Don’t mess with Taylor Swift

Stefanie Marsh

She doesn’t take drugs and she doesn’t have meltdowns. But cross the pop star at your peril – especially if you’re an ex-boyfriend

There comes a moment in every hack’s life when they realise that they’re technically old and that it is time to reconfigure all their journalistic instincts, brush up on their street patois and start reading Grazia – all so as not to be considered “lame”, thick or dreary by the “younger generation”. My moment came three weeks ago in the run-up to interviewing Taylor Swift, an American, supposedly unspeakably prim new breed of squeaky clean pop star whose trillions of, mostly female, fans – not to mention record sales – seems to indicate that she will soon be “mega” on a Britney Spears level, but without a shaven-headed druggy episode mid-career.

Taylor Swift is 23. At 13, she was put on staff by Sony as one of its songwriters. She does not dress up as a naughty schoolgirl in her videos, take drugs or sing semi-covertly about blow jobs. Forbes estimated her earnings at $57 million (£38 million), making her the world’s 11th highest-earning person in showbusiness, a couple of notches behind Steven Spielberg and Tom Cruise but miles ahead of Beyoncé, Sir Paul McCartney and Angelina Jolie. Some people complain that she sounds reedy when she sings live (partly because, unlike most pop queens, she refuses to correct her pitch with Auto-Tune), but Neil Young loves her songwriting, as do Lady Gaga and Rolling Stone, which has compared her to Carole King and Joni Mitchell. Stevie Nicks predicts she will “save the music business”. Swift’s speciality is emotionally literate torch songs, mainly about her exes.

Until I was assigned the Swift job, I had never heard of Harry Styles. Whenever I had inadvertently glimpsed his face on the internet or the tabloids or on television, I’d filed it away in the anonymous pubescent boy-band person compartment of my brain, along with some vague thoughts that he had way too much hair. (Note to over-30-year-olds: shaggy-hair phobia is an incontestable sign that you are headed for Victor Meldrew territory.) But before interviewing Swift, word spread among the under-thirtysomethings in my life: “You are going to ask her about Harry, aren’t you?” they said scornfully, and when I replied, nonchalantly, that I had no idea who he was, they stood over me until I’d typed his name into Google and acknowledged that the mop-headed 15-year-old nonentity is in fact 19, the lead singer of the Simon Cowell vehicle One Direction, a fully formed international heart-throb with enviable “bastard” pop-star status whose band is always in the process of trying to elbow Swift off her No 1 spot in the charts. Mop-head, it turns out, is also the only recently extinguished former flame of Taylor Swift.

I slowly began to grasp that “Taylor” and “Harry” (the young no longer bother with surnames) form something of an elite in the new world order, along with the cast of Made in Chelsea and Justin Bieber’s worrying new hairstyle. There are blogs so full of Taylor/Harry gossip at the time of the break-up – the once happy couple seemed to have split up in the Caribbean over Christmas, with Styles finding solace in a hot tub on Sir Richard Branson’s private island while Swift was (supposedly) covertly photographed looking lonely and abandoned on a luxury yacht – it is a wonder they had anything to blog about before this ill-fated union. The entire universe seemed to want to get the lowdown on the split, as well as “deets” (details) on any movement in Swift’s dating activity.

The day before I met her, she had performed at the Brits, ripping off a wedding dress mid-song to reveal an untried and untested combo of – tutted and slavered the press – “revealing” long-sleeved T-shirt, knee-high boots and shorts. (Swift has been very famous since she was 16, when she used to wear cowboy boots and gingham.) Anyway. The song she performed, an autobiographical smash hit about a relationship fall-out between our first-person narrator and a “mystery” ex, is called I Knew You Were Trouble. It is extremely catchy in the same way as her previous hit We Are Never, Ever Getting Back Together (also about a mystery ex). The lyrics to Trouble include the killer line: “You never loved me or her, or anyone, or anything,” which rather juicily implies a cold-hearted soul of the sort Swift’s teenage female fans will identify with as they mournfully listen to it over and over again in their bedrooms. (P.S. I love it, too.) “Who is Trouble about?” I asked the under-30-year-olds. Collectively, they rolled their eyes (#howcanshebeajournalistandnotknowthis). “It’s so like obviously about Harry Styles.” That afternoon, Swift’s PR rang me to say that Swift loves antiques and cooking, but was not going to talk about her ex-boyfriends.

