RED
October 22, 2012
«I've always been very aware of my own relevancy mortality. My career started when I was 16, putting out albums. So by 22, I was already on some days feeling like old news. I was already watching newer, cooler artists come out every week. And I was feeling like, ‘Shit, I'm on my fourth record. What can I offer people?’ And that was when I was like, ‘No, you know what? I want to make music with people I've never made music with before. I want to learn and grow. And I don't want this to be the part of me that just stays in this one place, musically, forever and bores people to death.’ So it actually was an interesting match with my own fears of remaining stagnant that made RED the kind of joy ride that it ended up being.»
Table of Contents
Background
«The first songs that I wrote for the RED album are the Nashville songs, the ones that I did with Nathan Chapman. Songs like ‘State of Grace’, ‘Stay, Stay, Stay’ and ‘All Too Well’. Those are songs that I wrote first. And then I made this journey out to LA and started working with other people. RED was like a wellspring of really important relationships that I carried with me for the rest of my career. I became best friends with Ed Sheeran and he's still someone that I talk to every week. And Max Martin, who was the person who taught me more about writing than anyone I can imagine ever meeting. So this was a really important record for me in terms of, I guess, the origins of things that I carried with me.»
Title Significance
«All the different emotions that are written about on this album are all pretty much about the kind of tumultuous, crazy, insane, intense, semi-toxic relationships that I’ve experienced in the last two years. All those emotions — spanning from intense love, intense frustration, jealousy, confusion, all of that — in my mind, all those emotions are red. You know, there’s nothing in between. There’s nothing beige about any of those feelings.»


Exploring A New Sound
«RED was the first time I ever ventured outside of Nashville and was in full exploration mode of almost like a songwriter apprenticeship. I wanted to see how every producer that I admired worked and I got to on RED.»
Another new collaborator was Jeff Bhasker, whose production of the song “We Are Young” (2011) by indie band Fun captivated Taylor by its drum instrumentation. Bhasker produced two songs: “Holy Ground” and “The Lucky One“. Taylor also worked with Butch Walker on the song “Everything Has Changed“, a duet with English singer Ed Sheeran. She admired Walker for “how he creates this really organic but emotionally charged music”. The songs “Treacherous” and “Come Back…Be Here” were produced by Dan Wilson, whose works with his band Semisonic served as an inspiration for Taylor. She enlisted musicians Gary Lightbody and Jacknife Lee of the indie band Snow Patrol, saying, “they can just hit you when they are singing about loss or longing”. Lee produced the song “The Last Time“, on which Lightbody is a featured vocalist.
«I love Jackson Pollock, and I really do see this album as my splatter paint album. I'm using all the colors and throwing it at the wall and seeing what sticks. And I really think that when RED came out, it had a lot of people that were criticizing it for its (the fans make fun of me for saying this so much over the course of a couple of years) lack of being sonically cohesive. It was absolutely not cohesive, but it was sort of a metaphor for how messy a real breakup is. I look back on this as: This is my only true breakup album. Every other album has flickers of different things, but this was an album that I wrote specifically about a pure, absolute to the core heartbreak. And you do a lot of vacillating and changing when you're going through something like that. So this record actually is an accurate depiction symbolically of that.»
Lyrics and Themes


Album Artwork
«What ended up happening was one of her background singers needed headshots. When Taylor saw them a few months later, she came to me and was like, 'Liz showed me the shots you took of her, and I need my album to look exactly like that.' Clearly, this was a no-brainer. I said, 'OK!' Before then, I’d been kind of burned out on music photography. A lot of the shoots were super controlling. I needed a new perspective on the field itself and wanted future shoots to be very free-flowing — just the artist and a minimum crew. Luckily for me, that’s exactly how Taylor presented the RED album shoot. So it was just us shooting everything together. She wanted everybody else to remain off set, allowing for a more personal and intimate experience.»
Release and Promotion
On September 22, 2012, Taylor announced that she would preview one song from RED each week on “Good Morning America,” as part of a four-week release countdown from September 24 until the album’s release week. The four songs — “Begin Again”, “Red”, “I Knew You Were Trouble.”, and “State of Grace” — were also released for digital download ahead of the album’s release. “Begin Again” was later released to US country radio as an official single on October 1, 2012. It peaked at No. 7 on the US Billboard Hot 100.
Both the standard and deluxe versions of RED were released on October 22, 2012. In the US, the standard edition was available in digital and physical formats, and the deluxe edition containing six extra tracks was available exclusively for physical purchase at Target. Taylor also had tie-ins with corporations including Keds, Wal-Mart, and Papa John’s. A day after the release, Taylor began a cycle of television appearances, starting with a live performance on “Good Morning America.” She made many appearances on radio, giving interviews to as many as 72 stations, mostly in the US, and a few international outlets from South Africa, New Zealand, Spain, Germany, and Mexico. She also performed at awards shows including the MTV Video Music Awards, the Country Music Association Awards, and the American Music Awards.
RED was further promoted by a string of singles. “I Knew You Were Trouble.” was released to pop radio as an official single on November 27, 2012. It was a big hit on pop radio, peaking atop the Billboard Mainstream Top 40/Pop Songs for seven weeks. The single peaked at No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 and was a top ten chart hit in Oceania and Europe. “22” was released to pop radio in March 2013, and “Red” was released to country radio in June 2013. The singles peaked at No. 20 and No. 6 on the Billboard Hot 100, respectively. Other singles were “Everything Has Changed” and “The Last Time”; the latter had a limited release to UK radio.


