#and they officially have taylor swift song titles from midnights

[sophiesonlinediary]

Official TTPD Review

Fortnight - Such a vibe with headphones on, but still far from being my favorite though. I'm quite shocked this is the first single but I do really like it now at the second listen, still sad post malone didn't get his own verse i was excited for that :/

The Tortured Poets Department - The charlie puth mention really ruined verse 2 for me sadly, but the bridge ruined my life "At dinner, you take my ring off my middle finge. And put it on the one people put wedding rings on. And that's the closest I've come to my heart exploding" LIKE WTF HEART = BROKEN the title of the song is really cool but i dont know i wasnt expecting the song to sound like this.

My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys - I think this may be my second least favorite from this album i dont understand why i didnt really like this song. Maybe it was the vibe of the song and sound especially the choruses which sadly didnt hit. i love how she wrote about a rocky relationship in this song. I feel like this one will definetly be a grower

Down Bad - literally one of my favorites from the whole album. Maybe it's cause the sound feels familiar to me kind off like midnights vibe. But wow that chorus is amazing truly so catchy and the lyrics like wow. i love this song so muchhhh

So Long, London - Not what I expected but still so heartbreakingly pretty. I love her voice in this song it's so pretty and the lyrics are so good oh my god. I swear the verse 3's in this album are vile. "I died on the altar waitin' for the proof" like god damn this whole song is amazing.

But Daddy I Love Him - I loved this song so fucking much. When she said "I'm having his babies" my face dropped and then she hit me with "no not really but you should see your faces" was really fun i'll probably never forget that. i believe this song is of everyone trying to decide her love life for her. And her being like fuck you guys it's my life and you have to accept it and i love her for that!

Fresh Out The Slammer - Those choruses are so good man especially the second one is so good and so me. On first listen this one isn't very memorable but still really good. Now that i've listened to it more like i love this song so much too and the bride ahhh <333

Florida !!! - Ok so maybe i'm a little biased but man this one is so fucking good. I have loved Florence and Taylor for years so like them collaborating was like everything and more. I have now listened to the song like thrice and wowwwww i love it so muchhhhh. Taylor, Florence, Fl welcomes you with open arms man. And like verse 3 was so good their song writing skills are out of this world.

Guilty As Sin? - What an interesting song, like man, idk how to feel. I love the chorus fs. I've come to interpret this song as her having thoughts of a man who possibly isn't available per say or it's just something that can never happen between the two but the want for eachother is there. "They don't know how you've haunted me so stunningly" I love this lyric btw and the chorus right after like wowwww

Who's Afraid Of Little Old Me - ME IM SCARED WTF. Her screaming that line was everything and like the second half of the song is so incredible like wow. also this line has stuck with me since last night "Then we could all just laugh until I cry" ALSO THE ASYLUM WHERE THEY RAISED ME SDJNVFI. I love how she's kind of portraying herself in this song as like the stereotypical scary neighbor in movies. At least that's how I saw it. The whole bridge is incredible and magnificent I adore this song.

I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can) - GIRL NO YOU CANT AND IM SO HAPPY YOU ACCEPTED THAT. Once I got past the point that this song is about ratty healy I really liked it. it's vibes are so good and the imagery is amazing.

loml - what if i said this should've been track 5. This was the only song in the album I cried to on first listen. It hit me like a bullet and I will never forgive cat lady swift for not preparing me for this song. Literally so fucking hurtful i'm screaming oh my lord. I- no im never getting over this song, sorry not sorry. And the fact "They almost had it all" but there life was cut short aka the relationship ended oh god kill me.

I Can Do It With A Broken Heart - I don't know whether to laugh or to cry. This song is heartbreaking don't let the production fool you, the lyrics want to make you rip you're hair out. And you know what i'll be dancing to this song with a broken heart. "The lights refract sequin stars off her silhouette every night. I can show you lies" it's giving mirrorball like augh i love this song so much!!! and the chorus is everything "I'm so obsessed with him, but he avoids me like the plague" SO FUCKING REAL.

The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived - DRAG HIS ASS TAYLOR YEAHHHH. HELLO WTF THIS SONG IS SO GOOD AND FOR ALL OF U HATING ON IT U JUST DONT GET IT THE PASSIVE AGGRESSIVENESS IS EVERYTHINGGGG. mad woman you'd be proud asf. also my religion mentioned as a tongue in cheek to his anti religion views 👏

The Alchemy - I'm not gonna talk about this song much but like I didn't like it at all, i'm sorry. It sounds like one of those Kelce parody songs 😭

Clara Bow - Not the name-dropping herself, damn. I wanna manifest that second pre-chorus btw 🤞 i need to see the light of manhattan. I truly love this song and I can tell it's very personal to her. she's had such an unbelievable career it's always interesting when she writes about it. loved this as the album closer!

this is my ttpd review. remember im just a girl who's only listened to this album twice so please dont drag me for these opinions. gonna do the anthology later!

[bi-bard]

Taylor Swift Songs that Would Describe a Relationship with Dick Grayson - Dick Grayson Imagine [Titans]

Title: Taylor Swift Songs that Would Describe a Relationship with Dick Grayson

Pairing: Dick Grayson X Reader

Word Count: 1,200 words

Warning(s): mention of death/violence

Author's Note: It may be a new year, but that doesn't mean I'm gonna stop using Taylor Swift songs to inspire my writing all the time.

---------------------------

New Year's Day

Don't read the last page But I stay when you're lost, and I'm scared And you're turning away I want your midnights But I'll be cleaning up bottles with you on New Year's Day

The tower was tenser after the team left than it was in the moments before.

I looked toward the doorway that everyone, but Gar had walked through. I didn't get it. I didn't get why everyone was running. I understood that Dick had lied, but in either series of events, Dick didn't have a proper chance to save Jericho. In either series of events, Slade Wilson was still at fault for what happened.

I sighed and shook my head before walking over to Dick. "Come on, let's get your face cleaned up."

It was still bloody from when Hank had punched him.

Dick didn't talk until I had wiped a wet washcloth under his nose.

"Are you gonna head back to Gotham," he asked.

"What," I replied, pulling the washcloth away. "I... I wasn't planning on it, why?"

"After everything that happened... what happened with Jericho-"

"What happened to Jericho was Slade's fault, got it," I cut him off. "I don't blame you for that. I... I don't quite understand why you lied to me about it, but I don't blame you. I don't think that you would have knowingly dragged Jericho into that fight."

Dick nodded. I grabbed his jaw so he would stay still enough for me to wipe away some of the remaining blood.

"You always saw the best in me."

He said it like he didn't deserve that, but his face didn't look like that. He looked more stunned than anything. Shocked that I would stay or shocked at the sudden realization of his.

"Why are you staying," he asked.

"Because you're my friend," I replied, going to rinse some of the blood out of the washcloth. "And I care about you."

Dick didn't respond.

I looked back at him. "You're my best friend, Dick. You saved my life; you helped me find a purpose. I'm going to stay by your side. You are officially stuck with me."

A grin crossed his lips. I smiled back at him.

I put the washcloth down before moving to hug him tightly. He hugged me back.

At the end of every day, no matter what, it was the two of us.

And that was all that mattered to me in the end.

long story short

And he's passing by Rare as the glimmer of a comet in the sky And he feels like home If the shoe fits, walk in it Everywhere you go

I never thought that I would be one to call Gotham "peaceful".

However, after so much had happened with Jonathan Crane and Jason, I would be wrong to say that there wasn't some kind of peacefulness that took over the city.

As soon as that peace settled, the team decided that it was time to head back to San Francisco. Back to the old base.

I smiled at the group climbing into the R.V. that Dick had managed to get without any of us noticing. I turned back to hug the few that were staying behind. I blinked back a few tears before heading to the R.V.

"Ready to go," Dick asked.

I nodded.

He closed the door to the compartment under the R.V. before smiling back at me. I smiled back.

Gotham felt peace when Crane had been taken down. I felt peace when I knew that Dick was safe.

He gave me the chance to stop fighting for a little bit. I didn't feel a need to hide things from him. I felt like I could share anything with him. He wouldn't judge me or share it with other people. He made me feel at home.

"Dick," I said before he could climb into the R.V.

"Yeah?"

I walked over quickly before leaning over to press my lips to his. It was only a matter of seconds before I pulled away again.

"Sorry," I mumbled, going to get into the R.V.

"Hey," he grabbed my hand.

He leaned over and kissed me again. It was just a few seconds longer than the first kiss. He grinned when he pulled away.

I took a deep breath and grinned back at him. "I... I love you."

"I love you too."

There was no hesitance in his voice. It made me look down as my face warmed up.

"Come on," he mumbled, pulling on my hand. "The rest of the team is waiting for us."

I followed him on to the R.V.

We were met by obnoxiously loud cheering from the rest of the team. I covered my face with my hands before plopping into my seat. Dick pulled the door shut before laughing to himself and getting in the driver's seat.

We looked at each other for another moment before Dick looked forward again. I bit my lip and looked out the window.

It felt freeing.

For once in my life, I felt truly free.

Everything Has Changed

'Cause all I know is we said, "Hello" And your eyes look like coming home All I know is a simple name Everything has changed

--third person--

It was easier to convince Bruce to reinstate the Titans than Dick thought it would be.

Bruce had two major requests. One was Jason to join the team. The other was for Dick to meet someone that Bruce had run into a few times while doing his work. All he asked was for Dick to see if they would be a valuable member of the team.

Dick agreed to a meeting.

It didn't take long for (Y/n) to make it to Wayne Manor. They hadn't known about Bruce being Batman, but they didn't have time to ask many questions before Bruce greeted them and led them into another room.

Dick stood up when (Y/n) walked in.

Neither one of them could explain it, but something changed. Shifted around them.

There was a pause before (Y/n) could pull themself together long enough to introduce themself. Dick blinked a few times before shaking their hand.

(Y/n)'s mind went back to every romantic film they had ever seen. Rom-coms and Disney movies. All of the times they had heard about love at first sight. They felt silly for ever considering the idea, but they were having trouble denying what was happening right in front of them.

Dick tried to ignore how it felt like the breath was knocked out of him. His grin was a bit awkward. He would think about it a minute later, fearing that (Y/n) saw the grin as fake. But in the moment, he could only think about how dumb he felt with his heart beating as fast as it was.

If Bruce noticed the pair's behavior, then he didn't make it known.

The three of them talked for a while. Bruce talked about the work (Y/n) had down. (Y/n) looked away from Dick, feeling embarrassed by Bruce's rambling.

It was well known in that moment that Dick and (Y/n) would work well together.

And, in the end, the rest was history.

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[thegentlesurvive]

I’m so sleep deprived, so this is truly a junk drawer post, but I’m not done talking about Taylor Swift and literary alchemy!!

Like can we just talk about the fact that the proper name for the alchemical process is magnum opus and how that term is commonly used to refer to an artist’s masterpiece that is most representative of them and their journey or the most important to them?

Is it possible that we’ll find that the title “The Alchemy” could be substituted by “The Great Work” or “The Magnum Opus”? That provides so much fuel for predictions about the song.

“Daylight” has been discussed as being connected to “The Alchemist” because of the mention of gold and to “Red” because of mention of red, but can we talk about how it specifically references ALL the colors of the three stages of alchemy in order (I once believed love would be black and white […] I once believed love would be burning red, but it’s golden”)?

And can we talk about the album colors and how they tie in to alchemy? If Reputation was the black stage, next comes white, right? But Lover isn’t white, even though that seems like the vibe it was going for—perhaps white was the stage Taylor wanted or believed it to be in her life and/or music career, but as the Apple Music “I Love You, It’s Ruining My Life” playlist tell us, Lover was mostly denial—nor is Midnights, which harkens back to the darkness. TTPD is the white stage—the purification and refinement (i.e., removing what doesn’t belong…just sayin).

What comes next, then? Either one (red, most likely) or two (yellow and red) final stages. Philosophically, the yellowing, cintrinitas represents an awakening, and the reddening/rubedo “stage entails the attempt of the alchemist to integrate the psychospiritual outcomes of the process into a coherent sense of self before its re-entry to the world” (Wikipedia). If it’s two, well, bring on the two ✌️ theories!

I think there probably are multiple correct answers here for how what’s to come next relates to alchemy, because it’s like that, and very layered (I mean, literary alchemy started as satire of alchemy before it became serious themes and tropes and story structures and the names of mentors in Harry Potter).

What speaks to me the most in regards to twos and alchemy is that she has two re-recorded albums to release to complete the Taylor’s Version project. Is Taylor’s Version her magnum opus, her hero’s journey?

If there’s just the one final alchemical stage to follow TTPD, will that yellow/red phase be the next new album and our mystery orange door? Whether or not the Karma theories have a factual basis, we know Taylor takes inspiration from fan theories, as most recently evidenced by the grief playlists. Could the concept of Karma—the orange (yellow+red) album that was waylaid by the blackening (Reputation) and burned down in the subsequent attempted whitening (Lover) which left us back at the dark stage (Midnights [leaving folkmore out because they’re not overall autobiographical and weren’t planned, so there wasn’t an intention to move/transform into the next stage, if that makes sense?])—be used by Taylor to represent that the end of this alchemical process is getting back on track for what she had planned before the Taylor Swift Is Over Party and/or Joe? Or, if that potential album indeed burned down completely with the rest of the Lover house, will whatever her next album after TTPD be rising in some way from those ashes?

Okay I’m officially deliriously tired now to where I can’t read what I’m writing as I write it, so I’m going to pause here tonight before my theories totally lose the plot, but please continue and add your thoughts/ideas!!

[andiwriteordie]

why do you call it maroon fic ?

REMI! hi! ok i love this question & i'm gonna be long-winded about it because i'm a nerd. and i love writing. and byler. and taylor swift. so. you get a free maroon/byler analysis for your saturday.

a real fucking legacy, to leave is also called maroon fic whenever i post stuff because the title comes from the song maroon by taylor swift! this is one of my favorites off the midnights album, and i just have a lot of thoughts in general about this song buuuuut

when it comes to byler, i really enjoy thinking about how, when stripped down to a bare skeleton of a story, theirs is a story about love and loss. we meet two childhood friends, first through mike's eyes, and the whole first season is about mike trying to find his lost friend. and in some sense or another mike has been trying to find will (and will trying to find his way back to mike) since s1, because of the kidnapping, the possession, and the tension in their friendship across s3-s4. it's a story about two people who love each other but keep losing each other, especially when we consider it from mike's pov (catch me crying at the "maybe i lost you" line in s4).

anyways, with maroon now! one of my favorite parts of maroon is how the first chorus switches from the line: and i chose you, the one i was dancing with to the line and i lost you, the one i was dancing with. it's a simple change, but it tells the story taylor is sharing with us so incredibly well. it's a story of how this narrator went from choosing this person they love so much to losing them in the end—which i think just really mirrors mike's story very well in stranger things! will went from being such a priority in his life—so much so that he says meeting will is the best thing he's ever done—to then just time and time losing will again, first from the upside down then from his own distance and mistakes.

and here's where i get really nerdy, thanks to @wiseatom who pointed out that the official taylor swift music video for maroon has an incredibly niche detail within it:

that's a real fuckin' legacy, to leave

the comma between the words "legacy" and "to" add another little layer of nuance to the meaning behind this song, which i just looooove. that comma placement shifts the meaning slightly, implying that the legacy itself is leaving. the legacy left behind by the partner taylor is singing about in the song is leaving her.

so then, circling back to byler and from mike's pov, i could go on and on and on about how mike has a need to be needed and wanted and a fear of abandonment that stems from that, but i won't lol. the point i think about here is how the theme of love and loss is intertwined with byler as a whole, but then also specifically in this line, getting to explore the potential of mike's thought that it is, in a way, will who keeps leaving. mike keeps losing will, maybe not always as an intentional action on will's part, but it is always mike who loses will.

allllllll that to come back around and say this: i wanted to write a fic that explored the themes of love and loss in byler's story and then maroon came out and it just fit. the story kinda pieced together as it was about two people in a relationship, hence why i chose to explore established byler, so we could see those themes amplified to a greater extent than we even see in the show. :)

i could've answered that in 2 sentences, but i didn't bc i'm a nerd. so happy saturday 🤣

[whatsonmedia]

Taylor Swift Drops “The Tortured Poets Dept”: Release & Details

Get ready for the release of 11th studio album of Taylor Swift “The Tortured Poets Department.” Discover everything you need to know about this highly anticipated new era of Swift’s music, from the intriguing lead-up filled with puzzles and Easter eggs to the excitement surrounding its Friday drop.

When is the official debut of the album?

“The Tortured Poets Department” is set to release this Friday at 12 a.m. ET, and it’s available for preorder now. If you’re planning to stream the album immediately upon its release, be aware of potential delays. Similar to Swift’s recent album “Midnights,” which caused a temporary crash on Spotify due to high demand, anticipate possible streaming delays.

How many songs are included?

“The Tortured Poets Department” comprises 16 songs, including four bonus tracks: “The Manuscript,” “The Bolter,” “The Albatross,” and “The Black Dog.” These bonus tracks will be exclusively available on separate physical album variants, not on the streaming version. Historically, Swift has made vinyl exclusives accessible on streaming platforms several months post their physical release.

With an average track length of 4 minutes and 4 seconds, “The Tortured Poets Department” ranks as the third longest album in Swift’s discography. The longest song, “But Daddy I Love Him,” runs for 5 minutes and 40 seconds, while the shortest, “I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can),” lasts 2 minutes and 36 seconds. Stay tuned for the length of each bonus track!

What songs are on the new album?

“Fortnight (feat. Post Malone)”

“The Tortured Poets Department”

“My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys”

“Down Bad”

“So Long, London”

“But Daddy I Love Him”

“Fresh Out the Slammer”

“Florida!!! (Florence + the Machine)”

“Guilty as Sin?”

“Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?”

“I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can)”

“LOML”

“I Can Do It With a Broken Heart”

“The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived”

“The Alchemy”

“Clara Bow”

What’s the reason behind the name “The Tortured Poets Department”?

Fans have noticed that “The Tortured Poets Department” holds the title for Taylor Swift’s longest album title by a significant margin, surpassing her third album, “Speak Now.” Speculation about the album’s unusual title largely centers around Swift’s 2023 breakup with British actor Joe Alwyn after their six-year relationship.

