“That’s a pap,” she says as we leave the restaurant, pointing toward an anonymous gray car that looks like the floor model in an auto dealership specializing in anonymous gray cars. Her security detail suggests that it’s probably not a paparazzo because there’s no way a paparazzo could find us at such an unglamorous, unassuming establishment. But as with seemingly every other inference she has ever made, Taylor Swift is ultimately proven right. The guy in the gray car is taking her picture. This annoys her, but just barely.
It’s August in Southern California. We crawl into the back of a massive Toyota and start driving to Swift’s West Coast residence, located in a rural enclave of Beverly Hills. The gray car trails us through Franklin Canyon. Swift whips out her phone and starts showing me images from the video shoot for “Wildest Dreams,” including a clip of a giraffe licking her face. She has more photos on her phone than any person I’ve ever met. “I wanted this video to be about the making of a 1950s movie being filmed on location in Africa,” she explains. Swift came up with the concept after reading a book by Ava Gardner and Peter Evans, The Secret Conversations. Her premise for the video is that—since social media did not exist in the ’50s—it would be impossible for actors not to fall in love if they were isolated together in Africa, since there would be no one else to talk to.
We chat a little about Ryan Adams and a little about books. Swift mentions that she wrote a non-autobiographical novel when she was 14, titled A Girl Named Girl, and that her parents still have it. I ask her what it was about, assuming she will laugh. But her memory of the plot is remarkably detailed. If she released it today, it would immediately be the best-selling YA novel in the nation. When she was about that same age, Swift’s family moved from Pennsylvania to Nashville, to jump-start her music career. I ask what she imagines might have happened if they’d never moved and if she’d never become an artist. “I would still be involved with music in my spare time,” she says. “But I would have gone to college, and I would probably be involved with a form of business where words and ideas are at the forefront. Such as marketing.” She returns to her phone and starts scrolling for an old voice memo she sent to Jack Antonoff of the band Bleachers while they were co-writing songs for 1989. Antonoff’s nickname for Swift is Dead Tooth, a reference to a minor dental mishap. Just as she tells me this, her cell phone rings. The display panel says the incoming call is from J TIMB. “Oh, my God. Justin Timberlake?” Her surprise does not seem artificial. “Can I take this?”
She takes the call. The volume on her phone is loud enough for me to intermittently hear both sides of the conversation. Swift explains that she’s driving to her house, but that she can’t actually stay there because contractors are renovating almost every room. “Have you ever seen the movie The Money Pit?” asks Timberlake. She has not, so Timberlake provides a capsule review. He has a 4-month-old baby at home and is constantly tired, yet he can’t fall sleep. He asks Swift for advice on sleeping. Swift tells the driver to pull over to the shoulder of the road, since she keeps losing reception as we drive through the canyon. The paparazzo in the gray car casually passes, having not-so-casually followed us for at least five miles.
The conversation lasts almost 15 minutes . “You’re never going to get old,” Swift assures Timberlake. “That’s scientific fact. That’s medical.” Even her sarcasm is aspirational. Eventually JT tells her the reason he’s calling is because he wants to perform the song “Mirrors” with her on the last night of her upcoming five-date stand at Staples Center. She reacts to this news the way a teenage girl in Nebraska would react if suddenly informed that a paternity test had revealed Taylor Swift was her biological sister.
When she ends the call, Swift looks at me and says, “This is so crazy. This is so crazy.” She repeats that phrase four times, each time with ascending volume.
Now, inside my skull, I am thinking one thought: This is not remotely crazy. It actually seems like the opposite of crazy. Why wouldn’t Justin Timberlake want to perform with the biggest entertainer in America, to an audience of 15,000 people who will lose their collective mind the moment he appears? I’d have been much more surprised if he’d called to turn her down. But then I remember that Swift is 25 years old, and that her entire ethos is based on experiencing how her insane life would feel if she were exactly like the type of person who’d buy a ticket to this particular concert. She has more perspective than I do. Every extension of who she is and how she works is “so crazy,” and what’s even crazier is my inability to recognize just how crazy it is.
