was she worth this mess?

“Songwriting is something that, it’s a very intimate, tiny little thing, for me. I have a lot of things I like to do. I like to bake, I like to make art, I like to paint, I like to sew, I like to write songs. And I try to keep it as like, dear to me as those other things I just named. I have to know that like, there’s certain things we have as a tradition between me and my fans. They love for an emotional song to be track 5—there’s like special things like that. But at the same time, there’s sort of so many of them now, which is great, but there’s corners of my fanbase who are gonna take things to a really extreme place. There’s nothing I can do about that. There’s people who are gonna 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 that person,’ because I’m like [sighs], ‘That dude didn’t write the song. I did,’ 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 [blows] ‘There it goes! Hope you like it! If you don’t now, hope you do in five years!’ And if you never do, I was doing it for me anyway.”

“You ask about her brilliance/I can only say ~-If only I had — written it …/For me, this song will always live ~/In my heart/You’re on your own kid —You always have been … […] P.S. Yes, this is the song that reconnected Taylor and I. The title of the song is something Christine would have said to me after she passed away — and I felt it came through Taylor. It helped me a lot to let her go ~ And brought me a new friend. …”

“Songwriting is something that, it’s a very intimate, tiny little thing, for me. I have a lot of things I like to do. I like to bake, I like to make art, I like to paint, I like to sew, I like to write songs. And I try to keep it as like, dear to me as those other things I just named. I have to know that like, there’s certain things we have as a tradition between me and my fans. They love for an emotional song to be track 5—there’s like special things like that. But at the same time, there’s sort of so many of them now, which is great, but there’s corners of my fanbase who are gonna take things to a really extreme place. There’s nothing I can do about that. There’s people who are gonna 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 that person,’ because I’m like [sighs], ‘That dude didn’t write the song. I did,’ 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 [blows] ‘There it goes! Hope you like it! If you don’t now, hope you do in five years!’ And if you never do, I was doing it for me anyway.”