Talk of the relationship gained more currency when Harry’s close friend Nick Grimshaw spoke publicly about it. This was the first time anyone in the inner circle of either Taylor or Styles had officially spoken about them being involved. ‘Harry really likes Taylor, he’s fallen for her in a big way,’ he said. ‘At first, I wasn’t sure if the relationship was a real one, but I talk to him a lot and it seems to be that she’s the one for him – for now, anyway.’
He explained that Taylor’s wit was a big factor in her appeal. ‘Harry likes people who make him laugh. I talk to Harry a lot on the phone while he’s away touring and he talks about her a lot. He is very happy with her. I like her a lot, too; she came on my show recently and we had a really fun time.’ This talk of Taylor’s wit tied in with what Styles had said previously about the importance of humour in finding someone attractive.
In December 2012, the media got the sort of photographic evidence it had been after when Taylor and Harry visited Central Park Zoo together. Photographs of their time in the zoo were splashed everywhere. After that date, the two reportedly spent two evenings together at Taylor’s Manhattan hotel. Then they were seen at the after party of a 1D gig at Madison Square Garden. They left at 4 a.m. and retired to the same hotel, then emerged shortly after one another the next morning. During the holiday season, both Taylor and One Direction had a series of appearances and performances to honour on America’s East Coast.
In the New Year, she reportedly flew Harry to Britain to help her celebrate her twenty-third birthday. They ate at the George & Dragon pub in Great Budworth, Cheshire. ‘He’s amazing,’ Taylor was reported to have said of the much-coveted Styles. They also went for a walk in the Peak District and dined with Styles’s sister at The Rising Sun Inn. Harry reportedly introduced Taylor to the goofy UK teen comedy The Inbetweeners while she was in Britain. An American version of the series has been made since, but it is said that Taylor was tickled by the original.
As well as learning things about British humour, Taylor was learning a great deal about the nature of fame. When she dated Jake Gyllenhaal, he had been the one who had been uncomfortable with the increased whirlwind of media scrutiny. However, with Styles it was Taylor’s turn to be shocked. ‘I don’t know necessarily how much privacy I’m entitled to, but I know I don’t get much out of it. At the same time, I asked for this. I could be playing in a coffee house. I’d be happy doing that, but not as happy, probably.’ She said that knowing masses of people would hear her music was ‘the most amazing feeling’, but added that the presence of ‘dudes’ with cameras ‘hiding in the bushes’ is a ‘less awesome feeling’.
It was said that the already much-inked Harry had got yet another tattoo that referenced his feelings for Taylor, while she was said to be splashing £50,000 on Beatles memorabilia for him. At the final of the US X Factor, where One Direction performed their single ‘Kiss You’, Harry was asked about Taylor. ‘She’s good,’ he replied. Hardly a world-changing comment in itself, yet in the context of this story it was treated as if it were media gold.
Then Taylor jetted off to Australia on a promotional jaunt. She was amused at the prospect of spending the run-up to Christmas Day in the heat of the Aussie summer. ‘It’s going to be non-stop sun,’ she said. ‘So it will be weird to have a tan around Christmas, but I’m really excited about it.’ She was back in the US for New Year’s Eve, where she was booked to perform for Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve in Times Square. She sang ‘I Knew You Were Trouble’ and ‘We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together’. According to a fan on Twitter, Taylor and Harry ‘made out’ in an elevator afterwards.
As with Gyllenhaal, it seemed her relationship with Styles was beginning to accelerate. Unnamed ‘insiders’ were telling the press that Taylor and Styles were planning to marry. It was at this stage that, according to reports, her father Scott intervened and took Styles to one side to tell him to ‘slow down and take things easy’. While Scott was, according to the reports, not seeking to split the couple up, he was arguing strongly that they should not rush into anything.
However, early in 2013 Taylor and Harry were flying off in search of the sun. They jetted to the British Virgin Islands. Photographs were snapped of them eating alongside some fans at a restaurant in Virgin Gorda. It was a blissful scene and one worth pausing on for a moment, as within hours the scene would change. When Taylor was later spotted alone on a boat while Styles continued to party elsewhere, it seemed that their love was on the rocks.
