Taylor Swift has said she used her music to overcome a “hate frenzy”.

The 36-year-old singer made the comments when speaking about the making of her 2017 album Reputation in an interview during her Grammy Museum Icons Session.

She said: “It was a time in my life when, for the very first time – not the last – people had really actively tried to misunderstand me, just in general, and to misunderstand what I was trying to say, and to purposely misinterpret it.

“This is when I learned when people are in a hate frenzy about a public figure, or really anyone – it could be you know your daughter in her middle school class.

“When people decide we’re all going to stand around someone and point, and mock them, you can’t respond with outward sincerity.”

She went on to say that attempts to “explain yourself earnestly or sincerely” would “just be mocked even worse”.

Swift continued: “I’m very proud of it when I look back on it (Reputation), and I just think the things that I look back on now is like when I’ve gone through something that was sort of an attempt to drive me insane.

“When you don’t allow that to happen, and you use art and music as a way to barrel-roll out of that, those are the moments I’m the most proud of.”

Elsewhere in the interview she explained she primarily made music for her fans to help them “cope with their life in the way that I did”, but added: “Putting out music you’ve made that you love so much is not the path to universal validation.”

The American star was then asked how people’s interpretation of her music influences her song writing, and she replied: “Sometimes when people are mocking me, it’s really fun to mock them back.

“Sometimes I like to just use words that they have to look up in order to talk shit about me.

“But I go through several processes and coping mechanisms that I’ve gone through over the years, and one of them is saying, ‘you chose this, you chose this every day, you could have opted out of this any day before it got unmanageably big’.

“I decided not to because I love it that much, and that’s just where it begins and where it ends, and everything that comes with this ultimately is worth it as long as I get to still make music.”

The Love Story singer went on to say that her Taylor’s Version re-recordings of her first six albums, following a dispute with retired talent manager Scooter Braun after he acquired the back catalogue when he bought Swift’s former label, felt like having to “go into the teacher and be like, the dog ate my homework”.

She explained: “The public and the media, since it hadn’t really been done before in that way, and I guess on such a big scale and so loudly and obnoxiously, the public… did a little bit side-eye me the way that a teacher would if you did say the dog had eaten your homework.

“That was an interesting place to start from, and I had to get myself from the place of being ‘everyone says this isn’t going to work, and everyone’s saying nobody’s going to want to hear my new take on the same work’.

“But actually, I got to a place where it felt like a defiant reclamation of what was always mine to begin with.”

Her master copies were later sold in a deal with Shamrock Capital, before Swift bought them back from the company in May last year.

During the session, Swift also performed a medley of I Knew It, I Knew You, August and All Too Well on the piano she used on her record-breaking Eras Tour.

Swift married Kansas City Chiefs NFL player Travis Kelce in a ceremony, officiated by actor Adam Sandler, at New York’s Madison Square Garden in July, with guests including Gigi Hadid and Bradley Cooper, Graham Norton, Ed Sheeran, Hugh Grant and Ethan Hawke.