The GQ profile of Taylor Swift by Chuck Klosterman dropped Thursday morning. While the profile is not exactly earth-shattering, there are enough interesting nuggets, factoids, and Swiftian anecdotes scattered throughout the piece, coupled with Klosterman’s traditionally high-minded line of questioning, that it ends up being a fairly entertaining read. But you’ve got work to do now and don’t have time to read the whole thing until later. So let us break it down for you with five things we learned from the profile.
Taylor Swift wrote a novel
Swift wrote the non-autobiographical A Girl Named Girl when she was 14, and if you’re interested in giving it a read, you’ll have to first track down her parents and then pull together a decent enough reason for why they should let you read it. It better be good, because it’s probably buried in the attic somewhere and Mr. Swift, like all middle-aged men, most likely hates digging around the attic for his daughter’s things. But here, a plot synopsis for you: mother wants a son, mother gets a girl. Don’t think for a second that every publisher of young-adult books isn’t scrambling to get a copy of A Girl Named Girl as you read this.
It’s not in there as Justin, obviously
Justin Timberlake is in her phone as J TIMB, and J TIMB is having trouble sleeping because he has a newborn baby (same here), and came to her with the idea of performing “Mirrors” with her at her L.A. show. And this is crazy, because Swift says it’s crazy. Reportedly four times, each time with the volume getting louder and louder.
Her label wanted “Shake It Off” to be a country song
It’s no secret that Swift’s label wasn’t exactly thrilled with the idea of her doing a non-country album and, throughout the recording process, routinely brought that up, coupled with suggestions like adding a fiddle and a steel-guitar to “Shake It Off.” Swift stuck to her guns, though, and rebuffed their suggestions and talks at every turn.
Taylor Swift hates to be called the “C” word
Calculating. Klosterman brings up a lunch he had a few years ago with an acquaintance of Swift and how that person described Swift as “calculating.” Swift was flustered, briefly breaking character before explaining the genesis for her hatred of the word and where that label of her comes from.
“Am I shooting from the hip?” she asks rhetorically. “Would any of this have happened if I was? In that sense, I do think about things before they happen. But here was someone taking a positive thing—the fact that I think about things and that I care about my work—and trying to make that into an insinuation about my personal life. Highly offensive. You can be accidentally successful for three or four years. Accidents happen. But careers take hard work.”
“Bad Blood” is about who?
“Bad Blood” is about Katy Perry, right? Yeah, it is. You know, because of the whole stealing backup dancers thing. This is something we’ve all agreed on is the truth.
Or is it?
Spoiler: According to Swift, it’s not. Maybe?
“You’re in a Rolling Stone interview, and the writer says, “Who is that song about? That sounds like a really intense moment from your life.” And you sit there, and you know you’re on good terms with your ex-boyfriend, and you don’t want him—or his family—to think you’re firing shots at him. So you say, “That was about losing a friend.” And that’s basically all you say. But then people cryptically tweet about what you meant. I never said anything that would point a finger in the specific direction of one specific person, and I can sleep at night knowing that. I knew the song would be assigned to a person, and the easiest mark was someone who I didn’t want to be labled with this song. It was not a song about heartbreak. It was about the loss of friendship.”
So, it’s not about Katy Perry? It’s a song about a dude?
“…I don’t necessarily care who people think it’s about. I just needed to divert them away from the easiest target. Listen to the song. It doesn’t point to any one person or any one situation. But if you’d listened to my previous four albums, you would think this was about a guy who broke my heart. And nothing could be further from the truth. It was important to show that losing friendships can be just as damaging to a person as losing a romantic relationship.”
Okay then.
(Via GQ)