Following the album announcement, an interview from 2022 between Alwyn and Paul Mescal resurfaced, revealing their membership in a WhatsApp group called “The Tortured Man Club.” This prompted fans to draw connections between Alwyn and Swift’s forthcoming album.

While the true meaning of “The Tortured Poets Department” remains uncertain, the album rollout has featured nods to famous poems like Charles Baudelaire’s “The Albatross” and other literary references. Stay tuned for more insights into Swift’s latest creative endeavor!

When can fans anticipate the release of a new music video?

In an Instagram video showcasing the “TTPD Timetable,” Taylor Swift revealed plans to drop a music video at 8 p.m. ET on Friday. However, she kept the track’s identity under wraps. The timetable’s announcement was accompanied by 14 tally marks, prompting speculation among Swifties. Some theorize that the video might accompany the album’s first track, “Fortnight (ft. Post Malone),” which references a 14-day period, or the album’s 14th track, “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived.” Stay tuned for updates on Swift’s latest release!

Read more about the new album: Heartbreak’s Symphony: Taylor Swift’s “Tortured Poets”

[yessadirichards]

Taylor Swift reaches LA in journey from Tokyo to Super Bowl

TOKYO

Will she make it in time? Intrepid flight trackers online seem to think so.

On social media, fans of Taylor Swift and aviation journalists believe they've identified Swift's private jet, labeled “The Football Era." It arrived from Tokyo’s Haneda Airport to Los Angeles' LAX airport just after 3:30 p.m. local time.

Her transportation plans onward to Las Vegas, where her boyfriend, NFL star tight end Travis Kelce, will play in Sunday's Super Bowl, have yet to be revealed.

Representatives for Swift and VistaJet, the world’s only global private aviation company, did not immediately respond to AP’s request for comment.

Swift's last song was still ringing in the ears of thousands of fans at the Tokyo Dome on Saturday night when the singer rushed to a private jet at Haneda airport, presumably embarking on an intensely scrutinized journey to see Kelce.

“We're all gonna go on a great adventure,” Swift told the crowd earlier. She was speaking of the music, but it might also describe her race against time, which was to cross nine time zones and the international date line.

With a final bow at the end of her sold-out show, clad in a blue sequined outfit, the crowd screaming, strobe lights pulsing, confetti falling, Swift disappeared beneath the stage and her journey to the other side of the world began.

Her expected trip to see Kelce's Kansas City Chiefs play the San Francisco 49ers in Las Vegas has fired imaginations, and speculation, for weeks.

“I hope she can return in time. It’s so romantic," said office worker Hitomi Takahashi, 29, who bought matching Taylor Swift sweatshirts with her friend and was taking photos just outside the Tokyo Dome.

About an hour after the end of the concert, AP journalists were near Haneda’s private jet area when minivans drove up and someone went inside the gate area, as four to five people carrying large black umbrellas obstructed the view of the person.

There was plenty of evidence at the concert of the unique cultural phenomenon that is the Swift-Kelce relationship, a nexus of professional football and the huge star power of Swift. In addition to people wearing sequined dresses celebrating Swift, there were Kelce jerseys and hats and other Chiefs gear.

Some spent thousands of dollars to attend the pop superstar’s concerts this week.

“Romeo, take me somewhere we can be alone,” Swift sang.

She won't find that Sunday in Las Vegas when a sold-out crowd, not to mention millions around the world, will be watching her.

To call the worldwide scrutiny of Swift's travels intense is an understatement.

Fans have tracked her jet. The planet-warming carbon emissions of her globe-trotting travels have been criticized. Officials have weighed in on her ability to park her jet at Las Vegas airports.

Even Japanese diplomats have gotten into the act. The Japanese Embassy in Washington posted on social media that she could make the Super Bowl in time, including in their statement three Swift song titles — “Speak Now”, “Fearless” and “Red."

“If she departs Tokyo in the evening after her concert, she should comfortably arrive in Las Vegas before the Super Bowl begins,” it said.

Takahashi, the fan at the Tokyo Dome, was aware of the criticism Swift has faced about her private jets but said the singer was being singled out unfairly.

“Many other people are flying on business, and she is here for her work. She faces a bashing because she is famous and stands out,” Takahashi said.

Swift has been crisscrossing the globe this week.

Before coming to Asia, she attended the Grammys in Los Angeles, winning her 14th Grammy and a record-breaking fourth Album of the Year award for “Midnights.” The show was watched by nearly 17 million people. She also made a surprise announcement that her next album is ready to drop in April.

Then the four concerts in Tokyo, and now the trip back to the States. She has followed Kelce for much of the Chiefs’ season.

Swift is expected to fly to Australia later this week to continue her tour.

“This week is truly the best kind of chaos,” she posted Wednesday on Instagram.

Associated Press writer Mari Yamaguchi contributed to this report.

Editor: Story has bene updated to report arrival of private jet believed to be carrying Taylor Swift in Los Angeles.

[cyarskj1899]

Jake Gyllenhaal And John Mayer If I were you, I would log off of all my social media platforms and step away from the internet for the next week or better yet the rest of the year

Taylor Swift Seemingly Expressed “Regret” At Dating Older Men — AKA Jake Gyllenhaal And John Mayer — When She Was As Young As 19 In Heartbreaking New Lyrics

“I damn sure would've never danced with the devil at 19... Give me back my girlhood, it was mine first.”

Leyla MohammedPosted 4 hours ago

If you’ve been on the internet at all today, you’ve likely seen that Taylor Swift has officially released her 10th studio album, Midnights.

View this photo on Instagram

The album is, by Taylor’s own admission, a “wild ride” of “highs and lows and ebbs and flows” — and things were only made more chaotic with the subsequent release of Midnights (3am Edition),an additional album containing 7 extra songs, which dropped just 3 hours after Midnights did.

View this photo on Instagram

Between all 20 songs in total, Taylor most certainly upholds her ~reputation~ of nodding toward other celebrities in her lyrics, with Midnights seemingly charting several past breakups, feuds, and so much more.

One track in particular that has garnered huge attention online is “Would’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve,” which is on Midnights (3am Edition).

Given that the song is explicitly about “regret,” and that Taylor makes several references toward age-gaps in relationships throughout, fans have theorized that “Would’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve” is a reflection on the older men that she dated in the past.

For a bit of background, Taylor infamously dated John Mayer back when she was 19, and he was 32. Less than a year after reports claimed that they’d split, Taylor all but confirmed the breakup with the release of a very pointed song on her 2010 album, Speak Now.

Aside from literally titling the track “Dear John,” Taylor sang the lyrics: “Don't you think nineteen is too young / To be played by your dark twisted games, when I loved you so? / I should've known.”

John has long faced scrutiny for the 13-year age gap between himself and Taylor. He was even questioned about her lyric, “Don’t you think I was too young to be messed with?” during a past interview, though quickly shut the subject down, saying he didn’t “want to go into that.”

Shortly after John, Taylor was romantically linked to actor Jake Gyllenhaal, when she was 20 and he was 29. According to reports, their relationship ended after a brief few months, with a source telling Us Weekly at the time that Jake “wasn't feeling it anymore.”

Taylor’s famous song “All Too Well” — which was originally released the year after her apparent split from Jake — seemingly charts their rocky past relationship, with a notable reference toward a stark age difference between two lovers. “You said if we had been closer in age maybe it would have been fine / And that made me want to die,” she sings in the full 10 minute version, released last year.

So, with all this in mind, let’s delve into the lyrics on “Would’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve” — which fans are calling “the darkest song Taylor has ever written.”

Would’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve is the darkest song Taylor has ever written. I’m literally nauseous, it was grooming point blank. And Taylor called him out on it07:35 AM - 21 Oct 2022Twitter: @TheBookofTaylor

From the very first verse, Taylor immediately references a “grown man” who she was once romantically involved with, while she was, in her own words, “a child.” She sings, “If you tasted poison you could've spit me out at the first chance / And if I was some paint, did it splatter on a promising grown man? / And if I was a child did it matter if you got to wash your hands?”

In light of everything we’ve discussed about Taylor’s past relationships, fans were quickly left wondering whether these lyrics were perhaps in reference to John or Jake.

not now babe I’m trying to figure out if Taylor wrote would’ve, could’ve, should’ve about Jake or John https://t.co/sNjoKY5aB608:40 AM - 21 Oct 2022Twitter: @EnceeteeEnjoyer

Some people were initially swayed by the idea that Jake is the subject of the track, suggesting that Taylor was later singing about regretting the fact that he was the first person she had sex with — a long-swirling rumor that has never officially been confirmed.

Twitter: @puredelicate

Just last month, in fact, Taylor all but confirmed a years-long theory that the “scarf” she mentions in “All Too Well” — which she says she left at her lover’s sister’s house — was a metaphor for the fact she hadn't had sex. Several fans took this into account when decoding the lyrics on “Would’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve.”

Taylor sings: “If you never touched me, I would've gone along with the righteous / If I never blushed, then they could've never whispered about this.”

“And if you never saved me from boredom, I could've gone on as I was / But lord you made me feel important, and then you tried to erase us,” she goes on.

One fan theorized, “idk maybe should’ve could’ve would’ve is about jake purely based on Taylor confirming the scarf metaphor at the film festival and like the metaphor was a nice was for her to explain but now she’s like ‘real shit: that sucked.’”

idk maybe should’ve could’ve would’ve is about jake purely based on Taylor confirming the scarf metaphor at the film festival and like the metaphor was a nice was for her to explain but now she’s like “real shit: that sucked”08:08 AM - 21 Oct 2022Twitter: @darkbluetenn

However, given that Taylor goes on to specifically mention the age she was when she dated the mysterious “grown man” in question, it seems more plausible that she’s perhaps referring to John rather than Jake.

As mentioned, Taylor was 19 when she dated John, then-32. On the Midnights track, she sings: “I damn sure would've never danced with the devil at 19.”

As one Twitter user summarized, “Taylor and Jake did not even meet and start dating til the Fall of 2010 when Taylor was months away from her 21st birthday (even referred to it in ATW).” As we know, things with Taylor are never just coincidental, and it seems interesting that she mentioned the specific age of “19” in this song.

@justincferrell Did you even listen to the chorus?"And I'm damned sure I never would've danced with the devil at 19"---Taylor did not even meet Jake Gyllenhaal til the fall of 2010 months before her 21st birthday.When she was 19 she was dating John Mayer.08:33 AM - 21 Oct 2022Twitter: @JFrhink

“God rest my soul / I miss who I used to be... I regret you all the time / I can't let this go, I fight with you in my sleep,” she continues. “The wound won't close / I keep on waiting for a sign / I regret you all the time.”

And, perhaps most poignantly, Taylor then pleas for her “girlhood” back — a lyric that left fans devastated. “Give me back my girlhood, it was mine first,” she sings.

“no but ‘give me back my girlhood, it was mine first’ is one of the saddest lyrics taylor swift has ever written :(” one person tweeted.

no but “give me me back my girlhood, it was mine first” is one of the saddest lyrics taylor swift has ever written :(08:01 AM - 21 Oct 2022Twitter: @repiatation13

“‘give me back my girlhood it was my first’ is the most heartbreaking taylor swift lyric i’ve ever heard,” echoed another.

“give me back my girlhood it was my first” is the most heartbreaking taylor swift lyric i’ve ever heard07:30 AM - 21 Oct 2022Twitter: @sainthoodswift

What’s more, as “Would’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve” comes to an end, the next song on the tracklist is, perhaps conveniently, a track called “Dear Reader,” which several fans immediately tied to her aforementioned breakup hit, “Dear John.”

“putting a song called ‘DEAR reader’ after a song that absolutely annihilated mr. dear john was so intentional,” one person suggested, while others highlighted the “parallels” between both titles. In fact, some people went so far as to label “Would’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve” the darker version of “Dear John,” or “Dear John 2.0.”

putting a song called “DEAR reader” after a song that absolutely annihilated mr. dear john was so intentional #TSmidnighTS07:41 AM - 21 Oct 2022Twitter: @ellaalmighty_

All in all, fans are heartbroken for Taylor after listening to her apparent regret at the past relationship, suggesting that she’d been calling the subject in question out for “grooming” her. You can listen to “Would’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve,” and the whole of Midnights, here.

Your weekday morning guide to breaking news, cultural analysis, and everything in between

[alphafightmusic]

The Doo-Wap Queen is back!? Meghan Trainor has a New Album!?

“A wild Meghan Trainor has appeared!” is something I would say if I was traversing the city of Pallet Town in a Pokemon game. Literally had no idea Meghan was dropping a new album entitled Takin’ It Back. This took me by complete surprise because unlike Midnights and The Loneliest Time I wasn’t being constantly reminded of their existence by the constant fanfare and promotional advertising of their albums. I thought to myself “This girl has really fallen from grace”. Once a rising pop superstar, it seems like she has become an afterthought of Epic Records and another casualty of an artist on their way of having their work “shelved”. Meghan burst onto the scene with 2014’s “All About That Bass” an inescapable earworm which either made you want to get up and dance or stab your ears out. The song rocketed to #1 on the Hot 100 and made waves across the world. She followed it with multiple Hot 100 top 20 hits “Lips Are Movin’” (#4), “Dear Future Husband” (#14), and “Like I’m Gonna Lose You” (#8). Her debut album Title went on to debut at #1 on the Billboard Hot 200 and she even won a Grammy for “Best New Artist” in 2016. And then her sophomore album Thank You dropped in 2016 which was successful but not quite as successful as Title. Producing only two top 20 hits “No” (#3) and “Me Too” (#13) and debuting at #3 on the Hot 100 could have been the start of her demise. Fast forward to 2018 where her supposed third studio album No Excuses was supposed to be released after being pushed back multiple times and finally releasing in 2020. This was the nail in the coffin for Meghan. Her debut single for the album “No Excuses” released in 2018 didn’t even reach the top 40 (#46). Things only got worse for Meghan after two singles intended to be on No Excuses “Let You Be Right” and “Can’t Dance” didn’t even chart. This likely caused Epic Records to keep delaying the record until they could come up with a gameplan to salvage what was left of her career. Then in 2019 her second official single for the album “Wave” dropped. This song was a sonic departure of Meghan’s earlier work as she wished to pursue a “new sound”. Unfortunately this did not pay off. “Wave” failed to chart and to this day only has 10 million (a far cry from “All About That Bass” at 2.5 Billion). When No Excuses finally arrived in 2020, it hardly made an impact (debuting at only #25). On the same day of its release, the music video of its 3rd single “Nice to Meet Ya” ft. Nicki Minaj dropped. Now I personally thought this song was an absolute bop but was shocked to find out it only charted at #89 on the Hot 100. Perhaps with some better marketing and promotion, this song could have become a smash? That brings us to today where her latest studio album Takin’ It Back just dropped. Did anyone even know she had a new album coming out? And on the day of Taylor Swift’s Midnights? With all the Midnights buzz it appears that Meghan’s album was simply an afterthought to her label. The lack of marketing for the album makes this even more apparent. Did she even go on any talk shows or do any interviews for the album? Because I haven’t seen anything. I love Meghan but her label is mad slacking and making it seem like she is on the way out. From what I’ve listened from Takin’ It Back so far, it’s pretty good and marks a return to her signature doo-wap sound. Perhaps the virality of her song “Title” on Tik Tok had something to do with this. To my surprise though, the album seems to be holding its own so far. Currently, it sits at #5 on the U.S. Itunes charts right behind all the variations of Midnights and a handful of the songs are on the Itunes top 200. She dropped the music video for the track “Made You Look” on the album’s release date which is at the time of this writing is #8 on the Youtube Trending for Music charts and is steadily approaching 2 million views (the Jojo Siwa cameo was iconic, just saying). Can Meghan be a dark horse and rise back up to the prestige of pop’s elites or will she continue to falter? Guess we’ll just have to wait and find out.

[iwanthermidnightz]

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/gaylor-taylor-swift-gay-rumor-midnights-1234585574/

Queer narrative/gay rumors from an official publication has started!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! ROLLING STONES

OH MY GOD??

AUGUST HAS OFFICIALLY slipped away, which means Taylor Swift fans are now counting down the days until the release of her 10th studio album, Midnights — but stans are already using the time, and subsequent new content, to re-earth some of their most beloved conspiracy theories.

From what Swift has released, the album concept is focused on music written at night that grapples with fears, worries, and other things that keep you from peaceful sleep. Swift called the album the “stories of 13 sleepless nights” throughout her life, and encouraged her fans to meet her at midnight — which immediately sent fans scurrying to see all the clues leading up to the announcement they had missed.

One stan that remains year after year is #Gaylor. An ever-growing contingent of fans believe that Taylor Alison Swift is secretly gay. And after seeing the concept for Midnights, they’re convinced this might be the album where she finally admits it to the world.

#Gaylor has remained a steadfast theory since Swift gained her international level of stardom. A long-standing theory is the pop star’s rumored relationship and subsequent breakup with Glee alum Diana Agron. Agron and Swift were spotted together on outings and at birthday parties, making the gossip so mainstream that Jimmy Kimmel asked Agron if she was dating Swift during a 2012 appearance on his late-night show. She replied “No, but wouldn’t that be juicy,” before saying “Hi, Taylor” and blowing the pop star a kiss into the camera. Following the release of 1989, fans linked lyrics from the song “Wonderland” to Agron’s Alice in Wonderland themed tattoo.

The theory gained an even bigger foothold during the pop star’s 2015 “Girl Squad” era, when she was often surrounded by a plethora of leggy, mostly-blonde, famous best friends like Cara Delevigne, Gigi Hadid, Hailee Steinfeld, and Karlie Kloss. In 2015, a Vogue spread of Kloss and Swift gave fans a decidedly not best friends vibe which sparked rumors of a whirlwind but secret love story. Around 2017’s Reputation, the most prevalent theory was that a collaged photos of eyes used in promotional material and on the album’s physical CD contained a singular photo of Kloss’ eye instead of Swift’s. After Swift debuted Folklore‘s Betty, fans went wild over the song’s premise, which is a love song full of hope sung to a girl named Betty — an energy that couldn’t be dissuaded even after Swift said it was written from the perspective of a male narrator.

