Taylor Swift was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame on Monday night.
The 36-year-old singer became the Hall of Fame’s youngest-ever inductee at a ceremony at Nashville’s Music City Center on Monday.
The Shake It Off hitmaker was introduced by country music star Brad Paisley, while Lainey Wilson performed a rendition of Swift’s hit Love Story.
During her speech, Swift joked that she has been estranged from Paisley since 2007, when he played a prank on her while she was the opening act on his tour.
“He took a tour prank too far. Filled my entire tour bus with live crickets. Thousands of them. Oh my God. For months, I couldn’t sleep. Just chirp… chirp… chirp,” she light-heartedly recalled. “But you know what? You did such an amazing job with that introduction, I think we can let bygones be bygones. Thank you. Yeah, I think we’re good now.”
Elsewhere in her speech, Swift credited the Nashville music community for giving her the foundation to “genre-hop” and work in so many different ways with lots of different people.
“The only reason that I’ve been able to have that kind of dexterity in my creative process is because of the fundamentals and the foundation that I learned here in Nashville, and I never forget that for a single second,” she said. “I tell every single person I know about what we have here, and I’m so incredibly honoured to be inducted into this sacred club, especially at this point in my life.”
The pop superstar noted that Nashville was the place where she “honed and polished” her songwriting, which she described as “this thing about myself and the thing about my life that I am the most proud of and the most passionate about”.
“There is no music community like this music community,” she added. “I know, I checked all the communities.”
Swift was inducted alongside Lyle Lovett, Shawn Camp, Lee Thomas Miller, Bruce Channel and the late J.I. Allison, while George Strait received the Career Maker Award.
The honour comes several months after she was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in June, becoming the youngest woman to do so.
