ITâS A SUNDAY AFTERNOON in Tribeca, and Iâm in Taylor Swiftâs 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 literaryâlater, 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 âYou Need to Calm Down,â 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 sunglassesâliving, breathing lovey-eyes emojiâand 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 âLesbian Jesus,â shot arrows at a bullâs-eye. The YouTube comedian-chef Hannah Hart danced alongside Dexter Mayfield, the plus-size male model and self-described âbig boy in heels.â The Olympic figure skater Adam Rippon served up icy red snow cones. Swift and her close friend Todrick Hall, of Kinky Boots and RuPaulâs 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 wasnât sure what the vignettes would add up to. There were shoot days and cameos I wouldnât 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 â5â on the bullâs-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 2006âlong before her megafame made her into a symbol of pop supremacy. But I hadnât understood how coded and byzantine her body of work has become; I hadnât learned, as Swiftâs fans have, to see hidden meanings everywhere. For instance: In the 2017 video for âLook What You Made Me Do,â a headstone in a graveyard scene reads NILS SJOBERG, the pseudonym Swift used as her writing credit on Rihannaâs hit âThis Is What You Came For,â a Swedish-sounding nod to that countryâs pop wizards.
After an excessive amount of ad hoc scholarshipâa friend joked that I could have learned Mandarin in the time I spent trying to unpack Swiftâs oeuvreâI 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 McConnellâs 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. âI personally reject the presidentâs stance,â Swift wrote.
Back in the kitchen, Swift hits play. âThe first verse is about trolls and cancel culture,â she says. âThe second verse is about homophobes and the people picketing outside our concerts. The third verse is about successful women being pitted against each other.â
The video is, for erudite Swifties, a rich text. I had followed enough clues to correctly guess some of the other cameosâEllen DeGeneres, RuPaul, Katy Perry. I felt the satisfaction of a gamer who successfully levels upâachievement unlocked! The videoâs final frame sends viewers to Swiftâs change.org petition in support of the Equality Act, which has acquired more than 400,000 signaturesâincluding those of Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren, Beto OâRourke, and Kirsten Gillibrandâor four times the number required to elicit an official response from the White House.
âMaybe 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?â
We are upstairs in Swiftâs 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. âThe 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,â she says. âIf my son was gay, heâd be gay. I donât understand the question.â
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 sheâd enjoy a root canalâbut sheâs 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.
If he was thinking that, I canât imagine what my fans in the LGBTQ community might be thinking,â she goes on. âIt was kind of devastating to realize that I hadnât been publicly clear about that.â
I understand why she was surprised; she has been sending pro-LGBTQ signals since at least 2011. Many have been subtle, but none insignificantâespecially for a young country star coming out of Nashville.
In the video for her single âMeanâ (from 2010âs Speak Now), we see a boy in a school locker room wearing a lavender sweater and bow tie, surrounded by football players. In âWelcome to New York,â the first track on 1989, she sings, âAnd you can want who you want. Boys and boys and girls and girls.â 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 yearâs Reputation tour, she dedicated the song âDressâ to Loie Fuller, the openly gay pioneer of modern dance and theatrical lighting who captured the imagination of fin-de-sieÌcle 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. âShe believes businesses have a right to refuse service to gay couples,â Swift wrote. âShe also believes they should not have the right to marry. These are not MY Tennessee values.â
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, âHey, just so you know, you canât just roll up.â Some 65,000 new voters registered in the first 24 hours after her post, according to Vote.org.
Trump came to Blackburnâs defense the following day. âSheâs a tremendous woman,â he told reporters. âIâm sure Taylor Swift doesnât know anything about her. Letâs say I like Taylorâs music about 25 percent less now, OK?â
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. âHorrendous,â she says of the legislation. âThey donât call it âSlate of Hateâ for nothing.â Swift especially liked that the Tennessee Equality Project had organized a petition of faith leaders in opposition. âI loved how smart it was to come at it from a religious perspective.â
Meanwhile, the âCalm Downâ video provoked a Colorado pastor to call Swift âa sinner in desperate need of a saviorâ and warn that âGod will cut her down.â It also revived heated debate within LGBTQ communities about the politics of allyship and corporatization of Pride. Some critics argued Swiftâs pro-LGBTQ imagery and lyrics were overdue and out of the blueâa 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. âIt was either investing in my past or my and other artistsâ future, and I chose the future,â she says of the deal she struck with Universal.)
