it could be, and not that my songwriting didn\u2019t haunt me relentlessly until I cracked the perfect internal rhyme scheme for the third line, the second verse, to the point where my teachers called me out in class for not paying attention, because that definitely happened. <\/p>\n But when I say that songwriting was the easiest part for me, I think what I mean is that it was instinctual. No one taught me how to do it. I had to be taught how to entertain a crowd and learn choreography and be less annoying and navigate the industry and fiercely protect my own sanity. I had to learn all of that over time through difficult lessons and massive amounts of trial and error and chaos and calamity. But songwriting for me was pretty much the only thing I ever just naturally did.<\/p>\n My parents tell me stories about driving home from taking me to see Disney movies in the theaters and noticing I was singing the songs on the way home from the film in the car, but I was changing the lyrics and the melodies to be about my own life. As a little kid, I loved to sing; I loved to do children\u2019s theater performances. But everything came together when I learned to play guitar at 12. I wrote my first song after learning my first three chords. <\/p>\n It felt easy to work incredibly hard at this. It felt easy to nurture something I loved so much, to watch calluses form on the tips of my tiny fingers, and to become a constant observer of the human condition, because people\u2019s feelings, passions, and motivations have always fascinated me, and it was easy to choose songwriting over everything else in my life, but it couldn\u2019t have been easy for my parents and my brother\u2014[Swift gets emotional] I\u2019m good\u2014to just 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. But after it became obvious that this was not even remotely a temporary phase their tween daughter was going through, they uprooted their entire lives to move me to Music City, and even though words are supposed to kind of be my thing, I will never be able to express my gratitude to you guys for doing that for me. You\u2019re the reason I\u2019m here tonight.<\/p>\n In Nashville, I took meetings and I played acoustic shows until I was able to secure a publishing deal. I got signed when I was 14. Oh, thanks [for the applause]. And I got the chance to work with incredibly wise and experienced co-writers, people like Liz Rose, Troy Burgess, Hillary Lindsey, Robert Ellis Orrall, Angelo [Petraglia], the Warren brothers, and the late but so very loved Brett James. So I\u2019d written over 100 songs on my own at that point. But this would be my first experience co-writing. <\/p>\n My parents had raised me to be overprepared, show up early, never assume the world owes you anything. And I might have been 14 years old, but I didn\u2019t want anyone in a professional setting to treat me like a baby, or for these songwriters to think that I expected them to write songs for me to slap my name on, so at this point I started to approach songwriting like a full-time vocation. <\/p>\n And that didn\u2019t mean just showing up to my appointments and hoping that the ideas would show up, too. It meant spending nearly all of my free time writing ideas in preparation for my writing sessions, and then stopping myself at a certain point to allow my co-writers to later weigh in, so some of these ideas were 50 percent done, some were 75 percent done, some were just a hook with lyrics and a melody or a chorus. <\/p>\n I stockpiled them, so that when I went into a writing session with a co-writer, I\u2019d play them and sing them a few of these ideas, sort of like it was a pitch session, and whichever idea they liked the best was the one that we would finish together. <\/p>\n I kept long lists of words that I loved, and I added to it every time I thought of a new one. I developed a serious fixation on alliterations and juxtaposition, and I wrote poems when I didn\u2019t have the right melody yet. <\/p>\n When I was inspired by my own life, my curiosities about the world, or my very dramatic but extremely dire crushes on the boys at school who had never even once talked to me, I wrote about that. And if I wasn\u2019t inspired by my own life, I\u2019d use other methods to spark my imagination. I figured if the idea doesn\u2019t come to you, you have to become your own search party and go find it. Oftentimes, I\u2019d put a movie on, I\u2019d pause a scene and try to write a song from each character\u2019s perspective\u2014even the villain, I\u2019d explore what they were going through, and try to say it in a vernacular that that character might use. <\/p>\n And this is how I learned that every person has a self-constructed justification system that they live by, and we each get to decide what choices we\u2019re willing to condone in ourselves. We each decide what we see as good and true, fair and right. And so with my metaphorical Mary Poppins bag of hooks, choruses, and bridges, and my non-metaphorical backpack from sophomore year of high school, I\u2019d walk into my writing sessions on Music Row. And one of my favorite stories from this time in my life was when I got a chance to write with one of my favorite songwriters of all time, Craig Wiseman. <\/p>\n Craig is an absolute savant of a writer, but he\u2019s also one of the funniest people I\u2019ve ever met, too, so I know that I can tell this story. I brought in about five different semi-form[ed] songs that I thought were really strong. Because it was Craig Wiseman, I led my pitch with a song I really thought was special. It was pretty much done, except for a few lines in the bridge. So filled with nervous anticipation, I played it on guitar and sang it for him, and when I finished, he very kindly told me that he thought it was good, but he didn\u2019t really get it, and he\u2019d love to hear the other ideas I brought. <\/p>\n A few songs later, we landed on one that resonated better with him, and we had a fantastic writing session. It turns out you really can and should meet some of your heroes. But years back\u2014or years later, we still look back on that session, and we laugh about that first idea that I played for him. I had ended up going home and finishing the song on my own later that night. It was called \u201cLove Story.\u201d Finishing that song that night was me trusting my instincts as a writer regardless of any feedback or information I had about what other people\u2019s take on it might be. <\/p>\n I think now more than ever in an industry that seems to be consumed by metrics, data analytics, and we\u2019re all trying to predict whether something will trend or not, writers need to trust their human intuition. And I think the thousands of hours I\u2019ve spent loving the working of this craft have taught me to really be able to identify the ideas that jump out at me and sparkle and linger\u2014the ones that matter to me the most. <\/p>\n I have to say thank you to Sombr for that perfect performance<\/a> [during the ceremony of my music]. And his writing is so exceptional that it makes me actually envious, and I love that feeling. He\u2019s going to be the top of my Spotify Wrapped this year, guaranteed; it\u2019s locked, it\u2019s in the bag.<\/p>\n And a lot of my late-night debates with my friends about the state of the music industry involve me saying very loudly, \u201cSombr is the future, and he does it all on his own, and he doesn\u2019t need AI. The kids are fine.\u201d And so obviously Shane [Sombr\u2019s real name] is a very well-adjusted person, an artist, and doesn\u2019t need any of my advice at all. <\/p>\n There are so many incredible writers who I love who have come into their own recently, and if I had advice for young artists, though, who should perhaps be interested in it, I would say that you really have to prioritize what you love down to your very core, because you\u2019ll need that if your song ever gets heard by the public or the critics or the haters posing as critics, or the people chronically online, or the robots posing as people who are chronically online. <\/p>\n Songwriters have a real balancing act that they have to conduct every day, because inherently we\u2019re supposed to let it all in, feel deeply and be sensitive to the point of your delusion, and then reflect those feelings and delusions back to the world in the form of a three-and-a-half-minute sonic landscape or a bop or a folktale, or a battle cry, or a 10-minute coming-of-age song<\/a> about a star. So it\u2019s hard to harden yourself to certain brutal elements of this world. <\/p>\n But allow me to now make a hard pivot and pull out a quote I love from the show Yellowstone when a father says to his son, \u201cIt\u2019s the one constant in life, son: You build something worth having, somebody\u2019s gonna try to take it.\u201d <\/p>\n