#ICYMI: Taylor Swift & Ryan Adams Go One On One On Songwriting

In case you missed it, Taylor Swift did a really fun interview with GQ and it’s new distinguished journalist, Ryan Adams. Adams conducted a layered interview about songwriting to compliment his recent track-by-track covering of her 1989 album. Swift used the chat to also compliment Adams for interpreting her work in a completely new way.

“You know when actors say a line, they say a sentence, but they say it with different emphasis on different words and they completely change it? That’s what you did with my album,” Swift tells Adams of his 1989 cover. “When you take a song like ‘All You Had to Do Was Stay,’ my version of it is [hair flip] ‘All you had to do was stay. Sorry about it. I don’t miss you, but now you’re back.’ Yours is like, ‘All you had to do was stay. You broke my heart. That’s all you had to do.’”

Swift continues discussing the use of “cool observations” as the inspiration of new material.

“When I’m prewriting, which is what I’m always doing like right now; I’m not actively making an album,” she says. “But if I get an idea that I feel like is a cool observation and it’s a cool lyric thing, I type it into this endless notepad on my phone.”

Watch the full video below. Cheers!