Taylor Swift feared her songwriting would “dry up” once she was “truly happy”.
The 35-year-old pop idol has just released her 12th studio album, The Life of a Showgirl, and as she’s happier than ever – having just got engaged to her longtime partner Travis Kelce – Taylor was concerned she’d have nothing to write about, because she’d always assumed she was a tortured poet.
Speaking on the BBC Radio 1 Breakfast With Greg James about her follow-up to 2024’s The Tortured Poets Department, she said: “It’s wonderful. I used to kind of have this dark fear that if I ever were truly happy and free, being myself and nurtured by a relationship, what happens if the writing just dries up?
“What if writing is directly tied to my torment and pain? And it turns out that’s not the case at all, and we just were catching lightning in a bottle with this record.”
“What if writing is directly tied to my torment and pain? And it turns out that’s not the case at all, and we just were catching lightning in a bottle with this record.”
Many of Taylor’s albums have included manifestations about the future, but this time, she focused on the present.
She said: “With this album, my life is in exactly the same spot as when I wrote the record.”
Taylor reunited with pop producers Max Martin and Shellback on the record, and since the last time she’d worked with the pair, she has honed the art of creating characters.
The Actually Romantic singer explained: “I made this album with Max Martin and Shellback, who I hadn’t worked with in maybe seven or eight years.
“In the time that we kind of took a break from working together, we were all out there honing powers of different types, and one of the things that I was really playing with in our time away was writing in character, and kind of developing these characters and these character arcs and things – and that is present on this record.
“Even though it’s about my life, sometimes you cosplay, like, this is a love song through the lens of Elizabeth Taylor’s life.
“There’s different motifs that I think we’re trying out on this record that are sort of a culmination of me practicing and working up to the point where I could make this type of album.”