In a hotel suite in London, a tall, gawky (6ft 1in in heels), impeccably made-up, cheerful with an edge of the ribald, knowing yet well-mannered young woman – her forehead adorned by a (controversial) new fringe, her dress totally obscured by a long baggy jumper – sits politely opposite me, doing a good impression of a woman ten years older. Swift is almost unbelievably courteous and genial, and I understand why The Hollywood Reporter has described her as “the best People Person since Bill Clinton”.

The formalities over with, Swift exclaims how excited she is to meet me. Why are you excited to meet me? “Because,” she replies, so endearingly that I am completely unprepared for the fabrication that comes next, “you’re one of the most educated people in the whole world! So it’s really exciting for me.” Normally, I take the British view on shameless flattery – it is unforgivable. The problem is, she’s such fun that even the Swift “haters” don’t really hate her. Even when they’re slagging her off, the celeb gossip bloggers have taken to referring to her, affectionately, as “T-Swizzle”. She is also – annoyingly for me (it’s always so perversely satisfying interviewing people you can’t stand) – funny, highly intelligent and a tad geeky and eccentric. Occasionally, she lets slip weird thoughts such as, “I go into a trance when I’m in an antiques store.” And her exuberance for other people has stood her well. As a young, struggling musician, she would turn up at radio stations with home-made biscuits for the DJs. “People get confused when they’re musicians,” she says. “They think they have no boss. When really it’s the other way around – we have more bosses than anyone else. Every person who buys our records is our boss. And every time we go onto a radio station – you think that DJ isn’t your boss?”

Much as we would like to move directly on to thoughts about her best-selling album Red (five million copies sold so far, and rising), we must return to the Brits for one moment, while it is still fresh in our minds. I have a weakness for catchy pop songs. I love I Knew You Were Trouble. Taylor: “Thank you! Oh, my God, thank you so much.” She explains what was running through her head during her performance: “ ‘OK, made it down the stairs, didn’t trip. OK. Next move. Walk back upstage, keep your shoulders back. All right. And then… you turn.’ And at the same time, you’re balancing the analytical side of your brain, which is telling you where to go and how to go there, with the other side of your brain, which is saying, ‘Feel everything you’re singing and show it on your face. Feel everything exactly as you felt it when you wrote the song.’ ”

That sounds complicated, I say, especially if your ex-boyfriend is sitting there watching you.

To recap: while Swift sang, a million cameras homed in on Styles’s face. “A new notch in your belt is all I’ll ever be,” Swift belted out; Styles’s face remained studiously care-free. I tell her I think I would die if I had to perform in front of my ex-boyfriend.

“Well,” she says, “it’s not hard to access that emotion when the person the song is directed at is standing by the side of the stage watching.” In retrospect, it is definitely one of her favourite performances, and she is particularly happy to have pulled it off at the Brits (her first time). She was “stoked”.

Now that I’ve talked to Swift, I can see the appeal of fame: here is a platform to trash everyone who has ever disrespected you in your entire life. Styles fans accused her of being immature; Swift devotees (“Swifties”) adored it (“How brave”). Afterwards, she took all her dancers shopping, she says, with the radiant memory of personal triumph over romantic adversity still lingering on her face.

“When you see an American who’s never been to London walk into the Oxford Circus Topshop… Have you been to that Topshop? It’s like a magical world that we’ve never seen before… And they were literally running around like little kids.”

Swift was born in Pennsylvania, the eldest child of Andrea, a mutual fund wholesaler, and Scott, a financial adviser whose influence she credits for her thriftiness. She’s now struck a promotion deal with Coca-Cola but, besides her flat in Los Angeles, two residences in Nashville and treating her friends to dinner, “I really do want to be able to have options when I’m older, and to save my money and invest it correctly”.

At primary school she disliked maths and biology lessons, making up for it in class by writing and performing songs about parallelograms (the lyrics have not survived). She describes high school as “brutal, intense”. She suspects her classmates found her annoying – strumming her guitar, singing country and doing what they considered to be sucky-up things, such as singing the national anthem at a baseball game for her hometown team, the Reading Phillies, when she was 10.

Like most stars these days, Swift says she was lonely. It is why she began writing songs, “because I could say things in songs that I wasn’t brave enough to say in person… because I couldn’t tell that guy in the English class I thought he was cute, and I couldn’t tell that group of popular girls it really hurt my feelings that they didn’t invite me to that sleepover. I could turn that into a metaphor, into a chorus, and then, for some reason, those emotions made more sense to me.”

