ITāS A SUNDAY AFTERNOON in Tribeca, and Iām in Taylor Swiftās loft, inside a former printing house that she has restored and fortified into a sanctuary of brick, velvet, and mahogany. The space is warm and cozy and vaguely literaryālater, when we pass through her bedroom en route to her garden, 10 percent of my brain will believe her wardrobe might open up to Narnia. Barefoot in a wine-colored floral top and matching flowy pants, Swift is typing passwords into a laptop to show me the video for āYou Need to Calm Down,ā eight days before she unleashes it on the world.
I have a sliver of an idea what to expect. A few weeks earlier, I spent a day at the video shoot, in a dusty field-slash-junkyard north of Los Angeles. Swift had made it a sort of Big Gay Candy Mountain trailer park, a Technicolor happy place. The cast and crew wore heart-shaped sunglassesāliving, breathing lovey-eyes emojiāand a mailbox warned, LOVE LETTERS ONLY.
Swift and a stream of costars filmed six scenes over about a dozen hours. The singer-songwriter Hayley Kiyoko, known to her fans as āLesbian Jesus,ā shot arrows at a bullās-eye. The YouTube comedian-chef Hannah Hart danced alongside Dexter Mayfield, the plus-size male model and self-described ābig boy in heels.ā The Olympic figure skater Adam Rippon served up icy red snow cones. Swift and her close friend Todrick Hall, of Kinky Boots and RuPaulās Drag Race, sipped tea with the cast of Queer Eye.The mood was joyous and laid-back. But by the end of the day, I wasnāt sure what the vignettes would add up to. There were shoot days and cameos I wouldnāt observe. For security reasons, the song was never played aloud. (The cast wore ear buds.) Even the hero shot, in which Swift and Hall sauntered arm in arm through the dreamscape at golden hour, was filmed in near-total silence.
For weeks afterward, I tried to sleuth out a theory. I started casually. There was a ā5ā on the bullās-eye, so I did a quick search to figure out what that number might mean. Immediately I was in over my head.Swift has a thing for symbols. I knew she had been embedding secret messages in liner notes and deploying metaphors as refrains since her self-titled debut in 2006ālong before her megafame made her into a symbol of pop supremacy. But I hadnāt understood how coded and byzantine her body of work has become; I hadnāt learned, as Swiftās fans have, to see hidden meanings everywhere. For instance: In the 2017 video for āLook What You Made Me Do,ā a headstone in a graveyard scene reads NILS SJOBERG, the pseudonym Swift used as her writing credit on Rihannaās hit āThis Is What You Came For,ā a Swedish-sounding nod to that countryās pop wizards.
After an excessive amount of ad hoc scholarshipāa friend joked that I could have learned Mandarin in the time I spent trying to unpack Swiftās oeuvreāI was no closer to a theory. Pop music has become so layered and meta, but the Taylor Swift Universe stands apart. Apprehending it is like grasping quantum physics.My first indication of what her new album, Lover, would be about came just after midnight on June 1, the beginning of Pride Month, when Swift introduced a petition in support of the federal Equality Act. This legislation would amend the Civil Rights Act to outlaw discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation. (It has passed the House, but prospects in Mitch McConnellās Senate are unclear.) Swift also posted a letter to Senator Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee, asking him to vote yes. The request, on her personal letterhead (born in 1989. LOVES CATS.), denounced President Trump for not supporting the Equality Act. āI personally reject the presidentās stance,ā Swift wrote.
Back in the kitchen, Swift hits play. āThe first verse is about trolls and cancel culture,ā she says. āThe second verse is about homophobes and the people picketing outside our concerts. The third verse is about successful women being pitted against each other.ā.The video is, for erudite Swifties, a rich text. I had followed enough clues to correctly guess some of the other cameosāEllen DeGeneres, RuPaul, Katy Perry. I felt the satisfaction of a gamer who successfully levels upāachievement unlocked!The videoās final frame sends viewers to Swiftās change.org petition in support of the Equality Act, which has acquired more than 400,000 signaturesāincluding those of Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren, Beto OāRourke, and Kirsten Gillibrandāor four times the number required to elicit an official response from the White House.