Now it’s Midnights’ turn. The prevailing theory is linked to clips of Swift singing her 2017 track “New Year’s Day.” The song includes the lyrics, “But I stay when you’re lost and I’m scared and you’re turning away/I want your midnights.” Besides the heavily implied clock references in the song, which depicts lovers who stay together even after the party ends when the clock strikes midnight, fans are focusing on live clips of the song’s performance, where they claim Swift is using the words “I want her midnights.”

Pronoun game aside, fans have also pointed out that this song matches the vibe of recent promotional material, in which Taylor speaks about self imprisonment and mistakes that could have the possibility to either end her fate or help her find herself.

“We lie awake in love and in fear, in turmoil and in tears,” she wrote in her album announcement. “We stare at walls and drink until they speak back. We twist in our self-made cages and pray that we aren’t — right in this minute — about to make some fate altering mistake.”

For any other artists, such specific theories might seem a little far-fetched, but T-Swift is notorious for indulging her fans’ most intense detective urges. In past projects, easter eggs have been as large as placing her album title and next single in the music video for “ME”! and as small as including a 1989 Mercedes-Benz S-Class in All Too Well: The Short Film, as a reference to her 1989 album.

Given that Swift’s career has been marked by public reaction to her relationships with very famous men, Swift fans who believe she’s straight discount the theory with interviews of her with male partners, or lyrics they believe are dedicated to Swift’s longtime boyfriend Joe Alwyn. Some even say it’s rude to equate Gaylor theories to the good fun of finding references and hidden secrets in Swift’s body of work.

But underneath the fan edits, compilations, and conspiracy theories is the genuine desire Swift fans have to understand her music as thoroughly as possible. The defining factor of Gaylor — which allows fans who believe it to remain so attached to the pop star year after year, project after project — is that the pop star has been there for them.

Swift engages with her fandom in a way that is extremely unusual — and borderline terrifying — for her level of fame. She still hosts meet-and-greets, she’s hand-delivered merch to fans’ houses, and she even threw away a years long strategy of being apolitical when her fans asked her to speak out on what she believed in. So even if Midnights isn’t the gay album of their dreams, they won’t give up the theory. They’ll play it, then pick out small bits and references they think Swift is giving them, all to let her know that when, or if, she ever decides to come out, she knows they’re there to listen.

[thekidultlife]

I Want Your Midnights | Lee Jihoon

 Pairing: Jihoon x fem!reader

⍟ AU: Idol AU (?)

⍟ Genre: Fluff, a bit of angst on the side

⍟ Warnings: -

⍟ Word Count: 4.3k

⍟ A/N: Alright I know you guys are already sick of me just posting Jihoon fics, but it’s my birthday today, so just...humor me pls. This is almost a self-indulgent fic;;; I’ll be tagging @nrhfzh​ and all those jihoon stans who sent anons last time!!

(this should be posted on Friday which is Leanne’s schedule, but we decided she won’t post anything this week and I won’t post next Moday;;;) 

btw, the song featured here is New Year’s Day by Taylor Swift. I recommend you listen to that song while reading this skkssk  

-Hyeri

It was like an ordinary night. Like any night that you have spent before and will spend more in the future. Nothing extraordinary could be noted in particular between you and Lee Jihoon as you both sat eating in the quiet and privacy of his studio, between out of place candles and almost empty chicken buckets. It was as normal as a night can be.

Yet at the same time, in your own little way, it was also special.

Not being overly expressive with your love for each other, subtle gestures and acts of love screamed more than a thousand words could ever do. It never felt lacking or boring or empty like people thought it would be. In fact, your relationship was an adventure, even barely starting, it had been an uphill battle, and you both knew that. 

As you came back from the comfort room  washing your hands, you made a small scheming grin at your boyfriend who was still gobbling up the last remains of his chicken wing. Taking notice of that, he glanced at you with a smirk of his own. 

"I know that look. What are you planning?" He asked as you sat across him, your arms folded confidently. 

"Are you done eating?" You replied, watching him with a childish cheekiness in you. 

"Well yeah," he dusted off the crumbs on his shirt with an innocent look. "What are you thinking though?" 

With a coquettish smile, you stood up from your seat and went to his side. "Nothing really. Though I do want you to close your eyes and trust me."

Jihoon glanced at you with a bewildered look at first, wondering what you were scheming again this time, but when he saw that mischievous glint in your eyes, he knew it was something he shouldn't really worry about and simply chuckled at you. 

"Fine, but don't do any funny business!" He finally agreed as he closed his eyes and waited for you. 

He could hear you walking away and some wheels rolling. "I've never done any funny business." You denied teasingly. 

He scoffed, even with his eyes closed. "Yeah right. Except that time when you drew on my face when I was drunk!" 

He knew you were making an incredulous expression right now.

"C'mon! I was just trying to see what you would look like with a mustache," you laughed, walking towards him and reaching for his hands. "Don't open your eyes yet. I promise I won't draw a third eye on your forehead this time." 

"Please don't. And please stop sharing meme faces of me to the other members. My reputation as vocal boss is on the line," he retorted back with a toothy grin as you chuckled, guiding him somewhere in the room.

"Can't promise that, Ji. I like my status as the official Lee Jihoon meme distributor," you replied, making him laugh out loud at how ridiculous that title was, before the both of you stopped walking. "You can sit now. I promise there's a chair to catch your butt." 

For a while he feared that there really wasn't any chair for him to sit on, yet when he felt the soft foam of his swivel chair, he relaxed for a bit and sat down. Turning the chair around before you backed away, you allowed him to finally open his eyes. As soon as his sight came back, he was greeted by the image of you sitting in front of the electric keyboard with a soft smile on your lips. 

"I can't promise you my voice or my playing would be up to your standards, but just…it's the thought that counts right?" You suddenly rambled, giggling. 

Blinking, Jihoon was still processing what you were planning until it dawned on him the next second. "Are….are you going to sing me a song?" 

You smiled at him bashfully. "Yeah, though I wish it was a song that I made myself, but I guess I'll put my feelings into somebody else's words for now. So you better listen."

Gazing into your eyes, he could sense the sincerity deep in you. You were someone who wouldn't make an effort just for the sake of being romantic. Everything you do for him meant something and was done with great consideration, he understood that, that's why right now, he could feel his heart swell with emotion. 

A gentle smile on his lips, Jihoon leaned back. "I'll listen. Don't worry, I won't judge." 

“You promised that, okay?” With a sheepish grin, you turned your attention back to the piano and placed your fingers on the correct chords. 

With a small nervous breath, you began playing.

"There's glitter on the floor after the party

Girls carrying their shoes down in the lobby…"

Soft chords accentuate your raw and amateur voice. It didn't need to be technically perfect, the genuine emotions which surfaced on your voice reflected beauty in Jihoon's ears. It didn't need to be perfect, but it was real. He always loved that about you. Your brutal honesty, the unapologetic optimism you had. It gives him strength to look forward to another day.

He remembered as he watched your fingers dance on the keys, the first time you met. It wasn't that special. He just saw you on the internet as he monitored his own social media presence, posting stuff about Seventeen and what not. He found your comments funny, your reactions interesting, that he found himself going through your posts every day. He knew he'd love to be your friend if he could. 

Yet being an idol wasn't easy. You were so close yet so far away. It wasn’t as easy as typing the words ‘hey i wanna be your friend’ to just another person. His name held weight and Jihoon knew that. With his workload and all the responsibilities he had in his hands, he just couldn’t tell you what he felt. As he listened to your voice reverberating with the acoustics of his studio, he remembered how it took him years to finally stir up the courage and to finally see the opportunity to talk to you. 

He was glad he did. If he hadn’t, his heart wouldn’t feel as full as it has been since he met you. 

“If you’re really Woozi of Seventeen, then post a picture of yourself in Weverse and in the captions write what’s the last anime you’ve watched.” Jihoon remembered you telling him over chat, it was nerve-wracking back then but it felt silly now. Of course, you can’t just trust a random person claiming himself to be an idol. There were a lot of those these days.

“Let’s be friends first,” you wrote to him with a heart and a smiley face emoji back then. “I want to get to know you.” 

“Don't read the last page, but I stay when you're lost and I'm scared and you're turning away…”

Jihoon gazed at you, even then and until now, you were still beautiful in his eyes. No matter how many songs he’d composed about you, the emotions that reside in his chest would never run dry. The way you laugh, the way you talk, the way you’d do just about anything—he only had you in his eyes. Yet things weren’t always roses and butterflies. 

You were so frustrated at him at that time when he had gotten scared of his own emotions. Jihoon knew, deep inside, that he had grown to love you over chats on SNS; your witty sarcasm and wonderful conversations were like water and sunlight to the love growing, rooting deeper and deeper into his heart. 

He wasn’t unfamiliar to this feeling, yet he had been betrayed by this same emotion in the past  and he wished he’d never had to be again this time. He was frightened that you could easily leave him, broken and empty, like the others did. Admittingly, he had lost hope for a love that was unconditional. He didn’t believe that there would be anyone out there who could love him wholeheartedly as much as he did, even through his flaws and his mistakes. 

But you suddenly popped into his life, unaware of how much power you hold over him. 

“You annoy me so much!” you told him over one fateful video call. “Jihoon, I feel so confused, you know? What am I really to you? Do you want to be just friends or do you want something more? If you want to stay as friends, then fine! I won’t force you. But that doesn’t mean I’d wait for you forever when you’re ready to take this to another step.”

He didn’t enjoy fighting with you. Not at all. Yet he was scared and stuck and didn’t know what to do. Being more meant more risks of hurting you unintentionally.

“But I can’t decide, Y/N! Dating means people will talk, and I don’t want them to talk about you! But I can’t just make everything I feel about you disappear!” he replied, and you were taken aback. “But if letting you go is the price I have to pay for your peace, then I don’t mind hurting.” 

Tears were already threatening to slide down your cheeks, and if only you knew how much it pained him to see you like that back then. To hear you trip on your words, to hold back small sobs as you tried to find coherent words to keep the conversation going, it felt like a thousand knives piercing through him. 

“Stop that…please. Do you think I won’t feel anything when you say that?” you replied. “Jihoon, I can understand where you’re coming from but don’t ever think that you’re the only one carrying this relationship, or whatever this is. For this to work, you have to share your burdens with me, you have to trust me, to depend on me.”

“I know that all your life, you’re used to doing everything by yourself, and I’m no different. We’ve achieved so many things just by ourselves. But we can’t be like this forever. A relationship isn’t just you or just me. It’s us both. So lean on me, let me carry those heavy feelings and I’d do the same with you. I want this to work, Jihoon. I don’t want to give up.”

Even if it was only through some shitty PC screen that he could see you, it didn’t diminish the weight of those words. He could feel it back then, he could still feel it right now as you played on the piano, singing a simple song—you were the one he wanted, tomorrow and forevermore.

“You squeeze my hand three times in the back of the taxi, I can tell that it's going to be a long road…”

Jihoon would forever be thankful for you. Everything that you did for him, even if unintentionally on your part. He couldn’t admit how much he appreciates you in his life—through early morning calls when you were still far apart, and now through your warm presence in his studio as he worked.

“I’m considering moving there in the next year or so,” you suddenly told him over a phone call as you did your work. “Now that I’m breaking through the Korean webcomic scene, I think it’s better to stay close to my audience. And I think it’s better that we can finally be together, geographically at least.”

He could still remember it as fresh as that day. His heart began beating so fast, a wide grin broke out on his lips. He was worried that it’ll be too much for you to handle, but he had learned as your relationship progressed, that you’re someone who doesn’t get pushed back by hurdles so easily. Besides, you had him. 

Jihoon was glad that he can now keep you closer more than ever.

It wasn’t easy, like everything else in life. But there was nothing the both of you couldn’t handle. It took so much silence and deception to hide your relationship from the public—a decision the both of you agreed upon long before. Jihoon knew that the both of you were private people, and more than anything, you didn’t want anyone to become privy to your intimate relationships. 

For the first time, in such a long time, Jihoon was able to hold you close. Gazing at you, at your real eyes, at that time, felt surreal. Jihoon always thought he knew almost everything about you, yet he had never anticipated that there were still a lot of things about you which he hadn’t discovered yet. 

He never had thought how warm your touch was, how bright your grin was when you were scheming some prank, how loud your voice got when you were so passionate about something, how soft your lips were when you finally kissed for the first time. No matter how much technology brought you two together, nothing compared to actual, real life affection shared between lovers. 

“I'll be there if you're the toast of the town babe or if you strike out and you're crawling home...”

Jihoon remembers, as you sang, how you silently embraced him on nights when he felt the world was too heavy on his shoulders. You wouldn’t say anything to him until he would open up; patiently waiting as you tapped an irregular beat on his back. As easily as that, you’d erase all the stress that he had accumulated over time. 

You didn’t need to say anything grand or moving, or make all of his problems disappear. Your simple gestures were already enough. You were already enough for him. 

“I don’t deserve you, Y/N,” he whispered to you one night as he buried his face on your shoulder. “You’re everything that I want, but I’m not sure if I’m giving you everything that you want.”

You giggled, sighing as you brushed your fingers through his newly dyed hair. 

“You don’t have to worry, Jihoon. You’ve given me so much that you never even realized it.”

He pouted, not liking how vague you were. “Like what?”

“Aren’t you just conveniently forgetting how many songs you’ve written for me?” you replied, a smirk on your lips as you twirled a lock of his around your finger. 

“But…those are just songs! It’s not as special as the things you’ve done for me…”

“Don’t underestimate them, Ji,” you told him as you pulled back, cupping his cheeks and looking into his eyes. “I know how important music is to you, how it’s an extension of your feelings, and to be a part of it is something I’d consider meaningful.”

For a moment, Jihoon gazed at you; his eyes holding so much emotion. There it was that he knew—he was truly, deeply, madly in love with you. 

“Hold on to the memories, they will hold on to you…”

Feeling a strong urge, he leaned into you, capturing your lips into a deep and passionate kiss. Everything, everything that he felt for you at that time, he poured into that kiss, making you gasp for air. You cling to him for support, wholly surprised at his sudden intensity, yet not unwelcome at all. 

As the both of you pulled away, Jihoon once again returned to your arms, allowing himself to be vulnerable before you. 

“I truly don’t deserve you,” he whispered on your shoulder.. 

“After that incredible kiss?” you teased, “Statement denied.” 

Jihoon groaned and you chuckled.

“I know you’re overthinking again, so I’ll say it clearly. You’re more than I ever wanted, Lee Jihoon.”

You paused, patting his head, tightening your arms around him.

“Whenever you call just to check up on me despite your busy schedule, whenever you share funny stories about the members, whenever you act cute and pouty when I ask you to do aegyo for me…what else…?”

He grunted disapprovingly at your comment and you giggled. “I don’t act cute.”

“You do, you know? You’re naturally and inherently cute,” you replied. “You’re cute when you make ramyeon for me even when I just eat the noodles, you’re cute when you offer to hold my bag or open the door for me, or when you insist on paying for dinner, and you’re so cute when you hold me close whenever I feel down and insecure about myself and my work.”

Jihoon was silent, his cheeks burning with embarrassment. He thought you didn’t really catch on those little things he did, but he had underestimated your memory and your powers of observation.

“There’s a lot more I can say, you know? I should make a list for you and maybe stick it on your desk whenever you begin to question yourself again.”

He snorted. “No, thank you. The members would see it and I don’t want them to.” 

“I’ll do it when you annoy me,” you joked, despite your words. “Now, I hope I’ve reassured your worries for tonight.” 

Snuggling against your shoulder, Jihoon smiled. “Yeah, thank you.”

“Please don't ever become a stranger whose laugh I could recognize anywhere…”

As your words fell like chants into his ears, Jihoon was mesmerized by the image of you singing, his eyes wandering. A bitter memory relapsed into his mind, and a reminder that not everything was golden in your paradise. 

It was a cold January night, snow had finally ceased falling at one in the morning. The both of you were inside his studio just like normal; a habit the two of you took comfort in. He was holding your hand tight, keeping it warm with his hands in his pocket, as you scrolled on your phone.

For a while, it felt normal. The sounds of the clock ticking, the gentle thrumming of your heartbeat, the soft breaths you both shared. Yet, just like that, everything gradually became colder. It wasn’t the actual temperature, but your mood as he watched your expression turn from amused to a deadpan frown. 

“What’s wrong?” he asked, kissing your temple. For some reason, he had developed a rather intuitive connection with you over time, where he can easily sense your change of moods despite your lack of expression.

You sighed as you looked up, leaning against him. He wondered if you were pondering on telling him the truth, or just keep your thoughts hidden. Before he could actually express to you his own thoughts, you sighed and nestled yourself on his shoulder, closing your eyes. 

“Jihoon, is this all a mistake?” you asked, your voice small. 

He blinked, furrowing his brow at the complex question. “What do you mean?” 

“I’ve read a few things online.”

It was a simple thing to say, yet Jihoon immediately knew what you were talking about. With a sigh, he adjusted his position where he could wrap his arms around you tightly. 

“People always talk, Y/N. We can’t do anything about it but continue living our own lives and ignore them.”

“But what if they reveal our relationship as a scandal and you’re forced to leave Seventeen? They could do that so easily, you know!” You asked with a weak voice, clinging to him tightly. “I don’t want that to happen. I’ll never let that happen, Jihoon!” 

“Then we’ll announce before they do,” he easily replied, brushing his fingers through your hair. “Have you forgotten how strong the relationship between Carats and Seventeen is? Of course, some will react negatively, but I know that they would be accepting.” 

Once more, Jihoon heard you sigh. “Sometimes I feel like I’m just being selfish by being with you. A lot of people look up to you, Ji, and they all want a piece of your world. I don’t want to be possessive of you but sometimes I just question myself, like what if this is wrong? What if this was a mistake?” 

Gazing into your eyes, Jihoon felt all of your concerns. It was already given that dating an idol would be hard, and moments of weakness like these could make your anxieties grow into deeper, darker shadows. 

“It’s gonna be weird for me to say this but it’s ok to be selfish,” he told you, his words firm and certain. “Oh god, how do I say this…but look, Y/N, there’s nothing wrong with wanting to be with me. We’re a couple, and that’s normal. There’s nothing wrong with being a couple.”

“But you’re an idol! If they knew, people would say a lot of bad things about you, and I don’t want that!”

