Taylor Swift's relationship with her oldest songs may have changed over the years, but there's one song from her teenage years that will forever remain a staple of her live sets.
The 34-year-old singer told how the tracks in her back catalog dated back nearly 20 years, and while some of her earliest releases do not represent who she is now, she still very much resonates with the 2008 hit, "Love Story."
"There's a song called 'Love Story' that I wrote when I was 17," Swift said in a 2014 interview with NPR. "When I do a live show, there are certain songs fans really want to hear, and I'm gonna always play those songs."
Fans Keep 'Love Story' Alive
Swift can credit her loyal fans for always keeping the song so close to her heart. She said the stories that people have told her over the years have extended their meaning.
"I'm going to be playing that as long as I'm playing concerts," she said. "And I can go back and I can connect to that song — because of the stories I've heard from fans saying, 'We walked down the aisle to that song,' or how special I feel it was when that was our first No. 1 worldwide hit."
Though "Love Story" has aged well in Swift's eyes, some of her other early songs haven't necessarily held the same appeal for her. In fact, she now says she cannot even relate to the music that started her career at 16, "Tim McGraw."
"'Tim McGraw,' that song I don't really connect to as much. I connect to it in the form of nostalgia, but that was a song about a first love," the award-winning singer-songwriter confessed. "I'm in a very different place in my life right now, and I think you can only hope to grow so much, emotionally, that you can't necessarily connect to wide-eyed 15-year-old ideas of love anymore."
Still Writing From the Heart
While Swift's songwriting has not changed since her debut, she did admit that she grew up in front of a camera.
"I wrote my first album when I was 14 and 15, so now we're going on 10 years of making albums right now."
"The formula has never changed, in that I try to make an album that best represents the last two years of my life."
However, Swift noted that having this high degree of candor comes with a price, and she never deviated from being up-front with her fans.
"People have essentially gotten to read my diary for the last 10 years."
"I still write personal songs, and sometimes people like to put a very irritating, negative spin on that — as if I'm oversharing, as if it's too much information — when this has been the way I've lived my life and run my career the entire time."
No Regrets About Early Work
Talking to TIME magazine in 2023, Swift explained that she tries her hardest not to cringe at her early material. She is embracing her journey instead.
"Every part of you that you've ever been, every phase you've ever gone through, was you working it out in that moment with the information you had available to you at the time," she said. "There's a lot that I look back at like, 'Wow, a couple years ago I might have cringed at this.' You should celebrate who you are now, where you're going, and where you've been."
Originally published on Music Times
