Thanks to her surprise quarantine album, folklore — in which she broke all her own songwriting rules — Taylor Swift has been named one of Entertainment Weekly’s Entertainers of the Year.

In a cover story Q&A, the singer discusses what it was like keeping the album a secret from some of her closest friends.

“It was weird because I had never made an album and not played it for my girlfriends or told my friends,” she says. “The only people who knew were the people that I was making it with, my boyfriend, my family, and then my management team. So that’s the smallest number of people I’ve ever had know about something.”

She adds, “I’m usually playing it for everyone that I’m friends with. So I had a lot of friends texting me things like, ‘Why didn’t you say on our everyday FaceTimes you were making a record?’”

Taylor adds that keeping the album secret was a freeing process where she got to do things she’s never done before, including writing fictional narratives and dropping the F-bomb.

“It felt like such an inner world I was escaping to every day that it almost didn’t feel like an album,” she says. “Because I wasn’t making a song and finishing it and going, ‘Oh my God, that is catchy.’”

Unlike with previous albums, Taylor says she’s not trying to pick this one apart now that it’s out.

“I don’t love that I do that but it is the thing that has kept me pivoting to another world every time I make an album,” she says. “But with this one, I just still love it. I’m so proud of it.”

By Andrea Tuccillo
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