Singer-songwriter Taylor Swift returned to the city where she signed a publishing deal at 14 to receive its highest songwriting honor. Her October 26 induction into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame came at 36, making her the youngest member in its history, with her debut album’s 20th anniversary just 2 days behind her.
Brad Paisley inducted her at the Hall’s 56th gala at Music City Center. Swift opened by revisiting their 2007 tour, when he put thousands of live crickets on her bus.
“I’m really surprised to see you here, actually, because we’ve been estranged since 2007. I think you know why,” she joked.
“For months I couldn’t sleep. Just chirp, chirp, chirp all night. All night I considered buying a pet lizard to eradicate the problem,” Swift said.
She told Paisley his induction speech had earned her forgiveness. Turning to the words in the honor itself, Swift said:
“So I am so honored to be inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame. I got the news and I was just kind of staring at the words. I was staring at Nashville.
“I was just like, ‘Wow, this is crazy.’ And then I kind of zeroed in on a few words that have had a particularly intense impact on my life.
“The first one being ‘Nashville,’ the second ‘songwriters.’ And the last one, ‘fame.’ I’d like to start with songwriters and expanding upon the impact that word has had on my life.
“I started writing songs when I was a little kid and I knew from the time I wrote my first song that even if it couldn’t be my career, it would be my passion. It would be what I centered my entire life around.
“Nashville is the place that I went to in my middle school daydreams. It was the place where all the wisdom that I wished to acquire existed in one place. All the lessons that I wished to learn existed in this magical place for me.
“And it ended up being all of that and more. It ended up being everything.
“Fame, that’s sort of a byproduct of my love for music. It’s kind of like songwriter plus Nashville equals fame. It’s why a lot of people know the words to my music, which is awesome.
“It’s also why there’s sort of like these daily random doses of chaos that just pop up in my life every once in a while, every couple of hours. That can be kind of weird, but I have tools in place in my mind that help me navigate that and get back to true north when life feels so bizarre.
“Those tools are my memories and the memories that I visit most frequently when I need to return back to some semblance of remembering what normalcy is and why I do this. I think back to when I first got to Nashville and I started writing on Music Row.
“I was lucky enough to get a publishing deal with Sony Publishing when I was 14 and I just hit the ground running. I started writing every single day. I learned so much.
“I was like a sponge and I have really curly hair and it was yellow, so I kind of looked like a sponge too. But I learned by repetition. I think you truly learn a craft when you do it over and over and over and that is what the magnificent songwriters that work in this amazing town do.
“There is no music community like this music community. I know. I checked all the communities.
“There’s no one doing it.
“I learned so much. I learned how to push through a creative block when you’re in the middle of a session. Are we going to tunnel under this?
“Are we going to hurdle over it? I learned which ideas are worth fighting for, which ideas are worth letting go of and move on to the next one. I learned how to accommodate when your co-writer has a hangover or when they’re going to need to talk about their divorce for a really long time before we write anything.
“Because one thing that I did learn is that songwriters, although they possess the superhuman ability to understand and interpret the human condition and insane levels of empathy, they are just people too. And they are people who in a lot of ways raised me and guided me through my formative years.
“One of the memories I revisit a lot on good days and bad because it just makes me feel cozy is that I used to write a lot in two favorite buildings. I had two favorite places that I loved to write the most. The first one being the Sony Fire Hall because you could hear the other writers through the walls and I just kind of liked to pretend that I was in the Brill Building.
“And then my most favorite was a place called Jody Williams Music, an independent publishing company that was located in a little craftsman house. Let’s say the year is like 2005 in this memory.
“My mom would pick me up from Hendersonville High School, drive me downtown and drop me off and I’d scamper in the front of Jody Williams Music and I’d say ‘Hi’ to Katherine who worked at the front and sometimes her boyfriend Eric would be there visiting. Things have gone great for them. They’ve got a couple kids, married like 20 years now.
“His full name is Eric Church, just for clarity.
“But then I’d run up the stairs and I would plop down on the couch in front of Liz Rose in this room that was painted red. And I’d be like, ‘Liz, this happened at school today. I’ve got a hook that I wanna like, you know, you got to write this thing.’
“And she’d get her notebook and we’d just write so fast. When we finished with the song, I kind of jog out the back of this house to the backyard where there was a garden shed. And in that garden shed was a one person studio where Jody Williams Music’s favorite demo producer, Nathan Chapman, was making demos.
“I would run in and Nathan would play every single instrument on these demos and he interpreted my music so intuitively that later on I would fight for him to produce my entire first album. And it was our first album, both of us. And I am shocked and stunned to say that as of a couple days ago, that album is 20 years old.
“I’ve been very fortunate I’ve gotten to genre hop and travel the world and write with so many different people and in so many different ways. And the only reason that I’ve been able to have that kind of dexterity in my creative process is because of the fundamentals and the foundation that I learned here in Nashville.
“And I never forget that for a single second when I tell every single person I know about what we have here. And I’m so incredibly honored to be inducted into this sacred club, especially at this point in my life.
“It’s not lost on me how crazy this is. I will cherish it forever because Nashville is the place that honed and polished the thing about myself and the thing about my life that I am the most proud of and the most passionate about.
“So to be here with you and to be getting to have this moment, I am truly grateful and it just feels like one of those amazing Nashville moments I’m going to revisit on a rainy day. Thank you so much.”