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1989 Era

2014-2016

In March 2014, Taylor relocated to New York City. It marked the beginning of the 1989 era which was, simply put, her world domination phase. She was certain that this album was going to be huge and she made sure that it succeeded in ways that no other album of hers had before. In a matter of months, Taylor was everywhere: on the cover of every magazine, photographed daily, performing at every award show. In hindsight she was overexposed, but it worked. She became the biggest star on the planet.

Taylor asserted her freedom and influence more than ever during the 1989 era. In her mid-20s, she was world famous, incredibly wealthy, critically celebrated, a style influencer, and a cultural movement unto herself, recognizable everywhere she went. She also had two awesome cats. But since 2012, her public image had morphed in tandem with her private life, and not always to her liking. She felt like change was needed. So in early 2014, she cut her hair, made a bunch of new friends and moved from Nashville, where she had lived and worked since high school, to New York City. Her music reflected those changes. Immediately upon release, 1989 turned out to be so successful that Taylor would not only go on to become one of the most successful recording artists ever, but also an unrivaled power broker who prevailed in a volatile media economy and brought music’s overlords to heel.

Deciding to Become A True Pop Star

On January 25, 2014, Taylor’s genre-spanning fourth album, RED (2012), was nominated for the coveted “Album of the Year” award at the Grammys. The night before the big event, she wrote in her diary: “Never have I felt so good about our chances. Never have I wanted something as badly as I want to hear them say RED is the ‘Album of the Year.'” But it wasn’t meant to be. When the album did not win, Taylor went home devastated, ate some burgers and fries with her friends, cried, and finally went to bed. That night she made one of the most important decisions of her career:

«I woke up at four in the morning and I was like, ‘It’s called 1989. I’ve been making ’80s synth pop, I’m just gonna do that. I’m calling it a pop record. I’m not listening to anyone at my label. I’m starting tomorrow.'»

Taylor Swift

1989 is Taylor’s birth year. In all of her interviews leading up to the release of the album she talked about the concept of rebirth. Even without the fateful night at the Grammys, she had been planning on making a major change in her life anyways. On January 6, 2014, her journal entry read: “So I’ve decided I want to look at places in New York. I know I went through this phase months ago, but it has to mean something that I’ve circled back to it, right? You know what they say, if you love something let it go and if it comes back…blah blah blah. So I’m leaving the day after tomorrow. Dating is awful. Love is fiction/a myth. I’m over it all.”

Moving to New York City

In March 2014, Taylor bought a $19.9 million pair of penthouses in Manhattan’s Tribeca neighborhood that had once belonged to the director Peter Jackson. Soon after she became a fixture on the city’s sidewalks, officially a New Yorker. Now that she was finally here, she had never felt more free. “It’s so refreshing to see people move on from the idea that all I do is sit in my lair and write songs about boys for revenge.” She’d much rather go walk down the street to get dinner, or go furniture shopping with friends in Brooklyn. Even the paparazzi were better, she said. “They don’t provoke me, or ask weird questions. And a lot of them are long-lensing it – which, if you have to have paparazzi in your life, is such a better way.” The relationship between her and the photographers worked like a dream. She got papped daily (sometimes even multiple times and in different outfits) leaving her apartment, leaving the gym, leaving restaurants. Always in high heels, with perfect hair and make-up and, come summer, matching co-ord sets. When asked about turning the streets of New York into her own personal runway, Taylor simply said:

«If I’m in the mood to be held accountable for every single article of clothing on my body, whether it matches, if it clashes, if it’s on trend, then I go out. If I’m not interested in undergoing that kind of debate and conversation – regarding how I’m walking, whether I look tired, how my makeup is right, what’s that mark on my knee, did I hurt myself? – I just don’t go out.»

Taylor Swift

There was rarely a day she didn’t feel like going out. In turn, she was appearing in “Best Dressed” slideshows of every noteworthy magazine, all before having even announced her next album. The stage was set. So when she eventually started dropping hints that something would soon be happening in early August 2014, the internet went into a frenzy. At first, Taylor was posting cryptic videos and pictures on her Instagram account, but a couple days later she went all out by hiring skywriting planes to write “Taylor Swift 18 5 p.m. Yahoo” over Central Park – seriously. This all lead up to a hugely ambitious, globally broadcast event, filmed atop the Empire State Building. Taylor welcomed her fans from around the world to the livestream with a gleeful ‘Welcome to New York!’ During the next 30 minutes, she managed to surprise everyone with the name of her “first documented, official pop album,” called 1989 (named after her birth year), the lead single, “Shake It Off,” its music video and the album cover art. Circling back to the idea of “rebirth”, Taylor was essentially telling people, “Forget Nashville. I am being reborn as a pop star.”

