Following the multi-platinum Red album, Taylor Swift brought us 1989, the post-breakup album we’ve had on repeat since its release! We chatted to the singer about the inspiration behind the album, her favourite tracks and her thoughts on relationships.
GLAMOUR: You explore some different themes on your album,
TAYLOR: “This album is a lot different emotionally than everything I’ve done before, especially it’s different than Red because Red is very much an album that I made about one breakup that really kind of levelled me emotionally, and it took a while to process that and get past it, and this is the album that I wrote once I was past it, and, you know, anything you hear on this album that is reflecting back on an old relationship is done with a lot of retrospect. It’s done with a lot of perspective, so it’s very much an album about the last two years of my life which has involved a lot of independence, freedom, strength, happiness, but that’s not to say there aren’t songs on the album that are about struggles I went through. I try to make my albums as emotionally complex as possible so there’s something on the album that can help or comfort someone who’s going through anything in their life.”
GLAMOUR: Is it true that it took two years to write this album?
TAYLOR: “I immediately start writing as soon as I put out an album. As soon as I put out Red I started to write again and what ends up usually happening when I first start writing is maybe I’ll write good songs, but they’ll sound a little more like they belong on the last album rather than standing alone and sounding like a new thing, so I’ll write and write and write and get all those songs out of my system until I then start trying all these crazy new things and every once in a while you hit on something really good and so you follow that, and what ends up happening is you create a new sound for this record that stands completely on its own from everything else you’ve done, and in this case I had to challenge myself even more than ever before because I had chosen to switch genres and really explore kind of the pop realm and how to craft those songs and what I would do differently. It was the most exciting experience of my life, really changing up my sound for this album and I really wouldn’t have it any other way.”
GLAMOUR: So, we know that you were born in 1989. Is that why you titled your album,
TAYLOR: “The ‘1989’ album title hit me actually the night of the Grammys this year. I went home and ate a bunch of In-N-Out Burger and sat around with my backup singers and played them what I had so far of the album. The one thing they kept talking about was, ‘This is such an 80s throwback record, like there’s such 80s sounds in the synths and the drums and the way that you’ve recorded the vocals.’ They kept commenting on it. Something about them saying that, it hit me for the first time that I’d been naturally gravitating towards that because I’d been listening to a lot of Peter Gabriel and late 80s Madonna and the Eurythmics and kind of focusing, without meaning to, on how they made music back then, cause I feel like looking back, music history is a huge fascination of mine, and the late 80s were a time of just kind of endless possibility and rebelling against what was normal and ‘we can wear bright clothes, we can dance how we want, we can make crazy music that sounds nothing like the music that was made in the last decade,’ so I was very inspired by the risk taking there, and, you know, I’m taking a risk in switching genres. In a way it’s creatively starting over, and so I was very inspired by their willingness to step outside their own box in the late 80s.”
GLAMOUR: We’ve heard that you spend a lot of time in New York. Do you find that you can be more creative in the Big Apple?
TAYLOR: “New York was a huge part in where I gathered inspiration for this album. I mean, you’re witnessing so much humanity on a daily basis that how can you not be inspired by the things you’re seeing, even if you’re not writing about your own life. I think that New York kind of provides the backdrop for this album. I think I’ve looked at all my albums as kind of having a location, and this one was definitely New York. It has that kind of electricity to it. It has that fast-paced energy going on the same way that that city does.”
GLAMOUR: You’ve been constant on both the pop and country scenes for the last few years, but it seems that you’re moving into pop more?
TAYLOR “I think with making a pop album it was something I decided to do on my own. My friends have always known that my music had a lot of crossover happening. I was always at the pop award shows. I was always at the pop radio shows and things like that so I don’t think it was really a big shock to anyone who knows me that I made this change. You know, I think that this was something I clearly have been dying to do for so long. I’ve just been wanting to challenge myself as a writer and to kind of switch lanes, and getting to do that and have people be so embracing (of) it, it’s really cool.”
GLAMOUR: Do you really get your friends to listen to all your new material?
TAYLOR: “A lot of my friends get to hear the music before everyone else, mostly my friends who are musicians cause I really respect their opinion. Ed Sheeran is someone I played the entire album for. Lorde is someone that I played the entire album for. It’s so wonderful to see the ones that they react to. You know, I can really read their reactions and so it actually helped me pick which songs were the best ones just judging based on which ones were their favourites.”
GLAMOUR: You worked with a lot of famous names when it came to producing
TAYLOR: “This is actually a smaller group of producers than I used on Red. Red was about 20 to 25 different writers and producers and I just wanted to learn as much as I possibly could when I was making Red, but with this one I wanted to kind of streamline what we were doing and create a very, very cohesive sound, so it reminds me a little bit of when we made my album Fearless when I was 18, so it just kind of was a small group of people that I’ve been dying to work with. They knew exactly what sound I was going for. We all kind of were going for the same goal, and so we made an album that I think is very cohesive.”
