Taylor Swift can come to the phone now — and she has no time for inequality, bullies or feeling redundant. The Grammy-winning artist phoned into On Air With Ryan Seacrest on Tuesday, August 27, and dished to Ryan Seacrest she’s entered a new era of “freedom” with the release of highly-anticipated album Lover. The “ME!” singer also clarified how she’ll go about re-recording her original songs which were recently purchased from under her and also her plans for a Lover tour. And, not to mention, how she’s grown up in the process.
Listen back to the full interview and read through the transcription below to learn more, including how she almost named the album "Daylight" to how she'll be turning to her fans to help make future decisions and much, MUCH more:
On Powerful Track “The Man”:
“If a man hears that song and feels uncomfortable, that means he’s probably not the greatest feminist. What's great is like when you hear that song — we do these things called 'Secret Sessions' and we have fans come and listen to the album beforehand and its guys and girls — and I see the guys out there nodding along to the song, because what we need in any fight for equality, in any group of people, is we need people from the other side to say, 'Yeah, you’re right. You’re right to want that.' So any time men are like, 'I love your song 'The Man.' I’m like, 'You know what? I want to give you a hug and a high five.'”
“It’s a song I’ve been wanting to write for a very long time because I've noticed the inequality starts at a basic perception level where it's like nothing we do is perceived exactly the same, so how are we ever supposed to ask for equal pay? [Or] equal standing entrance into the boys’ club or whatever when nothing we do is viewed the same? So that's what I kind of wanted to go into with the song.”
On How She Spent the First 13 Minutes of Album Release Night:
“Geographically I was in New York. I was in a hotel, in a room, that I had a few friends there. Jack Antonoff was there, who produced a lot of the songs on the record with me and wrote several things with me, and then I had my parents. I had a lot of people in the management team who have been absolutely killing themselves for six months preparing for this release so basically had like 20, 25 people in the room and … I was on Tumblr and one of my fans was like, ‘Guys! It’s on iTunes!’ And that happened like maybe 10 minutes early and I was like, 'Guys! Check your phone!' …. And so we all started freaking out and then playing the songs on our phones because these are songs that I've only been able to hear just me, like, in headphones, never being able to play out loud on the phone for the past year or so. It was amazing. It was this incredible experience and then all of a sudden what happens at midnight is the reviews start posting because these journalists have heard the album beforehand … so the reviews started hitting and all of a sudden, I’m like, 'These are the best reviews I've ever gotten my entire career.' Like, my hands were on my face. I was fully in shambles … I was like on the floor.”
On If the Positive Lover Reviews Impacted Re-Recording Her Earlier Songs:
“I think it definitely did and especially the fact that this is the first album that I own. It’s my own work, you know? It's crazy when you create things for 13, 14 years and then all of it is sold out from under you and you have this new fresh beginning and the first chance to actually own your art that you’ve been making all along and the fact that everyone is like, ‘Oh, no, this is the best thing that you’ve made.‘ Like, I cannot explain to you. Like, it gets me emotional even talking about [it]. Like, I can’t explain to you how good that feels because it's the first thing that no one can take from me. No one can sell it. It's mine.”
On How She’ll Re-Record Earlier Songs and Embrace Her Newfound Freedom:
“I have almost a year to plan and get all my ducks in a row and I’m really going to be listening to the fans because there are some amazing ideas that they’ve had. I’m always looking on Instagram and Tumblr and Twitter and seeing what they would want. Like, some of the things that they’ve said that are really interesting to me are like I wrote the song ‘Better Man’ for Little Big Town, and … they took that song all the way [CMA Song of the Year etc.], but that I wrote during the Red — it was originally going to be on the Red album — so the fans are like, 'Maybe she'll put 'Better Man,' her version, on the Red album?' And I was like, 'That's an amazing idea!' So I’m going to be listening to what they are saying. I think they want me to kind of stick to the original production a bit like make them pretty close. I don’t think they’d want to hear like 'Tear Drops on My Guitar' as a pop version. … The best part is, contractually, I can make them nearly identical to what they were originally which is great."
