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IT’S A SUNDAY AFTERNOON in Tribeca, and I’m in Taylor Swift’s
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 literary—later, when we pass through her
bedroom en route to her garden, 10 percent of my brain will believe
her wardrobe mightopen 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 “You Need to Calm Down,” 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 sunglasses—living, breathing lovey-eyes emoji—and
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 “Lesbian Jesus,” shot arrows at a bull’s-eye. The YouTube
comedian-chef Hannah Hart danced alongside Dexter Mayfield,
the plus-size male model and self-described “big boy in heels.” The
Olympic figure skater Adam Rippon served up icy red snow cones.
Swift and her close friend Todrick Hall, of Kinky Boots and RuPaul’s
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
wasn’t sure what the vignettes would add up to. There were shoot days
and cameos I wouldn’t 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 “5” on the bull’s-eye, so I did a quick search to figure out
what that number might mean. Immediately I was in over my head.
Swifthas 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 2006—long before her megafame made
her into a symbol of pop supremacy. But I hadn’t understood how
coded and byzantine her body of work has become; I hadn’t learned,
as Swift’s fans have, to see hidden meanings everywhere.For instance:
In the 2017 video for “Look What You Made Me Do,” a headstone
in a graveyard scene reads nils sjoberg, the pseudonym Swift used
as her writing credit on Rihanna’s hit “This Is What You Came For,”
a Swedish-sounding nod to that country’s pop wizards.
After an excessive amount of ad hoc scholarship—a friend joked
that I could have learned Mandarin in the time I spent trying to
unpack Swift’s oeuvre—I 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 McConnell’s 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. “I personally reject the
president’s stance,” Swift wrote.
Back in the kitchen, Swift hits play. “The first verse is about trolls
and cancel culture,” she says. “The second verse is about homophobes
and the people picketing outside our concerts. The third verse is about
successful women being pitted against each other.”
The video is, for erudite Swifties, a rich text. I had followed enough
clues to correctly guess some of the other cameos—Ellen DeGeneres,
RuPaul, Katy Perry. I felt the satisfaction of a gamer who success-
fully levels up—achievement unlocked! The video’s final frame sends
viewers to Swift’s change.org petition in support of the Equality Act,
which has acquired more than 400,000 signatures—including those
of Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren, Beto O’Rourke, and Kirsten
Gillibrand—or four times the number required to elicit an official
response from the White House.“Maybe 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?”
We are upstairs in Swift’s 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. “The 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,” she says. “If my son was gay,
he’d be gay. I don’t understand the question.”
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 she’d enjoy a root canal—but she’s 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.Celebrated, canceled, obsessed over—is Taylor Swift our most
endlessly debated pop star? With a new album, and a newly assertive
political voice, she opens up to Abby Aguirre about sexism, scrutiny,
and standing up for herself. Photographed by Inez & Vinoodh.Begin Again