“No matter how many times they say I’m an idol, I’m a human being, first and foremost, and just like everybody else, I have my own personal life which doesn’t revolve around my job. People will always say a lot of bad things about me no matter what I do, but what’s important to me is that I have you by my side, I have everyone by my side. So don’t ever think that this is wrong. You and I are never wrong. Who are they to judge what is wrong or right for me when they don’t know who I am?”

Jihoon realized that after his speech, you turned silent, and instead buried yourself deeper against his chest. 

“You’re important to me, Y/N. What other people say doesn’t matter to me anymore. As long as you’re here with me, I’m able to do anything.”

In a quiet voice, Jihoon caught your words. “Thank you for this, Ji…”

“But I stay when it's hard or it's wrong or we’re making mistakes…”

There was always a strange quality to time whenever he was with you. Sometimes time would slow down, sometimes it would pass by in just a blink of an eye. As he began to reminisce instead of actually listening, he realized just how much time had passed between the both of you.

“I want your midnights, but I'll be cleaning up bottles with you on New Year's Day…”

On that certain night, when the both of you were wrapped between sheets, when the bright lights of Seoul reflected on the stark white ceiling, when you were tangled in each others arms, listening to your own fast paced heartbeats after a long night, he remembers you pulling him close, brushing stray locks from his face. 

“Jihoon...” you whispered under your breath, your fingers tracing circles on his cheekbones then down his jaw and to his lips. “You’re very handsome, did you know that?” 

He smirked at you, placing a chaste kiss on your lips. “What? You still haven’t gotten enough?”

In an instant your face heated up as you hit his toned chest playfully, making Jihoon laugh. “Ehh...! Don’t mention that now!” 

As his devious eyes turned soft, he smiled at you, wrapping his arms around your waist. “What is it then?”

You sighed, gazing at the ceiling. “I just thought that someday, I know, things wouldn’t be this way anymore.The spark wouldn’t be as strong as before, the butterflies will eventually disappear. Things would become mundane between us...” 

There was a melancholic tone in your words; a detail which hadn’t escape his attention. Yet Jihoon knew that what you were talking about was reality. As the both of you would eventually be consumed by work, by responsibilities, by day to day obligations, it wasn’t a far off thought that the way you felt for each other would turn dim. He knew that, and he feared it. 

“But, you know...” you continued, breaking him away from his own thoughts. “Even if that happens, I’m not scared. Even if love do fail us someday, I’m confident that we would still be together, that we can still fix it. Rather than lovers who’re friends, we’re friends who became lovers. Even if you and I will eventually drift off, we still have a strong friendship. And we can rebuild everything from there.” 

Jihoon oftentimes wondered how you’re able to get these epiphanies. Your mind was deep and thoughtful, and that was one of the things he loved about you. Conversations with you were never dull as you bounced off ideas at one another. You would always say well-said ideas, often describing how he feels better than he ever will. 

“I want to share exciting things with you, Jihoon. I want to be helplessly all over you. I want to feel aroused, flustered, or dying of laughter. But when things get boring or nothing is really happening, or when we have to face bills, chores, or responsibilities, I’ll stay with you.”

A hundredfold, you were better at making him feel loved. He admits that. 

“You know, sometimes, I wonder what I’ve done in my past life for you to choose me,” he replied, a wide grin plastered on his face. “You’re everything that I could ever ask for, Y/N. Even if you don’t have to, you still take care of me so much. I swear I’ll make you happy even if I have to walk through fire or sleep on nails.”

“I don’t think that’ll make me very happy,” you replied, grinning. “But...wanna know what else that could make me happy?” 

Jihoon arched an elegant brow at you, his lips curving into a smirk. Ah yes, he definitely knows. “I was absolutely right when I said you still haven’t had enough.” 

“Hold on to the memories, they will hold on to you…”

Thinking of how much time has passed, how much the two of you had been through, almost left him in tears. The memories the both of you shared over the years was incredible that it was hard to let them go. 

As he watched you finally sing the last few seconds of the song, Jihoon was sure that this moment would become another beautiful memory he would reminisce about one day in the future. It filled his heart, thinking about a pleasant future with you. A long time ago he had sang a song—doubting what kind of future was in store for him, yet now he already knows that it was something bigger, more beautiful that he had ever expected.

“Hold on to the memories, they will hold on to you…”

As the final chord resounded across the room, both your eyes met in soft glances. You smiled at him, the sweetest, most loving smile you could ever muster, and then finally sang:

“...And I will hold on to you.”

Allowing the note to dissipate and disappear, you then turned to Jihoon with a bashful smile on your lips. “Well? Did you like your surprise?” 

Already a blushing mess, Jihoon simply burst out giggling as you looked at him in confusion. 

“Ya! Why are you laughing?” you exclaimed as you sulked, pulling on the sleeve of his shirt. 

Still chuckling, he stood up, pulling you towards his arms as he captured you in a tight embrace. He felt at peace with you more than anywhere. 

As it was apparent to you that he was in a rather good mood, you made a bemused smile as you wrapped your arms around him, also laughing on your own. 

“What’s gotten into you now?” You asked as he pulled away, now able to gaze into your eyes. 

“Nothing. I just thought you’re absolutely cute,” he replied as he cupped your cheeks, squishing them much to your chagrin. 

“Seriously, Jihoon! Why’re you so happy?” 

“Am I not allowed to be happy now?” he replied, his eyes turning into crescents. 

You raised your brows at him with a grin. “You like my song, didn’t you?”

“And what if I did? It was a really nice song, you know.”

This time, it was your turn to burst out into giggles. It was hilarious how Jihoon was being so roundabout with admitting that he liked it; it was incredibly adorable. 

“You’re so cute, Hoonie~” 

It was no secret that he doesn’t appreciate being cooed at, as he made a small frown upon hearing your nickname for him.

“Now I don’t think I’m so happy anymore.”

“Oh c’mon!” You hit his chest lightly with a chuckle. “Tell me what you really think about it!”

His eyes filled to the brim with endearment for you, Jihoon stared into your eyes, trying to communicate how much he was so thankful that you entered his life. 

“I like it. I love it, Y/N,” he replied, caressing your cheek. “It made me remember everything we’ve been through, and how much we’ve grown together.”

“And we’ll continue to the next year and in the future. Thank you for giving me your midnights, Jihoon.”

“My midnights would always be yours, as you will always be my mornings,” he gave you another embrace, embedding the feel of your skin against his, the way your hair brushes through his hands, the sound of your voice and the your scent—he will burn them all into his head so he won’t ever forget how much he loves you. 

There were so many words that he could say so he could just express how he was thankful that you became a part of his life, yet none of them seemed fitting to say at that moment. Instead, as Jihoon finally decided upon, that it was best to leave them for future songs and say the words that he really wanted to say for such a long time now. 

“I love you.”

 -Hyeri

[bananaofswifts]

IT’S A SUNDAY AFTERNOON in Tribeca, and I’m in Taylor Swift’s loft, inside a former printing house that she has restored and fortified into a sanctuary of brick, velvet, and mahogany. The space is warm and cozy and vaguely literary—later, when we pass through her bedroom en route to her garden, 10 percent of my brain will believe her wardrobe might open up to Narnia. Barefoot in a wine-colored floral top and matching flowy pants, Swift is typing passwords into a laptop to show me the video for “You Need to Calm Down,” eight days before she unleashes it on the world. I have a sliver of an idea what to expect. A few weeks earlier, I spent a day at the video shoot, in a dusty field-slash-junkyard north of Los Angeles. Swift had made it a sort of Big Gay Candy Mountain trailer park, a Technicolor happy place. The cast and crew wore heart-shaped sunglasses—living, breathing lovey-eyes emoji—and a mailbox warned, LOVE LETTERS ONLY. Swift and a stream of costars filmed six scenes over about a dozen hours. The singer-songwriter Hayley Kiyoko, known to her fans as “Lesbian Jesus,” shot arrows at a bull’s-eye. The YouTube comedian-chef Hannah Hart danced alongside Dexter Mayfield, the plus-size male model and self-described “big boy in heels.” The Olympic figure skater Adam Rippon served up icy red snow cones. Swift and her close friend Todrick Hall, of Kinky Boots and RuPaul’s Drag Race, sipped tea with the cast of Queer Eye. The mood was joyous and laid-back. But by the end of the day, I wasn’t sure what the vignettes would add up to. There were shoot days and cameos I wouldn’t observe. For security reasons, the song was never played aloud. (The cast wore ear buds.) Even the hero shot, in which Swift and Hall sauntered arm in arm through the dreamscape at golden hour, was filmed in near-total silence. For weeks afterward, I tried to sleuth out a theory. I started casually. There was a “5” on the bull’s-eye, so I did a quick search to figure out what that number might mean. Immediately I was in over my head. Swift has a thing for symbols. I knew she had been embedding secret messages in liner notes and deploying metaphors as refrains since her self-titled debut in 2006—long before her megafame made her into a symbol of pop supremacy. But I hadn’t understood how coded and byzantine her body of work has become; I hadn’t learned, as Swift’s fans have, to see hidden meanings everywhere. For instance: In the 2017 video for “Look What You Made Me Do,” a headstone in a graveyard scene reads NILS SJOBERG, the pseudonym Swift used as her writing credit on Rihanna’s hit “This Is What You Came For,” a Swedish-sounding nod to that country’s pop wizards. After an excessive amount of ad hoc scholarship—a friend joked that I could have learned Mandarin in the time I spent trying to unpack Swift’s oeuvre—I was no closer to a theory. Pop music has become so layered and meta, but the Taylor Swift Universe stands apart. Apprehending it is like grasping quantum physics. My first indication of what her new album, Lover, would be about came just after midnight on June 1, the beginning of Pride Month, when Swift introduced a petition in support of the federal Equality Act. This legislation would amend the Civil Rights Act to outlaw discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation. (It has passed the House, but prospects in Mitch McConnell’s Senate are unclear.) Swift also posted a letter to Senator Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee, asking him to vote yes. The request, on her personal letterhead (born in 1989. LOVES CATS.), denounced President Trump for not supporting the Equality Act. “I personally reject the president’s stance,” Swift wrote. Back in the kitchen, Swift hits play. “The first verse is about trolls and cancel culture,” she says. “The second verse is about homophobes and the people picketing outside our concerts. The third verse is about successful women being pitted against each other.” The video is, for erudite Swifties, a rich text. I had followed enough clues to correctly guess some of the other cameos—Ellen DeGeneres, RuPaul, Katy Perry. I felt the satisfaction of a gamer who successfully levels up—achievement unlocked! The video’s final frame sends viewers to Swift’s change.org petition in support of the Equality Act, which has acquired more than 400,000 signatures—including those of Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren, Beto O’Rourke, and Kirsten Gillibrand—or four times the number required to elicit an official response from the White House. “Maybe a year or two ago, Todrick and I are in the car, and he asked me, What would you do if your son was gay?” We are upstairs in Swift’s secret garden, comfortably ensconced in a human-scale basket that is sort of shaped like a cocoon. Swift has brought up an ornate charcuterie board and is happily slathering triple-cream Brie onto sea-salt crackers. “The fact that he had to ask me … shocked me and made me realize that I had not made my position clear enough or loud enough,” she says. “If my son was gay, he’d be gay. I don’t understand the question.” I have pressed Swift on this topic, and her answers have been direct, not performative or scripted. I do sense that she enjoys talking to me about as much as she’d enjoy a root canal—but she’s unfailingly polite, and when we turn to music, her face will light up and she will add little melodic phrases to her speech, clearly her preferred language. “If he was thinking that, I can’t imagine what my fans in the LGBTQ community might be thinking,” she goes on. “It was kind of devastating to realize that I hadn’t been publicly clear about that.” I understand why she was surprised; she has been sending pro-LGBTQ signals since at least 2011. Many have been subtle, but none insignificant—especially for a young country star coming out of Nashville. In the video for her single “Mean” (from 2010’s Speak Now), we see a boy in a school locker room wearing a lavender sweater and bow tie, surrounded by football players. In “Welcome to New York,” the first track on 1989, she sings, “And you can want who you want. Boys and boys and girls and girls.” Two years later, she donated to a fund for the newly created Stonewall National Monument and presented Ruby Rose with a GLAAD Media Award. Every night of last year’s Reputation tour, she dedicated the song “Dress” to Loie Fuller, the openly gay pioneer of modern dance and theatrical lighting who captured the imagination of fin-de-siècle Paris. Swift, who has been criticized for keeping her politics to herself, first took an explicit stance a month before the 2018 midterms. On Instagram, she endorsed Democrats for the Tennessee Legislature and called out the Republican running for Senate, Marsha Blackburn. “She believes businesses have a right to refuse service to gay couples,” Swift wrote. “She also believes they should not have the right to marry. These are not MY Tennessee values.” Swift says the post was partly to help young fans understand that if they wanted to vote, they had to register. To tell them, as she puts it, “Hey, just so you know, you can’t just roll up.” Some 65,000 new voters registered in the first 24 hours after her post, according to Vote.org. Trump came to Blackburn’s defense the following day. “She’s a tremendous woman,” he told reporters. “I’m sure Taylor Swift doesn’t know anything about her. Let’s say I like Taylor’s music about 25 percent less now, OK?” In April, spurred by a raft of anti-LGBTQ bills in Tennessee, Swift donated $113,000 to the Tennessee Equality Project, which advocates for LGBTQ rights. “Horrendous,” she says of the legislation. “They don’t call it ‘Slate of Hate’ for nothing.” Swift especially liked that the Tennessee Equality Project had organized a petition of faith leaders in opposition. “I loved how smart it was to come at it from a religious perspective.” Meanwhile, the “Calm Down” video provoked a Colorado pastor to call Swift “a sinner in desperate need of a savior” and warn that “God will cut her down.” It also revived heated debate within LGBTQ communities about the politics of allyship and corporatization of Pride. Some critics argued Swift’s pro-LGBTQ imagery and lyrics were overdue and out of the blue—a reaction the new Swift scholar in me found bewildering. Had they not been paying attention? Nor did it strike me as out of character for Swift to leverage her power for a cause. She pulled her catalog from Spotify in 2014 over questions of artist compensation. She stared down Apple in 2015, when the company said it would not pay artists during the launch of its music service. (Apple reversed itself immediately.) As a condition of her record deal with Universal Music Group last year, the company promised that it would distribute proceeds from any sale of its Spotify shares to all of its artists. And this summer, Swift furiously called out Scott Borchetta, founder of Big Machine Label Group, for selling her master recordings to the music manager Scooter Braun. (When I ask Swift if she tried to get her masters from Big Machine, her whole body slumps with a palpable heaviness. “It was either investing in my past or my and other artists’ future, and I chose the future,” she says of the deal she struck with Universal.) Swift’s blunt testimony during her 2017 sexual-assault case against a radio DJ—months before the #MeToo reckoning blew open—felt deeply political to me and, I imagine, many other women. Swift accused the DJ, David Mueller, of groping her under her skirt at a photo session in 2013. Her camp reported the incident to his employer, who fired him. Mueller denied the allegation, sued Swift for $3 million, and his case was thrown out. Swift countersued for a symbolic $1 and won. In a Colorado courtroom, Swift described the incident: “He stayed latched onto my bare ass cheek” as photos were being snapped. Asked why photos of the front of her skirt didn’t show this, she said, “Because my ass is located at the back of my body.” Asked if she felt bad about the DJ’s losing his job, she said, “I’m not going to let you or your client make me feel in any way that this is my fault. Here we are years later, and I’m being blamed for the unfortunate events of his life that are the product of his decisions—not mine.” When Time included Swift on the cover of its “Silence Breakers” issue that year, the magazine asked how she felt during the testimony. “I was angry,” she said. “In that moment, I decided to forgo any courtroom formalities and just answer the questions the way it happened…I’m told it was the most amount of times the word ass has ever been said in Colorado Federal Court.” Mueller has since paid Swift the dollar—with a Sacagawea coin. “He was trolling me, implying that I was self-righteous and hell-bent on angry, vengeful feminism. That’s what I’m inferring from him giving me a Sacagawea coin,” Swift says. “Hey, maybe he was trying to do it in honor of a powerful Native American woman. I didn’t ask.” Where is the coin now? “My lawyer has it.” I ask her, why get louder about LGBTQ rights now? “Rights are being stripped from basically everyone who isn’t a straight white cisgender male,” she says. “I didn’t realize until recently that I could advocate for a community that I’m not a part of. It’s hard to know how to do that without being so fearful of making a mistake that you just freeze. Because my mistakes are very loud. When I make a mistake, it echoes through the canyons of the world. It’s clickbait, and it’s a part of my life story, and it’s a part of my career arc.” I’d argue that no heterosexual woman can listen to “You Need to Calm Down” and hear only a gay anthem. “Calm down” is what controlling men tell women who are angry, contrary, or “hysterical,” or, let’s say, fearing for their physical safety. It is what Panic! at the Disco singer Brendon Urie says to Swift in the beginning of the “ME!” music video, prompting her to scream, “Je suis calme!” I cannot believe it is a coincidence that Swift, a numbers geek with an affinity for dates, dropped the single—whose slow, incessant bass is likely to be bumping in stadiums across the world in 2020 if she goes on tour—on June 14, a certain president’s birthday. It’s enlightening to read 13 years of Taylor Swift coverage—all the big reviews, all the big profiles—in one sitting. You notice things. How quickly Swift went from a “prodigy” (The New Yorker) and a “songwriting savant” (Rolling Stone) to a tabloid fixture, for instance. Or how suspect her ambition is made to seem once she acquires real power. Other plot points simply look different in the light of #MeToo. It is hard to imagine that Swift’s songs about her exes would be reviewed as sensationally today. I wonder if, in 2019, any man would dare grab the microphone out of a young woman’s hands at an awards show. I stared into space for a good long while when I was reminded that Pitchfork did not review Taylor Swift’s 1989 but did review Ryan Adams’s cover album of Taylor Swift’s 1989. I ask Swift if she had always been aware of sexism. “I think about this a lot,” she says. “When I was a teenager, I would hear people talk about sexism in the music industry, and I’d be like, I don’t see it. I don’t understand. Then I realized that was because I was a kid. Men in the industry saw me as a kid. I was a lanky, scrawny, overexcited young girl who reminded them more of their little niece or their daughter than a successful woman in business or a colleague. The second I became a woman, in people’s perception, was when I started seeing it. “It’s fine to infantilize a girl’s success and say, How cute that she’s having some hit songs,” she goes on. “How cute that she’s writing songs. But the second it becomes formidable? As soon as I started playing stadiums—when I started to look like a woman—that wasn’t as cool anymore. It was when I started to have songs from Red come out and cross over, like ‘I Knew You Were Trouble’ and ‘We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together.’ ” Those songs are also more assertive than the ones that came before, I say. “Yeah, the angle was different when I started saying, I knew you were trouble when you walked in. Basically, you emotionally manipulated me and I didn’t love it. That wasn’t fun for me.” I have to wonder if having her songwriting overlooked as her hits were picked apart and scrutinized wasn’t the biggest bummer of all. Swift: “I wanted to say to people, You realize writing songs is an art and a craft and not, like, an easy thing to do? Or to do well? People would act like it was a weapon I was using. Like a cheap dirty trick. Be careful, bro, she’ll write a song about you. Don’t stand near her. First of all, that’s not how it works. Second of all, find me a time when they say that about a male artist: Be careful, girl, he’ll use his experience with you to get—God forbid—inspiration to make art.” Without question the tenor of the Taylor Swift Narrative changed most dramatically in July 2016, when Kim Kardashian West called her a “snake” on Twitter, and released video clips of Swift and Kanye West discussing the lyrics to his song “Famous.” (No need to rehash the details here. Suffice it to say that Swift’s version of events hasn’t changed: She knew about some of the lyrics but not others; specifically, the words that bitch.) The posts sparked several hashtags, including #TaylorSwiftIsASnake and #TaylorSwiftIsCanceled, which quickly escalated into a months-long campaign to “cancel” Swift. To this day Swift doesn’t think people grasp the repercussions of that term. “A mass public shaming, with millions of people saying you are quote-unquote canceled, is a very isolating experience,” she says. “I don’t think there are that many people who can actually understand what it’s like to have millions of people hate you very loudly.” She adds: “When you say someone is canceled, it’s not a TV show. It’s a human being. You’re sending mass amounts of messaging to this person to either shut up, disappear, or it could also be perceived as, Kill yourself.” I get a sense of the whiplash Swift experienced when I notice that, a few months into this ordeal, while she was writing the songs that an interpolation of a ’90s camp classic, Right Said Fred’s “I’m Too Sexy.”) Nonetheless, most critics read it as a grenade lobbed in the general direction of Calabasas. One longtime Nashville critic, Brian Mansfield, had a more plausible take: She was writing sarcastically as the “Taylor Swift” portrayed in the media in a bid for privacy. “Yeah, this is the character you created for me, let me just hide behind it,” she says now of the persona she created. “I always used this metaphor when I was younger. I’d say that with every reinvention, I never wanted to tear down my house. ’Cause I built this house. This house being, metaphorically, my body of work, my songwriting, my music, my catalog, my library. I just wanted to redecorate. I think a lot of people, with Reputation, would have perceived that I had torn down the house. Actually, I just built a bunker around it.” In March, the snakes started to morph into butterflies, the vampire color palette into Easter pastels. When a superbloom of wildflowers lured a mesmerizing deluge of Painted Lady butterflies to Los Angeles, Swift marked it with an Instagram post. She attended the iHeartRadio Music Awards that night in a sequin romper and stilettos with shimmery wings attached. Swift announced the single “ME!” a month later, with a large butterfly mural in Nashville. In the music video for the (conspicuously) bubblegum song, a hissing pastel-pink snake explodes into a kaleidoscope of butterflies. One flutters by the window of an apartment, where Swift is arguing in French with Urie. A record player is playing in the background. “It’s an old-timey, 1940s-sounding instrumental version of ‘You Need to Calm Down,’ ’’ Swift says. Later, in the “Calm Down” video, Swift wears a (fake) back tattoo of a snake swarmed by butterflies. We are only two songs in, people. Lover, to be released on August 23, will have a total of 18 songs. “I was compiling ideas for a very long time,” Swift says. “When I started writing, I couldn’t stop.” (We can assume the British actor Joe Alwyn, with whom Swift has been in a relationship for nearly three years, provided some of the inspiration.) Swift thinks Lover might be her favorite album yet. “There are so many ways in which this album feels like a new beginning,” she says. “This album is really a love letter to love, in all of its maddening, passionate, exciting, enchanting, horrific, tragic, wonderful glory.” I have to ask Swift, given how genuinely at peace she seems, if part of her isn’t thankful, if not for the Great Cancellation of 2016, then for the person she now is—knowing who her friends are, knowing what’s what. “When you’re going through loss or embarrassment or shame, it’s a grieving process with so many micro emotions in a day. One of the reasons why I didn’t do interviews for Reputation was that I couldn’t figure out how I felt hour to hour. Sometimes I felt like: All these things taught me something that I never could have learned in a way that didn’t hurt as much. Five minutes later, I’d feel like: That was horrible. Why did that have to happen? What am I supposed to take from this other than mass amounts of humiliation? And then five minutes later I’d think: I think I might be happier than I’ve ever been.” She goes on: “It’s so strange trying to be self-aware when you’ve been cast as this always smiling, always happy ‘America’s sweetheart’ thing, and then having that taken away and realizing that it’s actually a great thing that it was taken away, because that’s extremely limiting.” Swift leans back in the cocoon and smiles: “We’re not going to go straight to gratitude with it. Ever. But we’re going to find positive aspects to it. We’re never going to write a thank-you note.” Though people will take the Perry-Swift burger-and-fries embrace in the “You Need to Calm Down” video as a press release that the two have mended fences, Swift says it’s actually a comment on how the media pits female pop stars against one another. After Perry sent Swift an (actual) olive branch last year, Swift asked her to be in the video: “She wrote back, This makes me so emotional. I’m so up for this. I want us to be that example. But let’s spend some time together. Because I want it to be real. So she came over and we talked for hours. “We decided the metaphor for what happens in the media,” Swift explains, “is they pick two people and it’s like they’re pouring gasoline all over the floor. All that needs to happen is one false move, one false word, one misunderstanding, and a match is lit and dropped. That’s what happened with us. It was: Who’s better? Katy or Taylor? Katy or Taylor? Katy or Taylor? Katy or Taylor? The tension is so high that it becomes impossible for you to not think that the other person has something against you.“ Meanwhile, the protesters in the video reference a real-life religious group that pickets outside Swift’s concerts, not the white working class in general, as some have assumed. “So many artists have them at their shows, and it’s such a confounding, confusing, infuriating thing to have outside of joyful concerts,” she tells me. “Obviously I don’t want to mention the actual entity, because they would get excited about that. Giving them press is not on my list of priorities.” At one point, Swift asks if I would like to hear two other songs off the new album. (Duh.) First she plays “Lover,” the title track, coproduced by Jack Antonoff. “This has one of my favorite bridges,” she says. “I love a bridge, and I was really able to go to Bridge City.” It’s a romantic, haunting, waltzy, singer-songwritery nugget: classic Swift. “My heart’s been borrowed and yours has been blue,” she sings. “All’s well that ends well to end up with you.” Next, Swift cues up a track that “plays with the idea of perception.” She has often wondered how she would be written and spoken about if she were a man, “so I wrote a song called ‘The Man.’ ” It’s a thought experiment of sorts: “If I had made all the same choices, all the same mistakes, all the same accomplishments, how would it read?” Seconds later, Swift’s earpods are pumping a synth-pop earworm into my head: “I’d be a fearless leader. I’d be an alpha type. When everyone believes ya: What’s that like?” Swift wrote the first two singles with Joel Little, best known as one of Lorde’s go-to producers. (“From a pop-songwriting point of view, she’s the pinnacle,” Little says of Swift.) The album is likely to include more marquee names. A portrait of the Dixie Chicks in the background of the “ME!” video almost certainly portends a collaboration. If fans are correctly reading a button affixed to her denim jacket in a recent magazine cover, we can expect one with Drake, too. Lover. “We met at one of her shows,” says McCartney, “and then we had a girls’ night and kind of jumped straight in. In London we’ll go on walks and talk about everything—life and love.” (Swift has no further fashion ambitions at the moment. “I really love my job right now,” she tells me. “My focus is on music.”) Oh, and that “5” on the bullseye? Track five is called “The Archer.” Yet something tells me the most illuminating clue for reading both Lover and Reputationmay be Loie Fuller, the dancer to whom Swift paid homage on tour. As Swift noted on a Jumbotron, Fuller “fought for artists to own their work.” Fuller also used swirling fabric and colored lights to metamorphose onstage, playing a “hide-and-seek illusionist game” with her audience, as one writer has put it. She became a muse to the Symbolists in Paris, where Jean Cocteau wrote that she created “the phantom of an era.” The effect, said the poet Stéphane Mallarmé, was a “dizziness of soul made visible by an artifice.” Fuller’s most famous piece was “Serpentine Dance.” Another was “Butterfly Dance.” Swift has had almost no downtime since late 2017, but what little she does have is divided among New York, Nashville, Los Angeles, and Rhode Island, where she keeps homes—plus London. In an essay earlier this year, she revealed that her mother, Andrea Swift, is fighting cancer for a second time. “There was a relapse that happened,” Swift says, declining to go into detail. “It’s something that my family is going through.” Later this year, she will star in a film adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats as Bombalurina, the flirtatious red cat. “They made us the size of cats by making the furniture bigger,” she says. “You’d be standing there and you could barely reach the seat of a chair. It was phenomenal. It made you feel like a little kid.” But first, she will spend much of the summer holding “secret sessions”—a tradition wherein Swift invites hundreds of fans to her various homes to preview her new music. “They’ve never given me a reason to stop doing it,” she says. “Not a single one.” Speaking of: Inquiring fans will want to know if Swift dropped any more clues about how to decode Lover during this interview. For you I reviewed the audio again, and there were a few things that made my newly acquired Swifty sense tingle. At one point she compared superstardom in the digital age to life in a dollhouse, one where voyeurs “can ‘ship’ you with who they want to ‘ship’ you with, and they can ‘favorite’ friends that you have, and they can know where you are all the time.” The metaphor was precise and vivid and, well, a little too intricately rendered to be off the cuff. (Also, the “ME!” lyric: “Baby doll, when it comes to a lover. I promise that you’ll never find another like me.”) Then there was the balloon—a giant gold balloon in the shape of a numeral seven that happened to float by while we were on her roof, on this, the occasion of her seventh album. “Is it an L’?” I say. “No, because look, the string is hanging from the bottom,” she says. It might seem an obvious symbolic gesture, deployed for this interview, except for how impossible that seems. Swift let me control the timing of nearly everything. Moreover, the gold seven wasn’t floating up from the sidewalk below. It was already high in the sky, drifting slowly toward us from down the street. She would have had to control the wind, or at least to have studied it. Would Taylor Swift really go to such elaborate lengths for her fans? This much I know: Yes, she would.

