Taylor Swift Joins the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame: “It Would Be What I Centered My Entire Life Around”

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Taylor Swift walked into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame with a bit about crickets. On Monday night (Oct. 26), at the organization’s 56th annual gala at Music City Center, Brad Paisley inducted her, and she opened by thanking him for the introduction. “I’m really surprised to see you here, actually, because we’ve been estranged since 2007,” Swift joked, Billboard reports. The grudge: Paisley once filled her tour bus with thousands of live crickets. “For months, I couldn’t sleep. Just chirp, chirp, chirp, chirp all night,” she said.

Then she got serious. Swift broke the honor into three words, Nashville, songwriters and fame, and said the first one mattered most. “I knew from the time I wrote my first song that even if it couldn’t be my career, it would be my passion,” she told the room. “It would be what I centered my entire life around.” Fame, she added, is “sort of a byproduct of my love for music.” She is the youngest artist inducted, Deseret News reports; she is 36.

Read moreTaylor Swift Asked Pixar, “Did You Guys Replace Me?” Before Writing the Toy Story 5 Song

The stories were specific. In December 2005 her mother would pick her up from Hendersonville High School and drive her to Jody Williams Music, an independent publisher in a small Craftsman-style house, where she would run upstairs to write with Liz Rose. Behind the house, in a garden shed, demo producer Nathan Chapman recorded her songs and played every instrument. “He interpreted my music so intuitively that later on I would fight for him to produce my entire first album,” she said. Her self-titled debut turned 20 on Oct. 24, two days before the induction, Billboard notes, and its first hit was “Tim McGraw.” Watch it below.

She credited the town’s writers with teaching her both the craft and the etiquette. “I think you truly learn a craft when you do it over and over and over,” she said, and she joked that she learned “how to accommodate when your co-writer has a hangover, or when they’re going to need to talk about their divorce for a really long time before we write anything.” Those writers, she said, “in a lot of ways, raised me and guided me through my formative years.” Her thesis for the night:

The only reason that I’ve been able to have that kind of dexterity in my creative process is because of the fundamentals and the foundation that I learned here in Nashville. And I never forget that for a single second.

Taylor Swift, at the gala (Oct. 26), Billboard

Lainey Wilson performed a bluegrass version of “Love Story,” which peaked at No. 4 on the Hot 100, and Paisley told Swift, “at your core, you’re a songwriter.” The class also included Lyle Lovett, Shawn Camp, Lee Thomas Miller, Bruce Channel and the late J.I. Allison. George Strait took the Career Maker Award, having recorded 264 songs written or co-written by 72 Hall of Fame members, Billboard says.

Songwriting is now part of her awards season, too. Her Toy Story 5 end-credits song is in the Best Original Song race, which we explained earlier this month.

Added to the High Grailed archive on November 10, 2026.