Plus, the singer opens up about her new single, 'ME!', and why her upcoming studio album will be so much different than 'Reputation.'
Taylor Swift couldn't be any more excited about her bright new era.
The singer joined Zane Lowe for an interview on Beats 1 on Apple Music via Facetime on Monday, where she shared all the details on "ME!," her fun, bubbly new single and music video featuring Brendon Urie of Panic! at the Disco.
"Putting out this song and video has been really, really exciting and just a really joyful experience," she gushed. "The video's like a magical, whimsical, mystical world. So it's kind of been amazing to see the fans pick out little Easter eggs. I just feel really grateful."
"It was a really great experience working with [director] Dave Meyers," she continued. "We got together and basically tried to figure out as many cool visual effects as we could incorporate into the storyline that I'd written. ... This video shoot, the amount of times that Brendon and I just doubled over laughing, like where your stomach hurts, where you need to sit down. [It was] that kind of laughter. When you can make stuff and laugh that much while you're making things, I mean, that's the best thing in the world."
Of course, Swift would be nowhere without her fans, whom she credits for encouraging her to make new music so quickly after the release of 2017's Reputation, an album where she felt she was "definitely putting up a defense mechanism."
"The aesthetic for the music I make is usually a reflection of how I feel as a person. During the Reputation stadium tour, I started to feel my life. My life felt different. It felt like there was a different tone, like different undertones to my life, like a different soundtrack playing behind my life," Swift explained. "I really do credit the fans for the complete resurgence of exuberance and excitement towards music and making new music. And the way that I felt about this enthusiasm towards making new music is what made me get in the studio so fast and just make music really quickly after the tour because of that energy that they had given me every single night of that tour."
"I was looking out into the crowd and seeing so much love and care," she recalled. "These people really, really are so wonderful to me and they really were the ones that made me feel like, 'No, I am ready to put out new music.' I'm ready to kind of do it a little bit more like I used to. I feel more comfortable."
Swift also teased her upcoming seventh studio album. She previously said on Twitter that "the new album title is actually revealed somewhere in the video AND so is the title of the second single," and Swifties have been channeling their inner detectives ever since to try and crack the case.
"A lot of them know it," she told Lowe. "They're really smart. [But] there are fewer people who know the next single title."
"The Easter egg hunts, when they stop being fun for my fans, I'll stop doing them," she continued. "But they seem to be having fun with them and I think that with music, I'm always trying to expand the experience from just being an audio one. Like, if I can turn it into something that feels symbolic or seems like a scavenger hunt or seems like some kind of brain game that feels like it's more, then I think that's something to keep in mind as a goal for me. I just want to entertain them on as many levels when I can."
While she couldn't reveal the album name just yet, Swift did tease that her new music will be "much more playful" than what fans heard on Reputation.
"When you get into this album, it's much more about me as a person, no pun intended with the song title," she joked. "It's kind of taking those walls, taking that bunker down from around you that I felt like I had to put up."
"I didn't try to explain [Reputation] because I didn't feel that I owed that to anyone. There was a lot that happened over a couple of years that made me feel really, really terrible," she remembered. "I didn't feel like expressing that to them. I didn't feel like talking about it. I just felt like making music, then going out on the road and doing a stadium tour and doing everything I could for my fans. Everything I did was for them."
And when Swift says "everything," she means it.
"The relationship between me and fans really actually strengthened throughout the course of Reputation," the pop star explained. "That was what made it something that I think I'll look back on and find to be one of the most beautiful times of my life, was when I realized that it's me and it's them and that's what makes this fun for me."
See highlights from the official music video for "ME!" below:
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