Taylor Swift Shares That Her Mother, Andrea, Has a Brain Tumor
Taylor Swift hasn’t stopped since releasing her seventh album, Lover last August. Since then, she’s been busy with a limited tour, press for the head-scratcher Cats (she has no regrets), plans to re-record her previous material, and preparing the premiere of Taylor Swift: Miss Americana, a Netflix documentary about her career and her place in pop culture that comes out on January 31. But between it all, Swift has been dealing with some pretty devastating family news: She revealed this week that her mother Andrea, who’s been battling cancer since 2015, has a brain tumor, which doctors discovered through her treatment.
Swift opened up about her mom’s health in a long profile that Variety ran this week. Their relationship has been a close-knit one, and Swift has already written two songs—”Soon You’ll Get Better” and “The Best Day”—about her battle with cancer. “Almost every decision I make, I talk to her about it first. So obviously it was a really big deal to ever speak about her illness,” Swift said during the interview before talking about the tough moment in which the tumor was discovered. “While she was going through treatment, they found a brain tumor. And the symptoms of what a person goes through when they have a brain tumor is nothing like what we’ve ever been through with her cancer before. So it’s just been a really hard time for us as a family.”
Swift explained that her mother is part of the reason why she’s planning to only play four stadium dates in America this summer and several festivals in Europe. “I feel like I haven’t done festivals, really, since early in my career—they’re fun and bring people together in a really cool way. But I also wanted to be able to work as much as I can handle right now, with everything that’s going on at home. And I wanted to figure out a way that I could do both those things,” she said.
She went further into what Andrea is going through and added, “I mean, we don’t know what is going to happen. We don’t know what treatment we’re going to choose. It just was the decision to make at the time, for right now, for what’s going on.”