[bangwoolofbangtan]

BTS' 'Dynamite' Blasts in at No. 1 on Billboard Hot 100, Becoming the Group's First Leader

BTS is the first all-South Korean act to top the Hot 100.

BTS achieves its first No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 songs chart, as "Dynamite" debuts at the summit.

The seven-member South Korean act rules the Hot 100 with its first all-English-language single, after previously reaching a No. 4 high with "On" in March.

BTS, which comprises members J-Hope, Jimin, Jin, Jungkook, RM, Suga and V, is additionally the first all-South Korean group to lead the Hot 100.

The Hot 100 blends all-genre U.S. streaming, radio airplay and sales data. All charts (dated Sept. 5) will update on Billboard.com tomorrow (Sept. 1). For all chart news, you can follow @billboard and @billboardcharts on both Twitter and Instagram.

"Dynamite," released on BigHit Entertainment/Columbia Records, is the 1,109th No. 1 in the Hot 100's 62-year history.

Let's recap the song's explosive start.

Streams, sales & airplay: "Dynamite," released Aug. 21 at midnight ET, roars in with 33.9 million U.S. streams and 300,000 sold in its first week, ending Aug. 27, according to Nielsen Music/MRC Data. It also drew 11.6 million radio airplay audience impressions in the week ending Aug. 30.

"Dynamite" starts at No. 1 on the Digital Song Sales chart, where it's BTS' fourth leader, and No. 3 on Streaming Songs.

The official video for "Dynamite" premiered upon the song's arrival (followed by an official "B-side" clip Aug. 24), and the track was available to purchase in the tracking week in its original form and via an EDM remix, acoustic remix and instrumental version (each sale-priced at 69 cents). Its original version was also available for purchase on 7-inch vinyl (for $7.98) and cassette ($6.98).

Biggest digital sales week in nearly 3 years: With 265,000 downloads sold (among its overall first-week total of 300,000, which includes its vinyl and cassette physical versions), "Dynamite" debuts with the biggest digital sales week since Sept. 16, 2017, when Taylor Swift's "Look What You Made Me Do" launched with 353,000.

Among groups, "Dynamite" sports the biggest weekly digital sales sum since Prince and the Revolution's 1984 classic "Purple Rain" sold 282,000 (May 14, 2016), following Prince's April 21, 2016, passing. Among songs by groups in tracks' debut weeks, "Dynamite" makes the best digital sales start in five years, since One Direction's "Drag Me Down" opened with 350,000 (Aug. 22, 2015).

BTS' first Hot 100 No. 1: BTS earns its first Hot 100 No. 1, and fourth top 10, among 12 visits to the chart. The group previously reached the top 10 with "On" (No. 4, where it debuted, this March); "Boy With Luv," featuring Halsey (No. 8 debut/peak, April 2019); and "Fake Love" (No. 10 debut/peak, June 2018). The act first appeared on the chart dated Oct. 7, 2017, with "DNA."

"Dynamite" is "made of positive vibes, energy, hope, love, the purity, everything," RM recently told Apple Music's Zane Lowe. "We made this song in hopes of giving energy to the listeners. We hope our fans can listen to it to receive the positive energy we tried to incorporate in the song."

BTS boasts four career No. 1 albums on the Billboard 200 chart and holds the record for the most weeks at No. 1 on the Social 50 chart, adding its 194th week on top this week.

First all-South Korean group to top Hot 100: BTS is the first all-South Korean group to lead the Hot 100. Among South Korean soloists, PSY reached a No. 2 Hot 100 best with "G100nam Style" for seven weeks in October-November 2012.

The history of Asian acts atop the Hot 100 dates back over a half-century, as Japanese-born Kyu Sakamoto became the first Asian artist to top the chart, with "Sukiyaki" for three weeks in June 1963. In October-November 2010, Far*East Movement led the Hot 100, also for three weeks, with "Like a G6," with the act's lineup at the time including two members of Korean heritage.

BigHit's biggest hit: BigHit Entertainment achieves its first Hot 100 No. 1, having, like BTS, hit a previous No. 4 best with the group's "On."

(Columbia Records most recently led three weeks ago, with Harry Styles' "Watermelon Sugar.")

43rd No. 1 debut: "Dynamite" is the 43rd single to start at No. 1 on the Hot 100. It's the eighth to debut atop the Hot 100 in 2020 (all since April), doubling the previous record for the most in a single year, as four songs each entered at No. 1 in both 2018 and 1995.

BTS' pop radio best: While "Dynamite" so far falls shy of the all-format Radio Songs chart (where it would mark BTS' first entry), it brings the group its best rank on the mainstream top 40-based Pop Songs radio airplay chart, where it bounds from No. 30 to No. 20 following its first full week of tracking. BTS previously climbed to a No. 22 Pop Songs highpoint with "Boy With Luv."

KMVQ San Francisco led all Pop Songs reporting stations with 53 plays for "Dynamite" in the week ending Aug. 30, followed by KJYO Oklahoma City, Okla. (49), KDDB Honolulu (47) and KAMP Los Angeles and WJFX Ft. Wayne, Ind. (46 each).

BTS Cruz-es to No. 1: Meanwhile, BTS charts the first Hot 100 No. 1 with the word "dynamite" in its title, one-upping Taio Cruz's "Dynamite," which reached No. 2 just over 10 years ago (Aug. 21, 2010).

Three other TNT-packed titles have infused the Hot 100: Jermaine Jackson's "Dynamite" (No. 15 peak, 1984); Sir Douglas Quintet's "Dynamite Woman" (No. 83, 1969); and Lorde's "Homemade Dynamite," featuring Khalid, Post Malone and SZA (No. 92, 2017; the song peaked on the chart dated that Oct. 7, coincidentally, as noted above, BTS' first week ever on the Hot 100).

© billboard.com

[theassofwonder]

Oh!! 1, 2, 3 of the Fun meta asks for writers. I would love to know the answers to these questions

Fun meta asks for writers!

1. Tell us about your current project(s)

* ACOTS, obviously- I swear to fuck I’m almost done with part 6! I know I keep saying that but I really do mean it!! I broke 2k last night (this morning?) and I’m in the homestretch! I can see the end in sight (literally, since I wrote the end of the chapter before I wrote most of the middle)!! And then after part 6 there’s only like three more chapters. I started writing  ACOTS only a little over a year ago and I’m more than halfway through? Fuckin mindblowing.

* I started writing more of the we’re sick (like animals) verse because I love it and technically the beginning of what is published was supposed to be in the middle? But then it was going to be waaay too long so I cut the ‘beginning’ (but still have it in a google doc that I check in on)

(more under the cut bc I actually have a fair bit of wip babies)

* not hockey rpf but I started writing a Teen Wolf fanfic? Despite never watching the show? So my only reference for the fic has been other fanfics. lol. It’s called Scotty Doesn’t Know based on the song by the same name and it’s just a mess of half-written snippets that I’m going to have to glue together at some point

* I want to eventually get around to rewriting (and then finishing? maybe?) my two destiel fics Midnight Blue and Holy Ground. Fun fact- I started writing both of those on Wattpad before I found out about ao3 and every chapter title of HG is a taylor swift song. But they’re both currently up on ao3 if anyone wants to give em a look!

