Taylor Swift is trying really hard to cut ties with her past life and reimagine her future.
In a new Rolling Stone interview, the country-gone-pop singer details her recent move to New York and talks about how much she loves living there. (She still owns a condo in Nashville.) The story also reveals the singer won’t attend any country music awards shows and that she rebuffed requests from her record label to include country songs on new album “1989.”
Swift also tells the magazine the project is free of love-gone-wrong songs, which had been a staple of her music.
“Different phases of your life have different levels of deep, traumatizing heartbreak,” Swift said in the story. “And in this period of my life, my heart was not irreparably broken. So it’s not as boy-centric of an album, because my life hasn’t been boy-centric.”
Swift said she hasn’t even been on a date since her relationship with One Direction singer Harry Styles ended more than a year-and-a-half ago.
“Like, have not gone on a date,” she said. “People are going to feel sorry for me when you write that. But it’s true.”
She said most of the time when someone asks her out, it is via email and at that point she just brushes them off. The singer explained she feels like watching her love life has “become a bit of a national pastime,” and she doesn’t like it.
“And I’m just not comfortable providing that kind of entertainment anymore,” she said. “I don’t like seeing slide shows of guys I’ve apparently dated. I don’t like giving comedians the opportunity to make jokes about me at awards shows. I don’t like it when headlines read ‘Careful, Bro, She’ll Write a Song About You,’ because it trivializes my work. And most of all, I don’t like how all these factors add up to build the pressure so high in a new relationship that it gets snuffed out before it even has a chance to start. And so, I just don’t date.”
However, that doesn’t mean her album is free of scorn. This time, it’s directed at a fellow singer.
The article said the “angriest” song on Swift’s “1989” is called “Bad Blood,” which is about a fellow female artist who Swift believes tried to sabotage her arena tour by attempting to hire people away from her camp.
“For years, I was never sure if we were friends or not,” Swift said of the artist, who online sites are speculating could be Katy Perry. “She would come up to me at awards shows and say something and walk away, and I would think, ‘Are we friends, or did she just give me the harshest insult of my life?’ And I’m surprisingly non-confrontational — you would not believe how much I hate conflict. So now I have to avoid her. It’s awkward, and I don’t like it.”
Conflict also arose for Swift when the head of her record label, Scott Borchetta, told her “1989” was the best album she had ever made but that he needed three country songs.
“Love you, mean it,” is how Swift reportedly responded. “But this is how it’s going to be.”
The changes have lead the superstar to a content place in her life where she said she’s almost happy.
“I really like my life right now,” she said in the magazine. “I have friends around me all the time. I’ve started painting more. I’ve been working out a lot. I’ve started to really take pride in being strong. I love the album I made. I love that I moved to New York. So in terms of being happy, I’ve never been closer to that.”
Swift’s new pop album “1989” will be in stores Oct. 27.