Taylor Swift Makes No Apologies for "Welcome to New York"
Taylor Swift, kisser of Karlie Kloss (maybe) and New York City Welcome Ambassador (definitely), recently addressed criticism of her song "Welcome to New York" in an interview with Billboard (She's not sorry!).
"You have been criticized for the tone of the 1989 song 'Welcome to New York,'" Billboard begins. "Has it made you think any differently, hearing people say that this is a difficult time to afford to live in the city?"
Surprisingly, Taylor Swift doesn't regret not choosing a bleaker and more realistically crushing tone for her three-minute pop song created for the New York City tourism board:
Absolutely. But when you write a song, you're writing about a momentary emotion. If you can capture that and turn it into three-and-half minutes that feel like that emotion, that's all you're trying to do as a songwriter. To take a song and try to apply it to every situation everyone is going through — economically, politically, in an entire metropolitan area — is asking a little much of a piece of a music.
Oh well. Maybe Taylor Swift will tackle poverty on her next album!