* I have several OG fiction novels I’m trying to write as well. the first one has the working title of Messier 30 (it’s a star cluster near the Capricorn constellation) and it’s supposed to be book 1 in a trilogy. The main character used to be named Charlene-call-me-Charlie Elizabeth Roman but I suddenly had a stroke of ACOTS-fueled need to make her half-russian and changed her name to Anastasyia Viktoriya. Her name/ethnicity change shouldn’t change the plotline itself but I guess we’ll see. the second work is set during a zombie apocalypse with flashbacks to the B.Z. (Before Zombies) era and the early days of the apocalypse. the main character’s mom accidentally created the virus and was Patient Zero so MC carries a fuckton of guilt and also she’s gay and her wife was one of the first ones to go since she was Mom’s second on the project

2. Tell us about what you’re most looking forward to writing

ACOTS: copied straight from the outline :) {The Russian word for uncle is ‘дядя’. It sounds almost identical to ‘dada’. Nikita calls him ‘дядя Sid’ one day and Sid just starts bawling, and then Nikita’s bawling because Sid is bawling and there’s so much tears and snot it’s so gross. Nikita is two years old and therefore has no idea that Sid is crying because he doesn’t just want to be Nikita’s “uncle” he wants to be his dad. It’s a good thing both Geno and Anna are old enough to understand. And reassure him that of course he’s also going to be Nikita’s father, what’s the point of him being with Geno and Anna if he’s not?? Sid admits that while he and Kathy didn’t officially break up in 2010 like the rumors said, they did take a break. Because Sid told Kathy that he was starting to have feelings for Geno. Even though he said it didn’t mean anything because he was with Kathy and he loved her and would never do anything to hurt her} and then everyone basically confesses their love for each other and there’s still a lot of crying but this time it’s happy!!

ALSO APPARENTLY I HAVE NINE CHAPTERS OUTLINED?? NOT TEN?? SO AFTER PART 6 IS DONE I’LL BE TWO-THIRDS DONE

WSLA: Sid and Geno getting together and sneaking around and not being subtle at all but everyone humors them anyway

SDK: this scene where Stiles’ dad tells him he knows he and Derek have been dating, which i made up for the specific context for this line: {“Look,” his dad says. “Scott may not have the sense God gave an ant but I haven’t been Sheriff this long just because of my dashing good looks.”}

MB: there’s a scene near the end where a character from Cas’ past comes in and shoots Cas and Mary knocks the shooter out with a cast iron frying pan and John has mega heart eyes and that’s where the reveal that Dean and Cas are married was supposed to happen

HG: I was kinda into crackfic when i started writing this so that’s why it’s like that in the beginning, but the scene i can’t wait for is heartbreaking and not in the fun way. I joke a lot about being super emotional but seriously. i cried during the outline for this scene. I love it so much.

3. What is that one scene that you’ve always wanted to write but can’t be arsed to write all of the set-up and context it would need?

well I guess the good thing is I almost always write The Scene first and then I have to write the setup and context. which still kinda sucks, but at least it’s more motivation to write all the other nonsense- and then sometimes I write something in the middle of all the nonsense that almost rivals The Scene?? and that’s my favorite part about writing. 

[makistar2018]

Taylor Swift on Sexism, Scrutiny, and Standing Up for Herself

AUGUST 8, 2019 By ABBY AGUIRRE Photographed by INEZ AND VINOODH

Cover Look Taylor Swift wears a Louis Vuitton jumpsuit. Rings by Cartier and Bvlgari. To get this look, try: Dream Urban Cover in Classic Ivory, Fit Me Blush in Pink, Tattoostudio Sharpenable Gel Pencil Longwear Eyeliner Makeup in Deep Onyx, The Colossal Mascara, Brow Ultra Slim in Blonde, and Shine Compulsion by Color Sensational Lipstick in Undressed Pink. All by Maybelline New York. Hair, Christiaan; makeup, Fulvia Farolfi. Fashion Editor: Tonne Goodman

Photographed by Inez & Vinoodh, Vogue, September 2019

IT’S A SUNDAY AFTERNOON in Tribeca, and I’m in Taylor Swift’s loft, inside a former printing house that she has restored and fortified into a sanctuary of brick, velvet, and mahogany. The space is warm and cozy and vaguely literary—later, when we pass through her bedroom en route to her garden, 10 percent of my brain will believe her wardrobe might open up to Narnia. Barefoot in a wine-colored floral top and matching flowy pants, Swift is typing passwords into a laptop to show me the video for “You Need to Calm Down,” eight days before she unleashes it on the world.

I have a sliver of an idea what to expect. A few weeks earlier, I spent a day at the video shoot, in a dusty field-slash-junkyard north of Los Angeles. Swift had made it a sort of Big Gay Candy Mountain trailer park, a Technicolor happy place. The cast and crew wore heart-shaped sunglasses—living, breathing lovey-eyes emoji—and a mailbox warned, LOVE LETTERS ONLY.

Swift and a stream of costars filmed six scenes over about a dozen hours. The singer-songwriter Hayley Kiyoko, known to her fans as “Lesbian Jesus,” shot arrows at a bull’s-eye. The YouTube comedian-chef Hannah Hart danced alongside Dexter Mayfield, the plus-size male model and self-described “big boy in heels.” The Olympic figure skater Adam Rippon served up icy red snow cones. Swift and her close friend Todrick Hall, of Kinky Boots and RuPaul’s Drag Race, sipped tea with the cast of Queer Eye.

Speak Now “Rights are being stripped from basically everyone who isn’t a straight white cisgender male,” Swift says. Celine coat. Dior shoes. Fashion Editor: Tonne Goodman. Photographed by Inez & Vinoodh, Vogue, September 2019

The mood was joyous and laid-back. But by the end of the day, I wasn’t sure what the vignettes would add up to. There were shoot days and cameos I wouldn’t observe. For security reasons, the song was never played aloud. (The cast wore ear buds.) Even the hero shot, in which Swift and Hall sauntered arm in arm through the dreamscape at golden hour, was filmed in near-total silence.

For weeks afterward, I tried to sleuth out a theory. I started casually. There was a “5” on the bull’s-eye, so I did a quick search to figure out what that number might mean. Immediately I was in over my head.

Swift has a thing for symbols. I knew she had been embedding secret messages in liner notes and deploying metaphors as refrains since her self-titled debut in 2006—long before her megafame made her into a symbol of pop supremacy. But I hadn’t understood how coded and byzantine her body of work has become; I hadn’t learned, as Swift’s fans have, to see hidden meanings everywhere. For instance: In the 2017 video for “Look What You Made Me Do,” a headstone in a graveyard scene reads NILS SJOBERG, the pseudonym Swift used as her writing credit on Rihanna’s hit “This Is What You Came For,” a Swedish-sounding nod to that country’s pop wizards.

After an excessive amount of ad hoc scholarship—a friend joked that I could have learned Mandarin in the time I spent trying to unpack Swift’s oeuvre—I was no closer to a theory. Pop music has become so layered and meta, but the Taylor Swift Universe stands apart. Apprehending it is like grasping quantum physics.

My first indication of what her new album, Lover, would be about came just after midnight on June 1, the beginning of Pride Month, when Swift introduced a petition in support of the federal Equality Act. This legislation would amend the Civil Rights Act to outlaw discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation. (It has passed the House, but prospects in Mitch McConnell’s Senate are unclear.) Swift also posted a letter to Senator Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee, asking him to vote yes. The request, on her personal letterhead (born in 1989. LOVES CATS.), denounced President Trump for not supporting the Equality Act. “I personally reject the president’s stance,” Swift wrote.

Back in the kitchen, Swift hits play. “The first verse is about trolls and cancel culture,” she says. “The second verse is about homophobes and the people picketing outside our concerts. The third verse is about successful women being pitted against each other.”

The video is, for erudite Swifties, a rich text. I had followed enough clues to correctly guess some of the other cameos—Ellen DeGeneres, RuPaul, Katy Perry. I felt the satisfaction of a gamer who successfully levels up—achievement unlocked!The video’s final frame sends viewers to Swift’s change.org petition in support of the Equality Act, which has acquired more than 400,000 signatures—including those of Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren, Beto O’Rourke, and Kirsten Gillibrand—or four times the number required to elicit an official response from the White House.

“MAYBE A YEAR OR TWO AGO, Todrick and I are in the car, and he asked me, What would you do if your son was gay?”

We are upstairs in Swift’s secret garden, comfortably ensconced in a human-scale basket that is sort of shaped like a cocoon. Swift has brought up an ornate charcuterie board and is happily slathering triple-cream Brie onto sea-salt crackers. “The fact that he had to ask me . . . shocked me and made me realize that I had not made my position clear enough or loud enough,” she says. “If my son was gay, he’d be gay. I don’t understand the question.”

I have pressed Swift on this topic, and her answers have been direct, not performative or scripted. I do sense that she enjoys talking to me about as much as she’d enjoy a root canal—but she’s unfailingly polite, and when we turn to music, her face will light up and she will add little melodic phrases to her speech, clearly her preferred language.

Balancing Act Later this year, Swift will appear in the film adaptation of Cats—as the flirtatious Bombalurina. Givenchy dress. Bracelets by John Hardy, David Yurman, and Hoorsenbuhs. Photographed by Inez & Vinoodh, Vogue, September 2019

“If he was thinking that, I can’t imagine what my fans in the LGBTQ community might be thinking,” she goes on. “It was kind of devastating to realize that I hadn’t been publicly clear about that.”

I understand why she was surprised; she has been sending pro-LGBTQ signals since at least 2011. Many have been subtle, but none insignificant—especially for a young country star coming out of Nashville.

In the video for her single “Mean” (from 2010’s Speak Now), we see a boy in a school locker room wearing a lavender sweater and bow tie, surrounded by football players. In “Welcome to New York,” the first track on 1989, she sings, “And you can want who you want. Boys and boys and girls and girls.” Two years later, she donated to a fund for the newly created Stonewall National Monument and presented Ruby Rose with a GLAAD Media Award. Every night of last year’s Reputation tour, she dedicated the song “Dress” to Loie Fuller, the openly gay pioneer of modern dance and theatrical lighting who captured the imagination of fin-de-siècle Paris.

Swift, who has been criticized for keeping her politics to herself, first took an explicit stance a month before the 2018 midterms. On Instagram, she endorsed Democrats for the Tennessee Legislature and called out the Republican running for Senate, Marsha Blackburn. “She believes businesses have a right to refuse service to gay couples,” Swift wrote. “She also believes they should not have the right to marry. These are not MY Tennessee values.”

Swift says the post was partly to help young fans understand that if they wanted to vote, they had to register. To tell them, as she puts it, “Hey, just so you know, you can’t just roll up.” Some 65,000 new voters registered in the first 24 hours after her post, according to Vote.org.

Trump came to Blackburn’s defense the following day. “She’s a tremendous woman,” he told reporters. “I’m sure Taylor Swift doesn’t know anything about her. Let’s say I like Taylor’s music about 25 percent less now, OK?”

In April, spurred by a raft of anti-LGBTQ bills in Tennessee, Swift donated $113,000 to the Tennessee Equality Project, which advocates for LGBTQ rights. “Horrendous,” she says of the legislation. “They don’t call it ‘Slate of Hate’ for nothing.” Swift especially liked that the Tennessee Equality Project had organized a petition of faith leaders in opposition. “I loved how smart it was to come at it from a religious perspective.”

Meanwhile, the “Calm Down” video provoked a Colorado pastor to call Swift “a sinner in desperate need of a savior” and warn that “God will cut her down.” It also revived heated debate within LGBTQ communities about the politics of allyship and corporatization of Pride. Some critics argued Swift’s pro-LGBTQ imagery and lyrics were overdue and out of the blue—a reaction the new Swift scholar in me found bewildering. Had they not been paying attention?

Nor did it strike me as out of character for Swift to leverage her power for a cause. She pulled her catalog from Spotify in 2014 over questions of artist compensation. She stared down Apple in 2015, when the company said it would not pay artists during the launch of its music service. (Apple reversed itself immediately.) As a condition of her record deal with Universal Music Group last year, the company promised that it would distribute proceeds from any sale of its Spotify shares to all of its artists. And this summer, Swift furiously called out Scott Borchetta, founder of Big Machine Label Group, for selling her master recordings to the music manager Scooter Braun. (When I ask Swift if she tried to get her masters from Big Machine, her whole body slumps with a palpable heaviness. “It was either investing in my past or my and other artists’ future, and I chose the future,” she says of the deal she struck with Universal.)

Swift’s blunt testimony during her 2017 sexual-assault case against a radio DJ—months before the #MeToo reckoning blew open—felt deeply political to me and, I imagine, many other women. Swift accused the DJ, David Mueller, of groping her under her skirt at a photo session in 2013. Her camp reported the incident to his employer, who fired him. Mueller denied the allegation, sued Swift for $3 million, and his case was thrown out. Swift countersued for a symbolic $1 and won.

Watch Taylor Swift Take Over Go Ask Anna:

In a Colorado courtroom, Swift described the incident: “He stayed latched onto my bare ass cheek” as photos were being snapped. Asked why photos of the front of her skirt didn’t show this, she said, “Because my ass is located at the back of my body.” Asked if she felt bad about the DJ’s losing his job, she said, “I’m not going to let you or your client make me feel in any way that this is my fault. Here we are years later, and I’m being blamed for the unfortunate events of his life that are the product of his decisions—not mine.”

When Time included Swift on the cover of its “Silence Breakers” issue that year, the magazine asked how she felt during the testimony. “I was angry,” she said. “In that moment, I decided to forgo any courtroom formalities and just answer the questions the way it happened...I’m told it was the most amount of times the word ass has ever been said in Colorado Federal Court.”

Mueller has since paid Swift the dollar—with a Sacagawea coin. “He was trolling me, implying that I was self-righteous and hell-bent on angry, vengeful feminism. That’s what I’m inferring from him giving me a Sacagawea coin,” Swift says. “Hey, maybe he was trying to do it in honor of a powerful Native American woman. I didn’t ask.” Where is the coin now? “My lawyer has it.”

I ask her, why get louder about LGBTQ rights now? “Rights are being stripped from basically everyone who isn’t a straight white cisgender male,” she says. “I didn’t realize until recently that I could advocate for a community that I’m not a part of. It’s hard to know how to do that without being so fearful of making a mistake that you just freeze. Because my mistakes are very loud. When I make a mistake, it echoes through the canyons of the world. It’s clickbait, and it’s a part of my life story, and it’s a part of my career arc.”

I’d argue that no heterosexual woman can listen to “You Need to Calm Down” and hear only a gay anthem. “Calm down” is what controlling men tell women who are angry, contrary, or “hysterical,” or, let’s say, fearing for their physical safety. It is what Panic! at the Disco singer Brendon Urie says to Swift in the beginning of the “ME!” music video, prompting her to scream, “Je suis calme!”

I cannot believe it is a coincidence that Swift, a numbers geek with an affinity for dates, dropped the single—whose slow, incessant bass is likely to be bumping in stadiums across the world in 2020 if she goes on tour—on June 14, a certain president’s birthday.

IT'S ENLIGHTENING to read 13 years of Taylor Swift coverage—all the big reviews, all the big profiles—in one sitting. You notice things.

How quickly Swift went from a “prodigy” (The New Yorker) and a “songwriting savant” (Rolling Stone) to a tabloid fixture, for instance. Or how suspect her ambition is made to seem once she acquires real power.

Other plot points simply look different in the light of #MeToo. It is hard to imagine that Swift’s songs about her exes would be reviewed as sensationally today. I wonder if, in 2019, any man would dare grab the microphone out of a young woman’s hands at an awards show. I stared into space for a good long while when I was reminded that Pitchfork did not review Taylor Swift’s 1989 but did review Ryan Adams’s cover album of Taylor Swift’s 1989.

I ask Swift if she had always been aware of sexism. “I think about this a lot,” she says. “When I was a teenager, I would hear people talk about sexism in the music industry, and I’d be like, I don’t see it. I don’t understand. Then I realized that was because I was a kid. Men in the industry saw me as a kid. I was a lanky, scrawny, overexcited young girl who reminded them more of their little niece or their daughter than a successful woman in business or a colleague. The second I became a woman, in people’s perception, was when I started seeing it.

“It’s fine to infantilize a girl’s success and say, How cute that she’s having some hit songs,” she goes on. “How cute that she’s writing songs. But the second it becomes formidable? As soon as I started playing stadiums—when I started to look like a woman—that wasn’t as cool anymore. It was when I started to have songs from Red come out and cross over, like ‘I Knew You Were Trouble’ and ‘We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together.’ ”

Those songs are also more assertive than the ones that came before, I say. “Yeah, the angle was different when I started saying, I knew you were trouble when you walked in. Basically, you emotionally manipulated me and I didn’t love it. That wasn’t fun for me.”

I have to wonder if having her songwriting overlooked as her hits were picked apart and scrutinized wasn’t the biggest bummer of all. Swift: “I wanted to say to people, You realize writing songs is an art and a craft and not, like, an easy thing to do? Or to do well? People would act like it was a weapon I was using. Like a cheap dirty trick. Be careful, bro, she’ll write a song about you. Don’t stand near her. First of all, that’s not how it works. Second of all, find me a time when they say that about a male artist: Be careful, girl, he’ll use his experience with you to get—God forbid—inspiration to make art.”

Without question the tenor of the Taylor Swift Narrative changed most dramatically in July 2016, when Kim Kardashian West called her a “snake” on Twitter, and released video clips of Swift and Kanye West discussing the lyrics to his song “Famous.” (No need to rehash the details here. Suffice it to say that Swift’s version of events hasn’t changed: She knew about some of the lyrics but not others; specifically, the words that bitch.) The posts sparked several hashtags, including #TaylorSwiftIsASnake and #TaylorSwiftIsCanceled, which quickly escalated into a months-long campaign to “cancel” Swift.

To this day Swift doesn’t think people grasp the repercussions of that term. “A mass public shaming, with millions of people saying you are quote-unquote canceled, is a very isolating experience,” she says. “I don’t think there are that many people who can actually understand what it’s like to have millions of people hate you very loudly.” She adds: “When you say someone is canceled, it’s not a TV show. It’s a human being. You’re sending mass amounts of messaging to this person to either shut up, disappear, or it could also be perceived as, Kill yourself.”

An overhaul was in order. “I realized I needed to restructure my life because it felt completely out of control,” Swift says. “I knew immediately I needed to make music about it because I knew it was the only way I could survive it. It was the only way I could preserve my mental health and also tell the story of what it’s like to go through something so humiliating.”

