Shadowing Practice: Học từ vựng IELTS Speaking qua bài phỏng vấn của Taylor Swift | Tự học IELTS Speaking - Learn English Speaking with YouTube

Which comes first for you as a songwriter,

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Which comes first for you as a songwriter,

the music or the lyrics?

I think for me it more comes as a general idea.

And my favorite thing about songwriting is that it's so spontaneous and unpredictable what's going to hit me first.

Whether it's going to be a general thought.

Like for example, you know,

I'll be going through something.

When I wrote the song Love Story,

that's a song I wrote sitting on my bedroom floor bedroom floor

because I liked a guy and my parents didn't want me to date him.

So I got this idea in my head,

it just popped into my head,

you were Romeo, you were throwing pebbles and my daddy said,

stay away from Juliet.

I didn't know where in the song that was going to fit

but I just started there and I built out from there.

It's crazy how the fastest songs that I write end up being my favorites.

The ones that just happen in just a surge of idea,

a surge of inspiration.

It's usually something I'm going through at the time.

It's very hard for me to come up with just some random metaphor for a situation

if I'm not going through it or haven't recently just gone through it.

But I think when I was growing up,

my mom talks in metaphor a lot.

And so I think I grew up just understanding metaphor and just kind of loving that,

how you could take something you're going through and speak about it in a different way that

applies how you're feeling to something completely different but connects it.

So I think for me it starts as an idea and a feeling and an emotion.

Yeah.

We had a lot of questions about the process from budding songwriters who submitted questions

that are big fans of yours from Buffalo and a bunch of different places.

And I mean, we were wondering,

is there one favorite part of the songwriting process that you have?

I mean, is it when you get that idea or

when you're sitting on the floor in the bedroom or when you're in the studio?

There are several moments in a song,

and I won't finish a song if I don't have these moments,

where you go, ooh, ooh,

ooh, ooh, ooh, like after you write a line.

And it's always that same feeling of like,

oh, that's exactly what I meant.

But if you're in a co-writing session,

I'm always the one who will be sitting there for a second

and then I'll say a line and if it's that moment where you're just like,

that's the one, that's the line,

I have to have about four or five of those lines in a song for me to put it on a record.

Like lines where I'm just like, yes.

So that's my favorite part is then

when the song goes into its phase of being recorded and then being put on an album.

And when you're playing it for people for the first time,

when it comes across those lines that you really feel are like,

I don't know, like zingers or like say it really well.

I love watching people's reactions if it comes across.

Like if they get those lines,

I'm like, yes, I knew it.

We'll get back to the co-writing thing in a second because there were some questions about that as well.

But here's another question.

This is from Music Maniac in Los Angeles.

You've said you're already writing for the next record.

Can you tell us anything about it?

Well, yeah.

For me, I never really switch the writing switch off.

It's always on.

Because I kind of have always felt like to make an album

that I am proud enough of to give to my fans and say,

here, allow this into your life,

it has to be two to two and a half years of writing.

and that way you know you have your best stuff

because I'm so tough on myself I drive myself insane writing records

and albums because it's like I'll write like 40 to 50 songs

and then 13 or 14 make it that's a lot of paring it down

and making sure you're getting to the best stuff yeah um

so for me it takes a while and um I've been writing ever since I stopped writing the last album.

And there's been a lot that's happened.

And I never really talk about my personal life,

but I write about it.

So that's basically what the album is about, as always.

Yeah.

The unreleased thing was something that came up a lot,

and one of the top voted questions was about,

you know, would you ever make a CD of your unreleased songs?

It's from Tay Swift Fearless in Missouri.

But, I mean, what happens to those songs that don't make it to the album?

And, you know, would you ever release some of the songs you wrote,

especially when you were younger, like 14, 15?

Well, I'm very, I'm obsessed with the latest song that I've written.

I'm very guilty of that because like my favorite thing is always the newest thing that I've written.

But lately I've become a little more self-aware because I had this song

that I wrote when I was 16 and it's called Sparks Fly.

And I played it in a few shows,

these little bar shows when,

you know, when I was playing to crowds of like 40

and 50 people and being psyched about that many people showing up.

And I played it a few times and it got on the internet

and when I was putting together the Speak Now album,

the fans just kept saying over and over again,

sparks fly, we want this to be on the record.

And so I went back and I revisited it and I kind of rewrote some things and updated it.

And when we put it out as a single,

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it's been one of the fastest rising songs we've had on the record.

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It kind of taught me a lesson about the old stuff,

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maybe possibly being good enough to put on new projects.

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Yeah.

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I'm sure there's a lot of people that would love to hear some of that stuff.

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Let's move on to some of the released songs.

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This is a question from Cookie13cupcake.

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This is in the United Kingdom.

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This is going to be a long one.

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All right.

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So out of all your released songs,

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which song took the longest to write?

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I think that the song Sparks Fly,

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the fact that it technically was started when I was 16

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and ended up on an album in sort of a different form in 2010,

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that took a while for it to turn into what it was going to be.

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So I'd say that was probably the longest developing song

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that I've ever put out because most of and especially having written this entire new record without any co-writers,

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it all happened really fast because I'm very impatient.

