Image in the original: Rosa Rafael (@rosarafael)
Last week, I wrote about Jay-Z.
About the history he carries into every room he enters. About the decision — repeated, album after album — to make what he didn’t choose the engine of his work.
The same New York Times feature that sent me to Jay-Z also listed Taylor Swift. I almost scrolled past her.
Not because I don’t respect the work — I do. In fact a fan, myself.
But Taylor Swift is so thoroughly discussed, so permanently in the cultural foreground, that I assumed I already knew what she would say.
I assumed the interview would confirm what I thought I knew.
Then I watched the whole interview.
And I stopped at a sentence I didn’t expect.
The Taylor Swift Interview
(https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/28/magazine/taylor-swift-songwriting-process-interview.html)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvcMFMTLSNU
Candle ash on the cuff of the shirt
Taylor Swift was talking about being seventeen.
Not about success, not about the industry, not about critics. About what it felt like to be seventeen and longing for something just out of reach.
She said this:
“You notice candle ash on the cuff of the shirt and the button — it’s everything that makes the mythology of those intense feelings that you have.”
Candle ash on the cuff of the shirt. One detail. Specific enough to be almost unbearably true.
This is the quality of attention she is describing — the way, at that age, before the defenses build, before you learn to manage your own reactions, the world lands on you with its full weight.
You can’t understand why you spend all day thinking about someone. You just do. And you notice everything. The ash. The button. The exact way the light was falling.
Taylor Swift has spent her entire career trying to keep that quality of attention alive.
“Without being,” she added, “a completely unhinged adult.”
I understood this immediately — and painfully. Because I think most writers know exactly the window she is describing. And most of us spend our adult lives slowly losing access to it. Learning to summarize instead of notice. Learning to name the feeling instead of find its ash and its button.
She has refused to do that. For over two decades, across twelve studio albums, she has kept insisting on the specific detail over the general feeling. That is not instinct.
That is discipline.
Don’t post it. Make art about it.
But there was something else in the interview that stopped me harder.
Taylor Swift was asked about criticism. About the years of mockery, the slideshow of her boyfriends, the narratives built to diminish her. About what it does to a person to be that relentlessly discussed and dissected.
She said this:
“Criticism has been a huge fuel for me. There are so many songs in my career that would not exist — ‘Blank Space’ would not exist if I hadn’t had people being like, here’s a slideshow of all her boyfriends.”
She took the mockery, sharpened it, handed it back as a No. 1 single. The people who built the narrative became the raw material for the song that demolished it.
And then she said something that I think is as close to a creative manifesto as anything I’ve heard:
“Don’t go to the notes app and post it. Write about it. Make art about this.”
Not as advice. As a description of how she actually works. As if any other response to criticism would simply be a waste of material.
Most people receive criticism as an attack. Something to defend against, absorb, or be wounded by. Taylor Swift receives it as a prompt. Raw data. The beginning of something.
That is not merely technique. It is a way of standing before the world. It is a fundamental orientation toward the world — a decision, made somewhere early and held onto fiercely, that nothing that happens to you is wasted. That everything is material. That the wound is not the end of the story. It is the story.
The line that feels too true
Near the end of the interview, she talked about vulnerability.
About the moment when you write something so honest that your first instinct is to take it back.
She described writing the line “I’ve never been a natural. All I do is try, try, try” — and the feeling that followed. The sense of exposure. The question she asked herself:
Do you actually want to say this?
And then she said:
“That always overrides my discomfort if a line feels too true. Because I don’t really think that there’s anything that’s too true.”
I sat with that for a long time.
I know this instinct. The instinct to make a sentence safer just before it becomes alive.
Taylor is describing the opposite.
She is saying: the moment you feel the urge to pull back is exactly the moment to push forward. The discomfort is the signal, not the warning.
“I don’t really think that there’s anything that’s too true.”
That sentence is either the most liberating or the most terrifying thing a writer can believe. Possibly both.
The mirrorball
And then came the image that tied everything together.
Taylor Swift described what it means to make art in public. To be known. To be discussed. To have strangers project their own feelings — their joy, their bitterness, their longing, their grief — onto you, endlessly, whether you invited it or not.
“A public person who makes art is a mirrorball.”
Whatever people feel about themselves will be projected onto how they perceive you. The mirrorball doesn’t absorb it. It doesn’t fight it. It spins, and scatters the light back in fragments across every surface of the room.
“That’s part of why I’ve been able to keep my wits about me through all this — because I know that.”
A mirror reflects one thing, directly. A star shines outward from a fixed point. But a mirrorball is neither — it receives light from every direction and gives it back in pieces, endlessly rotating, never holding any single beam for long.
It is a way of being seen without being consumed. And crucially, it only works because it keeps moving.
Stop spinning, and it’s just a disco ball hanging in an empty room.
Jay-Z carries his history into the room. He takes on what he didn’t choose and makes it the engine of his work.
Taylor Swift spins.
She doesn’t absorb what lands on her. She doesn’t fight it. She knows it is happening, names it clearly, and turns it into a song. The criticism becomes a lyric. The narrative becomes a hook. The wound becomes the material.
Two completely different orientations. Both, in their own way, untranslatable.
What I take from this
I write in public. Which means people bring themselves to what I make. They project. They misread. They use my words as mirrors for their own experience, sometimes in ways I never intended.
For a long time I thought the goal was to write clearly enough that this wouldn’t happen. To be precise enough that the meaning would arrive intact.
Reading Taylor Swift, I’m no longer sure that’s right.
Maybe the point is not to prevent the projection. Maybe the point is to write something true enough, and sturdy enough, to hold it. Something that can spin in the light without breaking.
And when the criticism comes — and it comes — not to reach for the notes app. Not to explain, not to defend.
Notice the ash.
Keep spinning.
Write. ■
First published on Substack on May 20, 2026 (JST). Archived here as part of the Fabio Caipirinha permanent archive (published on this site: Oct 15, 2026). Images from the original are omitted here pending rights clearance. Original: https://fabiocaipirinha.substack.com/p/taylor-swifts-the-mirrorball
Cover image: A mirrorball scattering points of light (CC BY 4.0, Wikimedia Commons — source)
