Nobody gets the shot until she says so, Taylor Nation.
Here at the Swift Agency, just a guy who once dreamed about interviewing the Sparkly Dressed, we’ve accepted we don’t have the charisma or the chill to just conduct an interview. Here’s Zane Lowe with the Blonde With The Sparkly Dressed talking about everything from the whole Dear Apple letter from Taylor to her relationship with Apple. Okey we can start now, I’m just blabbering here. Click on the image below to watch (it will open on another window, sorry) or just this link.
(Source: Beats1)
And now, for the bonus round, a few clips from The 1989 World Tour Live! Here’s T-Swizzle and Justin Timberlake planning his surprise guest performance.
January 6:People’s Choice Awards. Taylor is nominated for Favorite Female Artist, Favorite Pop Artist,Favorite Song for “Bad Blood” and Favorite Social Media Celebrity. Remember to Vote!
February 15: It’s the 58th Annual Grammy Awards! Taylor is nominated for Album of the Year for 1989, Record of the Year for “Blank Space”, Song of the Year for “Blank Space”, Best Pop Solo Performance for “Blank Space”, Best Pop Duo Group/Performance for “Bad Blood”, Best Pop Vocal Album for 1989 and Best Music Video for “Bad Blood”.
Hold on… Let me explain. Yes, I have a lot of things to do and in case you didn’t know, there’s an election going on over here. Don’t worry, politics is not in my aspirations for blog material. Here at the Swift Agency, just a guy who was more interested in the latest Star Wars trailer, we’re glad that this time around we’re just going to post some videos and this will be a short but enjoyable entry.
First up, we get an unexpected treat as Ryan Adams interviews Taylor Swift. Video courtesy of GQ Magazine. So that means this one is not going to disappear.
On the other side of the world (literally this time), Vogue Australia interviewed the Enchantress during her photoshoot for the cover of their November 2015 issue. Have a look.
If you don’t get the joke, you don’t deserve the joke, Taylor Nation.
The Forever and Always Fearless One (because there’s no chance of me retiring that nickname ever) talked to GQ magazine in one of those interviews that has it all: ground-breaking, revealing, provoking, sassy, smart and quirky. How exactly does one remain cute and adorable but at the same time strong and innovating is a mystery. Realize I’m not even talking about the pictures yet.
She once again discussed how 1989 did not initially had a lot of support from her label. “But to me,” said the former Princess in Red, “the safest thing I could do was take the biggest risk. I know how to write a song. I’m not confident about a lot of other aspects of my life, but I know how to write a song.” I will give credit to GQ, they do stress her autonomy as the major disclaimer against the usual pre-manufactured mainstream stereotype that prevails upon young acts. To quote GQ’s Chuck Klusterman, “She is in total control of her own constructed reality.” In my opinion, I do feel there’s a constrictive pressure upon Taylor that is Taylor herself on putting out the best image possible.
(Photo: Michael Thompson for GQ)
The article does point out Taylor has two ways of speaking. When she’s preparing the interview, “optimistic, animated, and seemingly rehearsed (even when that’s impossible)” which she uses when she’s on TV, and when she cares more about the message than the words, “chin slightly down, brow slightly furrowed, timbre slightly deeper”. I also have two ways of speaking, one is when I’m answering the phone at work and the other is when I’m talking to friends. I also can bet you have two ways of speaking, because we all do. One is professional (or when you’re answering the teacher at school) and the other is personal. And I bet the professional may sound rehearsed because it’s routinely used while the personal one sounds more… personal.
To quote the author, “she oscillates between the two styles fluidly, because either (a) this dissonance is less intentional than it appears or (b) she can tell I’m considerably more interested in anything delivered in the second style.” I’m going to add (c) because she can see right through you and is testing to see if you are just doing your work or are truly interested in what she has to say. Taylor might be very modest, but she’s usually smarter than the person interviewing her. To GQ’s Chuck Klusterman credit, she’s very revealing and candid in the interview and the article does pay her a lot of justice.
There’s a moment in the interview in which Taylor gets flustered (peeved, perhaps a bit annoyed) at one word that a third party (not named) used to describe her: calculating. The author stresses her voice remained in the “second mode” throughout the rebuttal. She doesn’t like this word at all. Here’s a brilliant quote.
“Am I shooting from the hip?” she asks rhetorically. “Would any of this have happened if I was? In that sense, I do think about things before they happen. But here was someone taking a positive thing—the fact that I think about things and that I care about my work—and trying to make that into an insinuation about my personal life. Highly offensive. You can be accidentally successful for three or four years. Accidents happen. But careers take hard work.”
You can harbour an illusion that Taylor’s career is prefabricated after that, but I wouldn’t. She is sharp as a freaking laser. She rehearses her moves. Would you call a dancer or a martial arts fighter fake? I would call them prepared. How can you nail a particular move or a jump or a kick without rehearsing? The article’s conclusion is along the same lines of my line of thinking: “So is it unfair to categorize Swift as calculating? Maybe, and particularly if you view that term as exclusively pejorative. But calling her guileless would be even crazier.”
Her guile shows strong when she talks about her infamous explanation for Bad Blood back in that Rolling Stone interview from last year. Taylor knew that the song would be assigned to a person. The “easiest mark” she calls him. And the song was not about heartbreak, but about losing a friend. As GQ points out, nobody thinks the song is about a guy.
