Taylor Swift took aim Scooter Braun and Scott Borchetta during her highly-anticipated Artist of the Decade performance amid their highly-publicized feud before revealing to the audience that she has had the ‘hardest’ year ever.
The 29-year-old hitmaker began her performance at the American Music Awards held at the Microsoft Theater on Sunday wearing a white button-down dress shirt with the titles of all her older albums on it including 1989 and Fearless.
She sang her female empowering hit – The Man – before shedding the top to symbolically hit back at the record executives as they own her old catalog of music despite her writing all of it.
The song plays with the perception of men and women in society as she previously explained to Vogue: ‘If I had made all the same choices, all the same mistakes, all the same accomplishments, how would it read?’
Taylor has been known to always have an eye for the details as she turned her back toward the crowd and camera to show ‘Fearless’ over her shoulders before ditching the garment to unveil her glittering gold look.
It truly was Taylor’s night, picking up a grand total of six awards including the top honor of Artist of the Year which lead her to eclipse Michael Jackson with 29 wins at the annual event for most of all-time. She had walked into the event winning 23.
She shed a little bit of light on the challenging year she’s had as she said: ‘I really don’t have anything articulate to say. Just the fact that the last year of my life has had some of the most amazing times, and also some of just the hardest things I’ve gone through in my life and not a lot of them are things that haven’t been public.’
Swift was likely alluding to her mother’s battle with cancer. Her mom Andrea Gardner Swift was seen several times throughout the event with tears in her eyes as she supported her talented daughter.
Taylor continued: ‘This industry is really weird where like sometimes people who do what we do feel like, as I’m sure some of you feel like this too with your lives, like you feel like your stock is either up or down and people either like you or they don’t or you’re feeling badaout yourself.’
‘I don’t know what I’m talking about other than the fact that this was just like this year for me has been a lot,’ she added. ‘It’s been a lot of good, it’s been a lot of really complicated, and so on behalf of my family and me — thank you so much for being there and for caring.’
Her second to last song in her medley was mega-hit Shake It Off as she was joined by Halsey and Camila Cabello whom both have been very vocal in support of Swift.
