Taylor Swift’s career has lasted decades, stretching from her teenage years into adulthood. The themes she covers in her songs have changed over the year. Still, she looks back fondly on the music she wrote as a teenager. While she said there were some early songs that no longer connected with who she was as a person, there were others she’d always love. She said she’d always perform one of her early songs in concert.

Taylor Swift said she’ll always play one of her songs in concerts

Swift can’t play every song she’s ever written in concerts. Still, she knows some old songs will always have a place on her set lists.

“When I do a live show, there are certain songs fans really want to hear, and I’m gonna always play those songs,” she told NPR in 2014. “There’s a song called ‘Love Story’ that I wrote when I was 17.”

Though she’d matured since writing the song, she still felt connected to it. This was due in part to how much her fans love it.

“I’m going to be playing that as long as I’m playing concerts,” she said. “And I can go back and I can connect to that song — because of the stories I’ve heard from fans saying, ‘We walked down the aisle to that song,’ or how special I feel it was when that was our first No. 1 worldwide hit.”

This wasn’t the case with all the songs she wrote in the early days of her career. She no longer felt particularly connected to her debut single, “Tim McGraw.”

“‘Tim McGraw,’ that song I don’t really connect to as much. I connect to it in the form of nostalgia, but that was a song about a first love,” she said. “I’m in a very different place in my life right now, and I think you can only hope to grow so much, emotionally, that you can’t necessarily connect to wide-eyed 15-year-old ideas of love anymore.”

Taylor Swift still had the same goals with writing songs as she did when she started out

The themes of Swift’s songs have, naturally, changed as she ages. Still, she said she always has the same goal in mind when she works on an album.

“I wrote my first album when I was 14 and 15, so now we’re going on 10 years of making albums right now,” she said. “The formula has never changed, in that I try to make an album that best represents the last two years of my life.”

She bared as much of herself as she could for her listeners.

“People have essentially gotten to read my diary for the last 10 years,” she said. “I still write personal songs, and sometimes people like to put a very irritating, negative, spin on that — as if I’m oversharing, as if it’s too much information — when this has been the way I’ve lived my life and run my career the entire time. So I do think it’s really important that I continue to give people an insight into what my life is actually like, even though it comes at a higher cost now.”

She tried not to look back on her old work with embarrassment

Even though Swift felt less connected to songs like “Tim McGraw” as she aged, she tried not to look back on her past work with any embarrassment. She felt it was more beneficial to celebrate herself at all stages of her life.

“Every part of you that you’ve ever been, every phase you’ve ever gone through, was you working it out in that moment with the information you had available to you at the time,” she told Time in 2023. “There’s a lot that I look back at like, ‘Wow, a couple years ago I might have cringed at this.’ You should celebrate who you are now, where you’re going, and where you’ve been.”