TAYLOR Swift is a honey-boiler who strategically dates men as songbait for her next kiss and dis breakup tune.

That’s the sexist tirade used against Swift after split hits We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together and I Knew You Were Trouble soundtracked the globe.

From stand-up comedians to anonymous Tweeters the not-so-subtle message was repeated — maybe it’s her, not them. Adele had the same problem when she dared write about a shattered heart as a female musician. Swift became shamed as the man-hungry pop star, a double standard never applied to the pantsman male rock star stretching back as far as Mick Jagger.

For a while Swift kept a dignified silence, leaving it to gentlemen like her friend Ed Sheeran, who pointed out she’d only dated two men in the two years they’d known each other.

Like her hero Carly Simon, Swift’s never revealed who her songs are about. Like, ever. And like Simon, who’s kept the subject of You’re So Vain secret since 1972 despite constant speculation to this day, you know Swift’s in for the long haul when it comes to not naming names.

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TAYLOR SWIFT: 1989 Tour of Australia — dates and venues

Carly Simon & Taylor Swift - You're So Vain

But something changed within Taylor Swift in the past year — she got in on the joke.

That’s her knowing laugh after she sings “I go on too many dates” and before “but I can’t make them stay, at least that’s what people say” on her hater negator anthem Shake It Off, the first taste of Swift’s pop masterpiece 1989.

media_camera “I think a lot of growth has happened in the last two years of my life that I’ve been living with just me” ... Taylor Swift at The Giver movie premiere in New York City. Picture: Dimitrios Kambouris / Getty Images

The inside joke — Swift’s two years single. The joke is amplified on second single Blank Space, home to the line “darling I’m a nightmare dressed like a daydream. In case you missed the self-parody the video sees Swift play a knife-waving, property-destroying, jealous ex-girlfriend that instantly defuses the ridiculous perception of her impressively private life.

“My life got a lot easier when I learned to take it all with a sense of humour,” Swift says. “When I started to laugh at myself people stopped making so many jokes about me! It’s almost like I’d made the joke first.

“It’s interesting having the first two singles off this album be tongue in cheek. I don’t know if people understand how tongue in cheek Blank Space is. It’s really fun to be able to play around with humour for the first time.”

The video was made with Joseph Kahn (behind two of her favourite clips — Britney’s Toxic and Eminem’s Love the Way You Lie) who embraced the fact Swift wanted to take some risks.

“The media painted this very extreme narrative of what they thought my life was,” Swift says. “So I took it a step further and fed it back into my career. Which is hopefully what you aspire to do as a songwriter. Hopefully if life keeps throwing you curve balls you can continue to articulate them into song form and be inspired by them for videos.”

There’s still relationship post-mortems on 1989, but Swift’s had some Taylor Time to reflect on lost love. It’s not new territory — Speak Now’s Back To December came with an in-built apology that didn’t fit the narrative of Swift’s man-bashing. And of course the Tay haters never focused on Swift’s loved-up album tracks like Enchanted and 1989’s You Are In Love.

But in Style (the double meaning of the title is surely no accident for someone as surgically precise with their words as Swift) she confronts her long haired, white t-shirted partner (One Direction’s Harry Styles, if fan detective work is correct) with rumours of his infidelity. He `fesses up while Swift surprisingly replies “I’ve been there a few times too.”

Is Taylor Swift owning up to something? Well, kind of.

“This record has a lot more relationship dynamics, compared to what I used to write about which had very clear good guy/bad guy roles,” she explains. “I usually fell into the role of ‘You hurt me and it made me feel like this, that’s why I’m writing this song’. I definitely expanded upon that and switched into a different lane of storytelling for this album.

“Which was a goal. You want to grow sonically. You want to grow thematically. You want to grow lyrically. You want people to ask you questions like the one you just asked me where you’re like ‘Well, what was it that taught that lesson that made you want to admit some fault?’

“The thing I learned in the course of writing this record is that a lot of the time it’s not so clear who was right and who was wrong, or who was the one who was good and who wasn’t. A lot of the time you get into complex relationships where it’s broken from lots of different angles, not just one.”

media_camera Swift performs at this weekend’s KIIS Jingle Ball in Los Angeles. Picture: Jason Merritt (Getty Images)

Indeed, Swift’s happy for her fans to see her as the poster girl for being single in a world where some believe love will complete or validate them.

Being single, she says, is not only healthy but a perfect way to cultivate friends and channel her creative energies.

“Everybody’s in a different place in their lives,” she says. “When I had people tell me ‘Oh you should just be single for a few years’ if you’re not in that place you don’t get it. But once you get to that place where you are totally fine with your life and your friends you just fall in love with your own life and it’s just as fulfilling. It’s a different kind of feeling, of course, but I think a lot of growth has happened in the last two years of my life that I’ve been living with just me.”

It’s also given Swift time to reinvent her songwriting and musical genres, temporarily leaving country for pop, but also to focus on the people responsible for her charmed life — her legion of loyal fans.

Connecting directly to fans was something instilled in Swift early on through the world of country and becoming the year’s most successful pop star in the world hasn’t changed her.

