Taylor Swift bursts into her mom’s Nashville kitchen, smiling, looking remarkably like Taylor Swift. (That red-lip, classic thing? Check.) “I need someone to help dye my hair pink,” she says, and moments later, her ends match her sparkly nail polish, sneakers, and the stripes on her button-down. It’s all in keeping with the pastel aesthetic of her new album, Lover; black-leather combat-Taylor from her previous album cycle has handed back the phone. Around the black-granite kitchen island, all is calm and normal, as Swift’s mom, dad, and younger brother pass through. Her mom’s two dogs, one very small, one very large, pounce upon visitors with slurping glee. It could be any 29-year-old’s weekend visit with her parents, if not for the madness looming a few feet down the hall.
In an airy terrace, 113 giddy, weepy, shaky, still-in-disbelief fans are waiting for the start of one of Swift’s secret sessions, sacred rituals in Swift-dom. She’s about to play them her seventh album, as-yet unreleased on this Sunday afternoon in early August, and offer copious commentary. Also, she made cookies. Just before the session, Swift sits down in her mom’s study (where she “operates the Google,” per her daughter) to chat for a few minutes. The black-walled room is decorated with black-and-white classic-rock photos, including shots of Bruce Springsteen and, unsurprisingly, James Taylor; there are also more recent shots of Swift posing with Kris Kristofferson and playing with Def Leppard, her mom’s favorite band.
In a corner is an acoustic guitar Swift played as a teenager. She almost certainly wrote some well-known songs on it, but can’t recall which ones. “It would be kind of weird to finish a song and be like, ‘And this moment, I shall remember,’'” she says, laughing. “‘This guitar hath been anointed with my sacred tuneage!'”
The secret session itself is, as the name suggests, deeply off-the-record; it can be confirmed that she drank some white wine, since her glass pops up in some Instagram pictures. She stays until 5 a.m., chatting and taking photos with every one of the fans. Five hours later, we continue our talk at length in Swift’s Nashville condo, in almost exactly the same spot where we did one of our interviews for her 2012 Rolling Stone cover story. She’s hardly changed its whimsical decor in the past seven years (one of the few additions is a pool table replacing the couch where we sat last time), so it’s an old-Taylor time capsule. There’s still a huge bunny made of moss in one corner, and a human-size birdcage in the living room, though the view from the latter is now of generic new condo buildings instead of just distant green hills. Swift is barefoot now, in pale-blue jeans and a blue button-down tied at the waist; her hair is pulled back, her makeup minimal.
How to sum up the past three years of Taylor Swift? In July 2016, after Swift expressed discontent with Kanye West’s “Famous,” Kim Kardashian did her best to destroy her, unleashing clandestine recordings of a phone conversation between Swift and West. In the piecemeal audio, Swift can be heard agreeing to the line “…me and Taylor might still have sex.” We don’t hear her learning about the next lyric, the one she says bothered her — “I made that bitch famous” — and as she’ll explain, there’s more to her side of the story. The backlash was, well, swift, and overwhelming. It still hasn’t altogether subsided. Later that year, Swift chose not to make an endorsement in the 2016 election, which definitely didn’t help. In the face of it all, she made Reputation — fierce, witty, almost-industrial pop offset by love songs of crystalline beauty — and had a wildly successful stadium tour. Somewhere in there, she met her current boyfriend, Joe Alwyn, and judging by certain songs on Lover, the relationship is serious indeed.
Lover is Swift’s most adult album, a rebalancing of sound and persona that opens doors to the next decade of her career; it’s also a welcome return to the sonic diversity of 2012’s Red, with tracks ranging from the St. Vincent-assisted über-bop “Cruel Summer” to the unbearably poignant country-fied “Soon You’ll Get Better” (with the Dixie Chicks) and the “Shake It Off”-worthy pep of “Paper Rings.”
She wants to talk about the music, of course, but she is also ready to explain the past three years of her life, in depth, for the first time. The conversation is often not a light one. She’s built up more armor in the past few years, but still has the opposite of a poker face — you can see every micro-emotion wash over her as she ponders a question, her nose wrinkling in semi-ironic offense at the term “old-school pop stars,” her preposterously blue eyes glistening as she turns to darker subjects. In her worst moments, she says, “You feel like you’re being completely pulled into a riptide. So what are you going to do? Splash a lot? Or hold your breath and hope you somehow resurface? And that’s what I did. And it took three years. Sitting here doing an interview — the fact that we’ve done an interview before is the only reason I’m not in a full body sweat.”
