Taylor Swift Sent You a Voice Memo

It’s March 2020. The world is in lockdown. And Taylor Swift decides it’s the perfect time to shake things up. She sends a message to Aaron Dessner, of The National: “Hey, it’s Taylor. Would you ever be up for writing songs with me?”

Aaron had met Taylor before, but this seemed out of the blue.

Dessner, at the start of the pandemic, had found himself in an unexpected creative surge.

With tours on hold and the world on pause, he immersed himself in producing music from his home studio in Upstate New York, Long Pond Studios.

He was exploring fully produced songscapes that could have been for The National, Big Red Machine, or maybe something entirely new.

When Swift reached out, he was ready.

He put together a folder of tracks and sent them.

Just like that, a creative collaboration was born.

“A few hours later, she sent ‘cardigan,’ fully written in a voice memo. That’s when I realized that this was unusual—just the focus and clarity of her ideas. It was pretty astonishing,” Dessner recalled in a Pitchfork interview.

Here’s the first takeaway: none of this happened by accident.

Swift didn’t wait for inspiration to knock. She reached out and catalyzed it.

And Dessner? He didn’t know where his tracks would land, but he kept creating anyway.

Both Taylor and Dessner were, proactive, high-agency.

They ended up working well together. Really well. Dessner ended up working on 11 out of the 16 songs on folklore, and folklore won the Grammy for best album of the year.

“Nobody needs to tell Taylor Swift how to write a song—and I certainly didn’t,” Dessner told Pitchfork. “But it did feel like we were going toe-to-toe pushing each other.”

And the second takeaway is this: you don’t need fancy tools to create magic.

That initial version of “cardigan” wasn’t a studio masterpiece. It wasn’t fully produced. It was a raw, simple, voice memo.

You don’t need more gear. You don’t need more skills. You have everything you need to create right now.

So what about you? Got a phone full of voice memos? What’s stopping you from turning those ideas into something real?

The biggest artist in the world uses the same app that you have in your pocket.

Take a page out of Taylor’s book. Hit record, create ideas, and share them with a collaborator.

P.S. Want to hear that original voice memo that started it all? You can listen to it here.