Taylor's full acceptance speech at Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame: [1/2] So I am so honored to be inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame. I got the news and I was just kind of staring at the words. I was staring at Nashville. I was just like, “Wow, this is crazy.” And then I kind of zeroed in on a few words that have had a particularly intense impact on my life. The first one being “Nashville,” the second “songwriters.” And the last one, “fame.” I’d like to start with songwriters and expanding upon the impact that word has had on my life. I started writing songs when I was a little kid and I knew from the time I wrote my first song that even if it couldn’t be my career, it would be my passion. It would be what I centered my entire life around. Nashville is the place that I went to in my middle school daydreams. It was the place where all the wisdom that I wished to acquire existed in one place. All the lessons that I wished to learn existed in this magical place for me. And it ended up being all of that and more. It ended up being everything. Fame, that’s sort of a byproduct of my love for music. It’s kind of like songwriter plus Nashville equals fame. It’s why a lot of people know the words to my music, which is awesome. It’s also why there’s sort of like these daily random doses of chaos that just pop up in my life every once in a while, every couple of hours. That can be kind of weird, but I have tools in place in my mind that help me navigate that and get back to true north when life feels so bizarre. Those tools are my memories and the memories that I visit most frequently when I need to return back to some semblance of remembering what normalcy is and why I do this. I think back to when I first got to Nashville and I started writing on Music Row. I was lucky enough to get a publishing deal with Sony Publishing when I was 14 and I just hit the ground running. I started writing every single day. I learned so much. I was like a sponge and I have really curly hair and it was yellow, so I kind of looked like a sponge too. But I learned by repetition. I think you truly learn a craft when you do it over and over and over and that is what the magnificent songwriters that work in this amazing town do. There is no music community like this music community. I know. I checked all the communities. There’s no one doing it. I learned so much. I learned how to push through a creative block when you’re in the middle of a session. Are we going to tunnel under this? Are we going to burgle over it? I learned which ideas are worth fighting for, which ideas are worth letting go of and move on to the next one. I learned how to accommodate when your co-writer has a hangover or when they’re going to need to talk about their divorce for a really long time before we write anything. Because one thing that I did learn is that songwriters, although they possess the superhuman ability to understand and interpret the human condition and insane levels of empathy, they are just people too. And they are people who in a lot of ways raised me and guided me through my formative years. One of the memories I revisit a lot on good days and bad because it just makes me feel cozy is that I used to write a lot in two favorite buildings. I had two favorite places that I loved to write the most. The first one being the Sony Fire Hall because you could hear the other writers through the walls and I just kind of liked to pretend that I was in the Brill Building. And then my most favorite was a place called Jody Williams Music, an independent publishing company that was located in a little craftsman house. Let’s say the year is like 2005 in this memory. My mom would pick me up from Hendersonville High School, drive me downtown and drop me off and I’d stamper in the front of Jody Williams Music and I’d say “Hi” to Catherine who worked at the front and sometimes her boyfriend Eric would be there visiting. Things have gone great for them.