TAYLOR SHIFT
With a quiet album launch, the star leaves her squad, her sparkles and her love of the spotlight in the past
THERE’S a blank space in the pop world, and it’s where Taylor Swift used to be.
The pop starlet releases “Reputation” on Friday — her sixth album and easily this year’s most anticipated record. But since the release of its first single, “Look What You Made Me Do,” in August, Swift has done no interviews, made no official public appearances and has kept the kind of profile that would make an agoraphobic hermit crab look thirsty for attention. It’s a strategy that’s impacted her chart performance, too. The four tracks debuted so far have tumbled down the Billboard Hot 100 quicker than expected.
Compare all that to 2014, when Swift announced her first full-fledged pop album “1989” from the top of the Empire State Building, graced the cover of Rolling Stone and was even declared Global Welcome Ambassador of her adopted hometown of New York City. The hype captured the attention of casual fans and helped the catchy first single “Shake It Off” hold at either No. 1 or No. 2 for the two months leading up to the release of “1989.” (By contrast, “Look What You Made Me Do” held the No. 1 spot for a mere three weeks in September.)
The 27-year-old star has gone from being the glamorous and gregarious figure who rolls up to a red carpet with a crew of famous friends to being noticeably more guarded and insular. “Nobody’s heard from me for months/I’m doing better than I ever was,” Swift sings on new track “Call It What You Want.”
“I think she’s definitely tightening her circle,” says Elvis Duran, the Z100 radio host who will be introducing Swift onstage at iHeartRadio’s Jingle Ball at Madison Square Garden in December. “She knows there’s a difference between being a celebrity and being a musician. She wants the music to speak for itself. You can only take that ‘squad’ thing so far.”
The “old” Taylor suffered a messy end in July 2016. It was death by Snapchat, and the assailant was Kim Kardashian.
Late on a Sunday night, the reality star released a video on the social network of her husband Kanye West and Swift discussing, over the phone, a controversial lyric to his song “Famous,” in which the rapper refers to the possibility of having sex with Swift. Contradicting a previous
statement she had made, through a publicist, in February 2016, Swift seemed to give West her approval and is heard to regard it as a “compliment.”
The carefully constructed public image of Swift as America’s sweetheart seemed to crumble overnight. Her Instagram was flooded with snake emojis from angry Kimye fans, and after the long promotional campaign for “1989,” the remaining public goodwill toward her seemed to evaporate.
“Her likability has taken a hit and, more troubling, so has her credibility,” celebrity blogger Perez Hilton told Billboard at the time. Swift herself put out another statement, on Instagram, asking to be “excluded from this narrative, one that I have never asked to be a part of, since 2009” — the year West infamously crashed Swift’s MTV Video Music Award acceptance speech.
Overexposed and caught off guard, Swift has since excluded herself from almost all narratives. She’s locked herself away to work on “Reputation” with her old collaborators Jack Antonoff, Max Martin and Shellback.
Aside from a corporate pre-Super Bowl show in February, Swift’s only real public appearance this year has been in a Denver federal court. In August, she won a lawsuit against DJ David Mueller, who allegedly groped her at a meetand-greet in 2013.
She also fenced off her love life. Throughout 2015 and 2016, Swift was seen regularly with Calvin Harris during their 15-month relationship. She was also frequently pictured with actor Tom Hiddleston, whom she dated for three months during late 2016. This time around, Swift is going to great lengths to keep her current squeeze, British actor Joe Alwyn, under wraps.
According to Us Weekly, she “concocted elaborate plans” to avoid being photographed with Alwyn, 26, especially outside her Tribeca apartment building, where the couple wore black hoodies to run through the back entrance.
“[In the past,] she’s been out there giving away pieces of her life, and people have run with it, and maybe taken advantage of it. I think it might have burned her to a degree,” says Duran. “There are also some cuts on ‘Reputation’ that deal with what it’s like to be her. Having someone take pictures of her in the street and make thousands of dollars from them.” The people that Swift has been opening up to are her most loyal fans. The singer continues to talk directly with the most hard-core Swifties on social media, and has held secret listening parties for “Reputation” in select cities around the world. “It’s like a fan-focus outreach program,” says Duran. “She doesn’t have to do an interview every day. There doesn’t have to be a circus.” Swift can’t, and won’t, hide forever. On Saturday, she will appear on “Saturday Night Live” and, aside from her appearances at several stops on December’s Jingle Ball tour, a much bigger tour next year seems almost certain. And she may yet have the last laugh on the charts, too. Part of the reason none of the “Reputation” songs have maintained their chart position is because of their modest streaming numbers. But she has millions of fans who will not just buy her albums, but actually protect her from damaging leaks. This week, a UK music store was inundated with threatening tweets from Swifties who were irate that staffers were playing the new album over instore speakers.
Additionally, Swift is also rumored to be keeping “Reputation” away from streaming platforms to boost sales. Presale orders are already at an impressive 400,000 units, and it’s become Target’s highest presale album in history. So, while hip-hop acts such as Post Malone and Cardi B sit pretty at the top of the Hot 100 based on low-earning streams, Swift will be taking home the big bucks thanks to actual sales.
“Predicted sales are somewhere around 2 million in the first week for ‘Reputation,’ so I don’t think she needs to be exposed at a high level,” says David Bakula, who monitors music sales and streams at Nielsen. (By comparison, sales of Adele’s blockbuster album “25” surpassed 3 million in its first week.)
“Taylor doesn’t exist on the strength of her singles,” Bakula adds. “It’s about the support and passion of the artist as a whole, so once the album comes out, I think she’s gonna be just fine!”