517
take from this other than mass amounts of humiliation? And then five
minutes later I’d think: I think I might be happier than I’ve ever been.”
She goes on: “It’s so strange trying to be self-aware when you’ve
been cast as this always smiling, always happy ‘America’s sweetheart’
thing, and then having that taken away and realizing that it’s actually a
great thing that it was taken away, because that’s extremely limiting.”
Swift leans back in the cocoon and smiles: “We’re not going to go
straight to gratitude with it. Ever. But we’re going to find positive
aspects to it. We’re never going to write a thank-you note.”
Though people will take the Perry-Swift burger-and-fries embrace
in the “You Need to Calm Down” video as a press release that the
two have mended fences, Swift says it’s 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: “She wrote back, This makes me so emotional. I’m so up for
this. I want us to be that example. But let’s spend some time together.
Because I want it to be real. So she came over and we talked for hours.
“We decided the metaphor for what happens in the media,” Swift
explains, “is they pick two people and it’s like they’re 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. That’s
what happened with us. It was: Who’s 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 protest-
ers in the video reference a
real-life religious group that pickets outside Swift’s concerts, not the
white working class in general, as some have assumed. “So many
artists have them at their shows, and it’s such a confounding, con-
fusing, infuriating thing to have outside of joyful concerts,” she tells
me. “Obviously I don’t want to mention the actual entity, because
they would get excited about that. Giving them press is not on my
list of priorities.”
At one point, Swift asks if I would like to hear two other songs
off the new album. (Duh.) First she plays “Lover,” the title track,
coproduced by Jack Antonoff. “This has one of my favorite bridges,”
she says. “I love a bridge, and I was really able to go to Bridge City.”
It’s a romantic, haunting, waltzy, singer-songwritery nugget: classic
Swift. “My heart’s been borrowed and yours has been blue,” she sings.
“All’s well that ends well to end up with you.”
Next, Swift cues up a track that “plays with the idea of percep-
tion.” She has often wondered how she would be written and spoken
about if she were a man, “so I wrote a song called ‘The Man.’ ” It’s
a thought experiment of sorts: “If I had made all the same choices,
all the same mistakes, all the same accomplishments, how would
it read?” Seconds later, Swift’s earpods are pumping a synth-pop
earworm into my head: “I’d be a fearless leader. I’d be an alpha type.
When everyone believes ya: What’s that like?”
Swift wrote the first two singles with Joel Little, best known as
one of Lorde’s go-to producers. (“From a pop-songwriting point of
view, she’s the pinnacle,” Little says of Swift.) The album is likely to
include more marquee names. A portrait of the Dixie Chicks in the
background of the “ME!” video almost certainly portends a collab-
oration. 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 McCart-
ney to coincide with Lover. “We met at one of her shows,” says
McCartney, “and then we had a girls’ night and kind of jumped
straight in. In London we’ll go on walks and talk about every-
thing—life and love.” (Swift has no further fashion ambitions at
the moment. “I really love my job right now,” she tells me. “My
focus is on music.”) Oh, and that “5” on the bullseye? Track five
is called “The Archer.”
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
“fought for artists to own their work.” Fuller also used swirling fabric
and colored lights to metamorphose onstage, playing a “hide-and-
seek illusionist game” 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 “the phantom of an era.” The effect, said the
poet Stéphane Mallarmé, was a “dizziness of soul made visible by
an artifice.” Fuller’s most famous piece was “Serpentine Dance.”
Another was “Butterfly Dance.”
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 homes—plus London. In an
essay earlier this year, she revealed that her mother, Andrea Swift,
is fighting cancer for a second
time. “There was a relapse that
happened,” Swift says, declining
to go into detail. “It’s something
that my family is going through.”
Later this year, she will star in a
film adaptation of Andrew Lloyd
Webber’s Cats as Bombalurina,
the flirtatious red cat. “They made us the size of cats by making
the furniture bigger,” she says. “You’d be standing there and you
could barely reach the seat of a chair. It was phenomenal. It made
you feel like a little kid.”
But first, she will spend much of the summer holding “secret
sessions”—a tradition wherein Swift invites hundreds of fans to her
various homes to preview her new music. “They’ve never given me a
reason to stop doing it,” she says. “Not a single one.”
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 “can ‘ship’ you with who they
want to ‘ship’ you with, and they can ‘favorite’ friends that you have,
and they can know where you are all the time.” The metaphor was
precise and vivid and, well, a little too intricately rendered to be off
the cuff. (Also, the “ME!” lyric: “Baby doll, when it comes to a lover.
I promise that you’ll never find another like me.”)
Then there was the balloon—a 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. “Is it an L’?” I say.
“No, because look, the string is hanging from the bottom,” she says.
It might seem an obvious symbolic gesture, deployed for this in-
terview, except for how impossible that seems. Swift let me control
the timing of nearly everything. Moreover, the gold seven wasn’t
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. @
“There are so many ways in which
this album feels like a new beginning,”
she says. “It is really a love letter to love”
SPECIAL THANKS TO THE 1896