So Taylor Swift is right again.If you don’t take Swift seriously, you don’t take contemporary music seriously. With the exceptions of Kanye West and Beyoncé Knowles, she is the most significant pop artist of the modern age. The scale of her commercial supremacy defies parallel—she’s sold 1 million albums in a week three times, during an era when most major artists are thrilled to move 500,000 albums in a year. If a record as comparatively dominant as 1989 had actually existed in the year 1989, it would have surpassed the sales of Thriller. There is no demographic she does not tap into, which is obviously rare. But what’s even more atypical is how that ubiquity is critically received. Swift gets excellent reviews, particularly from the most significant arbiters of taste. She has never gratuitously sexualized her image and seems pathologically averse to controversy. There’s simply no antecedent for this kind of career: a cross-genre, youth-oriented, critically acclaimed colossus based entirely on the intuitive songwriting merits of a single female artist. It’s as if mid-period Garth Brooks was also early Liz Phair, minus the hat and the swearing. As a phenomenon, it’s absolutely new.
And this, somewhat predictably, creates a new set of problems.
Even within the most high-minded considerations of Swift’s music, there is inevitably some analysis about her personal life. She’s an utterly credible musician who is consumed as a tabloid personality. Very often , that binary is attributed to ingrained biases against female performers. But it’s more complicated than that. Swift writes about her life so directly that the listener is forced to think about her persona in order to fully appreciate what she’s doing creatively. This is her greatest power: an ability to combine her art and her life so profoundly that both spheres become more interesting to everyone, regardless of their emotional investment in either.
Swift clearly knows this is happening. But she can’t directly admit it, because it’s the kind of thing that only works when it seems accidental. She’s careful how she describes the process, because you don’t become who she is by describing things carelessly.
Even the most serious critics inevitably discuss the more tabloid aspects of your life. Is this valid? Does the fact that you write about yourself in such a confessional style require intelligent people to look at your music through that lens?
I don’t feel there is any injustice when people expand beyond my music and speculate on who certain songs might be about. I’ve never named names, so I feel like I still have a sense of power over what people say—even if that isn’t true, and even if I don’t have any power over what people say about me. The fact that I’ve never confirmed who those songs are about makes me feel like there is still one card I’m holding. So if you’re going to look at your life and say, “I get to play sold-out football stadiums all over the world. I get to call up my favorite artists and ask them to perform with me, and most of the time they say yes. I get to be on the cover of this magazine”—this is all because I write songs about my own life. So I would feel a little strange complaining about how it’s covered.
But I’m not asking if it’s fair or unfair, or if the downside is worth the upside. I’m asking from an aesthetic perspective: Is thinking about your real life an essential part of appreciating your music? Could your music be enjoyed the same way in a vacuum, even if no one knew anything else about you?
“Shake It Off” is one of my most successful songs, and that has nothing directly, intricately, pointedly personal in it. No one really says I stay out too late. I just thought it sounded good.
Have you ever stopped yourself from writing a fictional lyric because you feared it would be incorrectly applied to your nonfictional life?
No. Some of the things I write about on a song like “Blank Space” are satire. You take your creative license and create things that are larger than life. You can write things like I get drunk on jealousy but you’ll come back each time you leave, ’cause darling I’m a nightmare dressed like a daydream. That is not my approach to relationships. But is it cool to write the narrative of a girl who’s crazy but seductive but glamorous but nuts but manipulative? That was the character I felt the media had written for me, and for a long time I felt hurt by it. I took it personally. But as time went by, I realized it was kind of hilarious.
It’s impossible for an artist to control how she is perceived. But an artist can anticipate those perceptions, which is almost as good. “A nuanced sense of humor does not translate on a general scale,” Swift says, “and I knew that going in. I knew some people would hear ‘Blank Space’ and say, See, we were right about her. And at that point, I just figure if you don’t get the joke, you don’t deserve to get the joke.”There’s a long tradition of musicians expressing a degree of disinterest in how they are metabolized by the culture. They claim to ignore their own reviews while feigning a lack of discernment about what their audience wants or expects, since these are things that cannot be manipulated. Swift is not like this. She has an extrinsic focus that informs her creative process. From her perspective, not tracking how people view your work feels stranger than the alternative.
