Taylor Swift Admits She Felt ‘Washed Up’ at 22, Thought She Was ‘Aging Out of the Music Industry’

Taylor Swift is opening up about a moment in her career when she thought she was “washed up.”

Back in 2021, the Grammy winner, now 36, released Red (Taylor’s Version), a rerecorded version of her hit 2012 album, Red, this time including the song “Nothing New,” which she’d previously written during the Red era in 2012. The song was recorded as a collaboration with her friend Phoebe Bridgers.

During her The Icon Sessions With Taylor Swift: A 20-Year Retrospective interview released on Monday, August 24, Swift opened up about the emotions she felt when she wrote “Nothing New.”

“When I would go back, I had these songs that were songs that I’d left on the cutting room floor, for one reason or another, and sometimes those songs resonated more with me when I rerecorded them,” she said of the process of rerecording her albums amid the dispute over her master recordings with Scooter Braun.

Swift continued, “When I rerecorded them, there’s a song that I had written when I was 22 called ‘Nothing New,’ and it ended up being a duet with Phoebe Bridgers, who is a friend of mine, and that song is about feeling like you’re aging out of the music industry.”

“I wrote it when I was 22, and I was like, ‘I’m washed up and boring and everyone’s over me.’ It’s sad and so I kind of get why I didn’t put it on Red … that’s kind of a passing thought when you’re 22. Like, that’s a sad night with a bottle of wine. But when I was like 30 and I was rerecording it, I was like, ‘Oh no, this hits. This hits.’”

Elsewhere in her career retrospective hosted by the Recording Academy’s Songwriters & Composers Wing, Swift looked back at her very first single, “Tim McGraw,” released in 2006, and how it predicted the course of her career.

“If I look back at the song ‘Tim McGraw,’ there are actually sort of hints at everything that was going to happen in the next 20 years,” Swift said.

Referring to the line, “He said the way my blue eyes shined / Put those Georgia stars to shame that night,” Swift said she had never actually been to Georgia when she wrote the lyric.

“That was not real. That had not happened. But as you are working around ‘character’ and what feels like what this character would have said,” she explained. “What paints a picture that informs a story that we just locked into because that first line describes so much for us.”

“It’s a song that jumps forward in time,” she added. “Even in jumping forward in time, it’s saying, ‘I hope you reflect back in time.’ It’s a sort of time machine song.”