The Taylor Swift Songwriting School

Jensen McRae, Gracie Abrams, Maisie Peters, and Phoebe Bridgers carry Swift’s Torch

Apr 26, 2025

Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or anywhere you get podcasts

In our college classrooms, we’ve witnessed a fascinating phenomenon that we can't help but analyze: Taylor Swift has transcended from chart-topping superstar to something far more interesting. In recent years, Swift has become a major influence on an entire generation of emerging songwriters. Though only 35, Swift has been crafting earworms since she was a teenager with a guitar and a dream of romance, giving her ample time to shape the musical sensibilities of artists who are now stepping into their own spotlight.

This Swift-fluence (too much?) is especially apparent in performers who've shared stages with her during the Eras Tour extravaganza. Artists like Gracie Abrams, Maisie Peters, and Phoebe Bridgers all demonstrate elements of Swift's songwriting DNA in their work. After close listening (and perhaps one too many late-night lyric analysis sessions), we've identified three distinctive Swiftian characteristics that have become nearly as recognizable as her signature red lipstick.

First up is her lyrical hyper-specificity. Swift doesn't do vague. She transports listeners into meticulously detailed scenes that play like short films in our minds. Think of the infamous red scarf from “All Too Well” or the character sketches in “You Belong With Me.” Swift fills her songs with furniture, as in tangible objects that make you feel like you're sitting on the couch in the middle of her story.

This stands in delightful contrast to mainstream pop's tendency toward vague universality. Compare Dua Lipa's cosmic "If you wanna run away with me, I know a galaxy and I can take you for a ride" with Swift's textural "To kiss in cars and downtown bars was all we needed / You drew stars around my scars, but now I'm bleeding." One gives you space abstraction; the other puts you in the backseat of a car parked outside a specific bar on a specific night.

This hyper-specificity appears in Gracie Abrams' “That's So True,” where she confesses, "I like her, she's so fun / Wait, I think I hate her, I'm not that evolved"—a very Swiftian acknowledgment of one's own contradictions. Similarly, Maisie Peters' ”There It Goes” references "Columbia Road" (echoing Swift's "Cornelia Street") and adds cinematic detail: "A black cat in the streetlights, brick lane in the brisk cold."

Next in our Swift songwriting manual comes minimal melodies with perfect prosody. Swift rarely goes for vocal acrobatics that would make Mariah proud. Instead, she opts for melodic restraint that delivers lyrics with maximum impact. ”Style” exemplifies this approach, with verses hovering around just a few notes ("Midnight / You come and pick me up / No headlights"), creating a conversational delivery where every syllable lands exactly where it should.

This approach flows through to Abrams and Peters, while even Phoebe Bridgers—despite her indie-rock credentials—maintains careful prosody in her song “Motion Sickness.” When she sings "You gave me fifteen hundred to see your hypnotherapist / I only went one time, you let it slide," each syllable fits like a perfectly tailored red cardigan.

Finally, we come to Swift's bombastic bridges, those extended emotional sections that take pop song structure to new heights. Rather than quick transitions, Swift's bridges become their own little universes, often stretching so long they function as suspension bridges, delivering the emotional beating heart of the song. For example, in “You're On Your Own, Kid,” the bridge escalates with accelerating detail and emotion: "I gave my blood, sweat, and tears for this / I hosted parties and starved my body / Like I'd be saved by a perfect kiss."

Gracie Abrams mirrors this technique in “That's So True,” where her bridge builds dramatically, transforming passive observation into active confrontation: "I'll put up a fight, taking out my earrings." Maisie Peters likewise extends her bridges into emotional crescendos before returning to familiar chorus territory.

To better understand how deeply Swift has shaped this generation of songwriters, we wanted to hear directly from someone immersed in this musical lineage. Enter Jensen McRae, a former student of Nate’s who has since blossomed into an acclaimed singer-songwriter in her own right. Jensen's thoughtful, detailed songwriting approach has garnered significant attention, including her viral hit "Immune" that began as a Phoebe Bridgers parody tweet before taking on a life of its own. With her sophomore album I Don't Know How But They Found Me! following her acclaimed debut Are You Happy Now?, Jensen represents this new wave of Swift-influenced artists who are now creating their own distinctive voices while acknowledging their musical heritage.

NATE: Jensen, tell us a little bit about your relationship to Taylor Swift and her music.

JENSEN: I have been a fan of Taylor Swift since I was in middle school. I think like many girls in my age group, the elder Gen Z, we had kind of a push and pull thing where you fall in love with Taylor Swift when you hear her, and then you feel like there's some sort of social pressure to not love Taylor Swift because everyone loves Taylor Swift. And then she gets you back because she always gets you back.

For me, she got me back with Red because the album came out when I was 15 and I was like, holy cow, this woman is not country anymore. And then 1989 came out when I was 17 and that I was like, this is the best pop album ever.

NATE: Red comes out when you're 15, that seems like a super impressionable age. If you could cast back to that time, what do you think it was about Swift's music and lyrics that resonated with you?

JENSEN: I think it was a really interesting time for me specifically in that it was also when I rediscovered literature. Taylor Swift felt like a gateway drug into the kind of music that I was probably always destined to listen to, but it felt inaccessible to me as a child. And so I listened to Taylor Swift and I was like, these lyrics are really something. And it was like, where, what else is there?

