Taylor Swift’s The new album was a surprise to its many fans, but it was months in the making.
The pop superstar released the new LP at midnight, just 24 hours after telling the world he was coming.
Accompanying the release is an elegant rehearsal, a primer, for Taylor’s new LP that she did in isolation.
It is a “collection of songs and stories that flowed like a stream of consciousness,” he writes.
Read Swift’s explanatory in its entirety below.
“It started with images. Images that popped into my mind and piqued my curiosity.
Stars drawn around scars. A cardigan that still has the scent of loss twenty years later. Battleships sink into the ocean, down, down, down. The tree sways in the forest of my childhood. Silent tones of “run away” and never do. The sun bathed the month of August, sipping like a bottle of wine. A reflected disco ball floating on a dance floor. A bottle of whiskey beckoning. Hands held through plastic. A single thread that, for better or for worse, ties you to your destiny.
Very soon these images in my head grew faces or names and became characters. I found myself not only writing my own stories, but also writing about or from the perspective of people I never knew, people I know, or people I wish I hadn’t known. An exiled man walking the cliffs of a land that is not his own, wondering how everything went so terribly wrong. A bitter torturer who appears at the funeral of his fallen obsession. A seventeen year old boy standing on a porch, learning to apologize. Delighted kids wandering the ever-green High Line. My grandfather, Dean, landed in Guadalcanal in 1942. A misfit widow cheerfully takes revenge on the city that kicked her out.
A story that becomes folklore is one that is broadcast and whispered. Sometimes he even sang. The lines between fantasy and reality blur, and the boundaries between truth and fiction become almost imperceptible. Speculation, over time, becomes reality. Myths, ghost stories and fables.
Fairy tales and parables. Gossip and legends. Someone’s secrets written in heaven for all to see.
Isolated, my imagination has gone wild and this album is the result, a collection of songs and stories that flowed like a stream of consciousness. Taking a pen was my way of escaping fantasy, history, and memory. I have told these stories to the best of my ability with all the love, wonder and fantasy they deserve.
Now it’s up to you to pass them on. “
