Taylor Swift Isn’t Uncomfortable With Your Feedback

Taylor Swift doesn’t think much about which of her eras you like best, or, frankly, if you don’t like any of them at all. She came to this realization a long time ago and is better off for it. Oh, and she has a Paramount+ account. Swift, at 36 years old, became the youngest-ever woman inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame on June 11 as part of a creatively robust class that included Kenny Loggins, Alanis Morissette, and Kiss’s Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley. While Swift chose not to perform at the ceremony — Sombr, whose own songwriting craft she has praised repeatedly, subbed in with his versions of “Cardigan” and “Dear John” — she instead spoke at length about the most important thing she’s accepted as one of the biggest pop-culture figures of the 21st century: a thick skin.

“It doesn’t feel uncomfortable for me to get feedback of all sorts because I know where I stand regarding the work I’ve made,” Swift said from the podium. (Well, here’s some for her then.) “As writers, we can only hope to meet people where they are in their lives. You can’t orchestrate or force the encounter.” Swift and her family moved from Pennsylvania to Nashville when she was a teenager to support her burgeoning music career. She paused to compose herself while recounting the sacrifices her parents and brother made on her behalf, simply so she had a chance to “hone my craft in the songwriting capital of the world.” Those dividends extended beyond pen and pad. “I had to be taught how to entertain a crowd, learn choreography, be less annoying, navigate the industry, and fiercely protect my own sanity,” she explained. “I had to learn all of that over time through difficult lessons and massive amounts of trial and error and chaos and calamity.”

Fast-forward from Fearless to Reputation to The Life of a Showgirl, and Swift had a recent epiphany about her empire thanks to a certain Montana man. “Allow me to make a hard pivot and pull out a quote I love from the show Yellowstone, where the father says to his son, ‘It’s the one constant in life, son, you build something worth having, somebody’s gonna try and take it,’” she recalled. “John Dutton was talking about a ranch, but I’m using this quote to refer to your self-worth, your peace of mind, and your singular vision as a creator.” Constant adoration, sure, will always feel incredible from people who worship you and claim that the Cats film was actually decent. “But you need to be ready to receive negative feedback, whether you seek it out or not,” Swift noted. “It’s no longer a shock that this is how things work, but somehow it feels like I have this conversation with a young writer every other week. If you make anything awesome, someone out there is bound to say horrible things about it or twist what you meant into something completely unrecognizable to you.” Swift only hopes that writers discover these universal truths sooner rather than later. “You can accept that feedback, skepticism, and criticism are inevitable,” she noted. “You can take what’s useful or constructive from that information and leave out what’s simply damaging to your creativity. No one should make art that appeals to everyone, everywhere, all the time.”

Swift was joined by her family and her fiancé, Travis Kelce, at the ceremony. (The couple got particularly excited and filmed themselves jamming to John Fogerty’s performance of “Fortunate Son.”) Steven Spielberg, at the personal request of Swift and just before his newest film, Disclosure Day, was released in cinemas, inducted her with pun-filled remarks; the director “asked AI how many words have been written about Taylor Swift” to help inform his speech, only to discover that she’s “such a force that the depths of her achievement defies AI.” So we’ll let Swift, a real human, put the punctuation mark on this article instead. “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 dogpiling of doubt, the criticisms of 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,” she said, “songwriting was the easiest thing I ever did.”