Here are some photos of Taylor Swift at last night’s Songwriters Hall of Fame ceremony. She didn’t walk the carpet with her fiance Travis Kelce, but he was there. He flew into NYC from the Chiefs’ mini-training camp down in Florida. Taylor wore Givenchy by Sarah Burton, and it’s a solid, appropriate look for the event. I have no complaints here, other than her out-of-control bangs situation. Taylor has been getting it right sartorially quite often this year. Taylor attended this event because she was being inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame, which makes her the youngest person to ever be inducted.
Taylor Swift gave an epic 21-minute acceptance speech at the Songwriters Hall of Fame 2026 induction ceremony, which took place at the Marriott Marquis Hotel in New York City on Thursday night.
Before her acceptance speech, which occurred just past midnight, Sombr paid tribute to Swift with a performance of her songs “Cardigan” and “Dear John.” Then, Swift retraced her trajectory during her speech, thanking her family for making sacrifices to lay the groundwork for her career.
“It was easy to choose songwriting over everything else in my life,” said Swift. “But it couldn’t have been easy for my parents and my brother to just pick up and move our entire family from Pennsylvania to relocate to Nashville so that I could hone my craft in the songwriting capital of the world. But after making obvious that this was not even remotely a temporary phase their teen daughter was going through, they uprooted their entire lives to move me to Music City. And even though words are supposed to kind of be my thing, I will never be able to express my gratitude to you guys for doing that for me. You’re the reason I’m here tonight.”
She also thanked Steven Spielberg for introducing her speech and recalled why she chose him to induct her. “A few months ago when the Songwriters Hall of Fame asked me about my heroes and the creatives who shaped my storytelling and who I might want to present this award to me, I said Steven’s name,” said Swift. “And about an hour later to my absolute delight, I ended up on the phone with him and his legendarily effervescent wife, Kate Capshaw, who is here tonight. And he was telling me yes, absolutely he would be thrilled to be here. I was completely blown away because the man has a massive film called ‘Disclosure Day’ that’s coming out at midnight tonight and he’s still going to agree and show up to do this for me a few hours before it comes out. Wouldn’t that be impossibly hard to balance? Wouldn’t that be too difficult scheduling wise? I’m trying to give him an out.”
At which point, said Swift, “Kate said something I’ll never forget. She said, ‘Good and true things are easy.’ And if I look back at my entire 23-year career in music, the ups and downs, the industry battles, the trials and tribulations, the tears and the cheers and the dogpiling of doubt, the criticism, both fair and unfair, the complete loss of privacy, the world tours and the ego wars and the twists of fate, the absolute magical chaos of this path that I chose when I was too young to remember it ever being a choice at all, songwriting was the easiest thing I ever did.”
I’m surprised that Steven Spielberg came out for Taylor too, just because he IS so busy right now. He’s had a different energy for months now – he was everywhere during the awards season, promoting Hamnet (which he produced), and now he’s putting himself front-and-center for Disclosure Day’s promotion. As for Taylor, she also spoke about Toy Story 5 in her speech – between that and Spielberg’s appearance, I think we can safely say that the awards season has officially begun. It starts earlier and earlier every single year.
Photos courtesy of Getty Images.