āMAYBE A YEAR OR TWO AGO, Todrick and I are in the car, and he asked me, What would you do if your son was gay?ā
We are upstairs in Swiftās secret garden, comfortably ensconced in a human-scale basket that is sort of shaped like a cocoon. Swift has brought up an ornate charcuterie board and is happily slathering triple-cream Brie onto sea-salt crackers. āThe fact that he had to ask me . . . shocked me and made me realize that I had not made my position clear enough or loud enough,ā she says. āIf my son was gay, heād be gay. I donāt understand the question.ā.I have pressed Swift on this topic, and her answers have been direct, not performative or scripted. I do sense that she enjoys talking to me about as much as sheād enjoy a root canalābut sheās unfailingly polite, and when we turn to music, her face will light up and she will add little melodic phrases to her speech, clearly her preferred language.āIf he was thinking that, I canāt imagine what my fans in the LGBTQ community might be thinking,ā she goes on. āIt was kind of devastating to realize that I hadnāt been publicly clear about that.ā
I understand why she was surprised; she has been sending pro-LGBTQ signals since at least 2011. Many have been subtle, but none insignificantāespecially for a young country star coming out of Nashville.
In the video for her single āMeanā (from 2010ās Speak Now), we see a boy in a school locker room wearing a lavender sweater and bow tie, surrounded by football players. In āWelcome to New York,ā the first track on 1989, she sings, āAnd you can want who you want. Boys and boys and girls and girls.ā Two years later, she donated to a fund for the newly created Stonewall National Monument and presented Ruby Rose with a GLAAD Media Award. Every night of last yearās Reputation tour, she dedicated the song āDressā to Loie Fuller, the openly gay pioneer of modern dance and theatrical lighting who captured the imagination of fin-de-sieĢcle Paris.Swift, who has been criticized for keeping her politics to herself, first took an explicit stance a month before the 2018 midterms. On Instagram, she endorsed Democrats for the Tennessee Legislature and called out the Republican running for Senate, Marsha Blackburn. āShe believes businesses have a right to refuse service to gay couples,ā Swift wrote. āShe also believes they should not have the right to marry. These are not MY Tennessee values.ā
Swift says the post was partly to help young fans understand that if they wanted to vote, they had to register. To tell them, as she puts it, āHey, just so you know, you canāt just roll up.ā Some 65,000 new voters registered in the first 24 hours after her post, according to Vote.org.
Trump came to Blackburnās defense the following day. āSheās a tremendous woman,ā he told reporters. āIām sure Taylor Swift doesnāt know anything about her. Letās say I like Taylorās music about 25 percent less now, OK?ā.In April, spurred by a raft of anti-LGBTQ bills in Tennessee, Swift donated $113,000 to the Tennessee Equality Project, which advocates for LGBTQ rights. āHorrendous,ā she says of the legislation. āThey donāt call it āSlate of Hateā for nothing.ā Swift especially liked that the Tennessee Equality Project had organized a petition of faith leaders in opposition. āI loved how smart it was to come at it from a religious perspective.ā
Meanwhile, the āCalm Downā video provoked a Colorado pastor to call Swift āa sinner in desperate need of a saviorā and warn that āGod will cut her down.ā It also revived heated debate within LGBTQ communities about the politics of allyship and corporatization of Pride. Some critics argued Swiftās pro-LGBTQ imagery and lyrics were overdue and out of the blueāa reaction the new Swift scholar in me found bewildering. Had they not been paying attention?.Nor did it strike me as out of character for Swift to leverage her power for a cause. She pulled her catalog from Spotify in 2014 over questions of artist compensation. She stared down Apple in 2015, when the company said it would not pay artists during the launch of its music service. (Apple reversed itself immediately.) As a condition of her record deal with Universal Music Group last year, the company promised that it would distribute proceeds from any sale of its Spotify shares to all of its artists. And this summer, Swift furiously called out Scott Borchetta, founder of Big Machine Label Group, for selling her master recordings to the music manager Scooter Braun. (When I ask Swift if she tried to get her masters from Big Machine, her whole body slumps with a palpable heaviness. āIt was either investing in my past or my and other artistsā future, and I chose the future,ā she says of the deal she struck with Universal.)
