COVERSTORY

Pop’s biggest star is viewed as a friendbyher fans—and evenbakes cookies for

them.Her rise has beenmeteoric, yet sheis regarded as a ruthless operator by her

critics. Is she too good to be true?

FASTANDFEARLESS

Taylor Swift talks to DanCairns

She’s a savvy, goofy, multitalented pop star withgood manners, a way with words and a tendency to writeback — full of empathy — to fans who cry on her shoulderonline. Who invites some of those fans over to her housefor cookies, selfies and an album playback (the recent,gone-viral Secret Sessions). And who names her cats —which have their own Twitter accounts, for God’s sake —after characters in Grey’s Anatomy and Law & Order. Boring,right? We want scuttlebutt rumours, diva strops and post-

watershed videos. Narcotics and naughtiness. Anything butnice. Because where does nice get you?

Quite far, as it happens. Taylor Swift is nice, in the same waythat one of her best friends, Ed Sheeran, is nice. Like Sheeran,

she writes diaristic songs that go over the heads of purse-lippedtaste-makers and communicate directly with her disciples —

songs, and albums, that have a habit of going to No 1 all aroundthe world and staying there for a good while. This maddenssome people. But it gladdens plenty more. Anyway, who’d bea Swift detractor these days? It’s just not worth it, not worth theaggro or the sheer predictable obviousness of being a sceptic —never mind the risk you run of being on the receiving end ofThe Look (smiling mouth and eyes, but a brain that is whirringalmost audibly behind them).

Watching the 24-year-old singer on The Graham Norton Showtwo weeks ago may have been car-crash television, but it wasinstructive. Caught in a patronise sandwich between John Cleeseand Kevin Pietersen, Swift resembled not the victim but the hunter,biding her time. Former boyfriends, among them Jake Gyllenhaal,Joe Jonas, John Mayer and One Direction’s Harry Styles, haveprobably reached the same conclusion, given the American’s habitof dressing down ex-lovers and calling them out — in song.Mean-girl classmates from 10 years ago continue to provide richinspiration for Swift’s songs. As the lyrics on her new album, 1989,demonstrate, she’s eating it all up. And consuming it cold.

“I had been thinking a lot about how the media has created thiscomplex, fictionalised cartoon version of me,” Swift says. (She’sreferring to the new song Blank Space, with its very Swiftian line:“Got a long list of ex-lovers, they’ll tell you I’m insane.”) We’re ina vast London hotel room, where I’ve just signed a non-disclosure

agreement of staggering pedantry. The singer, as ramrod straightas a Victorian schoolchild, her long legs stretching from a pleatedtartan skirt down to vertiginous wedged ankle-straps, is nursing asore throat after three days on the media-go-round.

“You know,” she goes on, “this man-eating, jet-setting serialdater who reels them in, but scares them off because she’s clingyand needy; then she’s all dejected, so she goes into her lair andwrites a song as a weapon. I mean, man, that’s pretty intense. And Istarted thinking about what an interesting character that person is.And, if I was that person, what would my life motto be, my mantra?What would I say? I think I’d own it.”

Of course she would. Ever since she persuaded her parents,wealthy Wasps who worked in finance, to uproot the family fromPennsylvania to Nashville when she was just 14, Swift has shownan ability to stay one step ahead of perceptions and preconceptions.As she sings on her recent No 1 hit, Shake It Off: “I’m lightningon my feet.” She moved to Nashville equipped with an artistdevelopment deal, having performed relentlessly back home, inchildren’s theatre, in karaoke contests, in coffee houses, in talentshows. Some of the gnarlier Music Row veterans in Tennesseetreated her with lofty disdain, and look where that got them: shereleased her self-titled debut album aged just 16, co-writing all thesongs. If Swift has tended to collect slights — a rumoured spat withKaty Perry is said to be the subject of a new song, Bad Blood — shehas proved superb at turning the resulting hurt into music.