GLAMOUR: We take it you started the album off with the track “Welcome To New York” because the city has been such an inspiration for you.
TAYLOR: “I wanted to start the album with this song because New York has been an important landscape and location for the story of my life in the last couple of years. I dreamt about moving to New York. I obsessed over moving to New York and then I did it, and the inspiration that I found in that city is kind of hard to describe and hard to compare to any other force of inspiration I’ve ever experienced in my life. It’s like an electric city, and I approached moving there with such wide-eyed optimism and sort of saw it as a place of endless potential and possibilities, and you can kind of hear that reflected in this music and in this first song especially.”
GLAMOUR: There’s been a lot of speculation about the track “Blank Space” – is it really about your romantic relationships?
TAYLOR: ‘”Blank Space’ is one of the only songs I’ve ever written that I started out writing as a complete joke (laughs). I think as a songwriter you have to be pretty well aware of who you are as a person, but then I think you also have to have one eye on what people think of you and kind of what the general perception is of you out in the world, and in the last couple of years I’ve noticed there’s been sort of a pretty sensational fictionalisation of my personal life. You know, they’ve kind of drawn up this profile of this girl who is a serial dater, jet-setting around with all her boyfriends, and then she can get ‘em but she can’t keep ‘em cause she’s too emotional and she’s needy. Then she gets her heart broken cause they leave and she’s jilted so she goes to her evil lair and writes songs about it for revenge. It’s just kind of this very complex profile of a person, but I got to thinking about it and I started to think about how interesting that character is. If she were a real person who had all these qualities and attributes what song would she write, and I’m pretty sure it would sound a little like this.”
GLAMOUR: What was the inspiration behind “Style”?
TAYLOR: “’Style’ is a song that I wrote about kind of observing fashion trends and cultural trends and seeing how there are certain things that are constants, you know, like you may not wear a little black dress for a while but you’re always gonna go back to it. No one’s gonna say, ‘Oh, red lips are so two years ago.’ There are certain staples, and I started thinking about that in terms of a feeling. There are certain feelings like that. There are certain people that float in and out of your life sort of like a trend that keeps coming back in style and never fully fades away, and so that was the inspiration behind this song.”
GLAMOUR: Did you draw from a past relationship when you wrote “Out of the Woods”?
TAYLOR: “One of the goals I set out to accomplish when I wanted to make this album was I wanted to make sure that these songs sounded exactly the way that the emotions felt when I felt them. This song is about the fragility and kind of breakable nature of some relationships. This was a relationship where I was kind of living day to day wondering it was going, if it was gonna go anywhere, if it was gonna end the next day. It was a relationship where you kind of never feel like you’re standing on solid ground, and that kind of a feeling brings on excitement but also extreme anxiety and kind of a frantic feeling of wondering (and) endless questions, and this song sounds exactly like that frantic feeling of anxiety and questioning but it stresses that even if a relationship is breakable and fragile and full of anxiety, it doesn’t mean that it isn’t worthwhile, exciting, beautiful and all the things that we look for.”
GLAMOUR: How do you deal with haters?
TAYLOR: “’Shake It Off’ is a song that I wrote about having to deal with on an everyday basis just kind of how human beings treat each other. It’s not just me who has to deal with it. It’s everybody out there living their lives. You know, the feeling of humiliation is the same when a girl has rumour spread around about her at school that isn’t true. It’s the same feeling I feel when I am checking out of the grocery store and I read some crazy headline about me, and I think that the way have to deal with those issues is the same. You have to learn to have a sense of humour about things after a while or else you’ll just live in an endless sea of resentment and bitterness and ‘why are people doing this to me?,’ and rather than writing a song that was victimised in nature I wanted to write a song that was joyful and gives people a way to cope with whatever amounts of ridiculousness that life is doling out to them but also makes them want to dance.”
GLAMOUR: Is the song “Bad Blood” about a former famous friendship?
TAYLOR: “’Bad Blood’ is a song that I wrote about a new kind of heartbreak that I experienced recently which was when someone that I desperately wanted to be my friend and thought was my friend ended up really making it very obvious that she wasn’t, so . . . This was somebody I really looked up to and really, really longed for the approval of this person so it was kind of devastating to receive kind of a low blow from that person, and this song was kind of the first time I ever really stood up for myself in that relationship cause she was always the bolder one and the louder one. I think it’s important to stand up for yourself and if you can only really come up with the courage to do it in song form then that’s how you should do it.”
GLAMOUR: And love? Has your outlook on relationships changed?
