She was Taylor Swift’s early secret weapon, who helped write some of the star’s biggest songs. Meet Liz Rose

Taylor Swift might not have become the most popular singer-songwriter on the planet today if it weren’t for Liz Rose.
This isn’t to say that Swift wouldn’t have sold more than 200 million records, garnered untold billions of streams, had 92 million monthly listeners on Spotify alone or sold out stadiums all around the world in an instant if she hadn’t met fellow songwriter Rose.
But the Dallas-born mother of two certainly played a formative role for the then-Nashville high school student, helping her write 17 songs.
“We just really hit it off,” Rose said during an August 2008 interview conducted for a newsletter published by Ole Media Management — now Anthem Entertainment — which owns Rose’s publishing share of several Swift hits that she co-wrote.
“We worked really well together. It was really easy, and we had a lot of fun and we just kept doing it.”
What’s remarkable about their partnership — which yielded such Swift country classics as “Tim McGraw,” “Teardrops on My Guitar,” “White Horse” (their first No. 1 on the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart and a Grammy winner) and “All Too Well” — is that Rose, now 67, didn’t start writing songs until she was well into her 30s and had relocated from Texas to Tennessee.
“I started as a song plugger,” recalled Rose, who pitched songs to labels for their artists to record.
“Then I had a publishing company, King Lizard Music, and then I started writing a little bit.”
Jody Williams, former president of MCA Music Publishing Nashville, heard some of Rose’s demos, bought her King Lizard Music catalogue and hired her to promote it. He then convinced her to focus on songwriting full-time.
It took her a few years to land her first placements: “Harmless Heart” for Trisha Yearwood in 2001, followed a year later by “All We Ever Find” for Tim McGraw. Gary Allan’s “Songs About Rain” was Rose’s first Top 20 co-write, in 2003, the same year she encountered Swift.
Rose met the 14-year-old singer, who had a development deal with RCA, at a writers’ round, where songwriters sit around talking about their songs and sometimes collaborate with one another. “She asked me if I wanted to write and we wrote every Tuesday at 4 p.m. after she got out of school.”
The first thing Rose noticed was that her young partner was naturally gifted.
“She’s very driven, very smart. I knew she was going to do something. She just has that in her,” Rose said.
“She walked in the room and started playing guitar and knew what she wanted to write.
“She’d start playing and singing and we just started from whatever idea she had in her head one day and whatever went on in school.”
The Tuesday sessions would last for up to 2½ hours, or “however long it took to get the thought out of her brain.”
Rose also felt that her strongest role as a Swift collaborator was as an editor, which was particularly apparent when Swift brought the song “Tim McGraw” to the table.
“She just plays and starts singing words, and I just help her put it all together,” said Rose, adding with a laugh, “I basically wrote down what she said and moved it around.”
Rose admitted that she didn’t fiddle too much with Swift’s lyrics.
“I think my biggest contribution is that I just don’t get in the way,” Rose said. “I let Taylor write Taylor songs.”
By the time Swift went into the studio, she had jumped to Big Machine Records. Still, Rose said that when she and Swift wrote, they weren’t thinking about creating hits.
“I think, ‘Let’s write a song and let it come out and let’s see what happens,’” she said. “‘Teardrops on My Guitar’ was special: just the idea and everything around it.
“We spent a lot of time figuring out what our strengths were, so we know how we work together, and it was always fun to see what she ended up cutting, because we wrote a ton of songs.”
Rose’s stature increased in 2007 when, owing to her Swift collaborations, performing rights organization SESAC named her songwriter of the year, an award Swift presented to her.
Edward Morris at Music Row magazine reported that Swift said working with Rose was “the most effortless” co-writing situation she had ever experienced, adding that her favourite thing about Rose was that she was more interested in giving credit than taking it.
Rose’s collaboration with the singer ended by the time Swift released her third album, 2010’s “Speak Now,” and had embraced a more pop esthetic, although their union enjoyed a brief resurrection when the performer introduced the 10-minute version of “All Too Well” as part of the Eras tour and it shot to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100.
Since then, Rose’s songwriting career has continued to bloom.
After founding Liz Rose Music in 2010 — which now has a stable of a dozen writers — she won the Academy of Country Music’s 2012 song of the year for the Eli Young Band’s “Crazy Girl”; formed a consortium with fellow writers Lori McKenna and Hillary Lindsey called the Love Junkies, which won a 2015 Grammy for Little Big Town’s “Girl Crush”; and was nominated for another Grammy in 2020 for her contribution to Miranda Lambert’s “It All Comes Out in the Wash.”
As well as contributing songs to albums by Lee Ann Womack, Bonnie Raitt, Blake Shelton and Maren Morris, among others, Rose released her own independent album, “Swimming Alone,” in 2016.
Last year, Rose’s legacy was cemented when she was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame. Earlier this month, she was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame.
And to think it all began when Rose agreed to work with a fledgling teen songwriter.
“My life changed because I’m on a great record, one of the biggest records of the past two years,” Rose said in 2008, referencing the multi-platinum “Taylor Swift.”
And she ended the interview with these prophetic words: “I don’t even think we’ve begun to see how major Taylor’s going to be.
“I don’t think there’s anything she can’t do.”