When we talked seven years ago, everything was going so well for you, and you were very worried that something would go wrong.
Yeah, I kind of knew it would. I felt like I was walking along the sidewalk, knowing eventually the pavement was going to crumble and I was gonna fall through. You can’t keep winning and have people like it. People love “new” so much — they raise you up the flagpole, and you’re waving at the top of the flagpole for a while. And then they’re like, “Wait, this new flag is what we actually love.” They decide something you’re doing is incorrect, that you’re not standing for what you should stand for. You’re a bad example. Then if you keep making music and you survive, and you keep connecting with people, eventually they raise you a little bit up the flagpole again, and then they take you back down, and back up again. And it happens to women more than it happens to men in music.
It also happened to you a few times on a smaller scale, didn’t it?
I’ve had several upheavals in my career. When I was 18, they were like, “She doesn’t really write those songs.” So my third album I wrote by myself as a reaction to that. Then they decided I was a serial dater — a boy-crazy man-eater — when I was 22. And so I didn’t date anyone for, like, two years. And then they decided in 2016 that absolutely everything about me was wrong. If I did something good, it was for the wrong reasons. If I did something brave, I didn’t do it correctly. If I stood up for myself, I was throwing a tantrum. And so I found myself in this endless mockery echo chamber. It’s just like — I have a brother who’s two and a half years younger, and we spent the first half of our lives trying to kill each other and the second half as best friends. You know that game kids play? I’d be like, “Mom, can I have some water?” And Austin would be like, “Mom, can I have some water?” And I’m like, “He’s copying me.” And he’d be like, “He’s copying me.” Always in a really obnoxious voice that sounds all twisted. That’s what it felt like in 2016. So I decided to just say nothing. It wasn’t really a decision. It was completely involuntary.
But you also had good things happen in your life at the same time — that’s part of Reputation.
The moments of my true story on that album are songs like “Delicate,” “New Year’s Day,” “Call It What You Want,” “Dress.” The one-two punch, bait-and-switch of Reputation is that it was actually a love story. It was a love story in amongst chaos. All the weaponized sort of metallic battle anthems were what was going on outside. That was the battle raging on that I could see from the windows, and then there was what was happening inside my world — my newly quiet, cozy world that was happening on my own terms for the first time. . . . It’s weird, because in some of the worst times of my career, and reputation, dare I say, I had some of the most beautiful times — in my quiet life that I chose to have. And I had some of the most incredible memories with the friends I now knew cared about me, even if everyone hated me. The bad stuff was really significant and damaging. But the good stuff will endure. The good lessons — you realize that you can’t just show your life to people.
In an airy terrace, 113 giddy, weepy, shaky, still-in-disbelief fans are waiting for the start of one of Swift’s secret sessions, sacred rituals in Swift-dom. She’s about to play them her seventh album, as-yet unreleased on this Sunday afternoon in early August, and offer copious commentary. Also, she made cookies. Just before the session, Swift sits down in her mom’s study (where she “operates the Google,” per her daughter) to chat for a few minutes. The black-walled room is decorated with black-and-white classic-rock photos, including shots of Bruce Springsteen and, unsurprisingly, James Taylor; there are also more recent shots of Swift posing with Kris Kristofferson and playing with Def Leppard, her mom’s favorite band.
In a corner is an acoustic guitar Swift played as a teenager. She almost certainly wrote some well-known songs on it, but can’t recall which ones. “It would be kind of weird to finish a song and be like, ‘And this moment, I shall remember,’'” she says, laughing. “‘This guitar hath been anointed with my sacred tuneage!'”
The secret session itself is, as the name suggests, deeply off-the-record; it can be confirmed that she drank some white wine, since her glass pops up in some Instagram pictures. She stays until 5 a.m., chatting and taking photos with every one of the fans. Five hours later, we continue our talk at length in Swift’s Nashville condo, in almost exactly the same spot where we did one of our interviews for her 2012 Rolling Stone cover story. She’s hardly changed its whimsical decor in the past seven years (one of the few additions is a pool table replacing the couch where we sat last time), so it’s an old-Taylor time capsule. There’s still a huge bunny made of moss in one corner, and a human-size birdcage in the living room, though the view from the latter is now of generic new condo buildings instead of just distant green hills. Swift is barefoot now, in pale-blue jeans and a blue button-down tied at the waist; her hair is pulled back, her makeup minimal.