Swiftâs blunt testimony during her 2017 sexual-assault case against a radio DJâmonths before the #MeToo reckoning blew openâfelt 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: âHe stayed latched onto my bare ass cheekâ as photos were being snapped. Asked why photos of the front of her skirt didnât show this, she said, âBecause my ass is located at the back of my body.â Asked if she felt bad about the DJâs losing his job, she said, âIâm 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 Iâm being blamed for the unfortunate events of his life that are the product of his decisionsânot mine.â
When Time included Swift on the cover of its âSilence Breakersâ issue that year, the magazine asked how she felt during the testimony. âI was angry,â she said. âIn that moment, I decided to forgo any courtroom formalities and just answer the questions the way it happened...Iâm told it was the most amount of times the word ass has ever been said in Colorado Federal Court.â
Mueller has since paid Swift the dollarâwith a Sacagawea coin. âHe was trolling me, implying that I was self-righteous and hell-bent on angry, vengeful feminism. Thatâs what Iâm inferring from him giving me a Sacagawea coin,â Swift says. âHey, maybe he was trying to do it in honor of a powerful Native American woman. I didnât ask.â Where is the coin now? âMy lawyer has it.â
I ask her, why get louder about LGBTQ rights now? âRights are being stripped from basically everyone who isnât a straight white cisgender male,â she says. âI didnât realize until recently that I could advocate for a community that Iâm not a part of. Itâs 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. Itâs clickbait, and itâs a part of my life story, and itâs a part of my career arc.â
Iâd argue that no heterosexual woman can listen to âYou Need to Calm Downâ and hear only a gay anthem. âCalm downâ is what controlling men tell women who are angry, contrary, or âhysterical,â or, letâs say, fearing for their physical safety. It is what Panic! at the Disco singer Brendon Urie says to Swift in the beginning of the âME!â music video, prompting her to scream, âJe suis calme!â
I cannot believe it is a coincidence that Swift, a numbers geek with an affinity for dates, dropped the singleâwhose slow, incessant bass is likely to be bumping in stadiums across the world in 2020 if she goes on tourâon June 14, a certain presidentâs birthday.
Itâs enlightening to read 13 years of Taylor Swift coverageâall the big reviews, all the big profilesâin one sitting. You notice things.
How quickly Swift went from a âprodigyâ (The New Yorker) and a âsongwriting savantâ (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 Swiftâs 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 womanâs hands at an awards show. I stared into space for a good long while when I was reminded that Pitchfork did not review Taylor Swiftâs 1989 but did review Ryan Adamsâs cover album of Taylor Swiftâs 1989.
I ask Swift if she had always been aware of sexism. âI think about this a lot,â she says. âWhen I was a teenager, I would hear people talk about sexism in the music industry, and Iâd be like, I donât see it. I donât 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 peopleâs perception, was when I started seeing it.
âItâs fine to infantilize a girlâs success and say, How cute that sheâs having some hit songs,â she goes on. âHow cute that sheâs writing songs. But the second it becomes formidable? As soon as I started playing stadiumsâwhen I started to look like a womanâthat wasnât as cool anymore. It was when I started to have songs from Red come out and cross over, like âI Knew You Were Troubleâ and âWe Are Never Ever Getting Back Together.â â
Those songs are also more assertive than the ones that came before, I say. âYeah, the angle was different when I started saying, I knew you were trouble when you walked in. Basically, you emotionally manipulated me and I didnât love it. That wasnât fun for me.â
I have to wonder if having her songwriting overlooked as her hits were picked apart and scrutinized wasnât the biggest bummer of all. Swift: âI 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, sheâll write a song about you. Donât stand near her. First of all, thatâs not how it works. Second of all, find me a time when they say that about a male artist: Be careful, girl, heâll use his experience with you to getâGod forbidâinspiration to make art.â
Without question the tenor of the Taylor Swift Narrative changed most dramatically in July 2016, when Kim Kardashian West called her a âsnakeâ on Twitter, and released video clips of Swift and Kanye West discussing the lyrics to his song âFamous.â (No need to rehash the details here. Suffice it to say that Swiftâs version of events hasnât 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 âcancelâ Swift.
