“We’re a democracy—at least, we’re supposed to be—where you’re allowed to disagree, dissent, debate. I really think that he thinks this is an autocracy,” she says of Trump, adding that the current atmosphere is like “gaslighting the American public into being like, ‘If you hate the president, you hate America.’”
The singer was famously mum during the 2016 election—an action, or rather lack of action, that received much criticism at the time. But according to The Guardian, she started feeling conflicted about the United States political climate after, she says, “all the dirtiest tricks in the book were used and it worked.” That was a tumultuous time for Swift: Her mother’s cancer had relapsed, and her feud with Kanye West and Kim Kardashian was at an all-time high after the couple posted videos on social media that they claimed proved Swift approved West’s lyrics about her in the song “Famous.” (You know the one.)
“I was just trying to protect my mental health—not read the news very much, go cast my vote, tell people to vote. I just knew what I could handle and I knew what I couldn’t. I was literally about to break,” she says. However, she adds that she now is “really remorseful” for not speaking out or endorsing Hillary Clinton for president.
Now, as the 2020 election looms closer, she tells The Guardian that she’ll “do everything” she can.
“Obviously, I’m pro-choice,” Swift adds. “I just can’t believe this is happening.”
Taylor Swift‘s Loveralbum is finally here. But last night, ahead of its release, she dropped the video for the title track.
Of course, this means that her fans jumped into deep analysis mode as they took in each frame, found so many hidden Easter eggs, and developed some theories. In the video, we see a little girl at Christmas time opening her presents. One of them is a snow globe, and soon we’re taken into the house inside the globe where Swift and her “lover” reside. We see the couple laughing, loving, dancing, fighting, throwing parties, and diving into a fish bowl together. You know, living their lives.
At the end, the camera pans out to show that the little girl is their daughter—a very sweet touch that I must admit choked me up a little bit.
Watch the video for yourself, below, and then let’s break down what it all means.
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The house.
The home inside the snow globe has seven rooms, which fans think represent Swift’s seven albums.
One fan also noted that the rooms are lit in color while the outside is dark, seemingly a reference to the lyrics in “Out of the Woods” from 1989: “The rest of the world was black and white, but we were in screaming color.”
Another thought it was a reference to the dollhouse in 13 Going on 30.
Taylor Swift‘s been quite outspoken about the sexism she’s faced in the music industry. When she was promoting her 1989 album in 2014, she called out the double standard of being criticized for writing about her exes even though male artists like Ed Sheeran do the same thing. Earlier this month, she opened up about the treatment she received after her 2012 album Red topped the charts.
“It’s fine to infantilize a girl’s success and say, ‘How cute that she’s having some hit songs,’” she told Vogue. “‘How cute that she’s writing songs.’ But the second it becomes formidable? As soon as I started playing stadiums—when I started to look like a woman—that wasn’t as cool anymore.”
Now she’s doubling down on this message with a new song, “The Man” off her album Lover (which dropped today). In it, Swift muses about how her life and career might have panned out if she were a man.
“I would be complex. I would be cool,” Swift sings. “They’d say I played the field before I found someone to commit to. And that would be OK for me to do. Every conquest I had made would make me more of a boss to you.”
Swift isn’t the first pop singer to call out this troubling dichotomy. Everyone from Madonna to Nicki Minaj has drawn attention to the fact that women in music aren’t allowed to be strong without being branded “divas.” “When [Lil’] Wayne walks on the set, and says, ‘Don’t talk to me. Have my music ready,’ it’s cool. But every time I put my foot down and stand up for myself, it’s like, ‘We’ve heard about Nicki Minaj,'” Minaj said in 2012.
Taylor Swift released her highly-anticipated seventh studio album, Lover, on Friday, August 23. Lyrically, the 18-track record is reminiscent of her earlier albums, like Speak Now (2010) and Fearless (2008). Sonically, however, it’s more on par with Red (2012) or 1989 (2014). It’s arguably her most varied work to date—some of the songs are pure pop while others are more soulful and subdued. There’s even a glorious return to country. In short, there’s something for everyone.
There is one consistent through-line on Lover, though: Swift’s love for…well, love. The album is wildly romantic and thematically seems to track the timeline of a relationship, from its early stages to finally realizing the situation is serious. Knowing Swift’s previous music history, it’s safe to assume—or at least theorize—that Lover is about the progression of her relationship with British actor Joe Alwyn.
Swift is notoriously private about this—and there’s nothing on Lover that mentions him directly (save for the aptly-titled track “London Boy”). But half the fun of being a Taylor Swift fan is coming up with theories, and this is mine: In my opinion, Lover is her way of telling us how the Joe Alwyn relationship came to be. My evidence lies in this track-by-track review below.
Swift doesn’t start Lover with a love song, but rather a track where she proclaims all the people who once brought her down are no longer an issue. She mentions no one specifically, but it’s safe to assume she could be talking about her ex-boyfriends, Calvin Harris, who she dated before meeting Alwyn. It’s clear from Reputation things did not end on good terms with Harris, but Swift seems to have moved past the drama on “I Forgot You Existed.”
