She conquered country and now Taylor Swift has her sights set on pop, and so far, she’s totally killing the game.
Taylor released her catchy first single, “Shake It Off,” off her upcoming album 1989, which officially marks her complete transformation from a country artist to a pop star.
As any Swiftie knows, Taylor has been slowly transitioning over the years, but still remained firm in her country roots. When it came time to write her fifth album, there was no denying the direction she was going in.
“As a songwriter I tried to stay really open to intuition and inspiration and impulses and I knew I needed to make this album the way it has turned out I knew I wanted it to be different than every album that I’ve done before,” Taylor said during an appearance on the French Canadian television show Tout le Monde en Parle recently. “And out of respect for the country music community, who I love and I adore, I felt it was best to be honest with them about what the album was and just be very very truthful about the fact that it is a pop album.”
But just because she isn’t considering herself a country artist with this album, that doesn’t mean she isn’t going to stop doing the one thing she loves the most about the genre, and that is telling stories with her music.
Taylor has written about love, loss and especially heartbreak, which have earned her all types of accolades, including seven Grammy awards, including two for her hit “Mean.”
“What’s weird about my life is that times that I’ve experienced the most amount of humiliation, rejection and criticism those times of pain have caused me to write songs that I’m most proud of and that song [“Mean”] ended up winning two Grammys that night, it was the craziest thing,” she said.
“Because not to say that I’m happy to experience pain because it equals Grammys, but kind of. If I hadn’t experienced people gossiping about me and saying things that weren’t true for five years straight I wouldn’t have written ‘Shake it Off,’ which I’m really proud of and I’m really happy I wrote it.”
Christina Garibaldi
Christina Garibaldi has been an on-camera reporter for MTV News since 2011. When not interviewing or writing about her favorite stars, she keeps herself busy with baby animal videos and boy bands.
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