TAYLOR SWIFT

In her own words: pop icon Taylor Swift writes about the power of music, and why she bares her soul in song

...AFTER ALL MUSIC has THE POWER to MOVE YOU TO TEARS or TRANSPORT YOU TO A DIFFERENT PLACE and TIME SO THERE’S no POINT MAKING it GENERIC. HERE for ELLE’S MUSIC ISSUE, SHE EXPLAINS why SHE PUTS HER HEART and SOUL INTO EVERY SONG

My favourite kinds of books to read are the ones that do more than just tell you a story. They do more than just set the scene or paint the picture. The writing I love the most places you into that story, that room, that rain-soaked kiss. You can smell the air, hear the sounds and feel your heart race as the character’s does. It’s something F. Scott Fitzgerald did so well, to describe a scene so gorgeously interwoven with rich emotional revelations that you yourself have escaped from your own life for a moment.

I’m highly biased, but I think that the way music can transport you back to a long-forgotten memory is the closest sensation we have to travelling in time. To this day, when I hear Cowboy Take Me Away by the Dixie Chicks, I instantly recall the feeling of being 12 years old, sitting in a little woodpanelled room in my family home in Pennsylvania. I’m clutching a guitar and learning to play the chords and sing the words at the same time, rehearsing for a gig at a coffee house. When I hear I Write Sins Not Tragedies by Panic! At The Disco, I’m transported back to being 16 and driving down the streets of Hendersonville, Tennessee, with my best friend Abigail, euphorically screaming the lyrics. When I hear How to Save a Life by The Fray, Breathe (2AM) by Anna Nalick or The Story by Brandi Carlile, I immediately flash back to being 17 and on tour for months on end. When I’d get a day at home in between long stretches on the road sharing a van with my band and crew, I would spend my rare nights off painting alone, with candles lit in my room – just being alone with those songs (those are all from the Grey’s Anatomy soundtrack. My commitment to that show truly knows no bounds). I’m convinced that You Learn by Alanis Morissette,

Put Your Records On by Corinne Bailey Rae and Why by Annie Lennox have actually healed my heart after bad breakups or letdowns.

I love writing songs because I love preserving memories, like putting a picture frame around a feeling you once had. I like to use nostalgia as inspiration when I’m writing songs for the same reason I like to take photographs. I like to be able to remember the extremely good and extremely bad times. I want to remember the colour of the sweater, the temperature of the air, the creak of the floorboards, the time on the clock when your heart was stolen or shattered or healed or claimed forever.

The fun challenge of writing a pop song is squeezing those evocative details into the catchiest melodic cadence you can possibly think of. I thrive on the challenge of sprinkling personal mementos and shreds of reality into a genre of music that is universally known for being, well, universal. You’d think that as pop writers, we’re supposed to be writing songs that everyone can sing along to, so you’d assume they would have to be pretty lyrically generic... AND YET the ones I think cut through the most are actually the most detailed, and I don’t mean in a Shakespearean sonnet type of way, although I love Shakespeare as much as the next girl. Obviously. (See Love Story, 2OO8.)

In modern pop, songs/bops/chunes including extremely personal details like, ‘Kiki, do you love me?’ and ‘Baby, pull me closer in the back seat of your Rover’ have been breaking through on the most global cultural level. Last year on tour, I got to hear stadium crowds passionately sing along to a young woman from Cuba singing about ‘Havana’.

I think these days, people are reaching out for connection and comfort in the music they listen to. We like being confided in and hearing someone say, ‘This is what I went through’ as proof to us that we can get through our own struggles. We actually do NOT want our pop music to be generic. I think a lot of music lovers want some biographical glimpse into the world of our narrator, a hole in the emotional walls people put up around themselves to survive. This glimpse into the artist’s story invites us to connect it to our own, and in the best-case scenario, allows us the ability to assign that song to our memories. It’s this alliance between a song and our memories of the time it helped us heal, or made us cry, dance or escape that truly stands the test of time. Just like a great book.