As some of you probably know, Taylor’s album ‘Red’ leaked online late last week – reviews for the album have been really positive! But lets all support Taylor by buying her album when it hits shelves tomorrow.
For her fourth studio album, “Red,” Taylor Swift tried the collaborative approach, reaching out to producers known for their work with Katy Perry, U2 and Snow Patrol and songwriters such as Ed Sheeran and Dan Wilson, whose collaborations with Adele resulted in Grammy wins.
Swift is featured on this week’s cover of Billboard. Here are some of her thoughts on the making of “Red,” the joy of being 22 and why she’ll always play her hits on tour.
Billboard: How did you decide who would make a good partner in the studio?
Swift: The people who inspired me were the people I reached out to. You look at someone like Ed Sheeran, who comes from such a sincere place as a writer, and his songs move you in every direction emotionally. That’s something I was so inspired by I ended up calling him. Snow Patrol are so absolutely dead-on, they can just hit you when they are singing about loss or longing. I have always been so fascinated by how (producer) Max Martin can just land a chorus. He comes at you and hits you and it’s a chorus — all caps, with exclamation points. Dan Wilson, back to his Semisonic days, has been a huge inspiration. When your inspirations become your collaborators, it becomes something really true to the music that you like.
Originally you were going to stick with your longtime collaborator, Nathan Chapman, who continues to work you. What changed?
I turned in 20 songs and I had this immediate sinking feeling, this can’t be done, this can’t be it. I think the reason I said that was because I made the record exactly the same way I made the last three. I knew I hadn’t jumped out of my comfort zone, which at the time was writing alone and working with Nathan. “Red” the song was a real turning point for “Red” the album. When I wrote that song my mind started wandering to all the places we could go. If I were to think outside the box enough, go in with different people, I could learn from and have what they do rub off on me as well as have what I do rub off on them.
The album has songs about break-ups and your emotional condition, sometimes in the moment and sometimes from a reflective point of view. While the beats and instrumentation are different throughout “Red,” do you see a thematic link there?
It’s all the different ways that you have to say goodbye to someone. When you’re experiencing the ups and downs of a relationship, especially when you’re 22 years old, they all strike you different ways. Every different kind of missing someone, every kind of loss – it all sounds different to me. When you are missing someone, time seems to move slower and when I’m falling in love with someone, time seems to be moving faster. So I think, because time seems to move so slow when I’m sad, that’s why I spend so much time writing songs about it. It seems like I have more hours in the day.
Right, you don’t write about dancing, you just dance.
Exactly.
But you specifically come back and sing about dancing around at your current age. Why 22?
For me, being 22 has been my favorite year of my life. I like all the possibilities of how you’re still learning, but you know enough. You still know nothing, but you know that you know nothing. You’re old enough to start planning your life, but you’re young enough to know there are so many unanswered questions. That brings about a carefree feeling that is sort of based on indecision and fear and a the same time letting lose. Being 22 has taught me so much.
In writing with so many people on “Red” after doing “Speak Now” solo, did you have to find multiple ways to work with collaborators or is there one way that works for you?
I start all of my co-writing sessions with girl talk. I walk in and I go, “I have to tell you what I’m going through right now” and I spend 25 minutes talking about the guy that I met four months ago and how things were fine and then he lied about this and I freaked out. I haven’t been talking to him, but I really want to. I want to write a song about that feeling. And then I get out my guitar and say here’s my idea, but I wanted to give you the back story before I played you the idea.
I think the pop songs will get the most attention, but you have a few lovely ballads on “Red,” “Treacherous” and “Sad Beautiful Tragic.”
“Sad Beautiful Tragic” is really close to my heart. I remember it was after a show and I was on the bus thinking about this relationship that ended months and months before. The feeling wasn’t sadness and anger or those things anymore. It was wistful loss. And so I just got my guitar and I hit on the fact that I was thinking in terms of rhyming; I rhymed magic with tragic, changed a few things and ended it with what a sad beautiful tragic love affair. I wanted to tell the story in terms of a cloudy recollection of what went wrong. It’s kind of the murky gray, looking back on something you can’t change or get back.
Have you begin to think about the “Red” tour and how you will present new material?