State of Grace Dior bodysuit and skirt. Photographed by Inez & Vinoodh, Vogue, September 2019

I get a sense of the whiplash Swift experienced when I notice that, a few months into this ordeal, while she was writing the songs that would become her album Reputation—and fighting off Mueller’s lawsuit—a portion of the media and internet began demanding to know why she hadn’t un-canceled herself long enough to take a position in the presidential election.

On that: “Unfortunately in the 2016 election you had a political opponent who was weaponizing the idea of the celebrity endorsement. He was going around saying, I’m a man of the people. I’m for you. I care about you. I just knew I wasn’t going to help. Also, you know, the summer before that election, all people were saying was She’s calculated. She’s manipulative. She’s not what she seems. She’s a snake. She’s a liar. These are the same exact insults people were hurling at Hillary. Would I be an endorsement or would I be a liability? Look, snakes of a feather flock together. Look, the two lying women. The two nasty women. Literally millions of people were telling me to disappear. So I disappeared. In many senses.”

Swift previewed Reputation in August 2017 with “Look What You Made Me Do.” The single came with a lyric video whose central image was an ouroboros—a snake swallowing its own tail, an ancient symbol for continual renewal. Swift wiped her social-media feeds clean and began posting video snippets of a slithering snake. The song was pure bombast and high camp. (Lest there be any doubt, the chorus was an interpolation of a ’90s camp classic, Right Said Fred’s “I’m Too Sexy.”) Nonetheless, most critics read it as a grenade lobbed in the general direction of Calabasas.

One longtime Nashville critic, Brian Mansfield, had a more plausible take: She was writing sarcastically as the “Taylor Swift” portrayed in the media in a bid for privacy. “Yeah, this is the character you created for me, let me just hide behind it,” she says now of the persona she created. “I always used this metaphor when I was younger. I’d say that with every reinvention, I never wanted to tear down my house. ’Cause I built this house. This house being, metaphorically, my body of work, my songwriting, my music, my catalog, my library. I just wanted to redecorate. I think a lot of people, with Reputation, would have perceived that I had torn down the house. Actually, I just built a bunker around it.”

IN MARCH, the snakes started to morph into butterflies, the vampire color palette into Easter pastels. When a superbloom of wildflowers lured a mesmerizing deluge of Painted Lady butterflies to Los Angeles, Swift marked it with an Instagram post. She attended the iHeartRadio Music Awards that night in a sequin romper and stilettos with shimmery wings attached.

Swift announced the single “ME!” a month later, with a large butterfly mural in Nashville. In the music video for the (conspicuously) bubblegum song, a hissing pastel-pink snake explodes into a kaleidoscope of butterflies. One flutters by the window of an apartment, where Swift is arguing in French with Urie. A record player is playing in the background. “It’s an old-timey, 1940s-sounding instrumental version of ‘You Need to Calm Down,’ ’’ Swift says. Later, in the “Calm Down” video, Swift wears a (fake) back tattoo of a snake swarmed by butterflies.

We are only two songs in, people. Lover, to be released on August 23, will have a total of 18 songs. “I was compiling ideas for a very long time,” Swift says. “When I started writing, I couldn’t stop.” (We can assume the British actor Joe Alwyn, with whom Swift has been in a relationship for nearly three years, provided some of the inspiration.)

Swift thinks Lover might be her favorite album yet. “There are so many ways in which this album feels like a new beginning,” she says. “This album is really a love letter to love, in all of its maddening, passionate, exciting, enchanting, horrific, tragic, wonderful glory.”

In Focus Swift’s new 18-track album, Lover, will be released August 23. Hermès shirt. Chanel pants. Maximum Henry belt. Photographed by Inez & Vinoodh, Vogue, September 2019

I have to ask Swift, given how genuinely at peace she seems, if part of her isn’t thankful, if not for the Great Cancellation of 2016, then for the person she now is—knowing who her friends are, knowing what’s what. “When you’re going through loss or embarrassment or shame, it’s a grieving process with so many micro emotions in a day. One of the reasons why I didn’t do interviews for Reputationwas that I couldn’t figure out how I felt hour to hour. Sometimes I felt like: All these things taught me something that I never could have learned in a way that didn’t hurt as much. Five minutes later, I’d feel like: That was horrible. Why did that have to happen? What am I supposed to take from this other than mass amounts of humiliation? And then five minutes later I’d think: I think I might be happier than I’ve ever been.”

She goes on: “It’s so strange trying to be self-aware when you’ve been cast as this always smiling, always happy ‘America’s sweetheart’ thing, and then having that taken away and realizing that it’s actually a great thing that it was taken away, because that’s extremely limiting.” Swift leans back in the cocoon and smiles: “We’re not going to go straight to gratitude with it. Ever. But we’re going to find positive aspects to it. We’re never going to write a thank-you note.”

Though people will take the Perry-Swift burger-and-fries embrace in the “You Need to Calm Down” video as a press release that the two have mended fences, Swift says it’s actually a comment on how the media pits female pop stars against one another. After Perry sent Swift an (actual) olive branch last year, Swift asked her to be in the video: “She wrote back, This makes me so emotional. I’m so up for this. I want us to be that example. But let’s spend some time together. Because I want it to be real. So she came over and we talked for hours.

“We decided the metaphor for what happens in the media,” Swift explains, “is they pick two people and it’s like they’re pouring gasoline all over the floor. All that needs to happen is one false move, one false word, one misunderstanding, and a match is lit and dropped. That’s what happened with us. It was: Who’s better? Katy or Taylor? Katy or Taylor? Katy or Taylor? Katy or Taylor? The tension is so high that it becomes impossible for you to not think that the other person has something against you."

Meanwhile, the protesters in the video reference a real-life religious group that pickets outside Swift’s concerts, not the white working class in general, as some have assumed. “So many artists have them at their shows, and it’s such a confounding, confusing, infuriating thing to have outside of joyful concerts,” she tells me. “Obviously I don’t want to mention the actual entity, because they would get excited about that. Giving them press is not on my list of priorities.”

At one point, Swift asks if I would like to hear two other songs off the new album. (Duh.) First she plays “Lover,” the title track, coproduced by Jack Antonoff. “This has one of my favorite bridges,” she says. “I love a bridge, and I was really able to go to Bridge City.” It’s a romantic, haunting, waltzy, singer-songwritery nugget: classic Swift. “My heart’s been borrowed and yours has been blue,” she sings. “All’s well that ends well to end up with you.”

Next, Swift cues up a track that “plays with the idea of perception.” She has often wondered how she would be written and spoken about if she were a man, “so I wrote a song called ‘The Man.’ ” It’s a thought experiment of sorts: “If I had made all the same choices, all the same mistakes, all the same accomplishments, how would it read?” Seconds later, Swift’s earpods are pumping a synth-pop earworm into my head: “I’d be a fearless leader. I’d be an alpha type. When everyone believes ya: What’s that like?”

Swift wrote the first two singles with Joel Little, best known as one of Lorde’s go-to producers. (“From a pop-songwriting point of view, she’s the pinnacle,” Little says of Swift.) The album is likely to include more marquee names. A portrait of the Dixie Chicks in the background of the “ME!” video almost certainly portends a collaboration. If fans are correctly reading a button affixed to her denim jacket in a recent magazine cover, we can expect one with Drake, too.

Eyes On Her Designer Stella McCartney on her friendship with Swift: “In London we’ll go on walks and talk about everything—life and love.” Stella McCartney coat. In this story: hair, Christiaan; makeup, Fulvia Farolfi. Photographed by Inez & Vinoodh, Vogue, September 2019

She recently announced a fashion collection with Stella McCartney to coincide with Lover. “We met at one of her shows,” says McCartney, “and then we had a girls’ night and kind of jumped straight in. In London we’ll go on walks and talk about everything—life and love.” (Swift has no further fashion ambitions at the moment. “I really love my job right now,” she tells me. “My focus is on music.”) Oh, and that “5” on the bullseye? Track five is called “The Archer.”

Yet something tells me the most illuminating clue for reading both Lover and Reputation may be Loie Fuller, the dancer to whom Swift paid homage on tour. As Swift noted on a Jumbotron, Fuller “fought for artists to own their work.” Fuller also used swirling fabric and colored lights to metamorphose onstage, playing a “hide-and-seek illusionist game” with her audience, as one writer has put it. She became a muse to the Symbolists in Paris, where Jean Cocteau wrote that she created “the phantom of an era.” The effect, said the poet Stéphane Mallarmé, was a “dizziness of soul made visible by an artifice.” Fuller’s most famous piece was “Serpentine Dance.” Another was “Butterfly Dance.”

SWIFT HAS HAD almost no downtime since late 2017, but what little she does have is divided among New York, Nashville, Los Angeles, and Rhode Island, where she keeps homes—plus London. In an essay earlier this year, she revealed that her mother, Andrea Swift, is fighting cancer for a second time. “There was a relapse that happened,” Swift says, declining to go into detail. “It’s something that my family is going through.”

Later this year, she will star in a film adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Catsas Bombalurina, the flirtatious red cat. “They made us the size of cats by making the furniture bigger,” she says. “You’d be standing there and you could barely reach the seat of a chair. It was phenomenal. It made you feel like a little kid.”

But first, she will spend much of the summer holding “secret sessions”—a tradition wherein Swift invites hundreds of fans to her various homes to preview her new music. “They’ve never given me a reason to stop doing it,” she says. “Not a single one.”

Speaking of: Inquiring fans will want to know if Swift dropped any more clues about how to decode Lover during this interview. For you I reviewed the audio again, and there were a few things that made my newly acquired Swifty sense tingle.

At one point she compared superstardom in the digital age to life in a dollhouse, one where voyeurs “can ‘ship’ you with who they want to ‘ship’ you with, and they can ‘favorite’ friends that you have, and they can know where you are all the time.” The metaphor was precise and vivid and, well, a little too intricately rendered to be off the cuff. (Also, the “ME!” lyric: “Baby doll, when it comes to a lover. I promise that you’ll never find another like me.”)

Then there was the balloon—a giant gold balloon in the shape of a numeral seven that happened to float by while we were on her roof, on this, the occasion of her seventh album. “Is it an L’?” I say. “No, because look, the string is hanging from the bottom,” she says.

It might seem an obvious symbolic gesture, deployed for this interview, except for how impossible that seems. Swift let me control the timing of nearly everything. Moreover, the gold seven wasn’t floating up from the sidewalk below. It was already high in the sky, drifting slowly toward us from down the street. She would have had to control the wind, or at least to have studied it. Would Taylor Swift really go to such elaborate lengths for her fans? This much I know: Yes, she would.

Taylor Swift Talks Googling Herself, Which Celebrity's Closet She'd Raid, and the Bravest Thing She's Ever Done:

Vogue

[hearyourheart]

Taylor Swift on Sexism, Scrutiny, and Standing Up for Herself

IT’S A SUNDAY AFTERNOON in Tribeca, and I’m in Taylor Swift’s loft, inside a former printing house that she has restored and fortified into a sanctuary of brick, velvet, and mahogany. The space is warm and cozy and vaguely literary—later, when we pass through her bedroom en route to her garden, 10 percent of my brain will believe her wardrobe might open up to Narnia. Barefoot in a wine-colored floral top and matching flowy pants, Swift is typing passwords into a laptop to show me the video for “You Need to Calm Down,” eight days before she unleashes it on the world.

I have a sliver of an idea what to expect. A few weeks earlier, I spent a day at the video shoot, in a dusty field-slash-junkyard north of Los Angeles. Swift had made it a sort of Big Gay Candy Mountain trailer park, a Technicolor happy place. The cast and crew wore heart-shaped sunglasses—living, breathing lovey-eyes emoji—and a mailbox warned, LOVE LETTERS ONLY.

Swift and a stream of costars filmed six scenes over about a dozen hours. The singer-songwriter Hayley Kiyoko, known to her fans as “Lesbian Jesus,” shot arrows at a bull’s-eye. The YouTube comedian-chef Hannah Hart danced alongside Dexter Mayfield, the plus-size male model and self-described “big boy in heels.” The Olympic figure skater Adam Rippon served up icy red snow cones. Swift and her close friend Todrick Hall, of Kinky Boots and RuPaul’s Drag Race, sipped tea with the cast of Queer Eye.

The mood was joyous and laid-back. But by the end of the day, I wasn’t sure what the vignettes would add up to. There were shoot days and cameos I wouldn’t observe. For security reasons, the song was never played aloud. (The cast wore ear buds.) Even the hero shot, in which Swift and Hall sauntered arm in arm through the dreamscape at golden hour, was filmed in near-total silence.

For weeks afterward, I tried to sleuth out a theory. I started casually. There was a “5” on the bull’s-eye, so I did a quick search to figure out what that number might mean. Immediately I was in over my head.

Swift has a thing for symbols. I knew she had been embedding secret messages in liner notes and deploying metaphors as refrains since her self-titled debut in 2006—long before her megafame made her into a symbol of pop supremacy. But I hadn’t understood how coded and byzantine her body of work has become; I hadn’t learned, as Swift’s fans have, to see hidden meanings everywhere. For instance: In the 2017 video for “Look What You Made Me Do,” a headstone in a graveyard scene reads NILS SJOBERG, the pseudonym Swift used as her writing credit on Rihanna’s hit “This Is What You Came For,” a Swedish-sounding nod to that country’s pop wizards.

After an excessive amount of ad hoc scholarship—a friend joked that I could have learned Mandarin in the time I spent trying to unpack Swift’s oeuvre—I was no closer to a theory. Pop music has become so layered and meta, but the Taylor Swift Universe stands apart. Apprehending it is like grasping quantum physics.

My first indication of what her new album, Lover, would be about came just after midnight on June 1, the beginning of Pride Month, when Swift introduced a petition in support of the federal Equality Act. This legislation would amend the Civil Rights Act to outlaw discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation. (It has passed the House, but prospects in Mitch McConnell’s Senate are unclear.) Swift also posted a letter to Senator Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee, asking him to vote yes. The request, on her personal letterhead (born in 1989. LOVES CATS.), denounced President Trump for not supporting the Equality Act. “I personally reject the president’s stance,” Swift wrote.

Back in the kitchen, Swift hits play. “The first verse is about trolls and cancel culture,” she says. “The second verse is about homophobes and the people picketing outside our concerts. The third verse is about successful women being pitted against each other.”

The video is, for erudite Swifties, a rich text. I had followed enough clues to correctly guess some of the other cameos—Ellen DeGeneres, RuPaul, Katy Perry. I felt the satisfaction of a gamer who successfully levels up—achievement unlocked!The video’s final frame sends viewers to Swift’s change.org petition in support of the Equality Act, which has acquired more than 400,000 signatures—including those of Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren, Beto O’Rourke, and Kirsten Gillibrand—or four times the number required to elicit an official response from the White House.

“Maybe a year or two ago, Todrick and I are in the car, and he asked me, What would you do if your son was gay?”

We are upstairs in Swift’s secret garden, comfortably ensconced in a human-scale basket that is sort of shaped like a cocoon. Swift has brought up an ornate charcuterie board and is happily slathering triple-cream Brie onto sea-salt crackers. “The fact that he had to ask me . . . shocked me and made me realize that I had not made my position clear enough or loud enough,” she says. “If my son was gay, he’d be gay. I don’t understand the question.”

I have pressed Swift on this topic, and her answers have been direct, not performative or scripted. I do sense that she enjoys talking to me about as much as she’d enjoy a root canal—but she’s unfailingly polite, and when we turn to music, her face will light up and she will add little melodic phrases to her speech, clearly her preferred language.

“If he was thinking that, I can’t imagine what my fans in the LGBTQ community might be thinking,” she goes on. “It was kind of devastating to realize that I hadn’t been publicly clear about that.”

I understand why she was surprised; she has been sending pro-LGBTQ signals since at least 2011. Many have been subtle, but none insignificant—especially for a young country star coming out of Nashville.

In the video for her single “Mean” (from 2010’s Speak Now), we see a boy in a school locker room wearing a lavender sweater and bow tie, surrounded by football players. In “Welcome to New York,” the first track on 1989, she sings, “And you can want who you want. Boys and boys and girls and girls.” Two years later, she donated to a fund for the newly created Stonewall National Monument and presented Ruby Rose with a GLAAD Media Award. Every night of last year’s Reputation tour, she dedicated the song “Dress” to Loie Fuller, the openly gay pioneer of modern dance and theatrical lighting who captured the imagination of fin-de-siècle Paris.

Swift, who has been criticized for keeping her politics to herself, first took an explicit stance a month before the 2018 midterms. On Instagram, she endorsed Democrats for the Tennessee Legislature and called out the Republican running for Senate, Marsha Blackburn. “She believes businesses have a right to refuse service to gay couples,” Swift wrote. “She also believes they should not have the right to marry. These are not MY Tennessee values.”

Swift says the post was partly to help young fans understand that if they wanted to vote, they had to register. To tell them, as she puts it, “Hey, just so you know, you can’t just roll up.” Some 65,000 new voters registered in the first 24 hours after her post, according to Vote.org.

Trump came to Blackburn’s defense the following day. “She’s a tremendous woman,” he told reporters. “I’m sure Taylor Swift doesn’t know anything about her. Let’s say I like Taylor’s music about 25 percent less now, OK?”

In April, spurred by a raft of anti-LGBTQ bills in Tennessee, Swift donated $113,000 to the Tennessee Equality Project, which advocates for LGBTQ rights. “Horrendous,” she says of the legislation. “They don’t call it ‘Slate of Hate’ for nothing.” Swift especially liked that the Tennessee Equality Project had organized a petition of faith leaders in opposition. “I loved how smart it was to come at it from a religious perspective.”

Meanwhile, the “Calm Down” video provoked a Colorado pastor to call Swift “a sinner in desperate need of a savior” and warn that “God will cut her down.” It also revived heated debate within LGBTQ communities about the politics of allyship and corporatization of Pride. Some critics argued Swift’s pro-LGBTQ imagery and lyrics were overdue and out of the blue—a reaction the new Swift scholar in me found bewildering. Had they not been paying attention?