TAYLOR: “’Wildest Dreams’ is kind of a good example of the way that my outlook on love has changed. Over the years I think as you get more experience under your belt, as you become disappointed a few times you start to kind of think of things in more realistic terms. It’s not like you meet someone and that’s it. If they like you and you like them, well it’s gonna be forever, of course. I don’t really look at love like that anymore. I think the way I see love is kind of a little more fatalistic which means to me that when I meet someone and we have a connection the first thought I really have is, ‘When this is over I hope you think well of me,’ so this song is about having that immediate connection with someone and these were my vivid thoughts right as I met him.”
GLAMOUR: What’s your advice to anyone looking to get back with an ex?
TAYLOR: “’How You Get The Girl’ is a song about how, you know, when we’re young, which most of my friends and most of my peers are, a lot of the time you’ll take for granted a really good relationship and let go of it and go out into the world and then realise you want it back, and this song is kind of an instruction manual for a guy who has broken up with his girlfriend and let six months go by and the lengths he’ll need to go to to get her back, and it’s not gonna be as simple as just sending a text message. It’s like, ‘S’up?’ ‘Miss you.’ That’s not gonna work (laughs). You need to do all the things in this song.”
GLAMOUR: “This Love” is the only song that you wrote alone, why is that?
TAYLOR: “’This Love’ is a song that I wrote fairly early on in this process, and it was the first time I started experimenting with different vocal recording styles. In this case I wanted it to sound kind of haunting, and so I sang this song differently than I’ve sung most of my other songs. I recorded it differently. You have multiple vocals going throughout the entire song. It’s about kind an experience I had where if you truly care about someone and you know they’re not ready to be in a relationship you will let them go, and it sucks to be the one has to let something go and cut someone loose when you don’t want to, but I think you have to be selfless in relationships when you know that it’s not the right time, and if you make that decision and that person is supposed to be in your life they’ll come back, and this was the way that I felt when that came back around.”
GLAMOUR: What was it like collaborating with OneRepublic’s Ryan Tedder?
TAYLOR:
“I wrote ‘I Know Places’ with Ryan Tedder, and it was the first song that I wrote with him, so I brought this idea in that I had kind of done very roughly on piano and sent him this voice memo of me singing the chorus and kind of babbling my way through the verse, and he liked it and wanted to work on it. It’s a song about how other people will really ruin a relationship if they get a chance to and how it might be the best way to go about starting a relationship to keep it a secret if possible just because it’s very fragile and I think that this was a song that I wrote about sort of how covert it would have to be in order for me to ever make something work eventually.”
GLAMOUR: Did you purposely close the album with a song called “Clean”?
TAYLOR: “’Clean’ is the last song on the album for a lot of reasons but mostly because it felt like a completion of this kind of emotional process I’ve been going through for the past couple of years. You know, I feel like my personal life was really, really discussed and criticised and debated and talked about to a point where it made me feel kind of almost tarnished in a way, you know, and the discussion wasn’t about music, and it broke my heart that I had made an album that I was proud of and I was touring the world and playing to sold-out stadiums and still they managed to want to only talk about my personal life. At a certain point I felt a switch, and it was at the end of recording this album that I began to feel like my life was mine again and my music was at the forefront again and I was living my life on my own terms and I really no longer cared what people were saying about me, and that was when I started to see people talk less about the things that didn’t matter.”
GLAMOUR: You wrote “Clean” with Imogen Heap – is she a big inspiration of yours?
TALOR: “This song was one that I did with Imogen Heap who I’ve idolised for so long and when I was over in London for the Red tour she reached out and said, ‘Hey, if you want to come work I’m here,’ and so I drove hours out of the city and went to her studio and watching her work, creating the track for this song was the most inspiring experience. She’s comping vocals and editing and creating the track, playing the instruments. I was absolutely astonished by that level of talent and skill, so we wrote the song ‘Clean’ which is essentially about allowing yourself to really feel pain and then all of a sudden time passes and you’ve survived it and you’ve made it out the other side.”
GLAMOUR: The deluxe edition of
TAYLOR: “The song ‘You Are In Love’ is one that I did with Jack Antonoff and it’s strange because he sent me the track and I ended up writing these lyrics that very much mirrored what his relationship with his girlfriend and my best friend looked like to me, and the song is kind of told as if I’m looking at their story through a window or something. This album is not heavily based on romance or love because that hasn’t been a huge part of my life but my friends have been a huge part of my life and watching my friends fall in love and find meaningful relationships has been one of the most moving experiences, so this song is all about what it’s like when you really do find real love. We’re not talking, like, the chase. We’re not talking about a phase you go through or a fling. This is what it’s like when you find real true love and to me this song is how that feeling sounds.”
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