Most artists would never admit to searching out blogs run by their fans — Swift not only avidly reads them, she’s sent personalised Christmas gifts to some of her most devoted bloggers around the world, with handwritten notes referencing things she loved on their pages and gifts she’d purchased with them in mind during her 1989 world promotional jaunt.

media_camera Chart toppers ... Taylor Swift and Ed Sheeran have become firm friends with love of joint selfies. Picture: Supplied

Some may dismiss it as ego-googling (the blogs are usually more about the authors’ personal lives than being mere Swift shrines) but the singer sees it as instant, direct research.

“It’s really good to have your finger on the pulse of what your fans actually want from you,” she says. “Being on Tumblr and Instagram and Twitter gives me a chance to really actively stay on top of that relationship. Any relationship needs nourishment. More so than ever before in my career I’ve been really keeping up with that relationship and trying as hard as I possibly can to show my fans in different ways that they don’t expect that I really appreciate them.”

Earlier this year Swift famously removed her music from all streaming services. It’s a topic she’s covered in detail, but her sales of 1989 so far (over 120,000 in six weeks in Australia, and 2.5 million in the US alone) vindicate her belief that the album isn’t dead if you make a special one that people are happy to pay for. Swift treats new music as an event.

Swift told Billboard (who named her Woman of the Year) this month succinctly “Until Spotify starts to fairly compensate the creators of music, I’m not going to be a part of it.”

While Ed Sheeran is obsessive about his sales figures and chart positions. Swift, who has the fastest-selling album in the US since 2002 with 1989, says charts don’t rule her thoughts.

“I really like to keep track of sales, I think that’s very important. If we have a song that could go to No. 1 that’s very important to me. But Ed is a whole different story, he knows his (radio) spin count on a daily basis for his singles, it’s crazy. He knows who’s coming down the chart, how many weeks before another song goes to No. 1, how many weeks it can stay at No. 1 ... it’s wild.”

media_camera World tour ... Swift wants her fans to know it’s OK to be single. Picture: Christopher Polk / Getty Images

Next year Swift takes her 1989 tour around the world’s stadiums, most of them with Melbourne’s Vance Joy to warm up the crowd — including the Australian leg.

It’s a coveted slot that helped break Ed Sheeran in the US _ Swift’s devoted crowd know she hand-picks her supports and are respectful enough to get there early.

“I fell in love with the song Riptide,” Swift says of Vance Joy (she covered the song for UK radio). “If there’s a song I’ve played more than 500 then chances are I’m probably going to offer that person an opening slot on my tour.”

media_camera Opening act on world tour ... Vance Joy’s Riptide has been played over 500 times by Taylor Swift. Picture: Nicole Cleary

No stranger to stadium shows, Swift has already got the stage sorted (“we’ve had that in place for months”) but is now busy creating her first ‘official’ pop tour after flirting with the genre for years. Her Red tour (which made over $150 million) featured choreographed routines and dancers for pop moments like I Knew You Were Trouble and 22.

“This album’s proved to be the favourite among my fans, so most of the songs I’m going to play on this tour will be from 1989,” she says. “Although I realise it’s important to play some songs from the past, but it’s going to be predominately 1989.

“Everything I do I try to make it my own. I knew I was making a pop album, but I didn’t want to follow any kind of blueprint anyone else had done before so I customised it to what I’m comfortable with. There’s no rule book that says you have to do a certain amount of choreography or you have to put a show together in a way that someone’s done it before. I like to play around with mixing high energy choreography with a theatrical story narrative. I’ll tell a story lots of different ways throughout the course of the night.”

The 1989 tour starts in Japan in May, before winding up in Melbourne in December 2015, just days before Swift’s 26 birthday (she’ll turn 25 on December 13).

“With this tour I want it to be an experience where people walk away knowing we really went all out. That it was worth them paying their hard earned money for a ticket and worth them parking their car and waiting in line. But I want it to be worth it in different ways than it has been before on my last tours. I want them to not know what’s coming next and be pleasantly surprised.”

*Taylor Swift, ANZ Stadium, Sydney, November 28. $89.90-$599.90.

*Taylor Swift, Suncorp Stadium, Brisbane, December 5. $94.80-$603.90.

*Taylor Swift, Adelaide Entertainment Centre, December 7. $129.90-$575.

*Taylor Swift, AAMI Park, Melbourne, December 11. $89.90-$599.90.

All tickets on sale 9am Melbourne, 10am all other venues, Friday (Ticketek.com.au)

Taylor Swift - Riptide

Taylor Swift media_camera Taylor Swift and guitarist Grant Mickelson perform live on stage at The Burswood Dome on March 2, 2012 in Perth, Australia. (Photo by Paul Kane/Getty Images) 1 of 64 media_camera Taylor Swift performs live on stage at The Burswood Dome on March 2, 2012 in Perth, Australia. (Photo by Paul Kane/Getty Images)

2 of 64 media_camera Taylor Swift performs live on stage at The Burswood Dome on March 2, 2012 in Perth, Australia. (Photo by Paul Kane/Getty Images) 3 of 64 media_camera Taylor Swift performs live on stage at The Burswood Dome on March 2, 2012 in Perth, Australia. (Photo by Paul Kane/Getty Images) 4 of 64 nav_small_close Want to see more?( 60 more photos in collection )Continue to full gallery nav_small_left nav_small_right

Originally published as Taylor Swift: My songs have changed