During an alleged row, she had reportedly told him he was ‘lucky’ to be with her. With their relationship seemingly a thing of the past all of a sudden, the media moved to question whether it had ever genuinely existed. American tabloid the National Enquirer even suggested that Taylor was unaware of the truth herself. It claimed: ‘Little does Taylor know that Harry’s handlers went to great lengths to put the two together because she’s such a huge star.’ The Guardian said it was ‘inevitable’ that they would have dated, ‘seeing as, between them, they have allegedly dated every single person on the planet’. With cynicism at the fore, it added that ‘the fact this relationship happened to bookend Swift releasing an album and One Direction announcing a tour is just one of those coincidences that often accompanies celebrity relationships’. Lest any reader had not picked up on the implication, it added that ‘some of their dates might have had the suspicious smack of PR exercises’.
Taylor’s fling with Harry had indeed felt a little too convenient at times. Yet there is not a celebrity coupling in history that could not be subject to a similarly cynical reading. While many famous couples have got together to boost their respective profiles, there are many stars who date other stars simply because they want to be with someone who understands the pressures of celebrity. As for Taylor, she was left on her own again. This is one of her deepest fears, as she has admitted. ‘I think the one thing I’m really afraid of is that the magic doesn’t last,’ she has said. ‘The butterflies and daydreams and love, all these things I hold so dear, are going to leave some day.’ Meanwhile, she had a new album to promote.
After Red was released in October 2012, Taylor opened up during an interview with radio network NPR about how her relationships have inspired her songs and why she writes so openly about them. With several high-profile relationships in her recent past, the words on her new release were going to be more closely scrutinised than ever. ‘The first thing that I think about when I’m writing my lyrics is directly communicating with the person the song is about,’ she said. ‘I think what I’ve learned recently is that it’s not … heartbreak that inspires my songs. It’s not love that inspires my songs. It’s individual people that come into my life. I’ve had relationships with people that were really substantial and meant a lot to me, but I couldn’t write a song about that person for some reason. Then again, you’ll meet someone that comes into your life for two weeks and you write an entire record about them.’
However, for Taylor, the music itself matters at least as much as the lyrics and their perceived themes. For Red, she had drawn on the widest range of styles yet. ‘I’m inspired by all kinds of different sounds,’ she told Rolling Stone, ‘and I don’t think I’d ever be someone who would say, “I will never make a song that sounds a certain way, I will never branch outside of genres,” because I think that genres are sort of unnecessary walls.’
She had been working hard on new material for her next album – and one of the first tracks she composed in these sessions would be called ‘State of Grace’. In its final form, this song turned into something bigger than any previous Taylor track. Never before had a song of hers been so rich and heavy. The opening bars hint at a stadium-rock tune, the likes of which U2 or REM would have been keen for. It would also be a song that was all the richer for its paradoxes and contradictions – and it kicked off her epic 16-track album with powerful confidence.
While Taylor sounds assured here, there is at the same time an additional layer of vulnerability. Her vo
ice seems too gentle to compete with such a fulsome backing track, and the way she draws out the syllables of the final words in each line of the bridge only adds to this tantalising dichotomy. Yet in the middle eight, she goes all sassy on us, confidently and wisely delivering her verdict on the story. He was never a saint, she sings, while she loved in shades ‘of wrong’. Her repetition of the words ‘never’ and ‘ever’ hints at a later track still to come on Red.
Overall, the lyrics deliver a message of mature pragmatism when it comes to love and romance. She neither celebrates them as perfect forces, nor slams them as the source of all heartbreak. Instead, she knowingly reflects on the happy and unhappy aspects of each. Making love work is a ‘fight’, she sings, but a ‘worthwhile’ one. When it works, a state of grace – that most Christian of concepts – is found. Indeed, the lyrics of the chorus are straight out of the U2 textbook, and one can easily imagine the band’s Christian lead singer Bono appreciating and singing them.
