There are few modern musicians whose praise goes as high as Taylor Swift’s, especially when it comes to songwriting. The 11-time Grammy winner has made a name for herself by turning deeply descriptive and addictively revealing stories into catchy lyrics that span nine studio albums, not to mention LPs from her own discography that she has re-recorded and to which she added previously unreleased songs.
But who is one of the generation’s favorite songwriters? In a new interview with the Los Angeles Timeshe shared that Phoebe Bridgers is definitely one of them.
“I think the specificity of Phoebe’s lyrics and the vulnerability she expresses in her voice as she delivers them is what makes her music so deeply impactful and moving for me as a fan,” Swift said in the interview published Thursday (April 7). “You feel like she’s reliving a specific memory or delivering a secret message to someone and you have the privilege of reading it or hearing about it.”
It was Swift’s love of vocals and Bridgers’ songwriting prowess that led her to invite the “Motion Sickness” singer on “Nothing New,” a 10-year-old vault track repurposed for her project. re-recorded in 2021. Red (Taylor’s version). “His phrasing is very conversational, which turns his storytelling into something extremely intimate, fragile and real,” the 32-year-old continued.
Swift originally wrote “Nothing New” for her fourth album, Red, but the track was eventually removed from the final track listing. In a 2012 journal entry, she said it was “about being afraid of getting old and changing things and losing what you have.”
“[The lyrics] hit me harder than I thought,” Bridgers told the Time of the song, to which she contributed vocals. “I was much more worried about my youth and being rejected when I was 21. At that age, everyone writes about you as a prodigy.”
The “All Too Well” songwriter asked Bridgers, who is due to play Coachella on April 15 and 22, to join her on “Nothing New” with a text via Aaron Dessner’s phone – a message the rocker 27-year-old independent almost didn’t believe was real. When it turned out to be legit, she confidentially recorded her part of the song in Los Angeles while Swift did hers from Northern Ireland. In fact, the two still haven’t met in real life.
“Have won [Swift’s] the trust was special – I knew there was a reason she was thinking of me,” Bridgers added to the newspaper. “I was stressed and wanted to get it right, but she was such a great guide to me and approached everything so carefully.”