1989 Secret Sessions

During her promotional tour for 1989 in the weeks before its release, Taylor held a series of the (now iconic) “1989 Secret Sessions” at her various homes across the world, where carefully-selected fans were told they were attending some sort of secret event, with no knowledge of what was in store for them. Almost everyone has entertained fantasies of what it’d be like to be friends with your favorite celebrity. They’d call you up and vent about some weird interaction that took place backstage at some awards show; there would be a never-ending stream of home-baked cookies. Well, for hundreds of fans that dream became a reality. They got to hang out in Taylor’s house, pet her kittens and hear the entirety of 1989 a month before anyone else.

The media praised the secret sessions as an unprecedented, innovative concept of fan interaction, unheard of for celebrities at Taylor’s level of fame. They played a huge role in the virality of the record: all of a sudden, there were YouTube videos of fans dancing to “Shake It Off” in Taylor’s living room. The secret sessions showed all of Taylor’s marketing and business genius as well as the close 1:1 connection she has with her fans. It also showed that she understood exactly what her fans wanted from her and how they would react to an event like that. That’s why she would continue to host the secret sessions for both reputation (2017) and Lover (2019).

1989

1989 October 27, 2014 This article is about the album. For the 2023 re-recording, see 1989 (Taylor’s Version).1989 is Taylor’s fifth studio album. It was released on October 27th, 2014 as her first official pop album. She named

Living the Single Life

Becoming an adult in the music industriy, Taylor was acutely, almost frighteningly, aware of fame’s pitfalls. Her sensitivity to media scrutiny and judgement had undoubtedly robbed her of many rites of passage. And while fear had provided her with vital material for a phenomenally successful career, it hadn’t always contributed to the happiest of outlooks. “You see, my greatest achievements have come hand-in-hand with my greatest moments of criticism or heartbreak. I’ve never had a huge achievement without having the rug pulled out from under me in some way, the next day. And I think that’s just life, but it’s the one thing that I’m still working on.”

One of those pitfalls was the incessant focus of the national media on her love life. Truth be told, Taylor was a bit jaded. “It’s not like I’ve sworn off love. My life is just not conducive to bringing other people into it right now. I’m very childlike and romantic about lots of things, but I’m realistic about this.” She told Rolling Stone in September 2014 that dating was hard for her. For one thing, there’s the logistics. “Seventy percent of the time, when a guy asks me out, it’ll just be a random e-mail.” Some movie star would get her address from his publicist and e-mail her cold. Usually she politely rebuffed them – but even if someone did penetrate that line of defense, building a relationship was hard:

«I feel like watching my dating life has become a bit of a national pastime. And I’m just not comfortable providing that kind of entertainment anymore. I don’t like seeing slide shows of guys I’ve apparently dated. I don’t like giving comedians the opportunity to make jokes about me at awards shows. I don’t like it when headlines read ‘Careful, Bro, She’ll Write a Song About You,’ because it trivializes my work. And most of all, I don’t like how all these factors add up to build the pressure so high in a new relationship that it gets snuffed out before it even has a chance to start. And so, I just don’t date.»

Taylor Swift

But as frustrated as she was with the media’s narrative, Taylor still insisted she was loving being single: “I really like my life right now. I have friends around me all the time. I’ve started painting more. I’ve been working out a lot. I’ve started to really take pride in being strong. I love the album I made. I love that I moved to New York. So in terms of being happy, I’ve never been closer to that.” Which is not necessarily the same as being happy.

Shattering Industry Expectations

While her private life may not have been entirely to her liking, there were a lot of career peaks at the end of 2014 which gave Taylor more than enough reasons to be proud of herself. She never doubted that 1989 would sell 1 million copies in its first week. But others were not so confident. So when the album shattered the industry’s expecations of first-week sales of 650k, she got the last laugh:

«Everyone, in and out of the music business, kept telling me that my opinion and my viewpoint was naive and overly optimistic — even my own label. But when we got those first-day numbers in, all of a sudden, I didn’t look so naive anymore.»