I know it will be theatrical, but different than the “Speak Now” tour. It felt like we put on a play every night. [As for material] I like when I go to a concert and the artist respects what the people’s favorite songs are. I’m going to be playing “Love Story” for the rest of my career because the fans really like it. If I ever get sick of it, I would continue to play it at my shows. You have to, as an artist, remember your experiences as a fan. And as a fan you heard the song in your bedroom, you played it over and over again, you know where the fiddle part is, you know where the banjo part is and you like the way it is sung on the record. I don’t see me altering the way my previous work sounds live because people want to hear it the way they heard it on record. I don’t need to do a jazz version of “Tim McGraw.” That being said, we’ve done some fun mash-ups. Sometimes it’s fun to weave someone else’s song into your song as a surprise. I’m always balancing — how much new material do people want to hear, how much old material — and at the end of the day I’m trying to put on a show that accurately represents where I am now.
Six-time GRAMMY Award winner Taylor Swift’s highly-anticipated fourth studio album, Red, arrives in stores on October 22nd, and Taylor will make several national TV appearances during release week to launch the Big Machine Records album.
On release date, October 22nd, a select group of Taylor’s Twitter followers and Facebook friends will join her in New York, where they will literally “follow” her during her release week events, providing live updates to millions of fans around the world via social media postings. Taylor currently has more than 19.7 million Twitter followers and 34.9 million Facebook likes.Taylor will be live in Times Square for ABC’s “Good Morning America” on both October 22nd and 23rd (7:00 a.m. ET/PT), and on the 23rd she will be the lead guest and perform on “The Late Show with David Letterman” (11:35 ET/PT on CBS).
On the 24th Taylor will be live on ABC’s “The View” for a performance and chat, and on the 25th she will make a special concert appearance on the “The Ellen DeGeneres Show.”
On the 26th, she will guest on ABC’s “Katie” with Katie Couric, and that same evening she will be featured on ABC’s “All Access Nashville with Katie Couric – A Special Edition of 20/20” primetime special (9:00 ET/PT).
Also, the week of October 22nd will be “Taylor Swift Week” on “Entertainment Tonight,” and Taylor will also be interviewed next week on “Access Hollywood,” “E! News,” and “Extra.”
In addition to her TV appearances that week, Taylor will sit down for a live Q&A session with an audience at the SiriusXM studios in New York. “SiriusXM’s Town Hall with Taylor Swift” will air live on The Highway on October 22nd at 2:00 pm ET. And, on the 24th, Taylor will visit Scholastic’s New York headquarters, where she will again this year take time out from her busy release week schedule for a special literacy event as part of their “Read Every Day” literacy campaign.
After the New York media events, Taylor will return to Nashville, where she’ll take part in the Taylor Swift Worldwide Radio Remote presented by Papa John’s. With 72 stations broadcasting live from Music City on Friday, October 26th, the radio event will cover four formats–Country, CHR, Hot AC, AC–and five continents, with stations from as far away as South Africa and New Zealand. In addition, Taylor Swift fans are fully engaged in the launch of Red, with more than 300 radio contest winners receiving VIP experiences at several of Taylor’s media stops.
Taylor is featured on the cover of Rolling Stone’s current Hot List issue, as well as on the November covers of Glamour and Marie Claire UK.
Red is already making huge inroads at both radio and retail. Individual digital paid song download sales have already exceeded 3.8 million, and the album’s lead single, “”We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” has been officially certified Double Platinum. “Never Ever” spent 3 weeks at #1 atop Billboard’s all-genre Hot 100 chart, topped the iTunes charts in 32 countries, and set a new record for the biggest digital sales week ever for a female artist. In addition, four more songs from Red, “Begin Again,” “Red,” “I Knew You Were Trouble.” and “State of Grace” have been released on iTunes, with exclusive previews on “Good Morning America,” and all topped the all-genre iTunes charts within hours of release.
New song “State of Grace” from RED will be available for download on iTunes TONIGHT at 12am ET! Only 7 days until RED.
Taylor Swift is giving fans little bits of excitement every day, as she announced on Twitter Sunday that a new song from her upcoming album, Red will debut Monday on Good Morning America.
Fans are (im)patiently awaiting the country-pop-princess’ album to drop on October 22 after she announced the exciting news on her YouTube channel back in August. From there, she debuted her now-hit, “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together.”
Then, just last week, Swift revealed the track-list to the album, as well as debuting another song, “Begin Again,” which is more country than pop as previously showing on “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together.”
Sunday, Swift took to Twitter to announce the debut of yet another song.
“So there’s gonna be a new song preview from #RED on @GMA tomorrow morning at 7am ET, available on iTunes Tuesday!! Called “State of Grace,” she wrote.
Swift has kept Twitter followers excited as she has kept a “Countdown” until her album drops. Today, she snapped a pic of eight seashells representing eight days till Red hits the shelves.
As Taylor Swift nears the October 22 release of her album, Red, she’s giving fans another taste of what’s to come. On Tuesday (October 9), Swift’s loopy break-up track, “I Knew You Were Trouble,” debuted in full and it follows her love affair with an irresistible cad.