Sensing the seriousness of her ambition, the Swift family relocated to Nashville, where she raised her game. Nowadays Taylor Swift can fill a stadium and easily generate $750,000 a night. In the past five years, she has sold 26 million albums – more than any other musician. Illegal downloading doesn’t seem to have touched her. She has sold 75 million song downloads and holds the Guinness World Record for the fastest-selling digital album, for Speak Now.

Her overriding theme is “taking apart the complicated feelings and micro emotions that go into love or heartbreak and trying to understand each one”. Swifties and gossipmongers seem to spend their lives trying to work out who “the poet laureate of puberty” (The Washington Post) is going out with, deciphering every word she sings as if it were the Rosetta Stone. Since 2010, Swift says she has only gone out with two men. It bothers her that the estimated total is so much higher, including Jake Gyllenhaal, Taylor Lautner and Joe Jonas. She definitely used to go out with the musician John Mayer. He seems to be something of a boyfriend for hire: having “dated” Jennifer Love Hewitt, Jessica Simpson and Jennifer Aniston, he is now with Katy Perry. Mayer said he was “humiliated” when, after they split up, Swift penned, “Dear John… Don’t you think I was too young to be messed with?” He accused her of “cheap songwriting”. Anti-Swifties often note that Swift chooses men who are much cooler than her, therefore I doubt that the Ed Sheeran (British songwriter, much shorter than Swift) rumours are true.

She said in an interview that she doesn’t mind if her exes write about her. But what would they say? “It depends on the stage we were at in the relationship,” she laughs, rather mischievously. “I’m a really good girlfriend. But I’m a nonexistent ex-girlfriend.”

I wouldn’t describe her as prim; she looks rather cool now. A male friend noted how “womanly” her legs have suddenly become. Vanity Fair has shoved her on to its April cover. Her poise and lack of arsiness do not suggest a career in the music industry. She didn’t drink until it was legal – 21 in the United States. “It was a big goal of mine as a teenager never to get labelled as a train wreck or a mess or a party girl, stumbling out of clubs with random people I don’t know… And I think, in an effort not to go off the rails, I did just that – I behaved myself.” I can’t imagine her drunk, but she protests: “Yeah. I’m 23!” She just loves working on her music or, at the end of a long day, settling down in front of the television with her cat, Meredith, to watch Teen Mom. She is thinking of changing the text message alert on her phone to the “da-da” on Law & Order. When she decides she no longer likes somebody, they get their own ringtone: “Da-duh-da-duh-da-duh”. Swift’s imitation of this special tone sounds like the music in Jaws when the shark was about to kill an innocent teenager. When she hears that ringtone, she does not pick up.

On fame: “I have been trying for a long time not to let it make me weird. I refuse to get intolerable.” She has diva fear, and speaks on the subject like an old hand in the biz: “Yeah, I’ve seen that kind of stuff. I’ve seen the bitterness.” She has a lot of friends, savvy actresses mainly, with their heads screwed on, some of whom I’ve heard of: Emma Stone and Jennifer Lawrence, Lena Dunham, the woman who wrote Girls. She and Swift have become friends after Dunham DM’ed (direct messaged) her on Twitter to tell her how many heartbreaks Swift’s songs had helped her survive. I imagine party girls such as Lindsay Lohan are barred from this inner circle. Who’s her best friend? “I have, like, ten of them, and I know exactly which one to call for each issue.”

It is time for some more scurrilous gossip. What about the rumour that she has a trunk where she stows keepsakes from past relationships? This really gets to Swift. It really “bothers” her. “Yeah, I read that, and it creeped. Me. Out… When I click on one of those blogs, it makes me feel as if the next article is going to say that I also have a coffin and conduct nightly séances. Like, it creeps me out that people would write that, and that a proportion of them would believe it.” She may or may not have a diary, however, in which she may or may not write notes. If she does have one it might be stolen, and she worries about that.

Items three and four on the did-she-or-didn’t-she gossip list: what about the rumour that she’s shooting her new video wearing exactly the same beanie as Harry Styles likes to wear? “I just like to wear a hat sometimes,” she smiles rather conspiratorially. “I mean, sometimes I do things symbolically, as a dig. Other times, I’m just wearing a hat.” Last year, she sang Never, Ever… (“So he calls me up and he’s like, ‘I still love you’ and I’m like, ‘This is exhausting’ ”) at the Grammys and burst into a British accent – mimicking Harry Styles, it was rumoured. I thought it was wonderful. Swift allows herself an infectious guffaw, finally to be asked about this much blogged-about prank:

“I mean, here’s the thing: not everything has to be explained to death, you know?” I think we can safely interpret this as a “yes”.

