When Taylor Swift was 22, she wasn’t feeling 22. At least not in the way her iconic song describes.
In reality, she sat alone in a hotel room and doom-spiraled about her career trajectory.
“It sounds ridiculous, but at 22 years old, I felt completely washed up,” Swift recently told The New York Times. “I felt like maybe the only thing that made me special was that I was this, like, ‘teen phenom,’ whatever I was looked at as.”
As is her custom, Swift wrote a song about these feelings. In the chorus of “Nothing New,” she sings, “How can a person know everything at 18, and nothing at 22? And will you still want me when I’m nothing new?”
“When I was 18, I had the ‘Fearless’ album come out, and I had my first international No. 1s, and everybody was like, ‘Oh, this writing, it’s so true, it’s so honest. It feels like she deserves to be here,'” Swift explained. “And then there was this big upheaval of, ‘No, she doesn’t. No, she doesn’t. She sucks, actually.'”
“Nothing New” was originally left on the cutting-room floor. Swift later rerecorded it as a duet with Phoebe Bridgers and released it on “Red (Taylor’s Version)” in 2021. Swift is the only songwriter credited.
Swift shared these recollections with The New York Times for the paper’s list of The 30 Greatest Living American Songwriters. Swift is featured alongside legends like Stevie Wonder, Dolly Parton, and Bob Dylan, as well as contemporary stars like Mariah Carey, Kendrick Lamar, and Bad Bunny.
In a filmed interview, Swift reflected on her two-decade career — and how the whiplash of fame has informed her songwriting process.
“Somebody was like, ‘Oh, you’re 22 years old, and you’re saying, ‘Are you tired of me? If you’re not yet, are you going to get tired of me?’ Because it’s usually something that you would sing about later in life,” Swift said. “But the entertainment industry, I’ll tell you, there’s 10 years for every year you’re in it. But it’s fun.”
Swift, now 36, has released several songs about the pressures, perils, and double standards that come with a life in the public eye, especially as a female entertainer. On Swift’s newest album, 2025’s “The Life of a Showgirl,” she invokes the memory of Elizabeth Taylor to illustrate this tension — and to honor the woman who persevered through exploitation and scrutiny.
On 2024’s “The Tortured Poets Department,” the predecessor to “Showgirl,” Swift included a song named after Clara Bow, who was known as the original “It Girl.”
In the first verse, the narrator — a powerful, presumably male Hollywood executive — tells an aspiring starlet, “You look like Clara Bow in this light, remarkable,” promising to give her a bright future in the industry. In the second verse, the pattern repeats with another young woman hoping for her big break.
“That was me that sat down opposite that desk, right? I sit down at a record label, and they’re like, ‘You look like Stevie Nicks. We’ll make you the next Stevie Nicks,'” Swift told the Times. “And basically, you learn that like, you’re in this machine and they’re trying to make you into a woman that they just idealized and then discarded. The entertainment industry love-bombs women.”
In the final verse of “Clara Bow,” the cycle continues: “You look like Taylor Swift in this light, we’re loving it / You’ve got edge she never did.”
Swift previously discussed her fears about aging out of show business in her 2019 documentary “Miss Americana,” which premiered when she was 29.
“It’s a lot to process because we do exist in this society where women in entertainment are discarded in an elephant graveyard by the time they’re 35,” Swift said at the time. “Everyone’s a shiny new toy for like, two years. The female artists that I know of have reinvented themselves 20 times more than the male artists. They have to. Or else you’re out of a job.”
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