How to sum up the past three years of Taylor Swift? In July 2016, after Swift expressed discontent with Kanye West’s “Famous,” Kim Kardashian did her best to destroy her, unleashing clandestine recordings of a phone conversation between Swift and West. In the piecemeal audio, Swift can be heard agreeing to the line “…me and Taylor might still have sex.” We don’t hear her learning about the next lyric, the one she says bothered her — “I made that bitch famous” — and as she’ll explain, there’s more to her side of the story. The backlash was, well, swift, and overwhelming. It still hasn’t altogether subsided. Later that year, Swift chose not to make an endorsement in the 2016 election, which definitely didn’t help. In the face of it all, she made Reputation — fierce, witty, almost-industrial pop offset by love songs of crystalline beauty — and had a wildly successful stadium tour. Somewhere in there, she met her current boyfriend, Joe Alwyn, and judging by certain songs on Lover, the relationship is serious indeed.
Lover is Swift’s most adult album, a rebalancing of sound and persona that opens doors to the next decade of her career; it’s also a welcome return to the sonic diversity of 2012’s Red, with tracks ranging from the St. Vincent-assisted über-bop “Cruel Summer” to the unbearably poignant country-fied “Soon You’ll Get Better” (with the Dixie Chicks) and the “Shake It Off”-worthy pep of “Paper Rings.”
She wants to talk about the music, of course, but she is also ready to explain the past three years of her life, in depth, for the first time. The conversation is often not a light one. She’s built up more armor in the past few years, but still has the opposite of a poker face — you can see every micro-emotion wash over her as she ponders a question, her nose wrinkling in semi-ironic offense at the term “old-school pop stars,” her preposterously blue eyes glistening as she turns to darker subjects. In her worst moments, she says, “You feel like you’re being completely pulled into a riptide. So what are you going to do? Splash a lot? Or hold your breath and hope you somehow resurface? And that’s what I did. And it took three years. Sitting here doing an interview — the fact that we’ve done an interview before is the only reason I’m not in a full body sweat.”
When we talked seven years ago, everything was going so well for you, and you were very worried that something would go wrong.
Yeah, I kind of knew it would. I felt like I was walking along the sidewalk, knowing eventually the pavement was going to crumble and I was gonna fall through. You can’t keep winning and have people like it. People love “new” so much — they raise you up the flagpole, and you’re waving at the top of the flagpole for a while. And then they’re like, “Wait, this new flag is what we actually love.” They decide something you’re doing is incorrect, that you’re not standing for what you should stand for. You’re a bad example. Then if you keep making music and you survive, and you keep connecting with people, eventually they raise you a little bit up the flagpole again, and then they take you back down, and back up again. And it happens to women more than it happens to men in music.
It also happened to you a few times on a smaller scale, didn’t it?
I’ve had several upheavals in my career. When I was 18, they were like, “She doesn’t really write those songs.” So my third album I wrote by myself as a reaction to that. Then they decided I was a serial dater — a boy-crazy man-eater — when I was 22. And so I didn’t date anyone for, like, two years. And then they decided in 2016 that absolutely everything about me was wrong. If I did something good, it was for the wrong reasons. If I did something brave, I didn’t do it correctly. If I stood up for myself, I was throwing a tantrum. And so I found myself in this endless mockery echo chamber. It’s just like — I have a brother who’s two and a half years younger, and we spent the first half of our lives trying to kill each other and the second half as best friends. You know that game kids play? I’d be like, “Mom, can I have some water?” And Austin would be like, “Mom, can I have some water?” And I’m like, “He’s copying me.” And he’d be like, “He’s copying me.” Always in a really obnoxious voice that sounds all twisted. That’s what it felt like in 2016. So I decided to just say nothing. It wasn’t really a decision. It was completely involuntary.
But you also had good things happen in your life at the same time — that’s part of Reputation.
The moments of my true story on that album are songs like “Delicate,” “New Year’s Day,” “Call It What You Want,” “Dress.” The one-two punch, bait-and-switch of Reputation is that it was actually a love story. It was a love story in amongst chaos. All the weaponized sort of metallic battle anthems were what was going on outside. That was the battle raging on that I could see from the windows, and then there was what was happening inside my world — my newly quiet, cozy world that was happening on my own terms for the first time. . . . It’s weird, because in some of the worst times of my career, and reputation, dare I say, I had some of the most beautiful times — in my quiet life that I chose to have. And I had some of the most incredible memories with the friends I now knew cared about me, even if everyone hated me. The bad stuff was really significant and damaging. But the good stuff will endure. The good lessons — you realize that you can’t just show your life to people.
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