Taylor Swift paid tribute to her family while being inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame.
The “I Knew You, I Knew It” singer, 36, was admitted into the prestigious hall of fame during an awards ceremony at the Marriott Marquis Hotel in New York City on Thursday, June 11.
During her 21-minute acceptance speech, Taylor acknowledged the sacrifices her parents, Scott and Andrea Swift, and brother, Austin Swift, made to help her kickstart her music career.
“It was easy to choose songwriting over everything else in my life, but it couldn’t have been easy for my parents and my brother to just 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,” she said, per Variety. “But after making obvious that this was not even remotely a temporary phase their teen daughter was going through, they uprooted their entire lives to move me to Music City. And 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. You’re the reason I’m here tonight.”
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Elsewhere during her speech, Swift, who attended Thursday’s ceremony with fiancé Travis Kelce, spoke about the impact her music has had on people.
“I’m very frequently told by people how they feel about my music,” she said. “That they never really got my music until they got their heart broken or started driving their daughter to school every day or until I made an alternative album in the pandemic called Folklore. Or that they only like the hits or that they only like the ones that weren’t hits or that they don’t like any of it at all. But 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.”
The Grammy winner added, “As writers, we can only hope to meet people where they are in their lives. But you can’t ever orchestrate or force the encounter. You just have to hope that in some exquisite happenstance you bump into them on the same path at the same time. That somehow, amidst the noise of life, a line we wrote or a melody that we crafted cuts through, and they hear it and feel something. But they get chills or feel lighter or think of someone they love. Our goal is to elicit that glint of recognition in another human being because something that felt good and true to us feels good and true to them at the same time. And in that moment, when someone blurts out, ‘I love this song,’ it was easy.”
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Swift concluded her speech by thanking the fans who have stuck by her since she released her first song, “Tim McGraw,” in 2006.
“Nothing makes me happier than when someone tells me that they used to listen to my music with their parent, and now decades later, they listen to it with their own child,” she gushed. “Or that they listen to it with their best friend or when a couple tells me that ‘Love Story’ is their song. Or where somebody does like a cute little dance to ‘The Fate of Ophelia,’ or I hear people in different countries singing ‘Opalite’ in their own accents, or someone tells me that the song ‘Enchanted’ gets their baby to stop crying. I’m humbled by the ways that fans have immortalized my songs in their own individual ways, allowing them to be the underscore of some of their real-life expeditions on this earth, the magnificent moments as important to me as the seemingly mundane.”
