Getting Bi With My Life

“But I think one of my favorite things about the Nashville music scene, country music, and the storytelling where it was when I arrived there—there was almost this tradition of almost breaking the fourth wall, making the song then a part of the song, or the writing of the song becomes a part of the song. And I did that in a song called Tim McGraw, where, you know, I’m singing about kind of, this love lost, and hoping that person thinks of me. And then in the bridge it’s revealed that I wrote this song and I hope he hears it. The song Our Song, which I still love so much, it’s all about this romance, this relationship, and then in the end it says, ‘I grabbed a pen and an old napkin, and I wrote down our song. So I loved doing that. I still kind of love doing that. That kind of just like, ‘And it was me!’ My favorite end plot twist, I think, that I’ve done in songwriting is the ending of The Last Great American Dynasty. That’s my favorite one, it is just so much fun to like, to tell this story about this real woman who lived in history, and she defied the social norms, and she drove people crazy and she had a marvelous time ruining everything. And you talk about the house she lived in on the coast, and basically then in the end, you’re like, ‘You know, she moved away from Holiday House, it sat quietly on that beach, free of women with madness, their men and bad habits, and then it was bought by me.’ And you’re like—every time I get to that part, when I would sing it on tour, I just like, have to kind of like, I wanted my grin to go from here to here, but that looks crazy. So it’s like I had to like, taper down my own excitement that that hook happened.”

*skipping stones across an artificial lake the Eridians made Grace*

“On Red, there was a song that I wrote a line in a hotel room when I was 22 years old called Nothing New, where I’m, it sounds ridiculous, but at 22 years old, I felt completely washed up. I felt like maybe the only thing that made me special was that I was this like, teen phenom, whatever I was looked at as, so I wrote this song, and it includes lines like, ‘How can a person know everything at 18 and nothing at 22,’ cause when I was 18, I had the Fearless album come out, and I had my first international no 1s, and everybody was like, ‘Oh, this writing, it’s so true, it’s so honest. We feel like she deserves to be here.” And then there was this big upheaval of, ‘No, she doesn’t. No, she doesn’t. She sucks actually.’ And it was like, it really turned the tables on my perception of like, love can be so quickly handed to you and then taken away, and it’s this kind of strange thing with fame, and that was the first time I’d ever grappled with that. Somebody was like, ‘Oh, you’re 22 years old and you’re saying like, ‘Are you tired of me? If you’re not yet, are you going to get tired of me?’’ Because it’s usually something you’d sing about later in life, but the entertainment industry, I’ll tell ya, there’s 10 years for every year you’re in it! But it’s fun.”