When it came time to host Saturday Night Live in 2009, Taylor Swift proved why she really is the man. Just ask Seth Meyers.
During an appearance on SiriusXM’s The Howard Stern Show on Monday, Meyers revealed how blown away he was when Swift hosted the sketch comedy series at just 19 years old. Explaining how most hosts have their monologues written by SNL staff, Meyers said Swift instead wrote her own song.
In the famously dubbed “Monologue Song (La La La),” the singer riffs on her tendency to write songs about people who’ve wronged her, touching on major headlines at the time like her breakup with Joe Jonas, Taylor Lautner dating rumors, and the infamous Kanye West VMAs debacle — all of which shocked Meyers, who was a cast member at the time.
“It really speaks to what a force of nature she is and the depths of her talent,” Meyers told Stern of her monologue. “Here’s a 19-year-old who nobody is really helping out; nobody gave her a manual of how to do that show. And yet, she came to us and said, ‘I wrote a song for the opening monologue.’ So we brought Taylor into Lorne [Michael, series creator]’s office, and she sings this song which is not only a beautiful song by a beautiful singer, it’s a perfect SNL monologue. Fully formed.”
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He continued, “To this day, I’ve never had a moment like that where someone brings you a fully gift-wrapped present and it’s exactly what you need it to be. When she finished I should’ve said, ‘Now Taylor, just for you, I want to look at you and read what we had written for you just so you know how much f—ing worse it was. Not only is your song great, but you cannot even begin to imagine how s—ty what we were doing for you is compared to how great what you did for yourself is.'”
Meyers, who left the show in 2014 after 12 and a half seasons to host NBC’s Late Night with Seth Meyers, became an SNL host himself in 2018, and it gave him an entirely new appreciation for the experience.
“I worked at that show for twelve-and-a-half years and then, [about] three years after I left, I went back and hosted for the first time. And … no one tells you anything,” he lamented to Stern.
“Even I, who had worked there, couldn’t believe how it works,” he continued, explaining that hosting made him feel retroactively guilty about how hosts were treated when he worked there.
“A host sometimes would say to me, ‘I don’t understand what I’m doing in the sketch,’ and in my head what I wanted to say was ‘Just f—ing do it,'” he recalled. “Then, when I hosted, there were a few times where I realized what I was thinking was, ‘I don’t understand what I’m supposed to do in this sketch.'”
Despite knocking her monologue out of the park, Swift has only ever hosted SNL once, though she’s made a number of other appearances over the years. Most recently, she made a cameo to introduce musical guest Ice Spice in the season 49 premiere following a sketch about her romance with NFL tight end Travis Kelce.
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