Taylor Swift – In her speech, she thanked the three characters of her quarantine album, Betty, James, and Inez, but said that “mostly, we just want to thank the fans. You guys met us in this imaginary world that we created, and we can’t tell you how honored we are, forever, by this.”
She also thanked Justin Vernon of Bon Iver, whom she said she’d actually never met, and boyfriend Joe Alwyn (!), whom she said is “the first person who I play every single song I write, and I had the best time writing songs with you in quarantine.” Congrats to real-life wood nymph Taylor Swift! Watch her full acceptance speech above.
The 63rd annual Grammy Awards combined splendor, star power and pandemic-era versatility on Sunday night to celebrate the music that emerged in a deeply challenging year, highlighting the Black Lives Matter protests and — after years of pointed criticism for past slights — the role of women in pop music.
With touring artists grounded and fans stuck at home, and the music industry pulling in billions of dollars from streaming yet criticized by artists overpay, the music world has been upended for the last year.
But the producers of the show promised a night of respect and togetherness, with a novel outdoor setting in downtown Los Angeles in which musicians faced each other while performing — and then gathered, masked and socially distant, to politely applaud each other’s acceptance speeches.
Women won all the night’s major awards. Megan Thee Stallion, the sparkplug Houston rapper who described her young ambition as to become “the rap Beyoncé,” took best new artist, and her song “Savage” — which featured Beyoncé as a guest — won for best rap performance and for best rap song.
“It’s been a hell of a year, but we made it,” Megan Thee Stallion said when accepting best new artist, while downtown traffic roared.
Billie Eilish, the 19-year-old who swept the awards last year, took record of the year for “Everything I Wanted,” and told Megan Thee Stallion: “You deserve this.”
Taylor Swift won album of the year for “Folklore,” which she made entirely in quarantine. It was her third time winning that coveted prize. (She lost each of the five other awards she was nominated for this year.)
Beyoncé, the pop deity whose every move is hyper-analyzed online, won four awards, bringing her lifetime total to 28 Grammys — more than any other woman, and equaling the total for the super-producer Quincy Jones.
Accepting the award for best R&B performance for her song “Black Parade,” which was released just as protests were breaking out last summer, Beyoncé said: “As an artist I believe it’s my job, and all of our jobs, to reflect the times, and it’s been such a difficult time.”
Even Beyoncé’s 9-year-old daughter, Blue Ivy Carter, took home a Grammy, her first: best music video for “Brown Skin Girl” (which she won with her mother and WizKid).
In an upset, the singer-songwriter known as H.E.R. won song of the year — beating Beyoncé, Eilish, Swift and Dua Lipa — for “I Can’t Breathe,” a fist-in-the-air anthem for Black Lives Matter, with lines like “Stripped of bloodlines, whipped and confined/This is the American pride.”
“We wrote this song over FaceTime,” H.E.R. said, accepting the award, “and I didn’t imagine that my fear and that my pain would turn into impact, and that it would possibly turn into change.”