Swiftās blunt testimony during her 2017 sexual-assault case against a radio DJāmonths before the #MeToo reckoning blew openāfelt deeply political to me and, I imagine, many other women. Swift accused the DJ, David Mueller, of groping her under her skirt at a photo session in 2013. Her camp reported the incident to his employer, who fired him. Mueller denied the allegation, sued Swift for $3 million, and his case was thrown out. Swift countersued for a symbolic $1 and won.In a Colorado courtroom, Swift described the incident: āHe stayed latched onto my bare ass cheekā as photos were being snapped. Asked why photos of the front of her skirt didnāt show this, she said, āBecause my ass is located at the back of my body.ā Asked if she felt bad about the DJās losing his job, she said, āIām not going to let you or your client make me feel in any way that this is my fault. Here we are years later, and Iām being blamed for the unfortunate events of his life that are the product of his decisionsānot mine.ā
When Time included Swift on the cover of its āSilence Breakersā issue that year, the magazine asked how she felt during the testimony. āI was angry,ā she said. āIn that moment, I decided to forgo any courtroom formalities and just answer the questions the way it happened...Iām told it was the most amount of times the word ass has ever been said in Colorado Federal Court.ā
Mueller has since paid Swift the dollarāwith a Sacagawea coin. āHe was trolling me, implying that I was self-righteous and hell-bent on angry, vengeful feminism. Thatās what Iām inferring from him giving me a Sacagawea coin,ā Swift says. āHey, maybe he was trying to do it in honor of a powerful Native American woman. I didnāt ask.ā Where is the coin now? āMy lawyer has it.ā.I ask her, why get louder about LGBTQ rights now? āRights are being stripped from basically everyone who isnāt a straight white cisgender male,ā she says. āI didnāt realize until recently that I could advocate for a community that Iām not a part of. Itās hard to know how to do that without being so fearful of making a mistake that you just freeze. Because my mistakes are very loud. When I make a mistake, it echoes through the canyons of the world. Itās clickbait, and itās a part of my life story, and itās a part of my career arc.ā
Iād argue that no heterosexual woman can listen to āYou Need to Calm Downā and hear only a gay anthem. āCalm downā is what controlling men tell women who are angry, contrary, or āhysterical,ā or, letās say, fearing for their physical safety. It is what Panic! at the Disco singer Brendon Urie says to Swift in the beginning of the āME!ā music video, prompting her to scream, āJe suis calme!ā.I cannot believe it is a coincidence that Swift, a numbers geek with an affinity for dates, dropped the singleāwhose slow, incessant bass is likely to be bumping in stadiums across the world in 2020 if she goes on tourāon June 14, a certain presidentās birthday.
IT'S ENLIGHTENING to read 13 years of Taylor Swift coverageāall the big reviews, all the big profilesāin one sitting. You notice things.
How quickly Swift went from a āprodigyā (The New Yorker) and a āsongwriting savantā (Rolling Stone) to a tabloid fixture, for instance. Or how suspect her ambition is made to seem once she acquires real power.
Other plot points simply look different in the light of #MeToo. It is hard to imagine that Swiftās songs about her exes would be reviewed as sensationally today. I wonder if, in 2019, any man would dare grab the microphone out of a young womanās hands at an awards show. I stared into space for a good long while when I was reminded that Pitchfork did not review Taylor Swiftās 1989 but did review Ryan Adamsās cover album of Taylor Swiftās 1989.I ask Swift if she had always been aware of sexism. āI think about this a lot,ā she says. āWhen I was a teenager, I would hear people talk about sexism in the music industry, and Iād be like, I donāt see it. I donāt understand. Then I realized that was because I was a kid. Men in the industry saw me as a kid. I was a lanky, scrawny, overexcited young girl who reminded them more of their little niece or their daughter than a successful woman in business or a colleague. The second I became a woman, in peopleās perception, was when I started seeing it.
