Taylor Swift thinks it’s a “bit weird” when her fans go full-on detective to try to figure out who her songs are about.
While talking with The New York Times after being honored as part of their 30 greatest living songwriters list, Swift unveiled the pitfalls of her craft and her passionate fanbase. She lamented that sometimes the focus feels too much on who a song is about and not on who wrote it.
“There’s corners of my fanbase that are going to take things to an extreme place, there’s nothing that I can do about that,” Swift said. “There’s people who are going to try to like, do detective work, figure out the details — who is that about? What is this? When it gets a little bit weird for me is when people act like it’s sort of like a paternity test. Like, ‘This song’s about this person.’ Because I’m like, ‘That dude didn’t write the song. I did.’”
She added: “But that’s part of it. You have to hold tight to your perception of your art and your relationship with it, and then you just have to kind of like, ‘There it goes, hope you like it! If you don’t now, hope you do in five years! And if you never do, then I was doing it for me anyway.’”
Swift later touched on how the constant discourse surrounding her – particularly the hate and criticism – can be a catalyst for her work. If it wasn’t for some lower reviews or comments online some of her biggest songs would not exist in quite the same way, or at all.
“There are so many songs in my career that would not exist — like ‘Blank Space’ would not exist if I hadn’t had people being like, ‘Here’s a slideshow of all her boyfriends,’” she said. “And then ‘Anti-Hero’ is a song that I’m so proud of still, like that song doesn’t exist if I don’t get criticized for every aspect of my personality that people have a problem with or whatever.”
But some criticism can go too far. For those fans of hers that dream of following in the songwriter’s footsteps, Swift advised to put up a wall against the worst of the online vitriol. If you can’t outright ignore it, at least learn to not let it affect your ability to put out new work.
“If it’s an interesting point for you to respond to, then that’s a gift for you to be able to write something — maybe you wouldn’t have written something that day,” she said. “But don’t like … God, don’t go to the Notes app and post it. Like, write about it. Make art about this. Don’t respond to like, trolls in your comments. That’s not what we want from you. We want your art.”
You can watch Swift’s commentary in the video above.
