Taylor Swift Borrowed 1 of Her Fan Favorite Ideas From The Beatles
Taylor Swift is a longtime fan of The Beatles, and took major inspiration from them when she released her debut album. While their music may have influenced her songwriting, she specifically sought to emulate them with her CD design. She shared the Beatles-inspired way she engaged with fans.
Taylor Swift said the Beatles inspired a creative choice
For years, Swift has dropped hints and Easter eggs into her music. Her fans use them, sometimes correctly and sometimes not, to predict when new music is coming. Swift said she has been doing this since her first album.
“It’s sort of a tradition that we started a very long time ago,” she said on The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon. “I think the first time that I started dropping sort of cryptic clues in my music what when I was — I was 14 and 15 putting together my first album.”
She said she got this idea from The Beatles. Some sources claimed they included backwards messages on their records. On her first album, Swift put coded messages in the lyrics on the CD jacket.
“They used to play around with secret messages in their records,” she says. “I figured you can’t play a CD backward, but with encoding stuff into the lyrics, I was able to get a similar kind of thing across.”
She explained that she also used Easter eggs to get fans to read her lyrics
Swift said that she hoped hiding Easter eggs in her music would encourage fans to really listen to her lyrics.
“I wanted to do something that incentivized fans to read the lyrics because my lyrics are what I’m most proud of out of everything that I do, every aspect of my job,” Swift said. “So I really wanted people to read the lyrics. And when I was a kid I used to read through CD booklets and just read the teeny, tiny, print and just obsess over it. And so I wanted to incentivize them.”
She shared the type of early code fans would have found on her first album.
“So in my lyrics, you know, for my first several albums, I would have all lowercase lyrics except for capital letter, capital letter, capital letter, everyone once and a while,” she said. “And if they circled the capital letter and wrote them down it spelled out a secret code, a secret passage.”
Paul McCartney gave Taylor Swift signed lyrics from a Beatles song
Swift eventually had the opportunity to meet Paul McCartney. They even had a conversation for Rolling Stone’s Musicians on Musicians series. Before they began their talk, she asked him to sign her favorite Beatles lyric: “Take these broken wings and learn to fly,” from the song “Blackbird.”
“We walk into his office for a chat,” she wrote, “and after I make a nervous request, Paul is kind enough to handwrite my favorite lyric of his and sign it.”
Swift said she would value the slip of paper for the rest of her life.
“He makes a joke about me selling it, and I laugh because it’s something I know I’ll cherish for the rest of my life,” she wrote. “That’s around the time when we start talking about music.”
