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Taylor Swift Reveals New Photos With Mother Andrea in ‘The Best Day’ Lyric Video Amid Brain Tumor Diagnosis
Mama’s girl for life. Taylor Swift debuted a brand-new lyric video for her song “The Best Day” on Friday, April 9 — the tribute track she wrote for her mother, Andrea Swift, which appeared on her debut album, Fearless.
The new lyric video, which features the rerecorded version of the song released on Fearless (Taylor’s Version), is filled with never-before-seen photos, including recent ones of herself, 31, and her mom, 63. The visual starts with childhood photos and progresses through the years before concluding with grown-up photos of the dynamic duo.
In January 2020, the singer revealed her mom was diagnosed with a brain tumor during an interview with Variety. The “Archer” artist confessed that it had been an extremely “hard time” for her family and her mother’s illness is a part of why her Lover tour was much shorter compared to her previous ones. The tumor was found while Andrea was receiving treatment for an “undisclosed type of cancer” for the second time in her life.
“While she was going through treatment, they found a brain tumor,” she explained while giving a health update on her mom. “And 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.”
Taylor only played five shows in the United States — plus some abroad — throughout 2019 and she noted it was because her mom’s future was very uncertain. “I mean, we don’t know what is going to happen,” she said. “We don’t know what treatment we’re going to choose. It just was the decision to make at the time, for right now, for what’s going on.”
Fans got a glimpse into Andrea’s health struggles during the “Delicate” singer’s documentary, Miss Americana, which premiered on Netflix the same month. Taylor explained that her mom was “going through chemo” during filming, which is “a hard enough thing for a person to go through.” There is also a nod to the matriarch on the Lover album. In the song “Soon You’ll Get Better,” Taylor sings of being “scared” in the doctor’s office and how she wants to “pretend it isn’t real.”
Taylor also asks, “Who am I supposed to talk to?” in the emotional track because Andrea has been her confidant since day one. “Everyone loves their mom; everyone’s got an important mom. But for me, she’s really the guiding force,” the Grammy winner explained to Variety. “Almost every decision I make, I talk to her about it first. So obviously, it was a really big deal to ever speak about her illness.”
