Twenty years after she arrived on Music Row as a teenager with curly hair and a notebook full of songs, Taylor Swift has officially joined the songwriters who taught her the craft. On Monday night, October 26, Swift was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame at the organization’s 56th annual gala at Nashville’s Music City Center.

The moment came just two days after her self-titled debut album turned 20, and outlets including Rolling Stone reported that she became the youngest member ever inducted. Here are the highlights, based on reporting from Billboard and Variety.

Brad Paisley did the honors, and Swift got her revenge

Country star Brad Paisley, who took a young Swift on tour in the late 2000s, inducted her. Swift opened her speech with a joke that brought the room to laughter.

“I’m really surprised to see you here, actually, because we’ve been estranged since 2007,” she said, according to Billboard. She explained that Paisley had once filled her tour bus with thousands of live crickets. “For months, I couldn’t sleep. Just chirp, chirp, chirp, chirp all night,” she recalled, before deciding his introduction had been good enough to let “bygones be bygones.”

Nashville, songwriters and fame

Swift built her speech around three words in the honor’s name. Songwriting, she said, was always the center of her life: “I knew from the time I wrote my first song that even if it couldn’t be my career, it would be my passion.”

Fame, in her telling, came last. “Fame, you know, that’s sort of a byproduct of my love for music,” she said. “It’s kind of like songwriter plus Nashville equals fame.” When the “daily random doses of chaos” of celebrity get strange, she said, she thinks back to signing a publishing deal at 14 and writing every day.

“I was like a sponge,” she joked. “And I had really curly hair and it was yellow, so I kind of looked like a sponge too.”

A trip back to Music Row

The most detailed part of the speech revisited December 2005. Swift described her mother picking her up from Hendersonville High School and driving her to Jody Williams Music, a small publisher housed in a Craftsman-style home.

Upstairs, in a red-painted room, she wrote with Liz Rose. “I’d be like, ‘Liz, this happened in school today,'” Swift recalled. “And she’d get her notebook, and we’d just write so fast.” In a garden shed out back, producer Nathan Chapman recorded her demos and played every instrument. Swift said she later fought for him to produce her entire first album: “It was our first album, both of us.”

She also credited Nashville’s writers with teaching her the unglamorous side of collaboration, joking about co-writers with hangovers or ones who “need to talk about their divorce for a really long time before we write anything.”

“There is no music community like this music community,” she said. “I know, I checked all the communities.”

Who else was honored

Swift was not the only inductee. According to Billboard, the class also included:

  • Lyle Lovett
  • Shawn Camp
  • Lee Thomas Miller
  • Bruce Channel
  • The late J.I. Allison

Lainey Wilson performed a bluegrass version of “Love Story” in Swift’s honor, and George Strait received the Career Maker Award.

Why it matters

Swift’s genre-hopping career has taken her from country radio to stadium pop and back to stripped-down folk. In her speech, she gave Nashville credit for all of it. “The only reason that I’ve been able to have that kind of dexterity in my creative process is because of the fundamentals and the foundation that I learned here in Nashville,” she said.

For a hall of fame that celebrates the people behind the songs, rather than just the voices singing them, inducting one of the most commercially successful songwriters of her generation at such a young age is a statement in itself.

The bottom line

Taylor Swift is now a Nashville Songwriters Hall of Famer, honored in the city where she learned to write. She called it “one of those amazing Nashville moments I’m going to revisit on a rainy day.” And Brad Paisley, it seems, has finally been forgiven for the crickets.

Image: Nashville skyline 2009 by Kaldari via Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain Mark 1.0