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would become her album Reputation—and fighting off Mueller’s
lawsuit—a portion of the media and internet began demanding
to know why she hadn’t un-canceled herself long enough to take a
position in the presidential election.
On that: “Unfortunately in the 2016 election you had a political
opponent who was weaponizing the idea of the celebrity endorse-
ment. He was going around saying, I’m a man of the people. I’m for
you. I care about you. I just knew I wasn’t going to help. Also, you
know, the summer before that election, all people were saying was
She’s calculated. She’s manipulative. She’s not what she seems. She’s
a snake. She’s 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.”
Swift previewed Reputation in August 2017 with “Look What You
Made Me Do.” The single came with a lyric video whose central image
was an ouroboros—a 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 ’90s camp classic, Right
Said Fred’s “I’m Too Sexy.”) Nonetheless, most
critics read it as a grenade lobbed in the general
direction of Calabasas.
One longtime Nashville critic, Brian Mans-
field, had a more plausible take: She was writing
sarcastically as the “Taylor Swift” portrayed
in the media in a bid for privacy. “Yeah, this
is the character you created for me, let me just
hide behind it,” she says now of the persona she
created. “I always used this metaphor when I
was younger. I’d say that with every reinvention,
I never wanted to tear down my house. ’Cause
I built this house. This house being, metaphor-
ically, my body of work, my songwriting, my
music, my catalog, my library. I just wanted to
redecorate. I think a lot of people, with Rep-
utation, would have perceived that I had torn
down the house. Actually, I just built a bunker
around it.”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 butter-
flies 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 “ME!” a month
later, with a large butterfly mural in Nashville. In
the music video for the (conspicuously) bubble-
gum 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. “It’s an old-timey,
1940s-sounding instrumental version of ‘You
Need to Calm Down,’ ’’ Swift says. Later, in the
“Calm Down” 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. “I was compiling ideas for a very long
time,” Swift says. “When I started writing, I couldn’t stop.” (We can
assume the British actor Joe Alwyn, with whom Swift has been linked
for two years, provided some of the inspiration.)
Swift thinks Lover might be her favorite album yet. “There are so
many ways in which this album feels like a new beginning,” she says.
“This album is really a love letter to love, in all of its maddening,
passionate, exciting, enchanting, horrific, tragic, wonderful glory.”
I have to ask Swift, given how genuinely at peace she seems, if part
of her isn’t thankful, if not for the Great Cancellation of 2016, then
for the person she now is—knowing who her friends are, knowing
what’s what. “When you’re going through loss or embarrassment or
shame, it’s a grieving process with so many micro emotions in a day.
One of the reasons why I didn’t do interviews for Reputation was that
I couldn’t 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 didn’t hurt as much. Five minutes later, I’d feel like: That
was horrible. Why did that have to happen? What am I supposed toSTATE OF GR ACE
Dior bodysuit
and skirt.