“I went through a few years where I just never went online and never looked at blogs,” she recalls. “This was around 2013, when the only thing anyone wanted to write about me was about me and some guy. It was really damaging. You’re thinking, ‘Everybody goes on dates when they’re 22. It’s fine, right?’ Nope. Not when you’re in this situation, and everything you do is blown out of proportion and expanded upon. And all of a sudden, there’s an overriding opinion that doesn’t accurately reflect how you actually live your life. So I didn’t go online for a year and a half. I actually forgot my Instagram password. But now I check in and see what’s happening. In 2015, that stuff does matter. Because if enough people say the same thing about me, it becomes fact in the general public’s mind. So I monitor what people say about me, and if I see a theme, I know what that means. I’ve had it happen twice before. In 2010, it was She’s too young to get all these awards. Look how annoying she is when she wins. Is she even good? And then in 2013, it was She just writes songs about guys to get revenge. She’s boy-crazy. She’s a problematic person. It will probably be something else again this year.”
How you view this level of consciousness is proportional to how you feel about Swift as a public figure. There is a perpetual sense that nothing about her career is accidental and that nothing about her life is unmediated. These are not unusual thoughts to have about young mainstream stars. But what’s different with Swift is her autonomy. There is no Svengali directing her career; there is no stage mother pushing her toward the spotlight. She is in total control of her own constructed reality. If there was a machine that built humans out of positive millennial stereotypes, Swift would be its utopian creation.
“I used to watch Behind the Music every day,” she says. “When other kids were watching normal shows, I’d watch Behind the Music. And I would see these bands that were doing so well, and I’d wonder what went wrong. I thought about this a lot. And what I established in my brain was that a lack of self-awareness was always the downfall. That was always the catalyst for the loss of relevance and the loss of ambition and the loss of great art. So self-awareness has been such a huge part of what I try to achieve on a daily basis. It’s less about reputation management and strategy and vanity than it is about trying to desperately preserve self-awareness, since that seems to be the first thing to go out the door when people find success.”
The advantage of this self-focused fixation is clear. Swift is allowed to make whatever record she wants, based on the reasonable argument that she understands her specific space in the culture more deeply than anyone around her. The making of 1989 is a prime example: She claims everyone at her label tried to persuade her not to make a straightforward pop album. She recounts a litany of arguments with various label executives over every possible detail, from how much of her face would appear on the cover to how co-writer Max Martin would be credited in the liner notes.
As far as I can tell, Swift won every one of these debates.
“Even calling this record 1989 was a risk,” she says. “I had so many intense conversations where my label really tried to step in. I could tell they’d all gotten together and decided, ‘We gotta talk some sense into her. She’s had an established, astronomically successful career in country music. To shake that up would be the biggest mistake she ever makes.’ But to me, the safest thing I could do was take the biggest risk. I know how to write a song. I’m not confident about a lot of other aspects of my life, but I know how to write a song. I’d read a review of Red that said it wasn’t sonically cohesive. So that was what I wanted on 1989: an umbrella that would go over all of these songs, so that they all belonged on the same album. But then I’d go into the label office, and they were like, ‘Can we talk about putting a fiddle and a steel-guitar solo on ‘Shake It Off’ to service country radio?’ I was trying to make the most honest record I could possibly make, and they were kind of asking me to be a little disingenuous about it: ‘Let’s capitalize on both markets.’ No, let’s not. Let’s choose a lane.”Like almost all famous people, Swift has two ways of speaking. The first is the way she talks when she’s actively shaping the interview—optimistic, animated, and seemingly rehearsed . The second is the way she talks when she cares less about the way the words are presented and more about the message itself . The first way is how she talks when she’s on television; the second is unequivocal and less animatronic. But she oscillates between the two styles fluidly, because either this dissonance is less intentional than it appears or she can tell I’m considerably more interested in anything delivered in the second style.
ate in our lunch, I mention something that happened several years ago: By chance, I’d found myself having dinner with a former acquaintance of Swift’s who offhandedly described her as “calculating.” This is the only moment during our interview when Swift appears remotely flustered. She really, really hates the word calculating. She despises how it has become tethered to her iconography and believes the person I met has been the singular voice regurgitating this categorization. As she explains these things, her speech does not oscillate from the second mode.
