“I learned you can’t ever really tell if other people are going to like it. But oftentimes, when I love it to a certain degree, that kind of tends to match up with people. And it could be that it doesn’t match up with the way people feel until six, six years later. I loved the reputation album. I was like, ‘You guys say what you want. I know what I did. I love it. Like, go with god, sorry. You can come around if you want. It’s okay if you don’t.’ And then you know, six or seven years later, people are like, ‘Oh my god, like, …Ready For It? People slept on that song.’ When we were making that song, I wanted to headbang myself through a wall. I felt that when we wrote …Ready For It? I felt that way during, writing Getaway Car. I felt that way, I think the first time I felt like, ‘I don’t care if people hate this because I love it so much’ was when I wrote the song Love Story when I was 17, sitting in my bedroom, mad at my parents because they wouldn’t let me go on a date with a guy who was too old, so I shouldn’t have been on a date with him anyway, and this is why you need to discipline your kids, because they might write songs that go no. 1.”

“When I wrote Speak Now, I was 18 and 19, and I was coming from this big, massive moment that I had with an album called Fearless, and it had won Album of the Year at the Grammys, and it was this big—it was the first time there was this big debate over whether I deserved to be there. There are always going to be little debates, do you know what I mean? But this was like, headline news. And I was like, ‘These discussions can lead to a really bad place if I don’t do something to counteract them and to prove that, no, it wasn’t my cowriters that did all this work. And yes, I am the author of this entire body of work that I was very proud of.’ I had written so many songs alone, and I love collaboration, I love cowriters, but it’s not something that I needed. It’s when I started to trust myself as an editor, because a lot of what I’ll do in a session even now, and one of the people that Liz Rose and Jack Antonoff became people that I loved to write with for albums and albums, is because I’ll have this stream of consciousness pouring out, and Liz would sit there with a notepad. But when you take that away, I just started, you know, recording everything, right? Recording everything on a voice memo, because there will be times when I’m like, kind of in a zone, and I’m writing so fast that there’s no chance I’m going to remember what that melody was that I did two minutes ago that I thought was cool for the verse. That was a really important album for me in terms of, in terms of becoming a writer that knew I could trust my own intuition.”

Meaning I have others but nothing compares to you...

mom i threw up