Taylor Swift

In fact, 1989 moved 1.29 million copies in its first week, the biggest seven-day sales of any release since 2002, according to Nielsen SoundScan. Taylor became the first artist to hit that 1 million-week milestone three times — of all time. It was an accomplishment that she engineered, maintaining worldwide ubiquity throughout 2014 with the European and Asian legs of her $150 million-earning “The RED Tour,” a savvy and accessible social media presence, and tireless promotion, taking on everything from TV appearances to a role as New York’s “global welcome ambassador.” And as she made the leap from country to pop, her fans stuck by her, eager to follow an idol charting her own course. For her hard work, Taylor got rewarded with the first-ever “Dick Clark Award for Excellence” at the 2014 American Music Awards and the “Billboard Woman of the Year” honor; the only artist to have ever been awarded the title twice. She closed out the year by performing in Times Square on New Year’s Eve.

The Squad

Since being single, Taylor had built a volunteer army of high-profile girl friends, many of whom appeared in her videos and served as special guests at her concerts. She insisted this was just another byproduct of being on her own. “When your number-one priority is getting a boyfriend, you’re more inclined to see a beautiful girl and think, ‘Oh, she’s gonna get that hot guy I wish I was dating. But when you’re not boyfriend-shopping, you’re able to step back and see other girls who are killing it and think, ‘God, I want to be around her.’” Growing up, Taylor was the unpopular kid in middle school who ate her lunch alone. So it was heartwarming to see her build such a large group of friends in which she could trust. She was clearly excited about it:

«My friends and I text every day. That’s 20 to 25 girls. Some of them are group texts, most of them are single texts. We know when everybody’s in New York, who’s in town, who’s in L.A. Being a huge group of girls who love each other, we know where everyone is…I’ve never had this before. I feel uncomfortable being the No. 1 priority in my friends’ lives. I want to be there to make their lives more fun, if they need to talk, to be there for spontaneous and exciting adventures, but I don’t want friends who don’t have a life outside of me. The one thing they all have in common is that they love what they do. They have me in their life because they want me in their life, not because they gain from it.»

Taylor Swift

But “the squad” did in fact have the effect of elevating Taylor’s (and her entire friends group’s) stardom. Everyone wanted to be her friend, so it seemed. But this turned out to be a circuitous dilemma for Taylor: Because her professional career had unspooled with such precision, it was assumed that her social life was no less premeditated; the internet started describing her as “calculating,” a term which she really, really hates. This accusation even got applied to casual, non-romantic relationships. Her famous friends were marginalized as acquisitions, selected to occupy specific roles, almost like members of the Justice League (“the ectomorph model,” “the inventive indie artist,” “the informed third-wave feminist,” etc.). Such perceptions perplexed Taylor, who was genuinely obsessed with these attachments.

At least part of the disconnect might have stemmed from the fact that Taylor had always been known for telling her fans that she was just like them; that she was their friend. For example, on the “1989 World Tour”, she would talk about all her friends and say that her requirements for friendship were 1) to like and her, and 2) to want to spend time with her, which everyone in that audience qualified for. But at the same time, Taylor was presenting standards of friendship in her own life that were unattainable to most of her fans. Pretty much all of her actual friends were famous and unbelievably beautiful models. In 2019, Taylor acknowledged that she has some regrets about showing off her large group of friends in such a public manner. In a piece she wrote for Elle she listed 30 things she learned before turning 30. One lesson she said she needed to learn was to rectify scars from her past. The example she gave was:

«Never being popular as a kid was always an insecurity for me. Even as an adult, I still have recurring flashbacks sitting at lunch tables alone, or hiding in a bathroom stall or trying to make a new friend and being laughed at. In my 20s, I found myself surrounded by girls who wanted to be my friend. So I shouted it from the rooftops, posted pictures and celebrated my new found acceptance into a sisterhood without realizing that other peole might still feel the way I did when I felt so alone. It’s important to address our long-standing issues before we turn into the living embodiment of them.»

Taylor Swift

Taylor is still close with most of her friends from her mid 20s, but they rarely share pictures of each other anymore.

