'Everyone’s got an important mom, but for me, she’s really the guiding force.'
Taylor Swift is opening up about her mom's health struggles.
In a new interview with Variety, the 30-year-old singer reveals that Andrea Swift's cancer has spread.
"Everyone loves their mom; everyone’s got an important mom, but for me, she’s really the guiding force," Taylor says. "Almost every decision I make, I talk to her about it first. So obviously it was a really big deal to ever speak about her illness."
Taylor first revealed her mom's breast cancer diagnosis in 2015 and shared in March 2019 that Andrea's cancer had returned. Andrea's new tumor, Taylor says, was discovered while she was undergoing chemotherapy treatment.
"She was going through chemo, and that’s a hard enough thing for a person to go through," she says. "While she was going through treatment, they found a brain tumor. And the symptoms of what a person goes through when they have a brain tumor is nothing like what we’ve ever been through with her cancer before. So it’s just been a really hard time for us as a family."
Her mom's illness partially led to her decision to limit her tour dates for her latest album, Lover, which included "Soon You'll Get Better," a track about Andrea's cancer battle.
"That’s the reason. I mean, we don’t know what is going to happen. We don’t know what treatment we’re going to choose," she says. "It just was the decision to make at the time, for right now, for what’s going on."
"... I wanted to be able to perform in places that I hadn’t performed in as much, and to do things I hadn’t done before, like Glastonbury. I feel like I haven’t done festivals, really, since early in my career -- they’re fun and bring people together in a really cool way," Swift adds. "But I also wanted to be able to work as much as I can handle right now, with everything that’s going on at home. And I wanted to figure out a way that I could do both those things."
Taylor's latest interview comes ahead of the Sundance premiere of her Netflix documentary, Taylor Swift: Miss Americana, which, Swift says, will showcase challenging times in her life including her mom's illness, her feud with Kanye West, and her GRAMMY snubs, among other things.
"The bigger your career gets, the more you struggle with the idea that a lot of people see you the same way they see an iPhone or a Starbucks," she says. "They’ve been inundated with your name in the media, and you become a brand. That’s inevitable for me, but I do think that it’s really necessary to feel like I can still communicate with people. And as a songwriter, it’s really important to still feel human and process things in a human way."
"The through line of all that is humanity, and reaching out and talking to people and having them see things that aren’t cute," she continues. "There's not a lot that's cute in this documentary."
Taylor Swift: Miss Americana will hit Netflix on Jan. 31.
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