Liz Rose has been helping Taylor Swift write hits for several years.
But that doesn't mean Rose, now in her 50's, was able to get inside the mind of a teenage girl when the duo began working together.
"Look at those lyrics," she told Yahoo! Music. "Those are the lyrics of a 13-, 14-, 15-, 16-, 17-, 18-year-old. We certainly weren't writing 50-year-old Liz Rose songs—or 40-year-old, or however old I was then. I don't think like that! It's so funny to me that people could imagine that."
Rose's recent interview was an enlightening look at the country music industry, but more so at Swift, who took a brave chance more than a decade ago when she approached Rose as a 13-year-old.
"The reason it worked is that I didn't get in her way," Rose said. "With Taylor, it really was editing. That's never anything that she said—that's just how it was... with her, that's really what I do, and it's unlike the way I've written with anybody else before or since. A lot of it with Taylor was editing and moving this there and saying, 'Well, what if we said it like this?'"
Several young women have come to Rose over the years looking for help with their careers. But the songwriter usually tells them to develop their songs alone first. That part always came easy to Swift.
"I can remember times when I would try and throw out an idea for a new song: 'How about we write this?' And she would just go, 'Yeah, I don't think so. Go and write that with somebody else,'" she said. "Because Taylor always wanted to write her songs. And there was always so much going on in her brain, you just had to help her get it out and get it down. She always has a reason behind why she's writing something. She's lived it or felt it. She's not making it up."
Later this year, Rose plans to finish a solo album.
"My kids are going, 'Oh no! what are you doing? But it's really fun to pull my skeletons out of the closet and put 'em down on paper," she said. "I may get a bunch of the girls I've been writing songs with and figure out how to do a Liz Rose & Friends record. I don't know what I'll do with it, but it's just gonna be fun, and I'll get to embarrass my kids!"
Meanwhile, Swift is prepping a new studio album (widely expected to drop this November), and will appear on Yahoo! Live Stream Aug. 18 to provide more details.
