Taylor Swift credited her harshest critics with helping shape her catalog.
For Swift, the criticism that dogged her career ultimately sparked some of her biggest hits.
“Criticism has been a huge fuel for me,” Swift explained during an interview with The New York Times. “It’s been a jumping off point, like a creative writing prompt or something. There are so many songs in my career that would not exist. Like ‘Blank Space’ would not exist if I hadn’t had people being like, ‘Here’s a slideshow of all her boyfriends.'”
“And then ‘Antihero’ is a song that I’m so proud of still. Like that song doesn’t exist if I don’t get criticized for every aspect of my personality that people, you know, have a problem with or whatever.“
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Swift has addressed the obsession and criticism of her dating life before. When re-releasing her “1989” album in 2023, the global pop star shared a prologue highlighting the judgment she experienced for “dating like a normal young woman.”
“The voices that had begun to shame me in new ways for dating like a normal young woman? I wanted to silence them,” she wrote. “I had become the target of s–t shaming — the intensity and relentlessness of which would be criticized and called out if it happened today.”
“The jokes about my amount of boyfriends,” Swift added. “The trivialization of my songwriting as if it were a predatory act of a boy-crazy psychopath. The media co-signing of this narrative. I had to make it stop because it was starting to really hurt.”
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With years of public scrutiny behind her, Swift said she’s turned those lessons into guidance for the next generation. The “Life of a Showgirl” singer channeled what she learned from the backlash into advice for younger artists finding their footing.
“My favorite thing when I sit down with new artists or songwriters is, I’m like, ‘Why are you reading your comments? Like, that’s too much of it. Like, you’re inundating yourself with too much criticism that doesn’t really have a focus,'” she told The New York Times.
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“But I think a little bit of it, you gotta just be like, ‘This is part of it.'”
The 36-year-old musician also told young artists to turn criticism into something they can create from.
“Don’t make this make you stop writing, or make you edit yourself, or whatever,” she said. “If it’s an interesting point to you to kind of respond to, then that’s a gift for you to be able to write something. Maybe you wouldn’t have written something that day.”
“But don’t like, God, don’t go to the notes app and post it, like write about it,” Swift encouraged. “Make art about this. Don’t respond to trolls in your comments. That’s not what we want from you. We want your art.”