“Am I shooting from the hip?” she asks rhetorically. “Would any of this have happened if I was? In that sense, I do think about things before they happen. But here was someone taking a positive thing—the fact that I think about things and that I care about my work—and trying to make that into an insinuation about my personal life. Highly offensive. You can be accidentally successful for three or four years. Accidents happen. But careers take hard work.”
Here we see Swift’s circuitous dilemma: Any attempt to appear less calculating scans as even more calculated. Because Swift’s professional career has unspooled with such precision, it’s assumed that her social life is no less premeditated. This even applies to casual, non-romantic relationships. Over the past three years, Swift has built a volunteer army of high-profile friends, many of whom appear in her videos and serve as special guests at her concerts. In almost any other circumstance, this would be seen as a likable trait; Leonardo DiCaprio behaved similarly in the ’90s, and everyone thought it was awesome. But it’s somehow different when the hub of the wheel is Swift. People get skeptical. Her famous friends are marginalized as acquisitions, selected to occupy specific roles, almost like members of the Justice League . Such perceptions perplex Swift, who is genuinely obsessed with these attachments. “I honestly think my lack of female friendships in high school and middle school is why my female friendships are so important now,” she says. “Because I always wanted them. It was just hard for me to have friends.”
Popular people often claim they were once unpopular, so I ask Swift for a specific example. She tells a story about middle school, when she called several of her peers on the phone and asked if they wanted to go shopping. Every girl had a different excuse for why she couldn’t go. Eventually, Swift’s mother agreed to take her to the local mall. When they arrived, Swift saw all of the girls she had called on the phone, goofing around in Victoria’s Secret. “I just remember my mom looking at me and saying, We’re going to King of Prussia Mall. Which is the big, big mall in Pennsylvania, 45 minutes away. So we left and went to the better mall. My mom let me escape from certain things that were too painful to deal with. And we talked about it the whole ride there, and we had a good time shopping.”
This incident appears to be the genesis for a verse in her 2008 song “The Best Day,” a connection she doesn’t note when she tells me the story. A cynical person could read something into this anecdote and turn it into a metaphor about capitalism or parenting or creativity or Pennsylvania. But in the framework of our conversation, it did not seem metaphoric of anything. It just seemed like a memory that might be more internally motivating than any simplistic desire for money or power.
So is it unfair to categorize Swift as calculating? Maybe, and particularly if you view that term as exclusively pejorative. But calling her guileless would be even crazier. Swift views her lyrics as the most important part of her art , so we spend some time parsing specific passages from specific songs. Here is how she dissects the conjecture over “Bad Blood,” a single universally assumed to be about Katy Perry.
You never say who your songs are about, but you concede that if enough people believe something, it essentially becomes fact. So by not saying who you’re writing about, aren’t you allowing public consensus to dictate the meaning of your work? If everyone assumes that “Bad Blood” is about a specific person, aren’t you allowing the culture to create a fact about your life?
You’re in a Rolling Stone interview, and the writer says, “Who is that song about? That sounds like a really intense moment from your life.” And you sit there, and you know you’re on good terms with your ex-boyfriend, and you don’t want him—or his family—to think you’re firing shots at him. So you say, “That was about losing a friend.” And that’s basically all you say. But then people cryptically tweet about what you meant. I never said anything that would point a finger in the specific direction of one specific person, and I can sleep at night knowing that. I knew the song would be assigned to a person, and the easiest mark was someone who I didn’t want to be labeled with this song. It was not a song about heartbreak. It was about the loss of friendship.
