Taylor Quick drew inspiration from Ethel Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy’s romance for one in all her dreamiest songs.
Ethel died on Thursday on the occasion of 96. The Kennedy community matriarch, who used to be widowed in 1969 when her husband “Bobby” used to be assassinated, gave up the ghost simply days then struggling a stroke.
Within the wake of Ethel’s loss of life, enthusiasts of Quick, 34, resurfaced interviews and clips during which the singer mentioned how the civil rights activist’s love tale with Bobby impressed a music off her book “Red,” titled “Starlight.”
“I get a lot of style inspiration from the 1960s, so I’ll go and look at black and white pictures, and look at [photos from the] ’50s and ’60s, and I came across this picture of these two kids dancing at a dance,” Quick instructed The Wall Street Journal in 2012. Because it occurs, the top of The Tortured Poets Area used to be relationship Ethel’s grandson, Conor Kennedy, on the future.
“It immediately made me think of, like, how much fun they must have had that night. It was back in the late ’40s. I ended up reading underneath that it was Ethel Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy.”
Quick persevered, “So I just kind of wrote that song from that place, not really knowing how they met or anything like that.”
Instructed from Ethel’s standpoint, the music strains most of the identical main points of her and RFK’s romance.
“I met Bobby on the boardwalk, summer of ’45,” Quick sings. “Picked me up, late one night at the window / We were 17 and crazy, running wild, wild.”
Quick took a little bit of creative license with the lyrics — Ethel and Robert if truth be told met within the iciness of 1945, when Ethel used to be 17 and Bobby used to be 20.
“Ooh, ooh, he’s talking crazy / Ooh, ooh, dancing with me / Ooh, ooh, we could get married / Have 10 kids and teach ’em how to dream.”
Ethel and Bobby married in 1950 and had 11 youngsters.
Quick additionally visible to WSJ that Ethel’s youngest daughter, Rory Kennedy, attended one in all her concert events prior to “Starlight” used to be exempted, and, then finding out what the music used to be about, instructed Quick she sought after to introducer her to Ethel. “I told [Rory] about the song,” Quick mentioned, “and she was like, ‘You have to meet my mom. She would love to meet you.’”
Quick did meet Ethel or even carried out “Starlight” for her. “I ended up meeting Ethel and going and playing it for her and she just loved it,” Swift said. “It was such a fun moment when she was just in love with the song and so happy about it and um, it’s just this adorable picture that to me, it just, like, brought forth all these potentials for how that night could’ve been.”
In January 2012, Rory even invited the Grammy-winner to wait the premiere of her documentary about her mom, titled “Ethel,” on the Sundance Movie Competition.
Date selling the document, Ethel said of Swift, “She is amazing. She is such good company.”
“I just think she’s terrific and such a great role model for young girls as well as for all women really,” Rory added.
“She really took the initiative to reach out to meet my mother because she had read about her and was a fan and admired her, and they’ve spent some time together. So I really just called her up and said, ‘Do you wanna come to Sundance?’”
“And she didn’t really hesitate and was so excited to come,” Rory mentioned.
Of Ethel’s dating with Quick, Rory mentioned, “I think there’s a mutual admiration society between my mother and Taylor Swift. And I just love it.”
“I think it says so much about Taylor that she has that ability to connect across generations to somebody like my mother,” Rory persevered. “It’s great.”
In a while then strolling the purple carpet at Sundance with Ethel, Quick said to Vogue about how a lot she respects her.
Greg Lovett / USA TODAY NETWORK by means of Imagn Pictures
“The only time in my life I have ever been starstruck was meeting Caroline and Ethel Kennedy,” she mentioned on the future. “I got to spend the afternoon with Ethel a couple of weeks ago. She is one of my favorites because you look back at the pictures of her and Bobby and they always look like they are having the most fun out of everybody. You know, eleven kids, all these exotic animals on their property. I’ve read a lot about them.”
Quick began relationship Ethel’s grandson, Conor, in July of that month.
When requested in August 2012 what she thought of the potential of Quick marrying into the Kennedy extended family, Ethel remarked, “We should be so lucky.”
The singer and the Kennedy scion called it quits in October 2012, and even though the connection used to be short-lived, the spell enchanment that “Starlight” forged will extreme ceaselessly.
