Taylor Swift revealed that she was 10 years old when she decided she wanted to achieve her dream of making music for a living. That decision has guided the next 26 years of her life.
“I was about 10 when I started obsessively thinking about and planning how I would be able to make music for the rest of my life,” Swift said.
In a special interview with the Recording Academy’s Songwriters and Composers Wing for the Grammy Museum, Swift talked about her experiences writing songs and being a woman in the music industry, and shared advice on how to trust your instincts.
Taylor Swift’s songwriting history
When Swift started writing her feelings and experiences into music, she started by studying the greats, like Faith Hill and other musicians she loved, to see how they structured their songs.
“I never turned to music to forget my human experience,” Swift said. “I turned to music to remember it.”
Swift was 16 years old when she was signed to Big Machine Records, and at the time, there were major concerns about demographics.
Some at the label were worried the country demographic wouldn’t relate to a young writer such as Swift, but the music artist trusted her instincts and kept creating music.
“If I were to look back and say, ‘Whoa, that’s crazy. This is why this all worked,’ it was because I didn’t listen to the people who said that I didn’t have a valid perspective on life because I didn’t fit into a certain demographic that they had studied because of the analytics of a certain genre and how people experience music,” Swift said.
Swift’s first song, “Tim McGraw,” was a commercial success, peaking at No. 6 on the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart and reaching No. 40 on the all-genre Billboard Hot 100, according to Billboard.
The song and her self-titled debut album launched Swift into the country music stratosphere. Her second album, “Fearless,” earned a Grammy award for album of the year and also spent 11 consecutive weeks at No. 1 on the U.S. Billboard 200 chart, per Billboard.
“I realized that I’m making music because I’m playing for the fans,” Swift said. “I’m putting this out for people who care about it and who look to music as a way to cope with their life in the way that I did.”
Taylor Swift on what makes music great
After “Fearless,” Swift completely self-wrote her third album, “Speak Now,” which debuted in 2010. While writing that album, Swift said she really learned how to build a world around a song.
She talked about how she wrote “Never Grow Up” to sound like a lullaby. Critics claimed she wasn’t “country enough,” so with her song “Mean,” she called out her critics — she said she tried to use “as much banjo as possible” in the song to make it even more country.
“Sometimes when people are mocking me, it’s really fun to mock them back,” Swift said.
Next, Swift released her fourth album, “Red,” in which she started to lean more into the pop sound, and said that’s when she really started “exploring her edges.”
“When you get visited by the idea fairy and you trust where that’s going to take you based on your thousands of hours of doing this, you can enter sort of a flow state.”
Taylor Swift on trusting your collaborators
The music artist revealed that she originally wrote her pop hit “I Knew You Were Trouble” to be a sad piano ballad, but Max Martin, one of the producers she was working with at the time, suggested they make the song dubstep and more upbeat. The song was another success story.
“It ended up being the best thing for it,” Swift said. “As a collaborator, the best people to be in the room are ‘yes, and’ people.”
After “Red” came her fifth album, “1989,” where Swift made the full transition into the pop scene.
“Enthusiasm in the studio can make or break what you end up creating,” Swift said.
Taylor Swift on handling criticism through art
Following the major success of “1989,” Swift released “reputation” — an album that arrived at a time when Swift was receiving a wave of backlash for her choices in friendships and relationships, and her “reputation” was under constant scrutiny.
“As a writer, it gave me this gnarled bite when I would write my lyrics,” Swift said.
Swift channeled her anger into a dark, broody album — though still with some tender and emotional songs — to enter her next era.
“When you use art and music as a way to barrel roll out of that, those are the moments I’m the most proud of,” Swift said.
Next, she released “Lover,” the first album under a new label, one in which she owned all of her own songs from the album for the first time.
Looking back over her discography is almost like a timeline of what exactly she was going through at the time.
“I look back on songs about gut-wrenching heartbreak,” Swift said. “And I look back and I’m like, that is a good lesson I learned.”
As a self-described “confessional songwriter,” for Swift’s eighth album, she pivoted to character writing and crafting songs about people “from her imagination.”
Swift has continued to blend both confessional songwriting and character songwriting with the rest of her work.
Taylor Swift on reclaiming your work
Around the same time as she released her eighth album, “folklore,” and ninth album, “evermore,” Swift began rerecording her first six albums, in order to rerelease them so that she would own all the rights to the entire catalog of her work.
Critics worried the rerecorded songs wouldn’t resonate the same way and that fans wouldn’t care about the songs.
They couldn’t have been more wrong.
The rollout of Swift’s rerecordings, dubbed “Taylor’s Version,” reached massive success, with the fan-favorite song “All Too Well (10 Minute Version)” becoming a major flashpoint for the fandom.
“When they love something that passionately, I’m going to listen to that,” Swift said about the song.
The rerecordings “achieved billions of streams, broke major sales records, and eventually allowed her to buy back her original catalog,” Rolling Stone reported.
“I got to a place where it felt like defiant reclamation of what was always mine to begin with,” Swift said.
In 2025, Swift was able to buy her entire catalog and now owns all of the music, artwork and concert films she ever created.
What’s Taylor Swift up to now?
Swift’s most recent project was a song for the “Toy Story 5″ movie about the character Jessie, titled “I Knew It, I Knew You.”
The song has a familiar country lilt and leans back into those country roots that Swift’s original fans are familiar with.
“I love my country roots more and more the further along this path I get,” Swift said. “And I want to honor them more and more. And I feel more tied and more loyal to them — the people that shaped and honored me as a writer, that all happened in Nashville.”
In a letter to the fans in 2025 about owning all of her work, Swift revealed that she had completely rerecorded her entire debut album.
Fans are speculating that she might release “Taylor Swift (Taylor’s Version),” along with never-before-heard “From the Vault” tracks, around the same time as the 20th anniversary of her debut album, which was released on Oct. 24, 2006.
Whatever comes next for Swift, it seems she will have the fans in mind, as well as trusting her own instincts continuing to do what she loves — making music.
“In the music industry, as wild and ever-changing as it is, enthusiasm can protect you from anything. I would know,” Swift said.