Taylor Swift was inducted into the Songwriters Hall Of Fame last night (June 11). At 36, she’s the youngest female to receive the accolade and the second youngest overall – only the great Stevie Wonder has got in earlier, entering the Hall Of Fame in 1983, aged just 33.
In her acceptance speech, Swift quoted Steven Spielberg’s wife Kate Capshaw, who apparently once told her that “good and true things are easy”. The singer then said: “If I look back at my entire 23 year career in music, the ups and downs, the industry battles, the trials and tribulations, the tears and the cheers, and the doubt, the criticisms, fair and unfair, the complete loss of privacy, the world tours and the ego wars and the twists of fate, the absolute magical chaos of this path that I chose when I was too young to remember it ever being a choice at all: songwriting was the easiest thing I ever did.”
She added: “Not because it didn’t take effort - definitely did - not that it wasn’t frustrating at times - because it could be - and not that my songwriting didn’t haunt me relentlessly until I cracked the perfect internal rhyme scheme for the third line, the second verse of the hook, where my teachers called me out in class without paying attention - because that definitely happened.”
Swift also recalled the sacrifices her parents made, saying that “it couldn’t have been easy for my parents and brother to 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.” Addressing them directly, she said, “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.”
Songwriters are eligible for the Hall of Fame twenty years after their first release, so Swift is entering at the earliest opportunity – it is indeed two decades this month since her first single Tim McGraw came out.
And of course she wasn’t the only songwriter to be inducted last night. Also honoured were Alanis Morissette, Kenny Loggins, Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley of Kiss, Walter Afanasieff (best known for co-writing Mariah Carey’s All I Want For Christmas Is You), Christopher ‘Tricky’ Stewart (who penned Umbrella for Rihanna) and Brits Graham Lyle and Terry Britten.
