'It was really, really nice for her to say, when I've told her my biggest, deepest worries.'
-era girlie,” says 18-year-old Taylor Gayle Rutherfurd, better known by her musician mononym GAYLE. When she was 14, she sat in the very last row, in the very last seat, in Nashville’s Nissan Stadium to watch The Reputation Tour. The next day, she and her best friend-slash-songwriting partner Sara Davis debriefed the show together.
Until she was a full teenager, Gayle had the kind of confidence and limitless faith in herself that becomes hard to find as you get older. It didn’t matter if she lost singing competitions, or if she was singing to adults in Broadway bars during the regularly scheduled musician’s bathroom break. “I was just one of those kids that didn't know they needed to be afraid,” she says, “but I learned eventually.
She began to change the way she wrote songs; she set out with this desire for validation, for people to acknowledge the strengths of her and Sara’s songwriting, to see her as a legitimate artist. She sought peace in replying to people on social media, or posting in the hopes of getting people to hear her side of the story. Simultaneously, she was lying to herself that she didn’t care what the world thought.
“[I had to decide] if I won't take advice from you, I won't take criticism from you,” she says. She could see that people-pleasing and genuine music creation, her focus on her art, were incompatible forces. This is the thing she wanted for so long: writing songs and sharing them with people. “I can’t not give it all I got just because I'm scared of the possibility of people not liking it … My music, at the very least, is supposed to make you feel something.
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