Taylor Swift Previews “Red” CD

Taylor Swift fans around the world are ready to get her fourth CD, “Red” when it becomes available on Monday.  This weekend, she spoke with Country Countdown USA’s Lon Helton about the making of the album. 

As you were working on this album, did you want to do something you hadn’t done before? “That’s exactly what I did.  On my last album, I wrote everything myself.  That became a comfort zone.  So I knew that to push myself and challenge myself as a writer, I had to seek out really cool collaborators who had different ideas from me.  I wanted to expand what I do, and try out different things musically.  I still have a lot of songs I wrote by myself.  I want to learn.  I’m only 22, and wanted to learn other ways of writing songs.  It teaches you things.  It broadens what you do.”

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Let’s talk about the imagery in the song Red.  It paints a real picture.  “I was very proud of the lyrics.  Like ‘Forgetting him was like trying to know someone you’ve never met.’   It’s impossible.  Like forgetting him is impossible.  You can’t know someone you’ve never met.  It’s a complicated line, but it meant you can’t forget him because it’s impossible.  Thank you for going into those lyrics.”

Why is it the title of the album? “I got the idea from the song, which talks about a love that was good and bad, good for you, intoxicating, and exciting but unforgetable.  That’s a lot of what this record is about.”

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Where did Red come about? “Red came about half way through the two years.  After that, I felt it was so interesting that I wanted to follow it.”

Another song is “I Knew You Were Trouble.” “For me, that was a song I came up with on the piano, and decided to work with Max Martin and Shellback.  I emailed Max and said, ‘I feel like I wrote something I want us to work on.’  We turned it into a crazy, chaotic song, and it’s a song I’m really proud of, because it gets stuck in your head, it’s heavy hitting, and it sounds like the emotion was to feel.  It was a feeling I hated to feel, because it was like, I learned this lesson before, and here I was learning it twice.  Shame on me.”

Talk about sequencing the album, because “Begin Again” is the last song on the album: “I bookended the album with two songs that were about the same person, that were about a significant relationship to me.  The song State of Grace began the relationship.  The idea that there’s hope, and the idea that you can pick yourself up and live to write another song, that’s how I wanted to end the record.”

How would you describe the feel of this record? It’s more about saying how I felt in the hope that other people felt that way too, and it’ll give them comfort knowing they’re not alone feeling that way.  It goes from really beautiful beginings of a relationship, to the bitter end of a relationship, to fighting, arguing, missing someone, all those things.”

Which is the song you’re proudest of?  “I’m really proud of a song called ‘Everything Has Changed,’ which is a song I wrote with an amazing artist named Ed Sheeran.  He & I wrote this as a duet, and it’s about meeting someone for the first time, and your life changes, and the way you see the world changes.  I loved writing this song with him, his voice is so beautiful, and I can’t wait for people to hear it.”

 

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