For Taylor Swift, there seems to be no limit when it comes to her influence and global stardom. The 33-year old has been named this year’s Time Person of the Year, sitting down with journalist Sam Lansky to talk about her career, her love-life, and the events that have shaped her extraordinary life so far.
Here are our top-rated moments from her interview:
She’s currently in her happy place
“It feels like the breakthrough moment of my career, happening at 33. And for the first time in my life, I was mentally tough enough to take what comes with that.”
“This is the proudest and happiest I’ve ever felt, and the most creatively fulfilled and free I’ve ever been.”
“I’ve been raised up and down the flagpole of public opinion so many times in the last 20 years.”
“I’ve been given a tiara, then had it taken away.”
“Over the years, I’ve learned I don’t have the time or bandwidth to get pressed about things that don’t matter. Yes, if I go out to dinner, there’s going to be a whole chaotic situation outside the restaurant. But I still want to go to dinner with my friends.”
“Life is short. Have adventures. Me locking myself away in my house for a lot of years—I’ll never get that time back. I’m more trusting now than I was six years ago.”
Gruelling workouts in preparation for her Eras Tour
“Every day I would run on the treadmill, singing the entire set list out loud. Fast for fast songs, and a jog or a fast walk for slow songs.”
“I had three months of dance training, because I wanted to get it in my bones. I wanted to be so over-rehearsed that I could be silly with the fans, and not lose my train of thought.”
Swift hired choreographer Mandy Moore (not the pop star actor) who Emma Stone worked with during La-La Land.
“Learning choreography is not my strong suit,” Swift said.
She also stopped drinking, because “Doing that show with a hangover — I don’t want to know that world.”
During a hiatus from consecutive shows, she rests for a full day: “I do not leave my bed except to get food and take it back to my bed and eat it there. It’s a dream scenario. I can barely speak because I’ve been singing for three shows straight. Every time I take a step my feet go crunch, crunch, crunch from dancing in heels.”
“I know I’m going on that stage whether I’m sick, injured, heartbroken, uncomfortable, or stressed.”
“That’s part of my identity as a human being now. If someone buys a ticket to my show, I’m going to play it unless we have some sort of force majeure.”
On performing her songs on Eras Tour
“Every part of you that you’ve ever been, every phase you’ve ever gone through, was you working it out in that moment with the information you had available to you at the time.”
“There’s a lot that I look back at like, ‘Wow, a couple years ago I might have cringed at this.’ You should celebrate who you are now, where you’re going, and where you’ve been.”
On the challenges working in the music industry
Swift’s life changed dramatically after Kanye West’s infamous VMAs disruption in 2009 when Swift was onstage accepting the award for Best Video by a Female Artist.
“I realised every record label was actively working to try to replace me. I thought instead, I’d replace myself first with a new me. It’s harder to hit a moving target.”
“By the time an artist is mature enough to psychologically deal with the job, they throw you out at 29, typically.”
“In the ’90s and ’00s, it seems like the music industry just said: ‘OK, let’s take a bunch of teenagers, throw them into a fire, and watch what happens. By the time they’ve accumulated enough wisdom to do their job effectively, we’ll find new teenagers.’”
On the two major career events:
“It’s not lost on me that the two great catalysts for this happening were two horrendous things that happened to me.”
“The first was getting canceled within an inch of my life and sanity. The second was having my life’s work taken away from me by someone who hates me.”
Kim Kardashian feud
In 2016, Kanye West released a song, “Famous” where he sings: “I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex / I made that bitch famous.”
West later said that Swift had consented to the lyrics. Swift denied this. A few months later, West’s then-wife Kim Kardashian claimed in a GQ interview: “[Taylor] totally approved that. She totally knew that that was coming out. She wanted to all of a sudden act like she didn’t. I swear, my husband gets so much shit for things [when] he really was doing proper protocol and even called to get it approved.”
She also called Swift a snake on Instagram. The following month, Kardashian released Snapchat receipts of Swift appearing to give Kanye permission to release “Famous.”
Swift immediately released a Notes app statement:
“Where is the video of Kanye telling me he was going to call me ‘that bitch’ in his song? It doesn’t exist because it never happened. You don’t get to control someone’s emotional response to being called ‘that bitch’ in front of the entire world.”
“Being falsely painted as a liar when I was never given the full story or played any part of the song is character assassination. I would very much like to be excluded from this narrative, one that I have never asked to be a part of, since 2009.”
After the scandal, Swift told TIME this week she felt like she was in “a career death.”
“Make no mistake—my career was taken away from me. I had all the hyenas climb on and take their shots.”
“You have a fully manufactured frame job, in an illegally recorded phone call, which Kim Kardashian edited and then put out to say to everyone that I was a liar.”
“That took me down psychologically to a place I’ve never been before. I moved to a foreign country. I didn’t leave a rental house for a year. I was afraid to get on phone calls. I pushed away most people in my life because I didn’t trust anyone anymore. I went down really, really hard.”
“I thought that moment of backlash was going to define me negatively for the rest of my life.”
“The Scooter Thing”
In June 2019, Scooter Braun’s Ithaca Holdings acquired Scott Borchetta’s Big Machine Label Group, which included Swift’s entire catalog at that point, which was valued at US$140 million.
The sale meant that Braun owned the rights to Swift’s first six albums, and any time someone requested license to a song, he would pocket the money.
“With the Scooter thing, my masters were being sold to someone who actively wanted them for nefarious reasons, in my opinion,” Swift told TIME.
“I was so knocked on my ass by the sale of my music, and to whom it was sold.”
“I was like, ‘Oh, they got me beat now. This is it. I don’t know what to do.’”
“I’d run into Kelly Clarkson and she would go, ‘Just redo it.’”
“My dad kept saying it to me too. I’d look at them and go, ‘How can I possibly do that?’ Nobody wants to redo their homework if on the way to school, the wind blows your book report away.”
Swift rerecorded her all her songs, and released them as “Taylor’s Version”.
“It’s all in how you deal with loss. I respond to extreme pain with defiance.”
“If you look at what I’ve put out since then, it’s more albums in the last few years than I did in the first 15 years of my career.”
“Nothing is permanent. So I’m very careful to be grateful every second that I get to be doing this at this level, because I’ve had it taken away from me before. There is one thing I’ve learned: My response to anything that happens, good or bad, is to keep making things. Keep making art.”
“But I’ve also learned there’s no point in actively trying to quote unquote defeat your enemies. Trash takes itself out every single time.”
On Feminism
“If we have to speak stereotypically about the feminine and the masculine. Women have been fed the message that what we naturally gravitate toward—”
“Girlhood, feelings, love, breakups, analysing those feelings, talking about them nonstop, glitter, sequins! We’ve been taught that those things are more frivolous than the things that stereotypically gendered men gravitate toward, right?”
“And what has existed since the dawn of time? A patriarchal society. What fuels a patriarchal society? Money, flow of revenue, the economy. So actually, if we’re going to look at this in the most cynical way possible, feminine ideas becoming lucrative means that more female art will get made. It’s extremely heartening.”
You can read the full interview with TIME here.