The Rolling Stone Interview: Taylor Swift
By: Brian Hiatt for The Rolling Stone Magazine
Date: September 18th 2019
In her most in-depth and introspective interview in years, Swift tells all about the rocky road to ‘Lover’ and much, much more.
Taylor Swift bursts into her mom’s Nashville kitchen, smiling, looking remarkably like Taylor Swift. (That red-lip, classic thing? Check.) “I need someone to help dye my hair pink,” she says, and moments later, her ends match her sparkly nail polish, sneakers, and the stripes on her button-down. It’s all in keeping with the pastel aesthetic of her new album, Lover; black-leather combat-Taylor from her previous album cycle has handed back the phone. Around the black-granite kitchen island, all is calm and normal, as Swift’s mom, dad, and younger brother pass through. Her mom’s two dogs, one very small, one very large, pounce upon visitors with slurping glee. It could be any 29-year-old’s weekend visit with her parents, if not for the madness looming a few feet down the hall.
In an airy terrace, 113 giddy, weepy, shaky, still-in-disbelief fans are waiting for the start of one of Swift’s secret sessions, sacred rituals in Swift-dom. She’s about to play them her seventh album, as-yet unreleased on this Sunday afternoon in early August, and offer copious commentary. Also, she made cookies. Just before the session, Swift sits down in her mom’s study (where she “operates the Google,” per her daughter) to chat for a few minutes. The black-walled room is decorated with black-and-white classic-rock photos, including shots of Bruce Springsteen and, unsurprisingly, James Taylor; there are also more recent shots of Swift posing with Kris Kristofferson and playing with Def Leppard, her mom’s favorite band.
In a corner is an acoustic guitar Swift played as a teenager. She almost certainly wrote some well-known songs on it, but can’t recall which ones. “It would be kind of weird to finish a song and be like, ‘And this moment, I shall remember,’'” she says, laughing. “‘This guitar hath been anointed with my sacred tuneage!'”
The secret session itself is, as the name suggests, deeply off-the-record; it can be confirmed that she drank some white wine, since her glass pops up in some Instagram pictures. She stays until 5 a.m., chatting and taking photos with every one of the fans. Five hours later, we continue our talk at length in Swift’s Nashville condo, in almost exactly the same spot where we did one of our interviews for her 2012 Rolling Stone cover story. She’s hardly changed its whimsical decor in the past seven years (one of the few additions is a pool table replacing the couch where we sat last time), so it’s an old-Taylor time capsule. There’s still a huge bunny made of moss in one corner, and a human-size birdcage in the living room, though the view from the latter is now of generic new condo buildings instead of just distant green hills. Swift is barefoot now, in pale-blue jeans and a blue button-down tied at the waist; her hair is pulled back, her makeup minimal.
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