Falling In Love Anyway

After swearing off love for the foreseeable future and declaring the 1989 era as her “single and not ready to mingle” phase, it came as a surprise when Taylor started becoming involved with DJ Calvin Harris in March 2015, when they were seen holding hands at a Kenny Chesney concert in Nashville. While she had long maintained a “never have, never will” policy when it came to discussing her dating life, this time around she seemed to want to try a different approach. Came summer, Harris and Taylor started showing up in each other’s Instagram feeds, the modern-day sign of “things getting serious.” When asked how she managed dating in light of making this intense commitment to her sisterhood, Taylor simply explained that she was only ever going to date someone who wouldn’t infringe on the new life she had carved out for herself. “That was the way that I decided to go on with my life. Not looking for anything, not necessarily being open to anything, and only being open to the idea that, if I found someone who would never try to change me, that would be the only person I could fall in love with. Because, you know, I was in love with my life.” Tayvin became the It-couple of 2015, and the relationship became Taylor’s longest up until that point. The media’s image of her as a “hopeless serial-dater” thankfully finally seemed to start dying down.

The 1989 World Tour

The 1989 World Tour 2015 “The 1989 World Tour” was Taylor’s fourth concert tour, in support of her fifth studio album, 1989 (2014). It began on May 5, 2015, in Tokyo, and concluded on December 12, 2015, in Melbourne, the day before Taylor’s 26th birthday.

The 1989 World Tour

2015 was probably one of the biggest moments of Taylor’s career. That’s why “The 1989 World Tour” was so highly anticipated: it was set to be her parade across planet earth, declaring it as her own, celebrating life and all the joys that comes with it, and inviting you along for the ride. When being asked about the setlist a couple of months in advance, Taylor said:

«I know that with the way the fans have latched onto this album, the setlist will be predominantly songs from 1989. You know, when I go back and play songs I know they want to hear, like “Love Story” or “I Knew You Were Trouble,” it’ll be interesting to reimagine them so that the fans get a new experience that feels in keeping with 1989. But I’m so excited. I have so many things I’ve been dreaming up for this.»

Taylor Swift

Taylor was, on every single level, the pinnacle of American Culture as it existed in the 2010s. When it finally launched in May 2015, “The 1989 World Tour” was the perfect pop spectacle, created by the most influential person in the world. And everyone was coming up on stage to celebrate this moment with Taylor: Mick Jagger, Mary J Blige, Selena Gomez, The Weeknd, Avril Lavigne and so on and so on. The group was, at is best moments, wide open. The demographic of Taylor’s fan base also expanded in ways it simply hadn’t before. By the time Taylor wrapped the tour in December 2015, it had grossed over $250 million and became one of the highest grossing tours of all time. “That was…that was it. My life had never been better,” Taylor said in retrospect.

On December 13, 2015 (Taylor’s 26th birthday), she announced she had partnered with Apple Music to release a concert film entitled The 1989 World Tour Live on December 20. Filmed in front of 75’980 fans during her stop at ANZ Stadium in Sydney on November 28, it shows the entire two-hour performance and never-before seen footage from backstage and from rehearsals with some of the musical and surprise guests from previous shows.

Changing the Music Industry

If Taylor wasn’t already the closest thing the world had to a pop-cultural empress, her stance against the emerging streaming platforms made the great power she wielded unquestionably clear. In spring of 2014, she wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal where she said: “Music is art. And art should be payed for. It’s my opinion that music should not be free and my preditction is that individual artists and their labels will someday decide what an album’s price point is.” She was planting her flag in fighting for her rights as an artist and artist rights in general. In November 2014, a day after 1989 debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200, she removed her entire catalog from Spotify, arguing that the streaming company’s ad-supported, free service undermined the premium service, which provides higher royalties for songwriters. She told TIME in November 2014:

«I’m always up for trying something. And I tried it and I didn’t like the way it felt. I think there should be an inherent value placed on art. I didn’t see that happening, perception-wise, when I put my music on Spotify. Everybody’s complaining about how music sales are shrinking, but nobody’s changing the way they’re doing things. They keep running towards streaming, which is, for the most part, what has been shrinking the numbers of paid album sales. On Spotify, they don’t have any settings, or any kind of qualifications for who gets what music. I think that people should feel that there is a value to what musicians have created, and that’s that.»