“I’m actually really excited, like this whole phase of my life is very much about freedom and the Lover album to me completely represents freedom. … You know creative freedom; artistic freedom; being able to actually freely own the work that I make and put everything I have into and so going back now I can do that with all the rest of my albums that I’ve made; that I’ve made every decision on; that I came up with every idea for and they will all be mine eventually which is the most amazing thing. It's really important to me as an artist to be able to have that moving forward.”
On If It's Harder to Name Albums Versus Songs Titles:
"They're both pretty easy for me, but … it's always different. Like, with Reputation, I came up with the album name before I even wrote song number one for that album, but with this one, I was halfway into writing the songs before I wrote the song ‘Lover.’ That’s the song I wrote alone and it was one of those songs that just freely — I just somehow wrote this song really quickly in the middle of the night at my piano — and all of a sudden I knew that was the title of the album. … I almost called the album Daylight, which is the name of another song on the record, but I felt like that was a little too on the nose because Reputation was such a dark, like evening-nighttime-city album, and I thought that calling the next album Daylight would be too obvious and it's such a love album. It's an album about all different forms of love. Even when love hurts, this album is about the full spectrum that love makes us feel, so I was like, this album is definitely going to be called Lover.”
On What’s Next and If There Will Be a Lover Tour:
“I’m not quite sure what we’re doing with touring because with this album, I was so full-on planning this album release and directing the videos and putting all these different clues in these videos and trying to make this album release experience the most fun one for my fans, that I didn’t wanna plan what we’re gonna do in terms of live and I don’t want to do the same thing every time because I don’t want my life to feel like I’m on a treadmill. There’s a lot that goes into touring that nobody knows like you have to reserve stadiums like a year and a half in advance and that to me is like a lot. Like, with Reputation, I knew that nobody would really fully understand this album until they saw it live because I knew what I had planed for it live was going to make people understand what I had made on the record. But this album is different because people are seeming to get this album on a first listen basis which is so wonderful. I can’t even tell you how much easier that is.”
“I’m waiting to figure out what I’m going to do with touring … I don’t want to feel like I have to do the same ting every single time. I definitely want to play this album live for a lot of people. I definitely want to give fans an opportunity and give me the opportunity to vibe with them on these songs in a live setting and see them sing the words back, but I don’t really know exactly what way that’s going to happen.”
On Her Growth and Need to Take a Breather:
“For example, with this time, I’ve learned to have more healthy ways of communicating how I’m feeling when I’m feeling like really, really kind of overwhelmed with like obligations and planning and blah blah blah. like maybe six months ago my management team came to me and we’re like, ‘Hey, we’ve got to book the stadiums for the next tour.’ And I was like, ‘Guys, I just got off tour — I literally just got off tour. I literally just took my tights off and my thigh-high boots off from the last tour. I literally cannot do this right now. You need to give me space even if that means we have to do things a little bit differently.’ I really can’t feel like my life is just album tour, album tour, album tour, album tour.”
“I think part of me growing up has been realizing my fans have been so generous to me and they’ve given me the opportunity to be able to change things up every once in awhile if its feeling like it’s too much of a pressure situation because I never want to ‘phone in’ a show. I never wanna be like this wasn’t what I wanted. … I want to give them 113% every show so I need for it to be in a way that feels right.”
“Stadiums are fun. Stadiums are amazing — I love stadiums; I just don’t know if we’re going to do the same thing as we did last time…. This album is so personal, so detailed, like, Reputation was very external, very loud … this is an album that is very personal, vulnerable, emotional so my goal for whatever live setting that we decide to do things in, is gonna be to try to make wherever we are … make it feel smaller like a living room. … That’s my goal. That’s my objective, [but] I truly don’t know what we’re doing … I haven’t had the meetings yet.”