In recording ‘State of Grace’, Taylor aimed for ‘a really big sound’ – and she got one. The melody and production are, in fact, euphoric at times. Although starting with an almost Stone Roses feel, the reverb-heavy guitars build and build. The drums crash throughout. She achieved what she set out to do, which was to represent ‘the feeling of falling in love in an epic way’. At her concerts this song would prove a fists-in-the-air favourite, just perfect for the large arenas she now commanded on the live circuit. Again, it is the contradiction that gives the song its power: the lyrics, which thousands bawl along to at concerts, are among her most intimate and vulnerable. She sings of her and her love alone in their room, with their slates clean.
The lyrics imply that the song was inspired by her romance with Jake Gyllenhaal. The lines about the lovers having ‘twin fire signs’ and ‘four blue eyes’ would suggest as much: both Taylor and Gyllenhaal were born under the fire sign of Sagittarius and they both have blue eyes. Dedicated de-coders of Taylor’s lyrics, of whom there is a growing number, found this song straightforward to analyse.
Then comes the album’s title track. It starts with a banjo line, bringing the country sound straight back after the album’s rocky opener. In the verses she lists a series of similes that comes closer to a checklist of irony than Alanis Morissette’s ‘Ironic’ ever did. The song then goes all soft-rock up-tempo on us in the chorus, in which she deploys colours simply and deftly to express the emotions of loss and love. Loving him was, she concludes, red. Later in the song she clarifies that she means a burning red. A stabbed keyboard repeats naggingly after each chorus, creating a catchy looped motif.
Speaking on Good Morning America, Taylor would later explain the concept behind the track. ‘I wrote this song about the fact that some things are just hard to forget,’ she said, ‘because the emotions involved with them were so intense and, to me, intense emotion is red.’ The song divided opinion among critics; some felt she had attempted too many genres in one song, leading to a spoiled broth. Yet the website Taste of Country more than welcomed ‘Red’, saying, ‘It’s a songwriting spotlight for Swift, who toys with colours like a skilled artist, and this song is her Sistine Chapel.’
It was a tricky song for Taylor to complete. She left it to marinate for a while, only returning to finish it once she had a clear idea of what overall direction the album, and her career, would take. This song, too, seems to be about Gyllenhaal. Her secret code for the song was ‘SAG’, and this could again be a reference to her and Gyllenhaal’s shared star sign. Some argue that it is the acronym for the Screen Actors Guild. This seems an outlandish theory, but if accurate it again points to Gyllenhaal.
If you want to write the best song, you turn to the best songwriter to collaborate with. For track three on Red, ‘Treacherous’, Taylor turned to Dan Wilson, the frontman of Semisonic and the man who co-wrote one of the biggest hits of the twenty-first century so far: ‘Someone Like You’ by Adele. Taylor told Wilson that she wanted to create a song on the concept of treachery. She had a melody in mind but wanted to work with him to turn it into something special. As they worked, they thought they had finished the track, but then they decided it would benefit from a heavier dimension. So they added the rockier chorus, which proved powerful in its own right and also provided a fine contrast to the gentle, almost whispered verses. Those verses were described well by Billboard, which wrote of their ‘hushed, confessional beauty’.
Wilson was heartily impressed with Taylor having worked with her in the studio. ‘An interesting quality, objectively speaking, was how on fire she was, the clarity she had,’ he said. ‘She was so open and excited about the things I would add. She works at a very high level of positivity, and that is rare.’ Yet the track itself is no inanely jolly effort. In common with several of Red’s tracks, it presents a more knowing, almost jaded view of love. Taylor seems to have grown up so fast – too fast, some would say. As Taylor told USA Today, the song details a relationship that could only ‘end in fiery, burning wreckage’, but that nevertheless has a ‘magnetic draw that doesn’t really let up – you walk toward it anyway’.
