Taylor Swift Talks Writing New Album & Making Her Music “Weirder,” “Darker”

Sam Lansky | October 15, 2013 9:38 am

Taylor Swift is hard at work on her upcoming fifth album, although she’s been relatively quiet about what to expect on the new LP — producers? Songwriters? Ex-boyfriends? Who knows! — but she’s broken her silence in a new interview with the Associated Press while accepting her thousandth award from the Nashville Songwriters Association International, and it all sounds pretty promising. How so? There’s change on this one.

To wit: “I think the goal for the next album is to continue to change, and never change in the same way twice,” she explained. “How do I write these figurative diary entries in ways that I’ve never written them before and to a sonic backdrop that I’ve never explored before? It’s my fifth album, which is crazy to think about, but I think what I’m noticing about it so far is it’s definitely taking a different turn than anything I’ve done before.”

When asked about her primary collaborators on the new LP, her answer was a little confusing — she said “it’s too early to tell,” but that her “absolute dream collaborators were Shellback and Max Martin on the last project.” Oddly, her tense then shifts to the present, suggesting that perhaps they’re working together again: “I’ve never just been so excited to show up to the studio every day, just because you never know what we’re going to put together. I’ll bring in ideas and they’ll take such a different turn than where I thought they were going to go, and that level of unexpected spontaneity is something that really thrills me in the process of making music. … What if we did this? What if we made it weirder? What if we took it darker? I love people who have endless strange and exciting ideas about where music can go.”

Given her various inroads into sonic experimentation on Red — the dubstep-lite of “Trouble,” the organic tribal drum-vibe of “Holy Ground” — her track record with pushing the parameters a little bit of what a country-pop superstar can do is already proven. Taylor Swift goes weirder and darker? Yes. I’ll take it.

[via Associated Press]

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