She opens up the tune by breaking down the early stages of their romance, “Once upon a time/ A few mistakes ago/ I was in your sights/ You got me alone/ You found me.”
The song touches on all genres of music, with moments of straight-up Top 40 pop, country and even dance, with its grinding effects, especially on the bumping chorus. On it, she professes, “I knew you were trouble when you walked in/ Shame on me now/ Flew me to places I’d never been/ ‘Til you put me down/ I knew you were trouble when you walked in/ Shame on me now/ Flew me to places I’d never been/ Now I’m lying on the cold hard ground/ Oh, trouble, trouble, trouble.”
The song offers more insight into her relationship with the bad boy later on when she sings, “A new notch in your belt is all I’ll be/ And now I see/ He was long gone/ When he met me/ And I realize/ The joke is on me.”
Musically, the way the song bounces around musical genres was one of Swift’s intentions. Speaking about “I Knew You Were Trouble” to “Good Morning America” on Monday, she said, “It’s a song that’s one of my favorite songs on the album because it sounds just as chaotic as the feeling was when I wrote it. It’s a song about kind of being frustrated with yourself because you have your heart broken and you knew when you first saw that person you saw all these red flags and you just went for it anyway,” she explained. “So, shame on me.”
In addition to releasing the song, she also dropped the 16-song track list for the album. Swift included her duet with Ed Sheeran on the song “Everything Has Changed,” but there is still one more mystery duet that she has yet to talk about. Her next single is slated to be “Begin Again.”
“Well, in terms of my album, it kind of signifies the intense, really bold emotions you feel when you’re in kind of mad love,” she told MTV News last month about the album, which includes her hit single, “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together.” “And I think that all of the songs on the album are written about those kinds of experiences that I’ve had.”
Weeks after she drops her album, Swift will be in Frankfurt, Germany, on November 11 to perform at the 2012 MTV Europe Music Awards where she is up for five awards.
Taylor Swift has another top forty single in the form of “Red.”
The award-winning singer’s latest single, which is the title track from her forthcoming album, “RED,” debuted at no.26 on the UK Singles Chart Sunday.
“Red” is Swift’s third single on the coveted tally at the moment. It joins the no.10 charting “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” and no. 47 charting “Begin Again.”
In related news, One Direction debuted at no.3 on the chart with “Live While We’re Young.”
Both Swift and One Direction, along with R&B singer/songwriter Ne-Yo, appeared at the BBC Radio 1 Teen Awards in London Sunday.
Walking the red carpet, they were also joined by radio personality Reggie Yates.
Lastly, Taylor Swift will be previewing a new song from “Red” on “Good Morning America (GMA)” Monday. Breaking the news via Twitter Sunday, Swift says the song is titled “I Knew You Were Trouble.”
“There’s a preview of a brand new song from Red tomorrow morning on GMA. It’s called ‘I Knew You Were Trouble.’ And it’s one of my favssss,” said Swift.
Great news Sydney Swifties! After a show stopping performance of her hit single ‘We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together’ at the ’2012 MTV Video Music Awards’, today ARIA announced Taylor Swift will be performing at the ’2012 ARIA Awards’.
The six-time Grammy Award winner joins a line up of talented homegrown acts to perform at Sydney Entertainment Centre on November 29 including 360, Jessica Mauboy, The Temper Trap, Hilltop Hoods, and The Jezabels.
But that’s not all the latest T-Swizzle news! The 22 year-old singer/songwriter just unveiled the official track listing of her soon to be released fourth studio album ‘Red’!
‘Red’ track list:
1. ‘State Of Grace’
2. ‘Red’
3. ‘Treacherous’
4. ‘I Knew You Were Trouble.’
5. ‘All Too Well’
6. ’22′
7. ‘I Almost Do’
8. ‘We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together’
9. ‘Stay Stay Stay’
10. ‘The Last Time’
11. ‘Holy Ground’
12. ‘Sad Beautiful Tragic’
13. ‘The Lucky One’
14. ‘Everything Has Changed’
15. ‘Starlight’
16. ‘Begin Again’
“
“Red,” the title track from Taylor’s forthcoming album RED is now available for download on iTunes! Get it HERE
“Red,” the title track from the forthcoming album RED, will be available for download on iTunes tonight at 12am ET! Check out a preview of the song below:
I’ve added HQ screencaps to the gallery from Taylor’s online appearance. Check out the link below.
X77HQ//October 1st – Taylor releases preview for upcoming single, Red
You can now buy Taylor’s new song, Begin Again, on iTunes HERE