October 31, 2014 9:29 PM
Heard on All Things Considered
NPR STAFF
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Taylor Swift's new album is titled 1989.
Courtesy of the artist
Taylor Swift has had one amazing week. Her new album, released Monday, is on track to eclipse 1 million sales by Tuesday. The last artist to go platinum in a week was Swift herself with her 2012 album, Red. So by the time she arrived at NPR's New York bureau today, she'd earned the right to a little goofiness — in this case, showing up in her Halloween costume, a fuzzy white bodysuit with wings that she described as a Pegasus-unicorn hybrid.
Her new album is titled 1989. That's the year Swift was born, which means that at just shy of 25 years old, she's spent close to half her life in the music industry. In a far-reaching conversation with NPR's Melissa Block, she addressed how things have changed since she began her career a decade ago — not just for her, but for the teenaged girls who have always been her primary demographic — as well as how she's reacted to the digital age's effect on media, music and feminism. Hear the radio version at the audio link, and read more of their conversation below.
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Melissa Block: I enlisted some expert outside counsel for this interview: my 12-year-old daughter. And I want to start with a question from her. "In your hit song 'Shake It Off,' why'd you address the song to your haters and not your motivators?"
Taylor Swift: That's amazing. With the song 'Shake It Off,' I really wanted to kind of take back the narrative, and have more of a sense of humor about people who kind of get under my skin — and not let them get under my skin. There's a song that I wrote a couple years ago called "Mean," where I addressed the same issue but I addressed it very differently. I said, "Why you gotta be so mean?" from kind of a victimized perspective, which is how we all approach bullying or gossip when it happens to us for the first time. But in the last few years I've gotten better at just kind of laughing off things that absolutely have no bearing on my real life. I think it's important to be self-aware about what people are saying about you, but even more so, be very aware of who you actually are, and to have that be the main priority.