Taylor Swift rarely gives interviews these days. She’s kind of busy, if you hadn’t noticed. However, in an in-depth, revealing interview with Time for their 2023 Person of the Year issue, Swift opened up not just about her triumphant 2023 and her relationship with Travis Kelce, but the lowest points of her career — namely the backlash from the infamous leaked interview and ensuing feud with Kanye West and Kim Kardashian in 2016.
It was an extremely tough time for Swift, who apparently thought the backlash — what she called “getting canceled within an inch of my life and sanity” — would define her for the rest of her life.
“You have a fully manufactured frame job, in an illegally recorded phone call, which Kim Kardashian edited and then put out to say to everyone that I was a liar,” said Swift. According to Swift, the incident took her “down psychologically to a place I’ve never been before” and forced her to change her life completely.
She revealed that she relocated out of the United States to a different country and essentially disappeared from the public eye entirely. “I didn’t leave a rental house for a year. I was afraid to get on phone calls. I pushed away most people in my life because I didn’t trust anyone anymore. I went down really, really hard,” she explained.
After some time away, Swift released 2017’s Reputation, an album full of both venomous anger and delicate love songs likely inspired by her relationship with Joe Alwyn. It was also the last album in her contract with Big Machine, and she was ready to go. At the time, Reputation was met with mixed reviews, but has enjoyed a recent resurgence. “The molecular chemistry of that old label was that every creative choice I wanted to make was second-guessed,” she says. “I was really overthinking these albums.”
As you probably know, Swift’s masters were then sold to Scooter Braun’s Ithaca Holdings; Braun and Swift had long been at odds, and he also was linked to West. The sale meant he would directly profit from the use of her music. This was another major blow to Swift, who was still finding her footing after the events of 2016. She describes the controversial sale as “having my life’s work taken away from me by someone who hates me.”
“With the Scooter thing, my masters were being sold to someone who actively wanted them for nefarious reasons, in my opinion,” she shared. “I was so knocked on my ass by the sale of my music, and to whom it was sold. I was like, ‘Oh, they got me beat now. This is it. I don’t know what to do.’”
Of course, Taylor Swift figured out a way to get her voice and her music back, embarking on the extremely ambitious Taylor’s Version project in 2020 in order to own her masters. “It’s all in how you deal with loss,” she shared of her motivation behind the re-records, which have been successful and industry-shifting. (Fans are eagerly awaiting the announcement of Reputation (Taylor’s Version).) “I respond to extreme pain with defiance.”
“Nothing is permanent,” she continued. “So I’m very careful to be grateful every second that I get to be doing this at this level, because I’ve had it taken away from me before. There is one thing I’ve learned: My response to anything that happens, good or bad, is to keep making things. Keep making art… but I’ve also learned there’s no point in actively trying to quote unquote defeat your enemies. Trash takes itself out every single time.”