āItās fine to infantilize a girlās success and say, How cute that sheās having some hit songs,ā she goes on. āHow cute that sheās writing songs. But the second it becomes formidable? As soon as I started playing stadiumsāwhen I started to look like a womanāthat wasnāt as cool anymore. It was when I started to have songs from Red come out and cross over, like āI Knew You Were Troubleā and āWe Are Never Ever Getting Back Together.ā ā
Those songs are also more assertive than the ones that came before, I say. āYeah, the angle was different when I started saying, I knew you were trouble when you walked in. Basically, you emotionally manipulated me and I didnāt love it. That wasnāt fun for me.ā.I have to wonder if having her songwriting overlooked as her hits were picked apart and scrutinized wasnāt the biggest bummer of all. Swift: āI wanted to say to people, You realize writing songs is an art and a craft and not, like, an easy thing to do? Or to do well? People would act like it was a weapon I was using. Like a cheap dirty trick. Be careful, bro, sheāll write a song about you. Donāt stand near her. First of all, thatās not how it works. Second of all, find me a time when they say that about a male artist: Be careful, girl, heāll use his experience with you to getāGod forbidāinspiration to make art.ā
Without question the tenor of the Taylor Swift Narrative changed most dramatically in July 2016, when Kim Kardashian West called her a āsnakeā on Twitter, and released video clips of Swift and Kanye West discussing the lyrics to his song āFamous.ā (No need to rehash the details here. Suffice it to say that Swiftās version of events hasnāt changed: She knew about some of the lyrics but not others; specifically, the words that bitch.) The posts sparked several hashtags, including #TaylorSwiftIsASnake and #TaylorSwiftIsCanceled, which quickly escalated into a months-long campaign to ācancelā Swift.To this day Swift doesnāt think people grasp the repercussions of that term. āA mass public shaming, with millions of people saying you are quote-unquote canceled, is a very isolating experience,ā she says. āI donāt think there are that many people who can actually understand what itās like to have millions of people hate you very loudly.ā She adds: āWhen you say someone is canceled, itās not a TV show. Itās a human being. Youāre sending mass amounts of messaging to this person to either shut up, disappear, or it could also be perceived as, Kill yourself.ā
An overhaul was in order. āI realized I needed to restructure my life because it felt completely out of control,ā Swift says. āI knew immediately I needed to make music about it because I knew it was the only way I could survive it. It was the only way I could preserve my mental health and also tell the story of what itās like to go through something so humiliating.ā.I get a sense of the whiplash Swift experienced when I notice that, a few months into this ordeal, while she was writing the songs that would become her album Reputationāand fighting off Muellerās lawsuitāa portion of the media and internet began demanding to know why she hadnāt un-canceled herself long enough to take a position in the presidential election.
On that: āUnfortunately in the 2016 election you had a political opponent who was weaponizing the idea of the celebrity endorsement. He was going around saying, Iām a man of the people. Iām for you. I care about you. I just knew I wasnāt going to help. Also, you know, the summer before that election, all people were saying was Sheās calculated. Sheās manipulative. Sheās not what she seems. Sheās a snake. Sheās a liar. These are the same exact insults people were hurling at Hillary. Would I be an endorsement or would I be a liability? Look, snakes of a feather flock together. Look, the two lying women. The two nasty women. Literally millions of people were telling me to disappear. So I disappeared. In many senses.ā.Swift previewed Reputation in August 2017 with āLook What You Made Me Do.ā The single came with a lyric video whose central image was an ouroborosāa snake swallowing its own tail, an ancient symbol for continual renewal. Swift wiped her social-media feeds clean and began posting video snippets of a slithering snake. The song was pure bombast and high camp. (Lest there be any doubt, the chorus was an interpolation of a ā90s camp classic, Right Said Fredās āIām Too Sexy.ā) Nonetheless, most critics read it as a grenade lobbed in the general direction of Calabasas.
One longtime Nashville critic, Brian Mansfield, had a more plausible take: She was writing sarcastically as the āTaylor Swiftā portrayed in the media in a bid for privacy. āYeah, this is the character you created for me, let me just hide behind it,ā she says now of the persona she created. āI always used this metaphor when I was younger. Iād say that with every reinvention, I never wanted to tear down my house. āCause I built this house. This house being, metaphorically, my body of work, my songwriting, my music, my catalog, my library. I just wanted to redecorate. I think a lot of people, with Reputation, would have perceived that I had torn down the house. Actually, I just built a bunker around it.ā.IN MARCH, the snakes started to morph into butterflies, the vampire color palette into Easter pastels. When a superbloom of wildflowers lured a mesmerizing deluge of Painted Lady butterflies to Los Angeles, Swift marked it with an Instagram post. She attended the iHeartRadio Music Awards that night in a sequin romper and stilettos with shimmery wings attached.
