Taylor Swift has learned some lessons along the way in her career, but one important thing she’s found is that she really has to live a quiet life, avoiding the spotlight as much as possible, for a very good reason.
Swift opens up about the past three years
Someone with Swift’s level of fame obviously can’t easily slip into the shadows and go undetected, but she has figured out how to keep the interest in her personal life under control.
In the new issue of Rolling Stone magazine, the interviewer notes that the singer, in addition to talking about her new album Lover, “ is also ready to explain the past three years of her life, in depth, for the first time.”
Swift shares that, at times, “You feel like you’re being completely pulled into a riptide. So what are you going to do? Splash a lot? Or hold your breath and hope you somehow resurface? And that’s what I did. And it took three years.”
She worried “something would go wrong”
Discussing her last interview with Rolling Stone seven years ago, she worried that “something would go wrong,” the interviewer noted. She confirmed: “Yeah, I kind of knew it would. I felt like I was walking along the sidewalk, knowing eventually the pavement was going to crumble and I was gonna fall through.”
She shared: “You can’t keep winning and have people like it.People love ‘new’ so much — they raise you up the flagpole, and you’re wavingat the top of the flagpole for a while. And then they’re like, ‘Wait, this newflag is what we actually love.’ They decide something you’re doing isincorrect, that you’re not standing for what you should stand for. You’re a badexample.”
It’s not for the faint of heart, the singer shared,continuing: “Then if you keep making music and you survive, and you keepconnecting with people, eventually they raise you a little bit up the flagpoleagain, and then they take you back down, and back up again. And it happens towomen more than it happens to men in music.”
Swift came under fire
Swift remarked how she’s “had several upheavals” during hercareer, with accusations that “She doesn’t really write those songs” when shewas 18. She continued, “So my third album I wrote by myself as a reaction tothat.”
The criticisms didn’t end there, as she noted, “Then theydecided I was a serial dater — a boy-crazy man-eater — when I was 22. And so Ididn’t date anyone for, like, two years. And then they decided in 2016 thatabsolutely everything about me was wrong. If I did something good, it was forthe wrong reasons. If I did something brave, I didn’t do it correctly. If Istood up for myself, I was throwing a tantrum. And so I found myself in thisendless mockery echo chamber.”
She equated it to being like “that game kids play,” where siblings mock one another, saying, “He’s copying me” and how it’s “always in a really obnoxious voice that sounds all twisted.” The singer explained: “That’s what it felt like in 2016. So I decided to just say nothing. It wasn’t really a decision. It was completely involuntary.
Her quiet life has provided so much positivity
In a discussion about her album Reputation, the singer shared how the album “was a love story in amongst chaos. All the weaponized sort of metallic battle anthems were what was going on outside.”
She continued: “That was the battle raging on that I could see from the windows, and then there was what was happening inside my world — my newly quiet, cozy world that was happening on my own terms for the first time… It’s weird, because in some of the worst times of my career, and reputation, dare I say, I had some of the most beautiful times — in my quiet life that I chose to have.”
“And I had some of the most incredible memories with thefriends I now knew cared about me, even if everyone hated me,” she shared,adding, “The bad stuff was really significant and damaging. But the good stuffwill endure. The good lessons — you realize that you can’t just show your lifeto people.”
She concluded, “I used to be like a golden retriever, just walking up to everybody, like, wagging my tail. ‘Sure, yeah, of course! What do you want to know? What do you need?’ Now, I guess, I have to be a little bit more like a fox.”
Her “quiet life” is an important piece of that, as Swift noted: “Since I was 15 years old, if people criticized me for something, I changed it… And so I decided I needed to live a quiet life, because a quiet personal life invites no discussion, dissection, and debate. I didn’t realize I was inviting people to feel they had the right to sort of play my life like a video game.”
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