Nor did it strike me as out of character for Swift to leverage her power for a cause. She pulled her catalog from Spotify in 2014 over questions of artist compensation. She stared down Apple in 2015, when the company said it would not pay artists during the launch of its music service. (Apple reversed itself immediately.) As a condition of her record deal with Universal Music Group last year, the company promised that it would distribute proceeds from any sale of its Spotify shares to all of its artists. And this summer, Swift furiously called out Scott Borchetta, founder of Big Machine Label Group, for selling her master recordings to the music manager Scooter Braun. (When I ask Swift if she tried to get her masters from Big Machine, her whole body slumps with a palpable heaviness. “It was either investing in my past or my and other artists’ future, and I chose the future,” she says of the deal she struck with Universal.)

Swift’s blunt testimony during her 2017 sexual-assault case against a radio DJ—months before the #MeToo reckoning blew open—felt deeply political to me and, I imagine, many other women. Swift accused the DJ, David Mueller, of groping her under her skirt at a photo session in 2013. Her camp reported the incident to his employer, who fired him. Mueller denied the allegation, sued Swift for $3 million, and his case was thrown out. Swift countersued for a symbolic $1 and won.

In a Colorado courtroom, Swift described the incident: “He stayed latched onto my bare ass cheek” as photos were being snapped. Asked why photos of the front of her skirt didn’t show this, she said, “Because my ass is located at the back of my body.” Asked if she felt bad about the DJ’s losing his job, she said, “I’m not going to let you or your client make me feel in any way that this is my fault. Here we are years later, and I’m being blamed for the unfortunate events of his life that are the product of his decisions—not mine.”

When Time included Swift on the cover of its “Silence Breakers” issue that year, the magazine asked how she felt during the testimony. “I was angry,” she said. “In that moment, I decided to forgo any courtroom formalities and just answer the questions the way it happened...I’m told it was the most amount of times the word ass has ever been said in Colorado Federal Court.”

Mueller has since paid Swift the dollar—with a Sacagawea coin. “He was trolling me, implying that I was self-righteous and hell-bent on angry, vengeful feminism. That’s what I’m inferring from him giving me a Sacagawea coin,” Swift says. “Hey, maybe he was trying to do it in honor of a powerful Native American woman. I didn’t ask.” Where is the coin now? “My lawyer has it.”

I ask her, why get louder about LGBTQ rights now? “Rights are being stripped from basically everyone who isn’t a straight white cisgender male,” she says. “I didn’t realize until recently that I could advocate for a community that I’m not a part of. It’s hard to know how to do that without being so fearful of making a mistake that you just freeze. Because my mistakes are very loud. When I make a mistake, it echoes through the canyons of the world. It’s clickbait, and it’s a part of my life story, and it’s a part of my career arc.”

I’d argue that no heterosexual woman can listen to “You Need to Calm Down” and hear only a gay anthem. “Calm down” is what controlling men tell women who are angry, contrary, or “hysterical,” or, let’s say, fearing for their physical safety. It is what Panic! at the Disco singer Brendon Urie says to Swift in the beginning of the “ME!” music video, prompting her to scream, “Je suis calme!”

I cannot believe it is a coincidence that Swift, a numbers geek with an affinity for dates, dropped the single—whose slow, incessant bass is likely to be bumping in stadiums across the world in 2020 if she goes on tour—on June 14, a certain president’s birthday.

It’s enlightening to read 13 years of Taylor Swift coverage—all the big reviews, all the big profiles—in one sitting. You notice things.

How quickly Swift went from a “prodigy” (The New Yorker) and a “songwriting savant” (Rolling Stone) to a tabloid fixture, for instance. Or how suspect her ambition is made to seem once she acquires real power.

Other plot points simply look different in the light of #MeToo. It is hard to imagine that Swift’s songs about her exes would be reviewed as sensationally today. I wonder if, in 2019, any man would dare grab the microphone out of a young woman’s hands at an awards show. I stared into space for a good long while when I was reminded that Pitchfork did not review Taylor Swift’s 1989 but did review Ryan Adams’s cover album of Taylor Swift’s 1989.

I ask Swift if she had always been aware of sexism. “I think about this a lot,” she says. “When I was a teenager, I would hear people talk about sexism in the music industry, and I’d be like, I don’t see it. I don’t understand. Then I realized that was because I was a kid. Men in the industry saw me as a kid. I was a lanky, scrawny, overexcited young girl who reminded them more of their little niece or their daughter than a successful woman in business or a colleague. The second I became a woman, in people’s perception, was when I started seeing it.

“It’s fine to infantilize a girl’s success and say, How cute that she’s having some hit songs,” she goes on. “How cute that she’s writing songs. But the second it becomes formidable? As soon as I started playing stadiums—when I started to look like a woman—that wasn’t as cool anymore. It was when I started to have songs from Red come out and cross over, like ‘I Knew You Were Trouble’ and ‘We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together.’ ”

Those songs are also more assertive than the ones that came before, I say. “Yeah, the angle was different when I started saying, I knew you were trouble when you walked in. Basically, you emotionally manipulated me and I didn’t love it. That wasn’t fun for me.”

I have to wonder if having her songwriting overlooked as her hits were picked apart and scrutinized wasn’t the biggest bummer of all. Swift: “I wanted to say to people, You realize writing songs is an art and a craft and not, like, an easy thing to do? Or to do well? People would act like it was a weapon I was using. Like a cheap dirty trick. Be careful, bro, she’ll write a song about you. Don’t stand near her. First of all, that’s not how it works. Second of all, find me a time when they say that about a male artist: Be careful, girl, he’ll use his experience with you to get—God forbid—inspiration to make art.”

Without question the tenor of the Taylor Swift Narrative changed most dramatically in July 2016, when Kim Kardashian West called her a “snake” on Twitter, and released video clips of Swift and Kanye West discussing the lyrics to his song “Famous.” (No need to rehash the details here. Suffice it to say that Swift’s version of events hasn’t changed: She knew about some of the lyrics but not others; specifically, the words that bitch.) The posts sparked several hashtags, including #TaylorSwiftIsASnake and #TaylorSwiftIsCanceled, which quickly escalated into a months-long campaign to “cancel” Swift.

To this day Swift doesn’t think people grasp the repercussions of that term. “A mass public shaming, with millions of people saying you are quote-unquote canceled, is a very isolating experience,” she says. “I don’t think there are that many people who can actually understand what it’s like to have millions of people hate you very loudly.” She adds: “When you say someone is canceled, it’s not a TV show. It’s a human being. You’re sending mass amounts of messaging to this person to either shut up, disappear, or it could also be perceived as, Kill yourself.”

An overhaul was in order. “I realized I needed to restructure my life because it felt completely out of control,” Swift says. “I knew immediately I needed to make music about it because I knew it was the only way I could survive it. It was the only way I could preserve my mental health and also tell the story of what it’s like to go through something so humiliating.”

I get a sense of the whiplash Swift experienced when I notice that, a few months into this ordeal, while she was writing the songs that an interpolation of a ’90s camp classic, Right Said Fred’s “I’m Too Sexy.”) Nonetheless, most critics read it as a grenade lobbed in the general direction of Calabasas.

One longtime Nashville critic, Brian Mansfield, had a more plausible take: She was writing sarcastically as the “Taylor Swift” portrayed in the media in a bid for privacy. “Yeah, this is the character you created for me, let me just hide behind it,” she says now of the persona she created. “I always used this metaphor when I was younger. I’d say that with every reinvention, I never wanted to tear down my house. ’Cause I built this house. This house being, metaphorically, my body of work, my songwriting, my music, my catalog, my library. I just wanted to redecorate. I think a lot of people, with Reputation, would have perceived that I had torn down the house. Actually, I just built a bunker around it.”

In March, the snakes started to morph into butterflies, the vampire color palette into Easter pastels. When a superbloom of wildflowers lured a mesmerizing deluge of Painted Lady butterflies to Los Angeles, Swift marked it with an Instagram post. She attended the iHeartRadio Music Awards that night in a sequin romper and stilettos with shimmery wings attached.

Swift announced the single “ME!” a month later, with a large butterfly mural in Nashville. In the music video for the (conspicuously) bubblegum song, a hissing pastel-pink snake explodes into a kaleidoscope of butterflies. One flutters by the window of an apartment, where Swift is arguing in French with Urie. A record player is playing in the background. “It’s an old-timey, 1940s-sounding instrumental version of ‘You Need to Calm Down,’ ’’ Swift says. Later, in the “Calm Down” video, Swift wears a (fake) back tattoo of a snake swarmed by butterflies.

We are only two songs in, people. Lover, to be released on August 23, will have a total of 18 songs. “I was compiling ideas for a very long time,” Swift says. “When I started writing, I couldn’t stop.” (We can assume the British actor Joe Alwyn, with whom Swift has been in a relationship for nearly three years, provided some of the inspiration.)

Swift thinks Lover might be her favorite album yet. “There are so many ways in which this album feels like a new beginning,” she says. “This album is really a love letter to love, in all of its maddening, passionate, exciting, enchanting, horrific, tragic, wonderful glory.”

Swift’s new 18-track album, Lover, will be released August 23.

I have to ask Swift, given how genuinely at peace she seems, if part of her isn’t thankful, if not for the Great Cancellation of 2016, then for the person she now is—knowing who her friends are, knowing what’s what. “When you’re going through loss or embarrassment or shame, it’s a grieving process with so many micro emotions in a day. One of the reasons why I didn’t do interviews for Reputationwas that I couldn’t figure out how I felt hour to hour. Sometimes I felt like: All these things taught me something that I never could have learned in a way that didn’t hurt as much. Five minutes later, I’d feel like: That was horrible. Why did that have to happen? What am I supposed to take from this other than mass amounts of humiliation? And then five minutes later I’d think: I think I might be happier than I’ve ever been.”

She goes on: “It’s so strange trying to be self-aware when you’ve been cast as this always smiling, always happy ‘America’s sweetheart’ thing, and then having that taken away and realizing that it’s actually a great thing that it was taken away, because that’s extremely limiting.” Swift leans back in the cocoon and smiles: “We’re not going to go straight to gratitude with it. Ever. But we’re going to find positive aspects to it. We’re never going to write a thank-you note.”

Though people will take the Perry-Swift burger-and-fries embrace in the “You Need to Calm Down” video as a press release that the two have mended fences, Swift says it’s actually a comment on how the media pits female pop stars against one another. After Perry sent Swift an (actual) olive branch last year, Swift asked her to be in the video: “She wrote back, This makes me so emotional. I’m so up for this. I want us to be that example. But let’s spend some time together. Because I want it to be real. So she came over and we talked for hours.

“We decided the metaphor for what happens in the media,” Swift explains, “is they pick two people and it’s like they’re pouring gasoline all over the floor. All that needs to happen is one false move, one false word, one misunderstanding, and a match is lit and dropped. That’s what happened with us. It was: Who’s better? Katy or Taylor? Katy or Taylor? Katy or Taylor? Katy or Taylor? The tension is so high that it becomes impossible for you to not think that the other person has something against you."

Meanwhile, the protesters in the video reference a real-life religious group that pickets outside Swift’s concerts, not the white working class in general, as some have assumed. “So many artists have them at their shows, and it’s such a confounding, confusing, infuriating thing to have outside of joyful concerts,” she tells me. “Obviously I don’t want to mention the actual entity, because they would get excited about that. Giving them press is not on my list of priorities.”

At one point, Swift asks if I would like to hear two other songs off the new album. (Duh.) First she plays “Lover,” the title track, coproduced by Jack Antonoff. “This has one of my favorite bridges,” she says. “I love a bridge, and I was really able to go to Bridge City.” It’s a romantic, haunting, waltzy, singer-songwritery nugget: classic Swift. “My heart’s been borrowed and yours has been blue,” she sings. “All’s well that ends well to end up with you.”

Next, Swift cues up a track that “plays with the idea of perception.” She has often wondered how she would be written and spoken about if she were a man, “so I wrote a song called ‘The Man.’ ” It’s a thought experiment of sorts: “If I had made all the same choices, all the same mistakes, all the same accomplishments, how would it read?” Seconds later, Swift’s earpods are pumping a synth-pop earworm into my head: “I’d be a fearless leader. I’d be an alpha type. When everyone believes ya: What’s that like?”

Swift wrote the first two singles with Joel Little, best known as one of Lorde’s go-to producers. (“From a pop-songwriting point of view, she’s the pinnacle,” Little says of Swift.) The album is likely to include more marquee names. A portrait of the Dixie Chicks in the background of the “ME!” video almost certainly portends a collaboration. If fans are correctly reading a button affixed to her denim jacket in a recent magazine cover, we can expect one with Drake, too.

She recently announced a fashion collection with Stella McCartney to coincide with Lover. “We met at one of her shows,” says McCartney, “and then we had a girls’ night and kind of jumped straight in. In London we’ll go on walks and talk about everything—life and love.” (Swift has no further fashion ambitions at the moment. “I really love my job right now,” she tells me. “My focus is on music.”) Oh, and that “5” on the bullseye? Track five is called “The Archer.”

Yet something tells me the most illuminating clue for reading both Lover and Reputation may be Loie Fuller, the dancer to whom Swift paid homage on tour. As Swift noted on a Jumbotron, Fuller “fought for artists to own their work.” Fuller also used swirling fabric and colored lights to metamorphose onstage, playing a “hide-and-seek illusionist game” with her audience, as one writer has put it. She became a muse to the Symbolists in Paris, where Jean Cocteau wrote that she created “the phantom of an era.” The effect, said the poet Stéphane Mallarmé, was a “dizziness of soul made visible by an artifice.” Fuller’s most famous piece was “Serpentine Dance.” Another was “Butterfly Dance.”

Swift has had almost no downtime since late 2017, but what little she does have is divided among New York, Nashville, Los Angeles, and Rhode Island, where she keeps homes—plus London. In an essay earlier this year, she revealed that her mother, Andrea Swift, is fighting cancer for a second time. “There was a relapse that happened,” Swift says, declining to go into detail. “It’s something that my family is going through.”

Later this year, she will star in a film adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Catsas Bombalurina, the flirtatious red cat. “They made us the size of cats by making the furniture bigger,” she says. “You’d be standing there and you could barely reach the seat of a chair. It was phenomenal. It made you feel like a little kid.”

But first, she will spend much of the summer holding “secret sessions”—a tradition wherein Swift invites hundreds of fans to her various homes to preview her new music. “They’ve never given me a reason to stop doing it,” she says. “Not a single one.”

Speaking of: Inquiring fans will want to know if Swift dropped any more clues about how to decode Lover during this interview. For you I reviewed the audio again, and there were a few things that made my newly acquired Swifty sense tingle.

At one point she compared superstardom in the digital age to life in a dollhouse, one where voyeurs “can ‘ship’ you with who they want to ‘ship’ you with, and they can ‘favorite’ friends that you have, and they can know where you are all the time.” The metaphor was precise and vivid and, well, a little too intricately rendered to be off the cuff. (Also, the “ME!” lyric: “Baby doll, when it comes to a lover. I promise that you’ll never find another like me.”)

Then there was the balloon—a giant gold balloon in the shape of a numeral seven that happened to float by while we were on her roof, on this, the occasion of her seventh album. “Is it an L’?” I say. “No, because look, the string is hanging from the bottom,” she says.

It might seem an obvious symbolic gesture, deployed for this interview, except for how impossible that seems. Swift let me control the timing of nearly everything. Moreover, the gold seven wasn’t floating up from the sidewalk below. It was already high in the sky, drifting slowly toward us from down the street. She would have had to control the wind, or at least to have studied it. Would Taylor Swift really go to such elaborate lengths for her fans? This much I know: Yes, she would.

[runtomy]

One Direction is the only fandom I’ve ever admitted and didn’t regret

The title is the summary of words I’ve poured here.

How do I know I didn’t regret?

Answer: I listen to 1D songs during middle to high school as well as I am listening to other singers. I genuinely only care about listening to their music, not really into fandom thing because I don’t know what that is at that time. Even when I finally understand what’s fandom, I still don’t bother. That time big news came like when Harry dated Taylor Swift or Zayn left 1D, I’m not bothered at all. It’s 2019, already graduated from middle and high school, now is working my undergraduate thesis to get me graduated from university, finding myself in love with 1D songs all over again. I get the flashback walk. I remember my friend told me that ‘Taken’ is her break up theme song. She showed me that song and that’s probably my first memory about 1D. Here I am, right now listening to their song as well as their songs as solo singer.

It’s all makes me shout out I AM BACKKK !!! Of course, in a cool way.

Back then, I think I never notice anything about them except their songs. Recently, I just noticed that 1D has 5 albums with different cover photo that shows how much they have grown in each album. And it’s all actually very distinct to each other. Hahaha. 

I DON’T KNOW ABOUT YOU, BUT I AM FEELING 22!!! Sorry, I have to brought up that song to point put that I am 22 now. So I make choice based on my age. I prefer Midnight Memories album cover photo (their third album that released in 2013). Meaning that I also prefer Four and Made in the A.M. than the first two album cover photo. Their youngest member is 20 in Midnight Memories, presumably showing Harry as a young man by appearance. I am not keen with teenage period, I don’t know if that’s me or the fact that I am officially in my 20′s.

‘Night Changes’ - ‘No Control’ - ‘Fireproof’ - ‘Spaces’ - ‘Stockholm Syndrome’ - ‘Hey Angel’ - ‘Perfect’ - ‘Drag Me Down’ - ‘Olivia’ - ‘History’ - ‘I Want to Write You a Song’ - ‘Olivia’ - ‘Best Song Ever’ - ‘Story of My Life’ - ‘Diana’ - ’Midnight Memories’ - ‘You and I’ - ‘Don’t Forget Where You Belong’ - ‘Act My Age’ - These are some songs I can mentioned as my favorite.

(‘ - ‘)

SIX YEARS of their appearance as a boyband is like Niall’s song in ‘Slow Hands’. It’s about doing laundry. 1D is a shirt that has just been washed. The shirt is squeezed to the last drop of water. When they realize there’s no more water to be squeezed, they hang the shirt, leave them, and let the sun dry them.

I feel like this fandom is the only mainstream fandom I have ever liked. After four years of hiatus, I am surprised knowing that their fandom is still alive. I found a lot of fan account on Instagram and Twitter still active and is not even handled by robot as Google has always asked me to make sure that I am not robot, there are real person behind it.

Even if the title is said to be like that, I am still not sure if I am like that because I know exactly who I am. At least, that sounds like me at this moment. 

P.S. I feel like I am going to share my opinion about 1D each member soon. Nobody cares, but I am still going to do it anyway.