Swift announced the single āME!ā a month later, with a large butterfly mural in Nashville. In the music video for the (conspicuously) bubblegum song, a hissing pastel-pink snake explodes into a kaleidoscope of butterflies. One flutters by the window of an apartment, where Swift is arguing in French with Urie. A record player is playing in the background. āItās an old-timey, 1940s-sounding instrumental version of āYou Need to Calm Down,ā āā Swift says. Later, in the āCalm Downā video, Swift wears a (fake) back tattoo of a snake swarmed by butterflies.
We are only two songs in, people. Lover, to be released on August 23, will have a total of 18 songs. āI was compiling ideas for a very long time,ā Swift says. āWhen I started writing, I couldnāt stop.ā (We can assume the British actor Joe Alwyn, with whom Swift has been in a relationship for nearly three years, provided some of the inspiration.)
Swift thinks Lover might be her favorite album yet. āThere are so many ways in which this album feels like a new beginning,ā she says. āThis album is really a love letter to love, in all of its maddening, passionate, exciting, enchanting, horrific, tragic, wonderful glory.ā.I have to ask Swift, given how genuinely at peace she seems, if part of her isnāt thankful, if not for the Great Cancellation of 2016, then for the person she now isāknowing who her friends are, knowing whatās what. āWhen youāre going through loss or embarrassment or shame, itās a grieving process with so many micro emotions in a day. One of the reasons why I didnāt do interviews for Reputationwas that I couldnāt figure out how I felt hour to hour. Sometimes I felt like: All these things taught me something that I never could have learned in a way that didnāt hurt as much. Five minutes later, Iād feel like: That was horrible. Why did that have to happen? What am I supposed to take from this other than mass amounts of humiliation? And then five minutes later Iād think: I think I might be happier than Iāve ever been.ā
She goes on: āItās so strange trying to be self-aware when youāve been cast as this always smiling, always happy āAmericaās sweetheartā thing, and then having that taken away and realizing that itās actually a great thing that it was taken away, because thatās extremely limiting.ā Swift leans back in the cocoon and smiles: āWeāre not going to go straight to gratitude with it. Ever. But weāre going to find positive aspects to it. Weāre never going to write a thank-you note.ā.
Though people will take the Perry-Swift burger-and-fries embrace in the āYou Need to Calm Downā video as a press release that the two have mended fences, Swift says itās actually a comment on how the media pits female pop stars against one another. After Perry sent Swift an (actual) olive branch last year, Swift asked her to be in the video: āShe wrote back, This makes me so emotional. Iām so up for this. I want us to be that example. But letās spend some time together. Because I want it to be real. So she came over and we talked for hours.
āWe decided the metaphor for what happens in the media,ā Swift explains, āis they pick two people and itās like theyāre pouring gasoline all over the floor. All that needs to happen is one false move, one false word, one misunderstanding, and a match is lit and dropped. Thatās what happened with us. It was: Whoās better? Katy or Taylor? Katy or Taylor? Katy or Taylor? Katy or Taylor? The tension is so high that it becomes impossible for you to not think that the other person has something against you.".