Critical Reception
RED received generally positive reviews from contemporary critics, most of whom commended Taylor’s songwriting. Jon Dolan from Rolling Stone lauded her autobiographical lyrics which are depicted in songs that “linger on like tattoos”. In a retrospective review published in 2019, Pitchfork‘s Brad Nelson described the album as Taylor’s fully-realized effort as a versatile songwriter, who explored her deeper observations and perspectives.
The album’s production polarized critics. While Taylor and Big Machine promoted RED as a country album, its diverse musical styles sparked a media debate over Taylor’s status as a country singer-songwriter. Music magazine Spin argued that it was hard to categorize RED, given that the genre country itself is “the most dynamically vibrant pop genre of the last decade or so”. Others noted that Taylor had always been more pop-oriented than country, and described RED as her inevitable move to mainstream pop. Taylor responded in an interview with the Wall Street Journal that country music “feels like home”, and dismissed the debate regarding her country status: “I leave the genre labeling to other people.” On a positive side, The Guardian‘s Kate Mossman described it as “one of the finest fantasies pop music has ever constructed”. Jon Caramanica from The New York Times agreed, calling the production a striking feature of RED which proves that Taylor is more of a pop star than a country singer.
Commercial Performance
The album was a huge global success as well, becoming Taylor’s first chart-topper in the UK. It also topped the album charts in Australia, Canada, Ireland and New Zealand while charting in the top ten in every other major market including China. RED has sold over 7 million copies in the US and 14 million worldwide as of December 2018.
Award Recognition
RED (Taylor's Version)
Impact and Legacy
The New York Times critic Steven Hyden credited RED for emerging a new generation of indie artists, whose works are “aesthetically much closer to Swift’s pop than anything in the rock underground”. Fans and critics have dubbed RED an “autumnal album” due to its aesthetic and lyrical imagery. Jordan Sargent of Spin named RED “one of the best pop albums of our time”.
The album’s production straddling between country and pop inspired Taylor to venture into genres she had not tried before. The successful pop radio singles, specifically the dubstep-infused “I Knew You Were Trouble.”, served as a “signal flare” for her to collaborate again with pop producers Max Martin and Shellback, known for radio-friendly pop.
«We were having these successful songs at pop radio, like ‘We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together’. We had ‘I Knew You Were Trouble.’ But I also had songs like ‘Begin Again’ that were absolutely, completely and totally country songs. I really felt like I was standing on a state line and I had a foot on either side of the borderline. And I was just getting to exist in both worlds, which for me at the time was really thrilling.»
Released | October 22, 2012 | |||
---|---|---|---|---|
Recorded | March 2011–2012 | |||
Studio | Ballroom West (Los Angeles) Blackbird (Nashville) Conway (Los Angeles) Enormous (Los Angeles) Instrument Landing (Minneapolis) Marlay (North Hollywood) MXM (Stockholm) Pain In The Art (Nashville) Ruby Red (Santa Monica) The Garage (Topanga Canyon) The Village (Los Angeles) | |||
Genre | Country Pop Rock | |||
Length | 65:11 (Standard Edition) | |||
Label | Big Machine Records | |||
Producers | Taylor Swift Nathan Chapman Jeff Bhasker Dann Huff Jacknife Lee Max Martin Shellback Butch Walker Dan Wilson | |||
TAYLOR SWIFT CHRONOLOGY | ||||
|