But they would have. So I don’t necessarily care who people think it’s about. I just needed to divert them away from the easiest target. Listen to the song. It doesn’t point to any one person or any one situation. But if you’d listened to my previous four albums, you would think this was about a guy who broke my heart. And nothing could be further from the truth. It was important to show that losing friendships can be just as damaging to a person as losing a romantic relationship.
GQ does point out here that Taylor went on to mention the business aspects of that incident. The dancers that left her tour. The details that will allow people to hone onto one name (yeah, we all thought Katy Perry, but now…) so this could be a historic rewrite. Unless…
Did Taylor Swift troll the entire mainstream media with a false trail of clues?
Or to quote GQ again: “Yet consider the strategy’s larger brilliance: In order to abort the possibility of a rumor she did not want, she propagated the existence of a different rumor that offered the added value of making the song more interesting.”
Why reveal it now? Because it’s too late. Regardless of what she says now about it, the idea behind Bad Blood is already ingrained onto people’s consciousness. Mainstream media will never let it go. People who already formed an opinion are incredibly resistant to change it. Remember, Taylor did not say it by accident. She knew where that would go.
The article has a brilliant ending: “Taylor Swift is 25. But she’s older than you.” And smarter. Way smarter than she will ever be given credit for.
Taylor Swift sat down for an interview with UK weekly magazine, NME. The Blonde With The Sparkly 1989 Microphone does not always rely on the formulaic, so from time to time you get a fresh batch of answers. This was one of those times. You probably have heard this highlight going around social media: “I was thinking about this yesterday and it hit me: I don’t want this tour to end. Ever,” she tells NME while backstage at the 1989 World Tour concert in Los Angeles’ Staple Center for the fourth night. “And that’s never happened to me before.”
She just had to tell Beck about a dinner she had with Kanye, with whom she has become good friends, six years after the VMA incident. “It took a while… But I had to tell Beck this story earlier. I was at dinner with Kanye a week after the Grammys, he stops what he’s saying and he goes, ‘What is this song? I need to listen to this every day.’ I say, ‘It’s Beck, it’s on an album called ‘Morning Phase’, I think you’ve heard of it…’ We just burst out laughing. And he says, ‘Hey, sometimes I’m wrong.’”
Taylor does not comment on the defunct feud with Nicki Minaj, but she has learned lessons from it. “But I send text messages now. If there seems to be some kind of misunderstanding, I go to someone’s management, I get their number and I text them. It’s an important lesson for anyone to learn in 2015.”
The high price of fame is her privacy, but she is not letting her peace of mind take a hit.
“I’m in the news every single day for multiple different reasons,” she says. “And it can feel, at times, if you let your anxiety get the better of you, like everybody’s waiting for you to really mess up – and then you’ll be done. A lot of the time I need to call my mom and talk for a really long time, just to remind myself of all the things that are great and all the things that matter. If you do something that defines your character to be not what the public thought you were, that’s the biggest risk.”
“It’s not about trying to be perfect,” she insists. “Not to try and sound like the good witch in The Wizard Of Oz or something, but I really do want to do good things with what I have, and that’s it. I don’t think my brain could cook up very shocking things for the sake of being shocking.”
Does the thought of having to top 1989 scare Taylor? “Nooooooo. How could the next one be as big? Maybe the next album will be a bridge to somewhere else. Or maybe I’ll just go ahead and change everything.” Now that would be a challenge.
NME’s Dan Stubbs asked if he could get a hint of the songs that she’s written so far. T-Swizzle’s response? “No! Why would I do that?! God!”
The Enchantress did reveal that at the time she has no upcoming plans for life after the 1989 World Tour.
“I think I should take some time off. I think people might need a break from me. I’m going to… I don’t know. Hang out with my friends. Write new music. Maybe not write new music. I don’t know.”
Here at the Swift Agency, just a guy who likes to come up with nicknames, we must admit that Vanity Fair has us beat for their September edition. They’ve dubbed Taylor the Captain of the #Girlsquad. It’s all about squads nowadays, but whatever clique you roll with please remember we’re all members of the Taylor Nation in the end.
“When you’ve got this group of girls who need each other as much as we need each other, in this climate, when it’s so hard for women to be understood and portrayed the right way in the media. . . . now more than ever we need to be good and kind to each other and not judge each other—and just because you have the same taste in men, we don’t hold that against each other,” Taylor tells Vanity Fair.
You can read the original article on Vanity Fair, with the full article by Josh Duboff and amazing photos from Mario Testino. Here’s the Queen of Sparks doing one-word associations in this behind the scenes featurette from her photoshoot.
On other news, the Belvoir Theatre Company was scrambling to get permission to use Shake It Off in their production of Seventeen, a play about the last day of school as played by 70 year olds. According to Music Feeds, they had gone through the proper channels – which unfortunately had nabbed them a negative. The request went through layers of label and management galore and probably never reached T-Swizzle (they’re from Australia so first you have to go through local representation). With only a few nights before the big night, they managed to get permission from the higher level – Tay herself.
Permission granted, @BelvoirSt. Good luck with your opening night 🙂
The Blonde With The Sparkly 1989 Microphone has already performed one of two nights at the Rexall Place in Edmonton, Alberta. She’s due for one more tonight. She’s back in the US of A on Saturday, August 8, when she will perform in Seattle, Washington.
