Taylor Swift opens up about her approach to songwriting, the importance of detail and emotion in her lyrics, and what she’s learned from years of collaboration in the studio. She also shares how working with Jack Antonoff and drawing inspiration from Randy Newman helped shape “I Knew It, I Knew You” for Toy Story 5.
“When I got to see an early version of Toy Story 5, I was struck by several themes going on throughout the movie, but I really was zeroing in on Jessie, the character that has been my favorite ever since she was introduced into these films. And I was seeing that she was going through sort of like a full circle moment as a character, and that if you’ve watched the Toy Story films, you know her central heartbreak comes from… her kid, Emily, and I was just kind of seeing her go through things with Bonnie that sort of healed those wounds in a way. there was a lot of like reunions of old friends and seeing people that you haven’t seen in a while and kind of forgiving past heartbreak or whatever and kind of healing that within yourself. And so I remember thinking of the line, I knew you through the days of the blades of the grass in summer. And that being sort of a line I loved because it conjures up this idea of childhood and playfulness and everything, but also they’re toys. So they’re literally looking through blades of grass because that’s how tall they are. And I also kind of like it when a word like days, like D-A-Z-E, sounds like D-A-Y-S and you can, as a listener, decide which word you assign to the meaning of that. But yeah, that was the first kind of lyric that I came up with. And it happens to be the first lyric of the song“
“When I realized that we were going to have the opportunity to write a song for Toy Story, it really hit me the weight of this, like how lucky we were to get to sort of take up what Randy Newman has created and continue that legacy. And so rather than thinking like, oh, you know what we’re going to do? We’re going to reinvent this. I just thought we’re going to take these beautiful, know, tapestries of of musical art he’s created brush stroke by brush stroke. And we’re going to try to create something that would go in that collection that you could hopefully hang next to those paintings on the wall if we were talking about paintings. I’m sorry, I go into metaphor a lot. Anyway, I’m a huge Randy Newman fan, so is Jack. Randy tends to go to really different kind of chord progressions and has very different musical sensibilities than I do. And so we tried to… we try to channel what would Randy do. That took us to a very different place musically and from a chord structure perspective. The harmonica came in because I really thought that we needed to, in this ode to Jessie, of pay homage to where she comes from, which is she’s this cowgirl doll and she comes from this Western landscape. I thought that that would be really cool to kind of signify that this is actually Jessie’s song. This is from her perspective. This is in honor of her.“
“It’s kind of been brought to my attention that I, and I agree with this, that I love to use detail in my lyricism. And that’s true, I’m very proud of that, but I also think one thing I always make sure to check myself on is does this detail signify something that informs the story? Or does it tell the listener the mindset that the narrator is in or what place they’re in in their life? Does it describe the person that is influencing and inspiring the song? Does it help further the storyline? Does it tell you more about what makes this song important, which is the human emotion behind it? So detail, just for the sake of saying descriptive words, is not really my thing. It’s like, I love detail if it informs the actual human emotion that we’re singing about. So I think that might be a lesson if somebody cared to take a lesson from what I’m doing.“
“I think one thing I’ve learned over the many years of studio sessions and writing sessions and working with people collaboratively is that your energy and attitude that you bring into the room can affect absolutely everything about the day. So really trying to be accountable to knowing that enthusiasm for the actual craft that you guys have all shown up to do, it can make or break the session. If you come in and you act like you don’t want to be there, everyone else is going to pick up on that. It doesn’t matter if you’re the artist or you’re a writer or you’re a producer or you’re an engineer, like, everyone’s going to pick up on you not wanting to be there. And it could very well… These are very intuitive people, people who, like, want to make art. It could kind of make sure that nobody makes anything that day if you’re acting like you had to be dragged in there. So I’d say, like, be enthusiastic about being able to be making art every day that you get to make art.“
