Taylor Swift will be inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame this autumn, the organisation announced on Tuesday afternoon. She goes in as the youngest writer it has ever admitted.
It is the second honour of its kind this year. In June she entered the Songwriters Hall of Fame in New York at 36, which made her the youngest woman ever taken in there.
What she said about Nashville
Her statement leans on the city rather than on the award. She fixed on Nashville as a child, as soon as she started writing songs, as the place she needed to get to. What she wanted was to learn alongside the best writers available and to sit inside a community of people who tell stories, and she says the city turned out to be what she had imagined.
The description she gives of it is a working one. A town that treats effort, persistence and imagination as the whole point, where writers turn up to the desk on the days when nothing arrives as reliably as on the days when it does. Being honoured by a city she loves this much, she said, is a beautiful thing, and she is grateful for it.
How she got there
In her speech at the New York ceremony in June, Swift went further into the same period and called Nashville the songwriting capital of the world.
The account she gave was of meetings and acoustic shows until a publishing deal came through. She was signed at 14. What followed was work with a run of experienced co-writers, among them Liz Rose, Troy Burgess, Hillary Lindsey, Robert Ellis Orrall, Angelo Petraglia, the Warren brothers, and Brett James, who has since died. By that point she had written more than a hundred songs on her own and had never once written with anybody else.
The method she built at 14
The most useful part of that speech is the process. Swift said her parents raised her to be overprepared, to arrive early, and never to assume the world owed her anything, and that even at 14 she did not want anyone in a professional room treating her as a child, or suspecting she expected other writers to produce songs for her to put her name on.
So she treated the work as a full time occupation rather than a series of appointments. She spent most of her spare time generating ideas ahead of a session, then deliberately stopped short of finishing them so that a co-writer had somewhere to go. Some were half done, some most of the way there, some were a hook with a melody attached and nothing else.
Then she stockpiled them. Walking into a room, she would play a few of them, effectively pitching, and whichever one the other writer responded to was the one they finished together.