We are exactly a week away now from the release of reputation. Which means the next few weeks or so are going to be all Taylor all the time. Just this morning, Good Morning America made the announcement that Taylor will perform a new song next Thursday, the same day the album comes out, on ABC’s TGIT during a new episode of Scandal. Sweeps month!

 

 

 

Did you see Robin Roberts’s face there? Is it just me or did she not seem all that into it?

Taylor also announced herself that tonight at midnight, she’s dropping yet another new song, apparently called Call It What You Want:


That makes four songs off reputation before the album comes out. Is she trying to run the table on the charts? Like to set some kind of record for the most hits in the top 10 or to own the entire top 10? Taylor does love those kinds of benchmarks.

Yesterday Taylor released a behind-the-scenes video for the making of Gorgeous, the last song she released, just two weeks ago. It’s the first in what will be an exclusive series available to AT&T subscribers starting November 13. Parents, are you being asked to subscribe to AT&T?

Gorgeous is not my favourite song. And not even close to my favourite Taylor Swift song, but I do love this video. Because I love work. Duana and I started a podcast about work because we’re so obsessed with work, the mechanics of work. Watching people work, allegedly, is not sexy. Bullsh-t. Have you ever seen the split-screen video from the control room that was taken during Grease Live last year? If not, click here. Nothing is sexier than the AD calling out the shots to the beat and showing her goddamn work.

And this is what Taylor is giving us here – she’s showing her work. Is there some contrivance to it? Of course there is. It’s part of a multi-million dollar deal she has with a major conglomerate. But still. The Taylor I like best isn’t the Taylor who’s trying to show me 18 iterations of herself in all her old clothes, or the one trying to shade-blame everyone else in the narrative. The Taylors I like best are 1. the Taylor Matrix who runs the sh-t out of her own business and 2. Taylor at the piano working her way through a new song. I could have watched another hour of this, easy.

 

Everyone will have something different to take away from these glimpses into the creative process. For me, personally, what I appreciate is that working at a song like this removes the romance out of it, doing away with the notion that artistic inspiration is temperamental. For a long time all we ever heard were stories of artists creating in a semi-conscious state. That poems and books and songs and paintings and sculptures magically appear in dreams. There’s often no “magic” to it at all. The end product might be magical. But getting there is simple grit. And it usually starts with sh-t. Sh-t that you have to mold and tweak and push and knead and grunt at until it starts resembling something not so sh-tty. (Like this paragraph. Which has taken me half an hour and if you think it sucks now, you should have seen it 15 minutes ago.) Seeing Taylor Swift this way, trying to fix her sh-t (as Duana taught me, “you can’t fix nothing”), is the most appealing she’s been, to me at least, this entire album cycle.