Taylor Swift - NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert

Taylor Swift - NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert Washington, D.C October 10, 2019

Wow! This is a lot of people in a tiny office! I love it

I'm Taylor, Welcome to my Tiny Desk Concert!

Wow It's great to be in DC

You guys have anything exciting going on the past few weeks?

Any possible changes in play?

Do us a favor : give a round of applause to NPR for putting this whole thing on

Tiny Desk is like one of my favorite corners of the internet...um and I always love seeing like

it's an opportunity for artists to decide a different way to showcase their music and so

and so you're kind of inundated by overwhelming opportunity and choices like I was

I just decided to take this as an opportunity to show you guys how the songs were sounded when I first wrote them

So it's just me...there's no dancers...unfortunately

Um "chuckle"

So, you know, I have this album that just came out called LOVER

Real happy you like it

It's one of those albums where I wrote everything on one instrument first, so

it's really fun to pick songs to do acoustically because they all started out that way

Um...and...There's a song that I had wanted to write conceptually for a very long time, because

Over the course of my life it occurred to me that we have a bit of a double standard issue in our society

It's something I've thought about about 700 million times a day for the last 10 years of my life

and I was always wondering, like

Can I write a song about this? Is there a concise and catchy way to write a song about this?

What angle would I take if I were to write a song about this?

And so I decided that the most fun thing to do would be to decide what my life would be like

And what people would say about my life if I did all the same things

But if I was a man

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Thanks guys

So...Um

So..Um There's a song that I wrote on the album that I knew as soon as I wrote it it was going to be the tittle track

Just....And it was like

Writing songs is strange cause it never happens exactely the same way

But sometimes it happens in a way that it feels like this weird like haunting that you can't really explain

Like you don't know where these ideas came from and you feel like you don't work at all to write it

And that's the best part - that's the best kind of song...Um

And then there most days, you show up, and the idea doesn't

And that's where craft you have to kind of know the craft of it, you have to scrounge your brain for something to write

Because you're not always going to be inspired, and that's okay...um

There's a really good Elizabeth Gilbert Ted Talk about that, it's like...one of my favorite things to cry while watching

Um, but yeah, like with this song, it was one of those weird moments where I was just like : Okay this is just

middle of the night...

I'm like in my PJs, like stumbling to the piano because I got this idea, and the song just happened really quickly

There's a line in the song that I'm really proud of...um and the line says :

With every guitar string scar on my hand I take this magnetic force of a man to be my lover

And that line is really special to me because um I've spent quite a bit of time writing breakup songs

And uh...songs about things not turning out the way you wanted them to

Or songs about what you thought would be love and it turned out to be not that at all or

You know just kind of the struggle of life...I find songwriting is really just a cathartic therapeutic thing for me

And so there are a lot of things I've written about in life that were just the harder things I had to go through so

I took that as a metaphor for like...you know the times when I was learning to play guitar and I'd like

play until my fingers bled when I was a kid And I still have the marks from that

You know all the times I'd be changing a string and it would pop and I still have scars from that

Um...but it's also a bigger metaphor for like in life, you accumulate scars, you accumulate hurt

You accumulate moments of you know learning and disappointment, and struggle and all that

And if someone's gonna take your hand, they'd better take your hand, scars and all

Um...So this is called LOVER

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Thanks guys

You guys ever have costume changes at Tiny Desk?

Um..so...over the course of the years that I've done interviews...Um...

which is I think probably 15 or 16 years now Um...

I've gotten a question over and over again that I think has has like the potential to seriously deteriorate my mental health

Um...The question is, "What will you ever do if you get happy? What will you write about?"

Will you just never be able to write a song again?

It's an interesting question

Um...and you know in the the interviews, when I would get that question as a young person

I'd kind of be like, 'Well, I started out writing songs about stuff I had no idea about

Like I started writing songs when I was 12 years old and they were usually about heartbreak"

I had no idea what I was talking about, but I had watched movies and I had read books, so I would grab inspiration from character dynamics, as you do

Um...and so I would say in the interviews, "Oh, I'd probably just do that!"

If stuff is going on in the world that not just happening to me, like maybe I could get inspiration from that

But then I'd go home and I'd be like :

What would happen if I was ever happy?

Would I not be able to do the thing that I love the most in the world? Like would that...is that? Oh my...Oh my god!

Would I not be able to write breakup songs anymore? I love breakup songs! They're so fun to write!

Um...and so then I happened to be writing this album Lover, which is a very, very happy, romantic....

Um...album, and I started, like in my life, a few of my friends were going through break ups, and we were talking