But nobody thinks that song is about a guy.
But they would have. So I don’t necessarily care who people think it’s about. I just needed to divert them away from the easiest target. Listen to the song. It doesn’t point to any one person or any one situation. But if you’d listened to my previous four albums, you would think this was about a guy who broke my heart. And nothing could be further from the truth. It was important to show that losing friendships can be just as damaging to a person as losing a romantic relationship.Now, there are more than a few molecules of bullshit in this response. When Swift says, “And that’s basically all you say,” she’s neglecting to mention that she also told the reporter that the disharmony stemmed from a business conflict, and that the individual in question tried to sabotage an arena tour by hiring away some of her employees. These details dramatically reduce the pool of potential candidates. Yet consider the strategy’s larger brilliance: In order to abort the possibility of a rumor she did not want, she propagated the existence of a different rumor that offered the added value of making the song more interesting.
Swift can manufacture the kind of mythology that used to happen to Carly Simon by accident.Speaking of accidents, here’s some breaking news: They happen to Taylor Swift, too. She believes the most consequential accident of her professional life was when Kanye West famously stormed the stage during her acceptance speech at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards. I’m surprised when she brings this up unprompted, because she has barely addressed the incident in five years, aside from the song “Innocent.” But fences have been mended and feelings have been felt. At this summer’s VMAs, Swift warmly presented West with the Video Vanguard trophy. She’ll probably serve as Secretary of the Interior when he becomes president.
Swift was lauded for handling West’s ’09 intrusion with grace and composure, but her personal memories of the event dwell on the bewilderment. When West first jumped onstage, Swift halfway assumed he was about to make a special presentation, honoring her for being the first country artist to ever win a VMA. She truly had no idea what was transpiring. “When the crowd started booing, I thought they were booing because they also believed I didn’t deserve the award. That’s where the hurt came from. I went backstage and cried, and then I had to stop crying and perform five minutes later. I just told myself I had to perform, and I tried to convince myself that maybe this wasn’t that big of a deal. But that was the most happenstance thing to ever happen in my career. And to now be in a place where Kanye and I respect each other—that’s one of my favorite things that has happened in my career.”
Swift analyzes her friendships so often that I eventually ask what seems like an obvious question: Does she ever feel lonely? She responds by literally talking about Friends. “I’m around people so much,” she says. “Massive amounts of people. I do a meet-and-greet every night on the tour, and it’s 150 people. Before that, it’s a radio meet-and-greet with 40 people. After the show, it’s 30 or 40 more people. So then when I go home and turn on the TV, and I’ve got Monica and Chandler and Ross and Rachel and Phoebe and Joey on a Friends marathon, I don’t feel lonely. I’ve just been onstage for two hours, talking to 60,000 people about my feelings. That’s so much social stimulation. When I get home, there is not one part of me that wishes I was around other people.”
This is understandable. Still, I note something any musician obsessed with self-awareness would undoubtedly recognize: In the retrospective context of a hypothetical Behind the Music episode, this anecdote would be framed as depressing. It would paint the portrait of a super-famous entertainer spending her day emoting to thousands of strangers, only to return home to an empty house and the one-way company of two-dimensional characters.
Does she not see the irony?
Oh, she sees it. But that doesn’t mean it’s real.
“There is such a thing as having enough,” she says in her non-TV voice. “You might think a meet-and-greet with 150 people sounds sad, because maybe you think I’m forced to do it. But you would be surprised. A meaningful conversation doesn’t mean that conversation has to last an hour. A meet-and-greet might sound weird to someone who’s never done one, but after ten years, you learn to appreciate happiness when it happens, and that happiness is rare and fleeting, and that you’re not entitled to it. You know, during the first few years of your career, the only thing anyone says to you is ‘Enjoy this. Just enjoy this.’ That’s all they ever tell you. And I finally know how to do that.”
Taylor Swift is 25. But she’s older than you.