Taylor Swift Talks Music, Writing and Time Travel

Taylor Swift performing in Chicago in 2017. Photo by RMV/REX/Shutterstock (9699860f)

Taylor Swift has penned an essay about her music and what inspires her. In the essay, which was published in full in Elle, she talks about everything from pop culture to songs that take her back to the start.

She begins by explaining the writing she loves: “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.”

She continues: “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.”

Writing and music are both art forms which allow people to connect with earlier memories. For Swift, this is the power that music has.

She writes: “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 traveling in time. To this day, when I hear “Cowboy Take Me Away” by the Dixie Chicks, I instantly recall the feeling of being twelve years old, sitting in a little wood paneled 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,” she recalls.