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Like, if I don't have a song finished,

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I'll obsess over it, I won't sleep that night,

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and I'll just edit constantly to the point where I can't focus on a conversation,

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and everyone around me is annoyed because they're like,

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clearly you're working on something, just finish it.

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So that one was a long time to kind of get where it needed to be.

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Cool.

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So let's talk about that co-writer thing for a second.

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As you mentioned, this This album was all you,

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as far as for Speak Now.

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But you do often work with co-writers.

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How do you decide if you're going to write a song with a co-writer or whether you're going to tackle it yourself?

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Well, there are a bunch of different circumstances that could bring about a co-write.

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If I'm writing for somebody else's project,

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that's always exciting for me.

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I love to put myself in somebody else's shoes and think about their style of music,

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incorporating their storyline, what they're feeling.

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It's really fun for me to do that.

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So I love, you know, writing for other people.

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And then, you know, if I'm working on an idea,

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but there's like a stopping point where I can't really figure out like where this chorus is going

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or if my hunch is right about the hook or things like that,

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if there's a definite stopping point,

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I'll bring it to a writer that I trust or a writer that I admire and just ask them what they think.

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A lot of times, co-writing,

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I write really well with people who don't even play instruments or sing

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because a lot of times my best co-writers are just really great at giving advice.

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Like, do you think this course is too long?

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Yes.

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Like, thank you.

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Yeah.

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Is there anybody you're working with right now that you could talk about?

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Yes.

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For me, since I write so much and I don't know what's going to end up on the record,

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I never want to say,

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well, wrote with this person.

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Because then what if it doesn't make it on the record?

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And then writing for some other people's projects,

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in which case I feel weird talking about it because it's like their project.

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So yes, but yeah.

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This was a popular, a lot of votes for this question.

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This is from Quadratic Formula in Michigan.

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It's appropriate for the Google.

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Wow.

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Do you sing your own songs in the shower?

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Yeah.

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Awesome.

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That's great.

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Do you have any sort of favorite place for writing songs?

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No, actually.

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I kind of have become...

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You have to adapt yourself to a million different places to write when you're always on the road because I just...

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I don't have the luxury of saying,

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well, I have to be in this certain room at this certain part of town and it has to be,

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you know, all one color tone and there has to be smart water in there.

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You know, like it's just you're never ever anywhere for more than two and a half seconds.

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So, you So I've written songs in airport bathrooms on paper towels.

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I've written songs...

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What song was on a bathroom towel at one point?

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Oh, it hasn't come out yet.

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Oh, okay.

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In the bus bunk, you'll wake up in the middle of the night

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and you'll have this idea and then so you write it and you're up at 4 a.m or...

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I get awakened by song ideas all the time.

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And it's just, it's like I wake up and I'm just like, oh, great.

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Because I know I won't forget,

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I won't remember it in the morning.

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So you have to record it.

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And then it's this whole thing where you check your phone and it's like mumbling and you don't understand.

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You thought it was great at the time.

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Yeah, actually, one of our Googler questions was about you recording songs into your cell phone.

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Is that something that you do regularly?

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Yeah, the ideas always end up in my phone because it has a great recording thing in there.

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And, you know, for me,

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it's like, you just write wherever, whenever you can.

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And that's been really fun for me,

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because sometimes I'll walk into a hotel room and I'll be like,

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I've been here, I wrote back to December here.

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Like, it's fun, because you have these memories of writing songs all over the world.

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Yeah.

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Cool.

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So I know a lot of your songs are very personal songs,

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and a lot of your fans are very interested in that stuff.

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But this one came from Michaela Kay in South Florida.

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Has any guy asked you not to write a song about him before you went on a date?

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Not at that point in the relationship.

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Because at that point, they're thinking that,

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you know, I would never have any reason to write a bad song about them.

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And then it's when, know,

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when they start to, you know,

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treat me in a way that wouldn't reflect well on them in a song,

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if I were to be honest about it.

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Oh, okay, yeah.

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I've had a guy be like,

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you're not going to write about this, are you?

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I'm like, yeah, I am.

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I think that's interesting.

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That's a point in a relationship

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that you would have to have is this is the part

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where I tell her not to write a song about me, you know?

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Well, and you'd think that they would decide that before asking me on the date,

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or before we become a couple,

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or before all this stuff happens.

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But it only occurs to him when it occurred to him that it wouldn't be a good song.

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I see.

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Do you always write about people that you know?

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Yeah, because I feel like in a song,

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I love it when a song is a story, and the story develops and my favorite stories have really beautiful characters,

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and I feel like you can most accurately describe a character if you know them.

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One of my favorite songs that I've ever put out is called 15,

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and it's about my freshman year of high school,

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and it kind of chronicles my best friend Abigail and me

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and the way that we went through our freshman year of high school and the lessons we learned.

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And that's kind of how I like to tell a story,

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from the point of view of really knowing what you're talking about and knowing where you're coming from because you were there.

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Yeah.

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Yeah.

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Shadowing Practice: Học từ vựng IELTS Speaking qua bài phỏng vấn của Taylor Swift | Tự học IELTS Speaking - Learn English Speaking with YouTube

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