Taylor Swift has officially given her first interview since the Reputation era. She talked to Entertainment Weekly about how her forthcoming seventh album has more songs than any of her previous albums, and how she masterfully she plans her music video Easter eggs, referencing music that won’t be released for years. (Her music video for “Look What You Made Me Do” has the most Easter eggs, and they still haven’t all been found. “It will be decades before they [the Swifties] find them all,” Swift said.)
Swift also touched on how she struggles to determine how authentic to be in public versus how curated, especially with everyone eager to “cancel” stars who do or say anything wrong. She said she was happy to find fans at her Reputation shows that didn’t see her as some kind of tabloid villain but instead as a human.
“So often with our takedown culture, talking sh*t about a celebrity is basically the same as talking sh*t about the new iPhone. So when I go and I meet fans, I see that they actually see me as a flesh-and-blood human being. That—as contrived as it may sound—changed [me] completely, assigning humanity to my life.”
And when it comes to social media, Swift considers it to be both a blessing and a curse because of the way people can be judged and treated, for better or worse, based on what they post.
“Our priorities can get messed up existing in a society that puts a currency on curating the way people see your life,” Swift began. “Social media has given people a way to express their art. I use it to connect with fans. But on the downside you feel like there are 3 trillion new invisible hoops that you have to jump through, and you feel like you’ll never be able to jump through them all correctly. I—along with a lot of my friends and fans—am trying to figure out how to navigate living my life and not just curating what I want people to think living my life is.”
Swift has also had trouble figuring out where to set boundaries between her private and public life, how to be open enough on social media that she doesn’t seem fake without compromising her privacy. “I’m not always able to maintain a balance, and I think that’s important for everyone to know about,” she said. “We’re always learning, and that’s something that I also had to learn—that I’ve got to be brave enough to learn. Learning in public is so humiliating sometimes….”
But for now, things are going well, and she’s enjoying that moment. “Do I feel more balanced in my life than I ever have before? Um, probably yeah,” she said. “But is that permanent? No. And I think being okay with that has put me in a bit of a better position.”