Over the past few days, the internet has been filled with rumors about Taylor Swift’s next album based on her recent Instagram posts, so much so that Swift herself addressed the hysteria (with a funny non-answer). Now, there’s another Swift-related item to endlessly dissect: Swift is on the cover of Elle UK‘s new music issue, for which she penned an essay about pop music.
.@taylorswift13 looks stunning on the cover of Elle Magazine. 💛 pic.twitter.com/91iOXv8flE
— Pop Crave (@PopCrave) February 28, 2019
In it, she wrote that she loves putting personal details into her songs, and that it’s a fun challenge: “The fun challenge of writing a pop song is squeezing those evocative details into the catchiest melodic cadence you can possibly think of. I thrive on the challenge of sprinkling personal mementos and shreds of reality into a genre of music that is universally known for being, well, universal.”
She goes on to say that despite pop’s reputation for being generic, that’s not actually what fans want from it:
“I think these days, people are reaching out for connection and comfort in the music they listen to. We actually do NOT want our pop music to be generic. I think a lot of music lovers want some biographical glimpse into the world of our narrator, a hole in the emotional walls people put up around themselves to survive.
This glimpse into the artist’s story invites us to connect it to our own, and in the best case scenario, allows us the ability to assign that song to our memories. It’s this alliance between a song and our memories of the times it helped us heal, or made us cry, dance, or escape that truly stands the test of time.”
Read Swift’s full essay here.
