Sorry, I'm still giggling over Real Madrid and fucking Lit.
You must just literally sometimes write these things and just be like...
Fuck yeah, that's sick.
I can't believe I put Real Madrid and fucking lit together.
That's banging.
You know, this album by personality was a was a funnier album.
You know it was, like you know, coming off of like Torture Post Department, like the kind of more.
The character attributes I was highlighting in that writing process were much more like serious and sensitive and introspective, and oftentimes more earnest and stoic and the characteristics of a poet.
This one was like, showgirls are mischievous, fun, scandalous, sexy, fun, flirty, hilarious.
So yeah, I'm glad you picked up on that.
Oh, for sure.
I love the way that you marry the two as well.
You're such an incredible writer and such an incredible conceptual writer.
You can take Elder's Daughter and listen to it and consume the experience, but then it's also just the glossary you're using, which you give away to me, at least at the end of the first verse about just dying and trying to be cool, and the idea of how you're using this language to tell this story.
At what point do you sort of start to write and it comes from a very sort of unexplained place, but then you go.
Okay, you know what?
I can actually marry this with something really interesting that mixes the cerebral with the emotional.
Yeah, I think that's a really amazing thing that you're cluing in on, which is that sometimes I'll use specific vernacular to be satirical.
Like the entire first verse of Eldest Daughter, is somebody trying to figure out how to say things that they've read on the internet, whether it be like apathy is hot or memes and trolling.
And how do I keep up with how we're supposed to talk in order to describe how much we don't care, when really we all care about something right?
So then you go to the pre-chorus and I go more into my own voice of I've been afflicted by a terminal uniqueness.
I've been dying just from trying to seem cool.
That's the test.
So that's the kind of flip of every way in which I was speaking in this entire first verse was me trying to assimilate to the way culture tells us to be.
Which is like weird because, like honestly, I feel like going back to the idea of a showgirl.
They are tough in a way.
That's actually kind of old school tough, where they're going to smile on the outside and they might have a storm going on in their, in their lives.
Because it's work.
To everyone else.
It's like glitz and glamour, but they have no idea the work required to make it feel frivolous to people in the audience.
That's the kind of toughness that I have tried to aspire to for the last two and a half years of my life that I've been preparing for and being on this very exhaustive tour.
But there's also this kind of cultural thing now where we we like sort of talk about softness and sadness and these feelings of being hurt and feeling like Those feelings.
We talk about them but we're not allowed to express wanting love, wanting these things in life.
There's this aversion to actually seeming like you could need anything, or that you could need or want anyone.
You're supposed to accidentally have love.
You're supposed then so we end up on vacation.
This is the cautious discretion, which you beautifully describe in that song as well.
This idea of learning cautious discretion, which is a heavy, heavy thing to have to take on at a young age, to check your moves before you make them.
I think like if I could be just honest for a second, that picture of you and your fiance driving away in his drop top to me was such an important moment because it felt like there goes cautious discretion.
It's gone.
You sound like my family right now.
Every one of my family members were like, that's how we have been.
We've been just, all we want is that for you.
You know, like so much of the way that anyone in my position in my industry has to be is you have to really think your way around every single thing you say before you say it.
It's obviously very easy to talk to you because you're so thoughtful about the music and you're coming from such a place of authenticity.
But you know that about yourself.
It's really one of the beautiful qualities that makes you fun to talk to for artists.
But when I met Travis I started to feel a little bit like I could be.
I could be like a person who could have romantic whims and have these dreams.
And the song Wish List is like that chorus.
Like you were just talking about the verses which were so fun and funny to write, but it gets very sincere in the chorus.
I don't know if you've seen the movie Happy Gilmore, but he has this happy place.
Like where he goes into this utopia of this is exactly what he would want.
And this is where he escapes to mentally in times of stress, pressure, anxiety, or chaos.
And that chorus of that song is me just describing what my happy place is.
You know, you've made so many people happy, Taylor, with the release of this record.
The fans are unbelievable.
I don't even know how to thank them for what they've done this week and for how much they've loved this music and how they've just like immediately gotten it.
How are you absorbing the reaction these days?
How do you choose to process?
The math is one thing and that just goes on around us in life now.