Meanwhile, the protesters in the video reference a real-life religious group that pickets outside Swiftās concerts, not the white working class in general, as some have assumed. āSo many artists have them at their shows, and itās such a confounding, confusing, infuriating thing to have outside of joyful concerts,ā she tells me. āObviously I donāt want to mention the actual entity, because they would get excited about that. Giving them press is not on my list of priorities.ā
At one point, Swift asks if I would like to hear two other songs off the new album. (Duh.) First she plays āLover,ā the title track, coproduced by Jack Antonoff. āThis has one of my favorite bridges,ā she says. āI love a bridge, and I was really able to go to Bridge City.ā Itās a romantic, haunting, waltzy, singer-songwritery nugget: classic Swift. āMy heartās been borrowed and yours has been blue,ā she sings. āAllās well that ends well to end up with you.ā
Next, Swift cues up a track that āplays with the idea of perception.ā She has often wondered how she would be written and spoken about if she were a man, āso I wrote a song called āThe Man.ā ā Itās a thought experiment of sorts: āIf I had made all the same choices, all the same mistakes, all the same accomplishments, how would it read?ā Seconds later, Swiftās earpods are pumping a synth-pop earworm into my head: āIād be a fearless leader. Iād be an alpha type. When everyone believes ya: Whatās that like?ā.Swift wrote the first two singles with Joel Little, best known as one of Lordeās go-to producers. (āFrom a pop-songwriting point of view, sheās the pinnacle,ā Little says of Swift.) The album is likely to include more marquee names. A portrait of the Dixie Chicks in the background of the āME!ā video almost certainly portends a collaboration. If fans are correctly reading a button affixed to her denim jacket in a recent magazine cover, we can expect one with Drake, too.She recently announced a fashion collection with Stella McCartney to coincide with Lover. āWe met at one of her shows,ā says McCartney, āand then we had a girlsā night and kind of jumped straight in. In London weāll go on walks and talk about everythingālife and love.ā (Swift has no further fashion ambitions at the moment. āI really love my job right now,ā she tells me. āMy focus is on music.ā) Oh, and that ā5ā on the bullseye? Track five is called āThe Archer.ā
Yet something tells me the most illuminating clue for reading both Lover and Reputation may be Loie Fuller, the dancer to whom Swift paid homage on tour. As Swift noted on a Jumbotron, Fuller āfought for artists to own their work.ā Fuller also used swirling fabric and colored lights to metamorphose onstage, playing a āhide-and-seek illusionist gameā with her audience, as one writer has put it. She became a muse to the Symbolists in Paris, where Jean Cocteau wrote that she created āthe phantom of an era.ā The effect, said the poet SteĢphane MallarmeĢ, was a ādizziness of soul made visible by an artifice.ā Fullerās most famous piece was āSerpentine Dance.ā Another was āButterfly Dance.ā
SWIFT HAS HAD almost no downtime since late 2017, but what little she does have is divided among New York, Nashville, Los Angeles, and Rhode Island, where she keeps homesāplus London. In an essay earlier this year, she revealed that her mother, Andrea Swift, is fighting cancer for a second time. āThere was a relapse that happened,ā Swift says, declining to go into detail. āItās something that my family is going through.ā.
Later this year, she will star in a film adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webberās Catsas Bombalurina, the flirtatious red cat. āThey made us the size of cats by making the furniture bigger,ā she says. āYouād be standing there and you could barely reach the seat of a chair. It was phenomenal. It made you feel like a little kid.ā
But first, she will spend much of the summer holding āsecret sessionsāāa tradition wherein Swift invites hundreds of fans to her various homes to preview her new music. āTheyāve never given me a reason to stop doing it,ā she says. āNot a single one.ā
Speaking of: Inquiring fans will want to know if Swift dropped any more clues about how to decode Lover during this interview. For you I reviewed the audio again, and there were a few things that made my newly acquired Swifty sense tingle.
At one point she compared superstardom in the digital age to life in a dollhouse, one where voyeurs ācan āshipā you with who they want to āshipā you with, and they can āfavoriteā friends that you have, and they can know where you are all the time.ā The metaphor was precise and vivid and, well, a little too intricately rendered to be off the cuff. (Also, the āME!ā lyric: āBaby doll, when it comes to a lover. I promise that youāll never find another like me.ā).Then there was the balloonāa giant gold balloon in the shape of a numeral seven that happened to float by while we were on her roof, on this, the occasion of her seventh album. āIs it an Lā?ā I say. āNo, because look, the string is hanging from the bottom,ā she says.
It might seem an obvious symbolic gesture, deployed for this interview, except for how impossible that seems. Swift let me control the timing of nearly everything. Moreover, the gold seven wasnāt floating up from the sidewalk below. It was already high in the sky, drifting slowly toward us from down the street. She would have had to control the wind, or at least to have studied it. Would Taylor Swift really go to such elaborate lengths for her fans? This much I know: Yes, she would''.More photos below.
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