Taylor Swift

Taylor’s decision made such an impact that Spotify’s CEO, Daniel Ek, flew out to Nashville multiple times to personally meet with Taylor and try and get her back on the platform. 1989 was the moment that propelled her into such a position of leverage. So when Apple announced that its new streaming service, Apple Music, would not to pay artists during an initial three-month free trial, Taylor wrote an open letter to Apple and its CEO, Tim Cook. In the note, she took the company to task for its decision and stated that she would pull 1989 from the catalog. The following day, Apple announced that it would pay artists during the free trial period, and Taylor agreed to release 1989 on the streaming service. That decision benefitted the entire music industry.

Record Label Disagreements

Another big battle for Taylor was on the home front: She was fighting for the rights to put out the music she wanted. In interviews she mentioned multiple times that she wasn’t happy with her (now former) record label Big Machine Records. They didn’t believe in her ability to cross over to pop and wanted to make her stay, at least in some regards, in country music, where she’d been the undoubted leading female artist for the better part of the last decade. When asked about the biggest challenge in creating 1989, Taylor recalled the “sit-downs” with her team in her interview with Billboard in December 2014:

«Convincing members of my team that [the pop move] was a good call. People seem to love the album, and we’re all high-fiving each other, but I remember all the sit-downs in the conference rooms, where I would get kind of called in front of a group of people who have worked with me for years. They said, 'Are you really sure you want to do this? Are you sure you want to call the album 1989? We think it’s a weird title. Are you sure you want to put an album cover out that has less than half of your face on it? Are you positive that you want to take a genre that you cemented yourself in, and switch to one that you are a newcomer to?' And answering all of those questions with 'Yes, I’m sure' really frustrated me at the time — like, 'Guys, don’t you understand, this is what I’m dying to do?' The biggest struggle turned into the biggest triumph when it worked out.»

Taylor Swift

At the same moment in time, an investment banking booklet shopping Big Machine (which would have included the rights to Taylor’s masters) was circulating all over the place. It was being looked at by Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat, among many others. That was the signal to the business world that all was not right. Music insiders saw that Taylor had one more album to deliver at Big Machine and that she had not re-signed. That was a red flag. All across the board, from her pre-album comments, to the way that the label and Scott Borchetta were working, you could see it: there was a rift there. She was moving away from the music that her label was familiar with. The seeds of why Taylor would eventually go on to re-record all of her six Big Machine albums in the 2020s decade start in the separation between her and her label, which was coming out into view during the 1989 era.

Trying to Avoid Overexposure

By fall 2015, Taylor was experiencing a kind of fame that started to feel unmanageable. 1989 was a cultural milestone, often called a new generation’s answer to Thriller (1982). If a record as comparatively dominant as 1989 had actually existed in the year 1989, it would have surpassed the sales of Thriller. There was no demographic Taylor didn’t tap into, which is obviously rare. But while Michael Jackson’s album’s mega-success set him on course for a peculiar life, he arguably had an easier ride than Taylor. She lived in a world in which her every word, move, outfit and Instagram post was dissected in real time. She told NME in October 2015:

«I’m in the news every single day for multiple different reasons. 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.»

Taylor Swift

And as “The 1989 World Tour” came to a close in December, people started to wonder: Is Taylor scared of not being able to follow up 1989 with something even bigger? “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.”

Either way, after the end of tour she planned on taking a break. “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.”

Music Hiatus (2016-2017)

Music Hiatus 2016-2017 From March 2016 to August 2017, Taylor took her first extended hiatus since the beginning of her career in 2006, following the massive success of 1989. It turned out to be a very eventful and challenging time in her life.

A Silent Battle

In hindsight, it turned out that Taylor not only wanted, but maybe really needed a break from the spotlight. Understanding the darkness of what was going on during the 1989 era beneath the surface while Taylor was at the peak of stardom is something that wasn’t possible at the time. She was struggling with trying to meet unattainable beauty standards, all while being photographed every day for years on end. Taylor has described having serious struggles with body image and disordered eating, most notably in the 2020 documentary Miss Americana:

«I learned over the years that it is not good for me to see pictures of myself every day. Because I have a tendency – and it’s only happened a few times and I’m not in any way proud of it – but I tend to get triggered by something, whether it’s a picture of me where I feel like I looked like my tummy was too big, or like someone sad that I looked pregnant or something, and that’ll just trigger me to just…starve myself a little bit. Just stop eating. I thought I was just supposed to feel like I was gonna pass out at the end of a show, or in the middle of it. I thought that was how it was. And now I realize no, if you eat food, have energy, get stronger you can do all these shows and not feel it. Which is a really good revelation because I’m a lot happier with who I am.»

