Taylor Swift was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame last night and gave a 21-minute speech that was very emotional. In fact, the Grammy-winner visibly teared up while talking about her family (who were in attendance) and the sacrifices they made early in her career.
“It was easy to choose songwriting over everything else in my life,” Taylor said. “But it couldn’t have been easy for my parents and my brother to 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 making obvious that this was not even remotely a temporary phase their teen 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’re the reason I’m here tonight.”
She also reflected on songwriting as a little kid, saying, “Songwriting for me, it’s pretty much the only thing I ever just naturally did. My parents tell me stories about driving home from taking me to see Disney movies. And 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 love to do children’s 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. 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’s feelings, passions and motivations have always fascinated me and it was easy to choose songwriting over everything else in my life.”
Tearing up, honestly!
