Taylor Swift Shares her Songwriting Techniques for 5 Minutes Straight

Took the money in the bag and I stole the keys. That was the last time you ever saw me. Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! These things is not like the others. Like a rainbow with all of the colors. Baby don't worry that you'll never find another like me. I have a bit of a habit in choosing something that is a phrase that people often say in conversation. And I thought of like that kind of triplet of notes being like, why are you mad? And like, you need to calm down. So that kind of rhythmic cadence. A hook is often talked about in songwriting. It can be one of the most powerful parts of a song. A lot of the time, if somebody only knows a little bit of a song, it's the hook. All of a sudden there was this moment where I thought of the whole chorus. And it was over the chords that I had just told him are not chorus chords. The chorus of Shake It Off just came out in like kind of one fell swoop. And I want it to be the song where like if it's played at a wedding and there's this one girl who hasn't danced all night at the reception, all her friends come over to her and they're like, you have to dance. Come on, you have to dance on this one. That's what I wanted. A lot of like, right? Like a hook is shake it off, shake it off. Or maybe now we got bad blood. I'm not thinking about all those people singing the words to the music. I'm not thinking about it. If it'll get played on the radio when I'm writing a song, all I'm thinking about is the person that I'm writing it about and what they're going to think when they hear it. And to me, that's just always been my process. It's like, I just keep it very one-on-one, very personal between me and whatever muse has come into my life and inspired it. I know people who will write a verse for one song and decide to just put it on another song or like, I like this chorus, but I like it with this pre-chorus from this song. And I'm like, I've never done that once. I kind of have to capitalize on the excitement of me getting that idea and see it all the way through or else I'll leave it behind. And I'll just assume it wasn't good enough. I think as a songwriter, there is that urge to connect. There is that urge to say like, this is how I feel sometimes and then have fans say, oh my God, like I feel that way sometimes too. And I think a documentary, if you are open enough, you can connect with people. I write songs not just to put them on albums, but I write songs to help understand life a little bit more. Life makes a little more sense to me when I can take these complex emotions and tricky situations and things that come at you in life and process them and say them in a song. Writing just kind of happens to me, like no matter where I am, four in the morning or in the middle of a conversation, I'll just get an idea and I'll have to record it into my cell phone so that I don't forget. So onto the phone, is that how you do it? Yeah, I record it onto the phone and then I come back to it later and see if I want to expand it into a whole song or if it's just stupid and I thought I had a good idea but I didn't, then I just delete it. Because that's the thing, do you go, do you think, I mean recording into your phone so you might sing something like a tune or do you just have a lyric come into your head? It's either. You know, it's really unexpected because it's always different. It could be like a fragment of a verse with like a little bit of a melody or it could be like a background vocal. It's always a different part of the song so it keeps me on my toes. The game was big. The ref got tricked. The wrong ones think they're right. You were outnumbered this time.