Taylor Swift

Taylor has said that she since has gotten better. In songs like “You’re On Your Own, Kid” from Midnights (2022) she would eventually go on to discuss that part of her past in her music.

Making Music History

Just as Taylor was getting ready to wind down for a bit at the beginning of 2016, she was back in the thick of it. Kanye West had released a new song in which he’d bragged he’d made Taylor famous and tackily theorized the pair would one day have sex. The story pinged around on social media for the next 72 hours and generally made Taylor want to bang her head loudly against a wall. Hadn’t this whole Kanye vs. Taylor feud been declared over? Taylor Nation was aghast. Austin Swift posted an Instagram video in which he casually tossed a pair of West’s Adidas Yeezy sneakers into the garbage. Taylor herself was just tired: “I think the world is so bored with the saga. I don’t want to add anything to it, because then there’s just more.”

West’s credit-taking and the long tradition of men being dismissive—actively as well as subconsciously mansplainy—of the hard work and success of women still triggered her, though. This was something Taylor had become hardened to, having spent much of her early years being mainly recognized not for her songwriting gifts but for who she was dating, her fame distilled into what she called “my incredibly sexist Men–of–Taylor Swift slideshows.” So when she won the music industry’s highest honor, the Grammy award for “Album of the Year” in February 2016, she decided to offer stirring words to women in the audience during her acceptance speech:

«You know, I went out on a normal amount of dates in my early 20s, and I got absolutely slaughtered for it. And it took a lot of hard work and altering my decision-making. I didn’t date for two and a half years. Should I have had to do that? No. I guess what I wanted to call attention to in my speech at the Grammys was how it’s going to be difficult if you’re a woman who wants to achieve something in her life — no matter what.»

Taylor Swift

But the feud didn’t take away from the crowning achievement the 2016 Grammys were for Taylor. Having decided to make a pure pop album after losing for RED two years prior, here she was taking home three awards, for “Album of the Year”, “Best Pop Vocal Album”, and “Best Music Video” for “Bad Blood“. That night, she became the first woman, and fifth act overall, to ever win “Album of the Year” twice (she would win again for folklore in 2021). It was also the moment 1989 became the most awarded pop album in history. Rolling Stone wrote in 2019: “1989 was a blockbuster; hit singles after hit singles after hit videos after tabloid headlines after, ‘Damn, is it really 2016 already and this album is still going?’ Sure was, and Taylor used her second ‘Album of the Year’ win to trumpet her own historic accomplishments. Wow, what a pop star.”

The First Break In Ten Years

After the Grammys, Taylor knew she was overexposed and had to disappear from the public’s eye immediately. She had become so big, so enticing a target, that she was no longer a mere person but a cultural symbol from which anything could be demanded. Producer and friend Jack Antonoff described Taylor’s status as “almost like being president. She’s the biggest, but a lot of people have been the biggest. Not a lot of people have been the biggest and the best, and she is.” Taylor was actually looking forward to having a more quiet 2016, she told Vogue in April:

«Honestly, I never relax, and I’m excited about being able to relax for the first time in ten years. I’m just taking things as they come. I’m in a magical relationship right now. This is the one thing that’s been mine about my personal life. I just decided that after the past year, with all of the unbelievable things that happened...I decided I was going to live my life a little bit without the pressure on myself to create something. I’m always going to be writing songs. The thing is, with me, I could very well come up with three things in the next two weeks and then jump back into the studio, and all of a sudden the next record is started. That’s an option, too. But probably not for the moment. I would really like to take a little time to learn things. I have lots of short-term goals.»

Taylor Swift

Those included “wanting to be a well-rounded person who can make a good drink” and CPR. “People tell you little tips, but that’s different from actually taking a class and getting certified.” And so, Taylor disappeared.

But she wouldn’t have much time to unwind. 2016 turned out to be the worst year of her life and career, a time which she described as “the apocalypse.” However, it would also lead her to her true love, the one she had been looking for all along, and as a consequence, she shifted her priorities and started living a much more private life. Fans didn’t know whether Taylor was going to return to music at all; until she blacked out her social media accounts in August 2017 to reclaim her reputation.