Taylor Swift says mother is battling brain tumor discovered during cancer treatment: 'It’s been really hard'
Taylor Swift has opened up about her mother's latest health struggles and in an interview on January 21 with Variety, the pop singer said, "while she was going through (cancer) treatment, they found a brain tumor." Andrea, Taylor Swift's mother, had already been dealing with breast cancer. She was diagnosed with cancer in 2015 and Swift later revealed in 2019 that it had returned. Swift continued: "The symptoms of what a person goes through when they have a brain tumor is nothing like what we’ve ever been through with her cancer before. So it’s just been a really hard time for us as a family.”
Swift said the discovery of the tumor occurred while her mother was going through chemotherapy after her cancer had returned for the second time. Swift, who is close with her mother, found the news especially hard. "Everyone loves their mom; everyone’s got an important mom,” the singer said. “But for me, she’s really the guiding force. Almost every decision I make, I talk to her about it first."
Swift drew from personal experience with her mother for her song 'Soon You’ll Get Better'. Her 'Lover' song, which is a collaboration with the Dixie Chicks, is a low-tempo melancholic ballad with Swift willing a loved one to recover from an illness.
Swift also brings up her father in the interview, in relation to her decision to break her silence on politics in 2018 to back a Democrat in the Tennessee Senate race. "My dad is terrified of threats against my safety and my life, and he has to see how many stalkers we deal with on a daily basis, and know that this is his kid," Swift said.
The singer, holding back her tears, wishes she spoke out against President Donald Trump earlier. She said, "I can’t change that. I need to be on the right side of history". The singer continues, "This was a situation where, from a humanity perspective, and from what my moral compass was telling me I needed to do, I knew I was right, and I really didn’t care about repercussions."
She added part of the reason why she maintained silence on the matter was due to seeing the repercussions the Dixie Chicks’ faced after Natalie Maines spoke against then-President George W. Bush. "I saw how one comment ended such a powerful reign, and it terrified me,” she said. “These days, with social media, people can be so mad about something one day and then forget what they were mad about a couple weeks later. That’s fake outrage. But what happened to the Dixie Chicks was real outrage. I registered it – that you’re always one comment away from being done being able to make music.”