Overall, the track is reminiscent in sound of Taylor’s previous album Speak Now. It forms a gentle bridge between ‘Red’ and the album’s stand-out track, ‘I Knew You Were Trouble’. When she met up with her co-writer and producer for this track, she told them that she wanted the song to explode after the chorus into something ‘crazy’, adding: ‘I want it to be really chaotic.’ She got her wish. An almost punk-rock feel is added to a dubstep track already rich with a mesmerising collision of genres, paces and moods. Here, we have punk-pop reminiscent of Busted, reggae sounds, including dubstep and dancehall, R&B and the aforementioned punk rock. Yet they blend together in Taylor’s hands into a country-fused feast. She has shown she can jump between genres easily by doing so wholeheartedly in this track.
It has been widely suggested that this song was written about One Direction heart-throb Harry Styles. An unnamed source was quoted across the world’s celebrity media stating: ‘“I Knew You Were Trouble” is 100 per cent about Harry.’ This perception was only strengthened when Taylor discussed performing the song at the BRIT Awards, a ceremony that Styles was due to attend, along with thousands of others. ‘Well, it’s not hard to access that emotion when the person the song is directed at is standing by the side of the stage watching,’ she said.
The rumours proved a useful publicity tool for the song, for Taylor and, as if he needed any more of the spotlight, Styles himself. Yet the timing of the track’s appearance on the airwaves makes it tricky for it to have been about Styles. The song was previewed in the early autumn of 2012, but Taylor had been working on Red for nearly two years before that, and the couple’s split seemingly came months after it. In all, she wrote 30 songs for Red, only around half of which made the final cut. Generally, the songwriting for a major-release album is completed many months ahead of its release, or sometimes as much as a year or more before.
When she unveiled the song, she explained its genesis to MTV. ‘I had just gone through an experience that made me write this song, about knowing the second you see someone, like, “Oh, this is going to be interesting. It’s going to be dangerous, but look at me going in there anyway,”’ she said. Taylor added that the song had a similar theme to ‘Treacherous’, in that it detailed a scenario she entered despite knowing the clear dangers involved. She reasoned that the chances of regret would be greater by avoiding such a relationship, rather than giving it a go. Having dived in, she found that there was indeed trouble. So much so that she hypnotically repeats the word after each chorus – trouble, trouble, trouble. The song was such a success that it brought Taylor the very opposite of trouble. Among its fans is none other than Justin Bieber, who reportedly told Taylor that he believed it to be ‘the best song ever’.
The anger and power chords of ‘I Knew You Were Trouble’ are nowhere to be found in the song’s successor. ‘All Too Well’ is a vivid, terribly sad song of reminiscence for a broke
n relationship. It is a bittersweet affair: the weary, resigned tone of the vocals is offset by the beauty and richness of Taylor’s memories. She recalls dances in the kitchen illuminated by the fridge light, road trips with the wind in her hair, autumn leaves dancing in the air. Every listener can picture the scenes and most can relate to the underlying emotions they induce. The lyrics are, as with ‘I Knew You Were Trouble’, defiantly melodramatic. In that previous song she was lying on ‘the cold hard ground’, whereas here she is a ‘crumpled-up piece of paper’.
The song was, for Taylor, her lifeline out of a period of creative block that had lasted as long as six months. ‘I was going through something that was so hard it was almost stifling, and so I wrote all these verses about everything from beginning to end of this relationship, and it ended up being, like, a 10-minute song.’ The song was completed in collaboration with songwriter Liz Rose, prompted by Taylor’s call to her to say: ‘Come over, we’ve gotta filter this down.’ Together, they edited the epic song into a final cut that, though still lengthy at five minutes and 29 seconds, was of a more palatable length for the commercial market.
Pertinently, ‘All Too Well’ throws Red, and Taylor herself, straight back into country-music territory after her flirtations with other genres. Indeed, just like ‘Treacherous’, musically it would not seem out of place on Speak Now, though its jaded view of love and life make it quite at home on Red. As Billboard put it: ‘Just like that, Swift snaps back to her core demographic: “All Too Well” is sumptuous country, with Swift dancing “around the kitchen in the refrigerator light” in the memory of a romance that has seemingly been buried in time.’ The PopCrush website felt that it was a ‘melancholic, confessional ballad’.
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