But then the real human interaction is what I know that you really still tap into.
And when you have an album that's this big, with so many people pouring their energy and being so invested in it, how do you absorb all of that in the days that follow?
Because we're talking for real a few days after the album came out.
Yeah, I mean, I welcome the chaos.
The rule of show business is if it's the first week of my album release and you are saying either my name or my album title, you're helping.
And art, I have a lot of respect for people's subjective opinions on art.
I'm not the art police.
It's like everybody is allowed to feel exactly how they want.
And what our goal is as entertainers is to be a mirror.
Oftentimes an album is a really, really wild way to look at yourself, right?
What you're going through in your life is going to affect whether you relate to the music that i'm putting out at any given moment.
And what i often love seeing my fans say is i used to be someone who didn't like relate to reputation, and now that i've been through some other things in my life, that's my favorite album.
Or i used to be a like fearless girly.
Now i'm obsessed with evermore like and we're doing this thing For keeps like.
I have such an eye on legacy when I'm making my music.
I know what I made.
I know I adore it.
And I know that like on the theme of what the show girl is.
All of this is part of it.
It's ordered chaos though Taylor, because I'm looking at the album cover right now, which you revealed in the video that you directed, which was already there and already waiting.
And we were trying to figure out what this all meant.
And then it all makes sense in time that moves forward.
And so you know it must have been really wonderful to release that video and know that it answered a lot of questions for fans and also raised a lot of questions because, as always, 87 on the door.
What's going on over there?
All these kind of really cool things to direct that and storyboard.
That must have been a blast.
Oh, it really was.
I had a list of just... It was like over a hundred Easter eggs to put into that video.
And I was just going through my list and checking them off one by one as we were going through our production design process.
And...
It's a blast because the fans have made it a blast, because they know that this all points to.
You know, current art, past art or future art.
That's pretty much the realm of the Easter egg thing.
So the fact that they care that much about the sort of canon of albums that I've made or plans I may have in the future,
It's like, I just am very honored by it.
And it seems like they're still having fun with it.
As long as this is something that's fun for them, it's going to be fun for me to plan.
Oh, I'm sure it is.
And if you say there's over a hundred or so in there, then I'm sure everyone's going to go right back and start watching that video again, trying to figure out what they haven't already figured out.
I wanted to finish this brief conversation by talking about legacy and personal legacy and growth.
The idea of being able to write in the moment, not necessarily be beholden to something you've experienced previous, but honoring it by putting it out a year later, or six months, or three months later.
And it being an album that's so full of joy and so full of humor even about the things that probably used to drive you crazy you're able to laugh at now, which I love as well.
And so the question is that getting to a place where you can make an album like this capture lightning in a bottle, as you described it.
What has it allowed you to leave behind?
You've created new space to fill it with love and joy and all the things to come, but we're finite.
What have you been able to leave behind by making this album?
Making this album was really something I've been wanting to do for my entire career, because I have always wanted to have fun in this type of way.
To have fun, to exhibit mischief and be flirty and fun and...
And make jokes and like get to have that side of my personality.
That's a huge part of my personality.
A lot of people like you know who are friends with me and when we meet in person and stuff, people realize that, like oftentimes I get so
I get so serious or I'm really known for a lot of my sad songs, my cathartic songs or breakup songs or whatever, because I love to write those things.
But that's not the place I'm in in my life.
So what I have left behind is something that really exhibits who I am in this moment pays homage to the most important moment of my life, which was the exuberance and electricity of the Eres tour.
I'm so proud of this song craft.
I'm so proud of these melodies and these lyrics and these stories and going in and out of character and kind of playing with your style of speak.
It's interesting.
I oftentimes have a recorder going while we're writing.
And me and Max and Johan are... vibe is very like stream of consciousness you sing this line i sing the next line wait wait wait what did you say two minutes ago that second note was better and that can we go back run it back what did you say there um and so what i i just actually just put this out on itunes is um voice memos from when we were writing because you actually get to hear us come up with these ideas stream of conscious in the moment in real time and it's it's pretty wild i'm very lucky to get to experience that with people like them who are just i mean they're they're geniuses in my opinion and and i am very i feel elevated every time we work together