Besides music and TV, she loves nothing more than talking to her friends for hours, discussing relationships. “And we’ll get the back story on it. And, ‘OK, what’s he doing to prove to you that he’s changed? And how much do you believe him, and how much are you going to believe him from here on out, knowing what he’s done in the past?’ ” If she ever falls on hard times, she would be a brilliant agony aunt or writer of self-help books, espousing the modern female tradition of taking no prisoners as far as badly behaved boyfriends are concerned. If a man shows signs of going off her or ambivalence, “I would always walk.”

How many chances should a man have?

“One. I don’t like to scream and yell and I don’t like it to get messy. And I don’t like to have the phase of, ‘Oh, we’re still talking all the time, but we don’t know where we are.’ ” She rolls her eyes at the patheticness of boys. She likes a quote from a book she’s read recently: “There’s really no sound quite as loud as a phone not ringing, a letter unanswered.” She has no time for commitment-phobes. “I don’t quite understand it, because I either want to be with you or I don’t… And we’re not going to mess things up by, like, accidentally making out. I really don’t feel like pursuing something that isn’t real or isn’t going somewhere, so if it’s established that someone’s commitment-phobic, I’m sorry – go be commitment-phobic with someone else. Because I’m not trying to scare you, I’m not pointing a gun at you; I’m offering to be with you.” She sounds a rather tall order for any man. Lisa Osbourne (wife of Sharon and Ozzy’s son, Jack) dissed her on Twitter: “Either Taylor Swift is bat s*** crazy & causes every guy to dump her, or she has too high standards for these poor guys! Droppin’ like flies.” She’s not crazy. Picky, maybe.

“If you’re forced to ask for it – that’s humiliating. You know?” says Swift. “It’s just easier to show yourself to the door than be dragged out, don’t you think?” For a moment she looks rather sad.

I think, I say, the problem is that you are very mature for your age.

“Thank you,” she says. “The way I look at love is that it’s all going to be bad until it’s good, you know?”

Perhaps you shouldn’t go for a famous person next time, I suggest.

“It’s not like I go for people in the entertainment industry. Those have been the types who have kind of gone for me recently.”

The only song of hers that doesn’t seem to be about love is Innocent, which she wrote about Kanye West. In 2009, Swift won Best Female Video at the MTV Video Music Awards. West came on stage and blurted out that it should have gone to Beyoncé. Did he ever apologise? Her look suggests “as if”, but she says merely: “I try not to talk about that. If I talk about it, it will be like the biggest deal: ‘Finally breaks her silence.’ ” After the debacle, Barack Obama weighed in, calling West a “jackass”. Then Innocent came out and Swift made another million.

Do you think, I ask, that it’s a bit of a shock to whoever you went out with when everything you forgot to say to them or you hadn’t said is on national radio? Wouldn’t some people wonder whether putting her feelings and former relationships into the public domain isn’t slightly crazy?

She protests: “If I’m not putting their first and last name in the song, then it could be about anything. And it’s helping people deal with emotions; maybe if they hear a song about it, they won’t go crazy on their ex.”

I wonder whether some men wouldn’t be wary of going out with a woman who might then crucify them in a bestselling pop song.

“You never know who doesn’t ask you out,” she says. “But I’m not scared of it. Because I know I’m not going to stop writing songs about my life. So if someone’s scared of that, then that’s not going to work anyway.” Not a girl for the faint-hearted man.

Discussing the commitment-phobes, Swift has started looking faintly glum. I try to cheer her up. I can see you with an older man, I say, encouragingly. Maybe not someone who’s a pop star. They’re not notoriously mature, even when they’re in their sixties.

She brightens. “I think,” she says carefully, shooting me one of her amused, complicit smiles, “that’s probably a sound observation.”

After the interview, e-mails from the under-thirtysomethings are clogging my inbox: “WHAT DID SHE SAY!!!???” Many of them suggest future matches for Swift: Prince Harry ranks highly. “She is SO not going out with Ed Sheeran,” reads one. “He’s too nice. What’s she going to sing about him: ‘You’re so dull’?”

Goodness, the young are harsh. Poor Ed. But they’re right: the future is blindingly bright for Taylor Swift. Especially if she keeps going out with bastards.

Taylor Swift’s new single, 22, is out on March 22