“How many days did I spend thinking about how you did me wrong?” she sings. “[I] lived in the shade you were throwing ’til all of my sunshine was gone.” In the chorus she proudly declares, “I forgot that you existed, and I thought that it would kill me, but it didn’t” before later saying, “I would’ve stuck around for ya, would’ve fought the whole town… [I] would’ve been there front row, even if nobody came to your show.” (Harris is a DJ.)
The gist of this song? Swift has shed the snakeskin from her Reputation era and is open to new possibilities.
Enter track two: “Cruel Summer,” which documents the flirty, occasionally tumultuous early stages of a relationship. “It’s new, the shape of your body. It’s blue, the feeling I’ve got,” Swift sings. In a separate section she says, “It’s cool, that’s what I tell him. No rules…We say we’ll just screw it up. In these trying times, we’re not trying.”
To me, this sounds like Alwyn and Swift’s earliest stage: a period where maybe they kept what was going on from friends and family. “I don’t want to keep secrets just to keep you,” she sings. And sometimes, this type of dynamic can cause drama: “Summer’s a knife,” Swift sings at one point.
But that stage ends quickly. By “Lover,” it seems Swift and Alwyn have become a full-on couple. In “Cruel Summer,” she sang about having “no rules” with a partner; now she says, “This is our place, we make the rules. “
“Have I known you 20 seconds or 20 years?” she sings later on. “Can I go where you go? Can we always be this close?…I’ve loved you three summers. Now honey, I want ’em all.”
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We deviate from a love story, slightly, on “The Man.” Here, Tay muses about how her career and reputation would have played out in the press if she were a man. “Every conquest I made would make me more of a boss to you,” she sings. “I’d be just like Leo in Saint Tropez.” (Some subtle Leonardo DiCaprio shade for ya!)
In late June, news broke that Justin Bieber’s manager, Scooter Braun, had acquired Taylor Swift’s back catalog of music as part of his purchase of Scott Borchetta’s Big Machine Label Group. (Big Machine was Swift’s old label.) Pretty much everyone, from Halsey to Todrick Hall to Justin Bieber, had something to say about the situation, and voices on social media (including Kelly Clarkson) even urged her to consider the biggest power move possible: re-recording her entire catalogue.
And it turns out that’s exactly what Swift has decided to do. A short transcript from her recent appearance on CBS Sunday Morning reveals that the pop star is planning to head back to the studio and create brand new masters of all the songs that Braun now owns. Here’s exactly what she said when correspondent Tracy Smith asked her if she was going to re-record everything.
“Might you do that?” Smith asks.
“Oh yeah,” Swift says.
“That’s a plan?” Smith asks.
“Yeah, absolutely,” Swift answers.
As a recap, the whole drama started when Big Machine Records—the Scott Borchetta-owned label that Swift was on for a bulk of her career—was acquired by Braun’s company, Ithaca Holdings. In a Tumblr post, Swift insisted that she didn’t know about the sale until it was announced and that she wasn’t given the chance to buy her music. She also expressed her frustration that the songs she’d worked so hard on were now owned by someone she says had subjected her to “incessant, manipulative bullying.”
“When I left my masters in Scott’s hands, I made peace with the fact that eventually he would sell them. Never in my worst nightmares did I imagine the buyer would be Scooter,” she wrote. “Any time Scott Borchetta has heard the words ‘Scooter Braun’ escape my lips, it was when I was either crying or trying not to. He knew what he was doing; they both did. Controlling a woman who didn’t want to be associated with them. In perpetuity. That means forever.”
It’s unclear when Taylor Swift is going to start this project, but it’s going to be a huge undertaking. It comes right as her seventh studio album, Lover, is scheduled to drop on August 23. The full CBS interview will be out on August 25.
Taylor Swift’s long-awaited seventh album, Lover, is almost here—and just before the big reveal, the singer released a first look at her upcoming collaboration with designer Stella McCartney.
Swift and McCartney partnered on a collection inspired by the upcoming release. And the Lover lookbook reveals there will be plenty of pastel-colored merchandise and accessories to go around.
The line includes hoodies decorated with hearts, tons of rainbow-hued shirts, and hats and totes that fit in with the dreamy tones that Swift has used for her Lover videos so far. It also gives eager Swifties a few more clues about what some of the unreleased songs might sound like: One sweater reads, “Summer’s a knife” and another item has “”Like a Tennessee Stella McCartney” on it. Her new cat, Benjamin Button, even makes an appearance.
Apparently, the idea for this collaboration started when Swift began spending time in London, where her boyfriend Joe Alwyn lives.
“When I started spending more time in London, Stella and I would go on walks, have cocktails, and talk about life. So when it came time to write this album, I name-checked her in one of my songs, and when I played her the album, I said, ‘Should we do something?’” Swift told Vogue. She wore a Stella McCartney dress to the 2019 BAFTAs after parties—before their collaboration was officially announced.
McCartney jumped on the chance to work with Swift and said she was immediately in after getting an advance listen of Lover. “I couldn’t believe that my name is in a Taylor Swift song (what?!?) and after Taylor played me the entire album it gave me such incredible inspiration for the collaboration and it really revolved around the music,” the designer told Vogue. “When Taylor asked me, or even thought to come and do this with me, what I love is how we really complement each other in what we generate creatively together.”
