Taylor Swift covers Elle Canada December 2020 issue looking gorgeously whimsical. The beautiful 22-year-old songstress sits down for a chat with the magazine and talks about “Oh snap!” moments, her new album Red, and falling in love. “Most of the songs are about very tumultuous relationships that I encountered over the past couple of years — none of them were anything mundane or normal. It was always just amazingly great or amazingly awful or just frustrating and confusing or incredible and exciting and wonderful and magnificent and magical or terrible. Nothing in between,” Taylor says in her interview.
She also dishes on celebrity and trying to live a “normal” life. “I’m always analyzing everything, so I thought a lot about what my life might be like if this actually happened to me,” she says. “I didn’t think I’d get to still be the same person. I would watch all these True Hollywood Stories, and it seemed like a lot of people didn’t get to live the life they loved once they’d made it.”
However, it seems that Taylor managed to remain realistic and bring the best things from her old life into the new one. “When you can still just call your best friend that you had in high school and talk about the same things you used to talk about, that’s when you know it’s okay,” she explains. “A lot of my friends now are stylists or actresses,” she admits. “But we never end up talking shop. We’re always just talking about our lives and our feelings and our relationships and our constant, never-ending, perpetual mini-dramas that happen on a daily basis.”
Speaking about love and relationships, the young starlet confesses that, “I have a lot of sayings. Like, if you’re debating whether you want to break up with a guy or not, I always ask myself the simple question of ‘Do you want more or not?’ When they leave and they go home to their house, do you wish they would turn around and come back to yours? And ‘I don’t know’ usually equals no in almost any scenario. I was just talking to my friend about that today.”
What about heartbreaks? “My album is actually a little bit of a life justification for me at this point, you know?” she says. “Because when you have a relationship that does nothing but hurt you — I know you learn lessons from everything you go through in life — when you’re just reeling from the pain of loss and you’re crying with your best friends on a three-person conference call and you’re just sitting there thinking ‘Why did this person come into my life if it hurts so much to lose them?’ you can sit there and say ‘Well, I got tracks six, seven and 12 out of it.’” “I mean, it’s not to say that I go out looking for bad relationships that end terribly, but they’ve produced some songs I’m really proud of.”
But will she ever get tired of writing/singing/ performing songs that are quite thematically similar? “I don’t know what else I would write songs about,” she told Elle Canada. “I just don’t feel like writing songs about anything other than human emotions because it’s such a fascinating thing…. What else is there other than love?”
In her interview with the magazine, Taylor also dishes on “Oh snap!” moments. “I don’t really have in-your-face moments. I’m always terrified of regretting something afterwards,” she explains. “I haven’t had an ‘Oh, snap’ moment, like running into someone who really hurt me and saying something really witty that really cuts them off at the knees. Then I’m horrible — then they’d walk away and be like ‘Wow, she was just super-mean to me; let’s go talk about her the whole car ride home.’” But what about ‘Dear John’? “All’s fair in music and songwriting,” she told the magazine. “I think that every guy who has dated me has completely known what they were signing up for — it was not written in fine print anywhere. My life ends up being music. It’s who I am.”
Photos courtesy of Elle Canada