NATE: Is there a particular song on Red that you were drawn to at that time?

JENSEN: I loved "Begin Again." I think I really liked the line where she says, "You said you've never met one girl who had as many James Taylor records as you." I love that she did the direct James Taylor reference. I was like, you can say another artist's name in a song – I loved that.

And the line which says "you throw your head back laughing like a little kid." I thought that was a really brilliant image. And again, it was like me figuring out like, what do I like about songwriting and what works and what's good?

NATE: Let's drill a little deeper. How did that relationship with her music seep into your own songwriting?

JENSEN: The songs that I was writing at that age, I was trying to figure out how to do what she was doing in terms of listing off specific observations and hoping that added up to a good song. When you're 15 and you're figuring out what songwriting is, you're like, well, Taylor Swift lists all the stuff that happened on her date in "Begin Again." So if I just list stuff that happened to me or stuff that I made up, then that's a good song – 'cause it's gonna be specific and it'll be chronological and it'll tell a story.

It was the beginning of me enacting my role as an observer, which is how I still see myself now, of paying really close attention to things people say and do and the way the world looks and feels around me so that I can translate it back into a song later.

NATE: I definitely hear that in Taylor's work. I hear that in your work. Is there a lyric of yours that comes to mind that you think is particularly Swiftian?

JENSEN: My whole song "Massachusetts" is very much like that. I wrote that song partly as an exercise of like, how many personal details about this person can I cram into this? "When someone tells me they're from Massachusetts now I always ask what part / I wonder if you kept the pilgrim ashtray that's still propped up on your bar cart" – like here's a bunch of artful arrangement of details, but me just being like, what's all the stuff I remember and how can I configure that into a narrative verse?

NATE: In your essay "Taylor Swift and the Persistence of Memory," you have a line that describes women as the keepers of memory, the caretakers, like that responsibility often falls on them. And in Taylor's music you point out the importance of memory. Does that apply to your work as well?

JENSEN: I think definitely. I'm a journaler, first of all, have been since I was 18, and my journals are a huge source of archival material in my writing. Something that I've thought about a lot in the journaling process is that it has become sort of socially feminized. But that's how it always goes. Like something is seen as high art when it's men and then as soon as women start to do it, people are like, oh, that's dumb. In the same way that once women get access to something, it becomes therefore a feminine activity and therefore less worthy.

NATE: Let's go back to "Begin Again" for a sec, because I love that you shouted out the James Taylor reference. There's a song where you do that with Taylor Swift actually, and that's "Immune." First of all, this song has such an interesting backstory. Can you tell us the genesis of "Immune"?

JENSEN: So it was January 2021 and it was the height of lockdown and I had an idea for a tweet: "In 2023, Phoebe Bridgers is gonna write a song about hooking up in the car while waiting to get vaccinated at Dodger Stadium, and it's gonna make me cry."

I sat for 20 minutes and I was like, what would Phoebe Bridgers do? I wrote a verse, filmed myself singing it, posted it on Twitter, went to sleep, and then the next day it just started to get traction. Eventually, Phoebe saw it. She reposted it and followed me and we messaged. So I finished the song that night and 10 days later it came out.

NATE: And then there's this line, "Radio is static through the Taylor song."

JENSEN: This song is so fictional. Most of my songs are very autobiographical. I have to stress this song is very fictional. None of the events in the song happened.

People ask me about that lyric a lot and they're like, "Are you talking about Taylor Swift or James Taylor?" And I was like, dealer's choice. The next part of the line is, "God, you hate top 40 shit, but as the sports preempted it, your mouth in my ear, you hummed along." So the implication is it's probably Taylor Swift, could be James Taylor too.

I really wanted to have that. I thought it was fun. Like I'm doing a Phoebe Bridgers parody and I'm name checking Taylor Swift. That to me felt like I was checking a lot of boxes.

NATE: Jensen, I want to hear your thoughts on what Taylor Swift means, not just to you, but more collectively to your generation of songwriters.

JENSEN: One of my favorite things about Taylor Swift is the sweaty effort that goes into Taylor Swift. I think there's so much pressure on artists and any public-facing person to be effortless, especially women. The whole point is you're supposed to be an effortless beauty and effortless talent. You're not supposed to want anything that much, and it's just supposed to have fallen into your lap.

And Taylor Swift from the beginning has been this transparent try-hard. And I think that there's something very refreshing about that. Like she's not trying to come off as effortless in any way. It's like she is laboring intensely to do everything and to be the best.

As a try-hard, as an incurable try-hard, that to me is a huge relief. I think anyone who ever has put in a lot of effort into something sees themselves in Taylor Swift and it's like, "Oh yeah, that's a good thing. It's good that I am putting myself into this to this degree."

The real impact of Swift's influence on this generation of songwriters is only beginning to unfold. As Jensen aptly put it in our full interview, “Taylor Swift is a genre, she's no longer a genre artist, she is the genre.” Swift’s influence isn't about mere imitation, but rather about empowering artists to tell detailed, personal stories through carefully crafted songs. From our college classrooms to concert stages, young artists have absorbed Swift's lesson that their specific experiences, when rendered with precision and care, can resonate far beyond their private journals. It turns out that the secret ingredient isn't vague emotional platitudes, but rather the red scarf in the drawer, the night on Columbia Road, and yes, even the pilgrim ashtray on the bar cart.