That this talent has coexisted with fierce ambition unsettlesthose still shackled to the notion of art and commerce as mutuallyexclusive. In this reading, Swift is just another pushy, stop-at-nothing, gimlet-eyed chancer, one more cog in the star-makermachinery. Even the semi-convinced seem unable to makethat final leap. “Taylor’s very likeable, odd and cute,” went onerecent post. “That said, part of me wishes Joni Mitchell wouldshow up at one of these Secret Sessions and just cackle at her.”

“I was talking to Ryan Tedder about this,” Swift says, referringto the go-to hit-maker for the likes of Adele and Ellie Goulding.“He calls it the left-brain/right-brain dilemma. Ryan and I aresimilar, in that we have equal sides of our brains that canwork simultaneously. We’ll turn one of them up at times, orone down. There are some artists who are completely right-brained, impulsive, artistic, but who don’t understand thebusiness side of things. Then there are artists who are all business,but aren’t really intuitive or plugged into an artistic outlet.Ryan and I can sit working on a song, but then, on our lunchbreak, we’ll be talking about tour dates, scheduling, which venuesare the best to play.”

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What if I was thisman-eating, jet-

setting serial dater?

Photograph by Sarah Barlow

4 5

COVERSTORY

Even songs by leftfield, “acceptable”artists, Swift argues, “have a

structure, don’t they? You can’t just standthere and scream, and that’s a song. It hasto be a certain length, a certain amount ofchord progressions. If you just playedseven random chords in no particularorder, that’s all right-brain. You have tohavea little of the left, just to conceptualisethe structure of a song.”One of today’s deftest, most intuitive

pop lyricists, Swift has now reached thepoint where she’s probably incapable ofproducing a clunky couplet. A diaristrather than a dramatist, she has the bornobserver’s eye for detail, which shecombines with a talent for scene-settingthat is almost novelistic. (See box, right.) Itis what she does with these talents that ischanging. On 2012’s Red, she settledmultiple scores. On 1989, by contrast, sheis nostalgic and much more forgiving.Relationships are remembered not withrancour, but in intense, evenwistful detail.The binding agent in her writing, how-

ever, all the way back to the 2006 debut

album that made her a star overnight, isits clarity and candour. Swift’s fans, asanyone who has seen her live will attest,treat her as a friend as much as a mentor.For someone who was bullied mercilesslyat school because of her musicalambitions, thatmust feel pretty good.“The thing with both Ed [Sheeran] and

me,” Swift says, “is that neither one of uswould be on stage if we didn’t write ourown songs.Therewould beno reason to be.The addiction we have is that connection.We have spent so much of our lives aloneand feeling misunderstood. You write asong about an emotion that confuses you,or about something you’re scared of orexcited about, and you release it, and all ofa sudden you’re making a connectionwith millions of people. Then the finalphase is that you look out into a crowdof thousands of people and they knowevery word. That’s an overwhelmingfeeling of camaraderie — which we’venever felt before in our lives.”So her longtime fans claim that version

of Swift: the person who joins in ontheir Instagram debates and dances withabandon at stuffy awards ceremonies. Yetothers take a harder line, balking at her

smooth trajectory upwards. The singer’snew album completes the move intodance-pop that Red began; she hasabandoned country, the genre that gaveher her first break, they tut. Her newBFFs, since she moved to New York twoyears ago, include the singer Lorde andthe Girls auteur Lena Dunham, and she’savoiding relationships for the moment;she’s a feminist because it’s cool. And it’sall about the marketing, not the music;those Secret Sessions are just a publicityploy. Even her current turn in a Diet Cokead, in which she plays a stereotypical catlady, overrun by moggies, is apparentlypart of a global PR conspiracy, with ahard-nosedHitchcockblonde at thehelm.Really, though? And what about the

songs? Take Shake It Off. Lyrically, it’sclassic, rapid-rebuttal Swift: “I stay outtoo late/Got nothing in my brain/That’swhat people say”. But it’s the music — ajoyous, beat-driven romp co-writtenwiththe Swedish hitmachinesMaxMartin andShellback — that really signals her intentand catapults Swift clear of Nashville,possibly for ever.“Ed texted me last night,” she says,

