Long Island, the teenager who wrote “Tim McGraw” is officially a Nashville Songwriters Hall of Famer.
Taylor Swift was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame on Monday night at the Hall’s 56th annual gala at Music City Center. At 36, she is the youngest songwriter the Hall has ever inducted.
- What
- Taylor Swift inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame
- Where
- Music City Center, Nashville
- When
- Monday, Oct. 26, 2026
- Inducted by
- Brad Paisley
- Tribute
- Lainey Wilson sang a stripped-back “Love Story”
- Also inducted
- Lyle Lovett, Lee Thomas Miller, Shawn Camp, Bruce Channel and the late J.I. Allison
- Also honored
- George Strait, Career Maker Award
Crickets, then gratitude
Paisley, her old tourmate, did the honors. Swift got him back right away. “I’m really surprised to see you here, actually, because we’ve been estranged since 2007,” she joked, per Variety. The reason: on that tour, he filled her bus with thousands of live crickets. “For months, I couldn’t sleep.” Then she let him off the hook: “I think we’re good now.”
Then she got real. Swift signed her first publishing deal at 14 and wrote every day on Music Row. “There is no music community like this music community,” she said. “I know. I checked all the communities.”
She told the room the fundamentals she learned in Nashville are why she can move between genres. “And I never forget that for a single second,” she said, per Billboard.
Hall tradition says inductees don’t sing their own songs, so Lainey Wilson did the honors with “Love Story.” Swift called her “one of the coolest people in the world” and gave Wilson’s new single, “Kinda Love It,” a plug.
Why it matters
The timing is perfect. Her self-titled debut album turned 20 on Oct. 24, two days before the ceremony. She moved to the Nashville area with her family in 2004.
It is her second songwriting hall this year. In June she became the youngest woman ever inducted into the New York-based Songwriters Hall of Fame.
From “Tim McGraw” to stadiums, she wrote her way there. Hear Taylor and the biggest hits all day, live on the WLIT.FM app. Keep it locked to WLIT.FM.
Sources: Consequence, Variety, Holler, Billboard. Photo: Raph_PH, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
