Taylor Swift Finally Revealed The Reason Why She Didn’t Do Interviews During Her Controversial Reputation Era

Highlights

• Taylor Swift refused to do interviews to promote her album Reputation because she felt emotionally “broken”.
• She wanted to establish boundaries and prioritize herself over her career.
• The Reputation era was the most difficult point in her music career.

Taylor Swift knows how to control her narrative. The musician is second to none when it comes to branding, presentation, and knowing what will connect with her seemingly infinite fanbase. The thing is, even the sharpest musicians have their moments of miscalculation.

Most people would point to 2017’s Reputation as the one moment in which Swift seemingly lost control of the narrative and was being perceived negatively by the press and listeners. It was an album rollout characterized by Swift’s ongoing feuds with artists like Kanye West and Katy Perry, and it remains the most polarizing release of her career.

Part of the reason fans were so confused was that Swift refused to do interviews to promote Reputation, which her previous album, 1989, had been characterized by public appearances and lots of fan interaction.

It turns out that Swift had a very specific reason for going silent.

Taylor Swift Refused To Do Interviews For Reputation Because She Felt Emotionally ‘Broken’

Taylor Swift had a difficult run from 2015 to 2017. The musician was criticized for not making her political beliefs clear to the public, and she was routinely criticized for playing a victim by the likes of Nicki Minaj and the aforementioned Kanye West.

When it came time for Swift to release her 2017 album, Reputation, she not only had to contend with these criticisms but somehow live up to the success of her previous album, 1989, which remains her biggest-seller. In a retrospective interview with Apple Music host Zane Lowe, Swift revealed that she made the decision early on to not promote Reputation:

“At the very beginning of the album I was pretty proud of coining the term: ‘There will be no explanation. There will just be Reputation.’ And I stuck with it.”

Swift told the host that the public feuds and the speculation regarding her personal life had proven to be too much and that she wanted to avoid the questions that would come with a press tour by refusing to do interviews. She was “literally about to break”, as she told The Guardian.

In addition to wanting less media hoopla, Swift admitted that she was at a place in her career where she felt that she should be afforded the respect of a star, and wanted to take advantage of the fact that she didn’t have to hype her album up to have it connect with fans:

“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.”

She did just that. Reputation was released with the least amount of promotion of any Taylor Swift album to date, and due to the confrontational nature of the music, it garnered a mixed reception from critics. It still managed to go 3x Platinum, but it was, by a pretty sizable gap, Swift’s least successful album to date.

Taylor Swift Wanted To Reestablish Boundaries After Exposing Her Personal Life In Song

Taylor Swift has been frank about Reputation in the years since, and she even joked about the reception to the album during a 2023 profile for TIME Magazine. She acknowledged the ways in which it failed to connect with the public, and felt that it was dismissed by some as just “sick snakes and strobe lights.”

Swift’s comfortability with the album, in retrospect, stems from the fact that she decided to prioritize herself, rather than her career, in 2017. In an interview with The Guardian, the musician explained that she had shared so much of her personal life in her songs, and left herself so open to the opinions of others, that she needed to reestablish her boundaries:

“Sometimes you don’t realize how you’re being perceived… I created an expectation that everything in my life that happened, people would see.”

The scrutiny that Swift received over her politics (or lack-thereof), her relationships, and her friendships with other celebrities, made her realize how much she valued her privacy, and she changed her approach accordingly. She went silent regarding her feuds, and she made a point of separating her public life from her personal one.

The high-profile relationships that Swift had previously been part of went away in favor of a quiet romance with actor Joe Alwyn. The pair were first linked in May 2017, several months before the release of Reputation, and Swift told Apple Music that her renewed sense of privacy, coupled with support from her fans, helped to boost her mental health:

“My life felt different. I really do credit the fans for the complete resurgence of exuberance and excitement towards music.”

Taylor Swift Considers The Reputation Era To Be The Most Difficult Of Her Career

In addition to feeling “broken”, Swift has admitted that the Reputation era marked the lowest point of her entire music career. She told Apple Music that she felt “terrible” during the recording process, and feared that she had lost the sense of joy she typically had when writing and producing new music.

Swift is happy that she didn’t allow her negative feelings to manifest during interviews, but she’s learned to make peace with Reputation and its complicated legacy.

When host Zane Lowe inquired about her opinion on the album, Swift said Reputation was “beautiful” and helped to fortify her relationship with her listeners:

“[It] was when I realized that it’s me, and it’s them and that’s what makes this fun for me.”

Reputation may not have been accompanied by interviews the first time around, but it will be when Swift releases the Taylor’s Version of the album in 2024. It’ll be the fifth time that Swift re-records one of her old albums, and she’s confident that the Taylor’s Version will help to rehabilitate its reputation as a “misstep.”

Swift talked about the re-recorded Reputation during her aforementioned TIME profile. She described the original as a “goth-punk moment of female rage at being gaslit by an entire social structure” and promised fans that the bonus tracks on the new version will be “fire.”

Reputation may have been the one instance in which Swift mishandled her narrative, but she’s done an excellent job of reclaiming it and making it an important part of her catalog.

Source: NewsFinale