#topic: muses

Here's something I've learned about people. We think we know someone, but the truth is that we only know the version of them they have chosen to show us. We know our friend in a certain light, but we don't know them the way their lover does. Just the way their lover will never know them the same way that you do as their friend. Their mother knows them differently than their roommate, who knows them differently than their colleague. Their secret admirer looks at them and sees an elaborate sunset of brilliant color and dimension and spirit and pricelessness. And yet, a stranger will pass that person and see a faceless member of the crowd, nothing more. We may hear rumors about a person and believe those things to be true. We may one day meet that person and feel foolish for believing baseless gossip. This is the first generation that will be able to look back on their entire life story documented in pictures on the internet, and together we will all discover the after-effects of that. Ultimately, we post photos online to curate what strangers think of us. But then we wake up, look in the mirror at our faces and see the cracks and scars and blemishes, and cringe. We hope someday we'll meet someone who will see that same morning face and instead see their future, their partner, their forever. Someone who will still choose us even when they see all of the sides of the story, all the angles of the kaleidoscope that is you. The point being, despite our need to simplify and generalize absolutely everyone and everything in this life, humans are intrinsically impossible to simplify. We are never just good or just bad. We are mosaics of our worst selves and our best selves, our deepest secrets and our favorite stories to tell at a dinner party, existing somewhere between our well-lit profile photo and our drivers license shot. We are all a mixture of our selfishness and generosity, loyalty and self-preservation, pragmatism and impulsiveness. I've been in the public eye since I was 15 years old. On the beautiful, lovely side of that, I've been so lucky to make music for living and look out into crowds of loving, vibrant people. On the other side of the coin, my mistakes have been used against me, my heartbreaks have been used as entertainment, and my songwriting has been trivialized as 'oversharing'. When this album comes out, gossip blogs will scour the lyrics for the men they can attribute to each song, as if the inspiration for music is as simple and basic as a paternity test. There will be slideshows of photos backing up each incorrect theory, because it's 2017 and if you didn't see a picture of it, it couldn't have happened right? Let me say it again, louder for those in the back… We think we know someone, but the truth is that we only know the version of them that they have chosen to show us. There will be no further explanation There will be just reputation.

"There are definitely moments when it's like this cloud of an idea comes and just lands in front of your face, and you reach up and grab it. A lot of songwriting is things you learn, structure, and cultivating that skill, and knowing how to craft a song. But there are mystical, magical moments, inexplicable moments when an idea that is fully formed just pops into your head. And that's the purest part of my job. It can get complicated on every other level, but the songwriting is still the same uncomplicated process it was when I was 12 years old writing songs in my room. I don't know what it is that makes some people really creatively inspiring. There have been people I've spent a lot of time with who I just couldn't write about. It's just that some people come into your life and they have this effect on you."

"I only write songs about crazy love. If I go on two dates with a guy and we don't click, I'm not writing a song about that. It didn't matter in the emotional grand scheme of things. There's a lot that goes on in daily life that isn't really worth turning into a verse and a chorus."

Like many famous people, Swift complains about the prying of tabloid gossips. In fact, she does a lot to encourage the attention. Accepting the Best Female Video award for "I Knew You Were Trouble" at the VMAs this August, Swift said: "I also want to thank the person who inspired this song, who knows exactly who he is"—a statement that unleashed a torrent of tweets about One Direction singer Harry Styles, the song's reputed target. At such moments, you can't help but conclude that you are watching a shrewd businesswoman at work: It doesn't hurt Swift's bottom line to keep gossip mills whirring. Swift has heard the criticism, but she waves it off. "There's a spin on every single celebrity out there," she said. "I know that one of my spins is: 'Oh, Taylor's heartbroken. Oh, Taylor fell in love and the guy broke her heart. She's sad all the time, and lonely.'  "I mean, they can say that all they want. Those are real feelings that every single person goes through. I think that it's okay to be mad at someone who hurt you. This isn't about, like, the pageantry of trying to seem like nothing affects you. I'm a songwriter. Everything affects me." "I'm a songwriter," surely, is the apt response. The tradition of musical score-settling stretches all the way back to medieval troubadours and lyre-plucking ancients; it's been a mainstay of American song at least since the first bluesman aimed an acidic twelve-bars at the woman who'd done him wrong. Bob Dylan is an incorrigible, at times malicious, kisser-and-teller; for decades, rock critics have been quoting with admiration Elvis Costello's famous dictum: "The only motivation points for me writing all these songs are revenge and guilt." Drake's new album Nothing Was the Same is, as usual, a vérité catalogue of his "bitches" and booty calls, in which he goes so far as to name one of his civilian exes, "Courtney from ­Hooters on Peachtree"—a creepier move by far than Swift's sly swipes at her famous former beaux. It's hard not to detect a sexist double standard in the policing of Swift's confessions, especially when you consider the routine misogyny in the songs of rockers, rappers, and woebegone beardy indie balladeers. Taylor Swift is a young woman who dates guys, falls in love, falls out of love, and writes some songs about it. Must we begrudge Swift her muse?

Swift prides herself on never explicitly saying whom her songs are about, and she's not going to start with this one. Yes, she sprinkles clues in her liner notes and makes winking references onstage, but she tries to keep them obscure enough to maintain some modicum of mystery (or at least plausible deniability). She's so disciplined on this front that she won't even say any of her ex-boyfriends' names out loud – so when she does slip up, even in the most innocent way possible, it's highly entertaining.

"For me, the best part of the whole thing is knowing in my mind and in my memory where the song started, whether I was in the middle of a conversation with one of my friends and I got completely distracted because this idea hit me out of nowhere, or it was four a.m. and I woke up with this melody in my head that I couldn't get it out. And, knowing where the song starts, and then seeing where it goes from there, because for me, it starts from a very personal place, that this is something I went through, I see the face of the person it's about, I'm writing the song to that person, and then it goes out into the world and all of these people apply it to their lives and to their problems, and I think, in a way, it makes all of us feel like we're not alone in feeling what we feel."

"For me, the one thing that I keep really close is the identity of who these songs are about."

"If guys don't want me to write bad songs about them, then they shouldn't do bad things."