Jam: Spotlight on Music StarsTaylor Swift: I don’t talk about my love life … I sing about it
If you want to know all about Taylor Swift's infamous romances (and heart-crushing breakups), you'll have to buy her music — because she refuses to give the juicy tidbits away for free in interviews. During an appearance on "Good Morning America" on Monday to promote her brand new album, Red, the singer got shy when asked about whether her current boyfriend, 18-year-old Conor Kennedy, inspires her to write a happy or a sad love song. "I don't really talk about my love life," she replied. "I kind of sing about it a lot because I think that it sounds more poetic and romantic about it with music behind it."
And sing she does. Her fourth album, Red, which shot to No. 1 on iTunes just hours after its midnight release, includes 16 songs touching on a variety of personal topics, from a damaging relationship ("State of Grace," already a No. 1 hit, along with "Begin Again), to intense emotion ("Red") to, finally, blissful happiness ("22").
[Related: 5 clues Taylor Swift's 'We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together' video is about Jake Gyllenhaal]
"For me, I think my music is my way of getting out what I don't typically say in my life," Swift, 22, tells Yahoo! Music. "In my life, I'm never going to yell at you. And I'm never going to actually go off on someone, but in my music, when I'm sitting there alone in my room and I can say these things that I really truly mean and be completely truthful, I can say them in a song. For me, music has always been the way to finally be 100 percent completely honest with people even if it hurts them. The only reason I would do that in a song is because someone had hurt me, but that's the part where I feel like I can rebel."
[Related: Taylor Swift: John Mayer is 'presumptuous' to think 'Dear John' is about him]
Two years in the making, Red, was the first time Swift switched up her creation process. "You have two choices: You can either do things the way you've always done them and you're forming a pattern of doing things the same way or you can switch it up and go outside your comfort zone," she says in the Yahoo! Music interview.
And for Red, it was writing and recording from a more emotional place. In an interview with Billboard magazine, Swift reveals, "I made the emotion of the song a priority rather than asking, 'What should we do from a production standpoint, or what works in this genre?' Instead, it was, 'What did that emotion feel like when I wrote the song?' And whatever the answer was determined what the track sounded like and what my vocals were supposed to sound like … I'm 22; I'm all over the place, so my record is all over the place. Part of this record is acknowledging [that] all these emotions are very loud and very different from one another."
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