“andwent, ‘I’m in a club, it’s 3am, they’ve

played Shake It Off three times in the threehours I’ve been here.’ And I had this feel-ing of complete triumph, of victory. I’vealways wanted to write a song that peoplewould dance to. I’ve done songs thatpeople have sat and listened to, andreflected on the thoughts it produced inthem; or songs people would cry to whentheywere going throughabreak-up. But todo a songwhere people’s first instinct is todance, oh, I’vewanted that for so long.”Swift is a great eye-roller, going into

ocular overdrive when I mention some ofthe more outrageous things printed abouther. People can say what they like, shesays. She knows her story is unusual. “Itdoesn’t feel normal. The only way I canreally explain it is that it just felt natural.Before I moved to Nashville, I had prettymuch been doing nothing but performing.Honestly, anywhere I could get my guitarout and play, that’s what I did. And anytime I had a complex emotional issue todeal with, I ran to my room, slammed thedoor and wrote a song about it. That wasmy copingmechanism.“Every important part of my life was

taken up bymusic. And it filled in the gapswhen I didn’t have acceptance at school,

when I didn’t have friends, becausethey just couldn’t relate to how much Iloved music. I think they thought, ‘Howannoying that she could think she couldactually do that.’ Even though I was neverboastful about it.”That apartness remains Swift’s USP — a

lifeline to her fans. “My confidence hasalways been really, really quiet, and really,really deep down. Because, as much as Ihave acquired confidence, I struggle with aself-awareness and insecurity that are justas loud.” She says this in a near whisper.But she knows everyone is listening. c

1989 is released tomorrowonBigMachine

LO RESPOSITIONAL

Striking a chordTaylor Swift excels at what might best betermed the “empathy grab”. Right fromthe start, her songs have snagged thelistener with setup couplets that act likethe beginning of a paper trail you cannothelp but follow. “Looking at it now, it allseems so simple/We were lying on yourcouch.” Involuntarily, we think, whatnext? Those lines open the new song Outof the Woods, which Swift describes as“the gateway to the rest of the album”.Clean, 1989’s second unimpeachablybrilliant track (co-written with ImogenHeap), begins: “The drought was the veryworst/When the flowers we’d growntogether died of thirst.” Swift doesn’twaste words. Invariably, her lyrics arespare, simple; invariably, too, they plugyou straight into the emotional mains.

Out of the Woods may, as theTwitter-tattle insists, be about herrelationship with Harry Styles, and itsmiddle eight may refer to a snowmobileaccident the couple had, but thatsection’s lyrics burn with a heart-tuggingintensity and sexual urgency that take

the song way beyond the specific, andinto a world of universal experience.“Remember when you hit the brakes toosoon?,” Swift sings, as the music cranksup the tension, “Twenty stitches in thehospital room/When you started crying,baby, I did, too/But when the sun cameup, I was looking at you/Remember when youcouldn’t take theheat/I walked out,I said, ‘I’m settingyou free’/But themonsters turnedto be just trees/Andwhen the sun cameup, you were lookingat me.”

On Clean, Swift’shabitual deploymentof metaphor uses theterminology of alcoholaddiction — “Ten monthssober/I must admit,just because you’reclean/Doesn’t meanyou don’t miss it” — tocreate a lyric that willresonate with anyone

who has found themselves drawn againand again to a romantic flame that canonly scorch them. Neither song would beout of place in an anguished diary. Andthat’s the point. Swift’s songs keep itsimple, grab you from the start, strike a

chord — and cut verydeep indeed. DC

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INTERVIEW | Taylor Swift

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Listen to the songs of TaylorSwift—past and present—on Spotify;if you haven’t signed up yet, go totimespacks.com/spotify2014

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