Taylor Swift was given the 2023 Innovators Award at the iHeart Radio Music Awards Monday night (March 27). The honor, presented to artists for their contribution to popular culture, hasn’t been given out since 2019.
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Swift’s Eras Tour support, Phoebe Bridgers, took the stage ahead of the “Anti-hero” singer to talk about her impact on pop music over the last decade. In the touching speech, Bridgers credited Swift as the reason she learned to be a songwriter.
“When I was little, I wanted to be a songwriter,” Bridgers said. “I had lots of big feelings, and I wanted to write songs about them. But songs were written by adults about their very adult lives. So when I started writing, I just made stuff up. And the songs sucked. I knew that, and I fantasized about the day far in the future when I’d finally have something to say—when I lived a life worth writing a song about.
“Then, one day, I was listening to country radio with my mom—my mom’s here—and Taylor came on,” she continued. “I heard a girl, not much older than me, sing a song she had written about her own life. And the song was really good. As I grew up, so did Taylor, and so did her songs. Gradually, my songs started to suck less because instead of trying to sound interesting, I just started telling the truth. Taylor has always told the truth.
“She’s written songs from exactly where she is,” she added. “Her music shifted genre in the same way life does—in the same way being 16 is totally incomparable to being 18, 22, 25, 28. I’m grateful to have grown up in a world with Taylor Swift in it, or, ‘The World: Taylor’s Version.'”
Check out a clip of the moment, below.
Bridgers is opening up for Swift on 12 Eras shows starting in May. She, along with Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker, recently shared a new Boygenius album, The Record. The album features a song called “We’re In Love,” which makes references to Swift’s re-recorded version of “This Love.”
Photo by Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for iHeartRadio