To this day Swift doesnât think people grasp the repercussions of that term. âA mass public shaming, with millions of people saying you are quote-unquote canceled, is a very isolating experience,â she says. âI donât think there are that many people who can actually understand what itâs like to have millions of people hate you very loudly.â She adds: âWhen you say someone is canceled, itâs not a TV show. Itâs a human being. Youâre sending mass amounts of messaging to this person to either shut up, disappear, or it could also be perceived as, Kill yourself.â
An overhaul was in order. âI realized I needed to restructure my life because it felt completely out of control,â Swift says. âI 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 itâs like to go through something so humiliating.â
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 an interpolation of a â90s camp classic, Right Said Fredâs âIâm Too Sexy.â) 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 âTaylor Swiftâ portrayed in the media in a bid for privacy. âYeah, this is the character you created for me, let me just hide behind it,â she says now of the persona she created. âI always used this metaphor when I was younger. Iâd say that with every reinvention, I never wanted to tear down my house. âCause 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.â
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 âME!â 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. âItâs an old-timey, 1940s-sounding instrumental version of âYou Need to Calm Down,â ââ Swift says. Later, in the âCalm Downâ 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. âI was compiling ideas for a very long time,â Swift says. âWhen I started writing, I couldnât stop.â (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. âThere are so many ways in which this album feels like a new beginning,â she says. âThis album is really a love letter to love, in all of its maddening, passionate, exciting, enchanting, horrific, tragic, wonderful glory.â
I have to ask Swift, given how genuinely at peace she seems, if part of her isnât thankful, if not for the Great Cancellation of 2016, then for the person she now isâknowing who her friends are, knowing whatâs what. âWhen youâre going through loss or embarrassment or shame, itâs a grieving process with so many micro emotions in a day. One of the reasons why I didnât do interviews for Reputation was that I couldnât 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 didnât hurt as much. Five minutes later, Iâd 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 Iâd think: I think I might be happier than Iâve ever been.â
She goes on: âItâs so strange trying to be self-aware when youâve been cast as this always smiling, always happy âAmericaâs sweetheartâ thing, and then having that taken away and realizing that itâs actually a great thing that it was taken away, because thatâs extremely limiting.â Swift leans back in the cocoon and smiles: âWeâre not going to go straight to gratitude with it. Ever. But weâre going to find positive aspects to it. Weâre never going to write a thank-you note.â
Though people will take the Perry-Swift burger-and-fries embrace in the âYou Need to Calm Downâ video as a press release that the two have mended fences, Swift says itâs 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: âShe wrote back, This makes me so emotional. Iâm so up for this. I want us to be that example. But letâs spend some time together. Because I want it to be real. So she came over and we talked for hours.
âWe decided the metaphor for what happens in the media,â Swift explains, âis they pick two people and itâs like theyâre 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. Thatâs what happened with us. It was: Whoâs 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 Swiftâs concerts, not the white working class in general, as some have assumed. âSo many artists have them at their shows, and itâs such a confounding, confusing, infuriating thing to have outside of joyful concerts,â she tells me. âObviously I donât want to mention the actual entity, because they would get excited about that. Giving them press is not on my list of priorities.â
At one point, Swift asks if I would like to hear two other songs off the new album. (Duh.) First she plays âLover,â the title track, coproduced by Jack Antonoff. âThis has one of my favorite bridges,â she says. âI love a bridge, and I was really able to go to Bridge City.â Itâs a romantic, haunting, waltzy, singer-songwritery nugget: classic Swift. âMy heartâs been borrowed and yours has been blue,â she sings. âAllâs well that ends well to end up with you.â
Next, Swift cues up a track that âplays with the idea of perception.â She has often wondered how she would be written and spoken about if she were a man, âso I wrote a song called âThe Man.â â Itâs a thought experiment of sorts: âIf I had made all the same choices, all the same mistakes, all the same accomplishments, how would it read?â Seconds later, Swiftâs earpods are pumping a synth-pop earworm into my head: âIâd be a fearless leader. Iâd be an alpha type. When everyone believes ya: Whatâs that like?â
Swift wrote the first two singles with Joel Little, best known as one of Lordeâs go-to producers. (âFrom a pop-songwriting point of view, sheâs the pinnacle,â Little says of Swift.) The album is likely to include more marquee names. A portrait of the Dixie Chicks in the background of the âME!â 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.
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 âcan âshipâ you with who they want to âshipâ you with, and they can âfavoriteâ friends that you have, and they can know where you are all the time.â The metaphor was precise and vivid and, well, a little too intricately rendered to be off the cuff. (Also, the âME!â lyric: âBaby doll, when it comes to a lover. I promise that youâll never find another like me.â)
Then there was the balloonâa 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. âIs it an Lâ?â I say. âNo, because look, the string is hanging from the bottom,â 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 wasnât 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.