She takes the call. The volume on her phone is loud enough for me to intermittently hear both sides of the conversation. Swift explains that she’s driving to her house, but that she can’t actually stay there because contractors are renovating almost every room. “Have you ever seen the movie The Money Pit?” asks Timberlake. She has not, so Timberlake provides a capsule review. He has a four-month-old baby at home and is constantly tired, yet he can’t fall asleep. He asks Swift for advice on sleeping. Swift tells the driver to pull over to the shoulder of the road, since she keeps losing reception as we drive through the canyon. The paparazzo in the gray car casually passes, having not-so-casually followed us for at least five miles.

  The conversation lasts almost fifteen minutes (which is a little weird, since I’m just sitting there beside her, openly taking notes). “You’re never going to get old,” Swift assures Timberlake. “That’s scientific fact. That’s medical.” Even her sarcasm is aspirational. Eventually J.T. tells her the reason he’s calling is that he wants to perform the song “Mirrors” with her on the last night of her upcoming five-date stand at Staples Center. (Late in every concert, Swift brings a surprise guest onstage.) She reacts to this news the way a teenage girl in Nebraska would react if suddenly informed that a paternity test had revealed Taylor Swift was her biological sister.

  When she ends the call, Swift looks at me and says, “This is so crazy. This is so crazy.” She repeats that phrase four times, each time with ascending volume.

  Now, inside my skull, I am thinking one thought: This is not remotely crazy. It actually seems like the opposite of crazy. Why wouldn’t Justin Timberlake want to perform with the biggest entertainer in America, to an audience of twenty thousand people who will lose their collective mind the moment he appears? I’d have been much more surprised if he’d called to turn her down. But then I remember that Swift is twenty-five years old, and that her entire ethos is based on experiencing (and interpreting) how her insane life would feel if she were exactly like the type of person who’d buy a ticket to this particular concert. She has more perspective than I do. Every extension of who she is and how she works is (indeed) “so crazy,” and what’s even crazier is my inability to recognize just how crazy it is.

  So Taylor Swift is right again.

  * * *

  —

  IF YOU DON’T TAKE Swift seriously, you don’t take contemporary music seriously. With the arguable exceptions of Kanye West and Beyoncé Knowles, she is the most significant pop artist of the modern age. The scale of her commercial supremacy defies parallel—she’s sold 1 million albums in a week three times, within an era where most major artists are thrilled to move 500,000 albums in the span of a year. If a record as comparatively dominant as 1989 had actually existed in the year 1989, it would have surpassed the sales of Thriller. There is no demographic she does not tap into, which is obviously rare. But what’s even more atypical is how that ubiquity is critically received. Swift gets universally excellent reviews, particularly from the most significant arbiters of taste (a 2012 New Yorker piece conceded that Swift’s reviews are “almost uniformly positive”). She has never gratuitously sexualized her image and seems pathologically averse to controversy. There’s simply no antecedent for this kind of career: a cross-genre, youth-oriented, critically acclaimed colossus where the success is exclusively based on the intuitive songwriting merits of a single female artist. It’s like if mid-period Garth Brooks was also early Liz Phair, minus the hat and the swearing. As a phenomenon, it’s absolutely new.

  And this, somewhat predictably, creates a new set of problems.

  Even within the most high-minded considerations of Swift’s music, there is inevitably some analysis (or speculation) about her personal life. She’s an utterly credible musician who is consumed as a tabloid personality. Very often (and not without justification), that binary is attributed to ingrained biases against female performers. But it’s more complicated than that. Swift writes about her life so directly that the listener is forced to think about her persona in order to fully appreciate what she’s doing creatively. This is her greatest power: an ability to combine her art and her life so profoundly that both spheres become more interesting to everyone, regardless of their emotional investment.

  Swift clearly knows this is happening. But it’s something she can’t directly admit, because it’s the kind of thing that only works when it seems coincidental. She’s careful how she describes the process, because you don’t become who she is by describing things carelessly.

  Even the most serious critics inevitably discuss the more tabloid aspects of your life. Is this valid? Does the fact that you write about yourself in such a confessional style require intelligent people to look at your music through that lens?

  I don’t feel there is any injustice when people expand beyond my music and speculate on who certain songs might be about. I’ve never named names, so I feel like I still have a sense of power over what people say—even if that isn’t true, and even if I don’t have any power over what people say about me. The fact that I’ve never confirmed who those songs are about makes me feel like there is still one card I’m holding. So if you’re going to look at your life and say, “I get to play sold-out football stadiums all over the world. I get to call up my favorite artists and ask them to perform with me, and most of the time they say yes. I get to be on the cover of this magazine”—this is all because I write songs about my own life. So I would feel a little strange complaining about that.

  But I’m not asking if it’s fair or unfair, or if the downside is worth the upside. I’m asking from an aesthetic perspective: Is thinking about your real life an essential part of appreciating your music? Could your music be enjoyed the same way in a vacuum, even if no one knew anything else about you?

  “Shake It Off” is one of my most successful songs, and that has nothing directly, intricately, pointedly personal in it. No one really says I stay out too late. I just thought it sounded good.

  Have you ever stopped yourself from writing a fictional lyric because you feared it would be incorrectly applied to your literal life?

  No. Some of the things I write about on a song like “Blank Space” are satire. You take your creative license and create things that are larger than life. You can write things like, “I get drunk on jealousy but you’ll come back each time I leave, because darling I’m a nightmare dressed as a daydream.” That is not my approach to relationships. But is it cool to write the narrative of a girl who’s crazy but seductive but glamorous but nuts but manipulative? That was the character I felt the media had written for me, and for a long time I felt hurt by it. I took it personally. But as time went by, I realized it was kind of hilarious.

  It’s impossible for an artist to control how she is perceived. But an artist can anticipate those perceptions, which is almost as good. “A nuanced sense of humor does not translate on a general scale,” Swift says, “and I knew that going in. I knew some people would hear ‘Blank Space’ and say, See, we were right about her. But at this point, if you don’t get the joke, you don’t deserve to get the joke.”

  * * *

  —

  THERE’S A LONG TRADITION of musicians expressing (or pretending to express) a degree of disinterest in how they are metabolized by the culture. They claim to ignore their own reviews while feigning a lack of discernment about what their audience wants or expects, since these are things that cannot be controlled. Swift is not like this. She has an extrinsic focus that informs her creative process. From her perspective, not tracking how people view your work feels stranger than the alternative.

  “I went through a few years when I just never went online and never looked at blogs. This was around 2013, when the only thing anyone wanted to write about me was about me and some guy,” she recalls. “It was really damaging. Doesn’t everyone go on dates when they’re twenty-two? Nope. Not when you’re in my situation, and everything you do is blown out of proportion and commented upon. And all of a sudden, there’s an overriding opinion about who you are that doesn’t reflect how you actually live your life. So I didn’t go online for a year and a half. I actually forgot my Instagram password. But now I check in and see what’s happening. In 2015, that stuff does matter. Because if enough people say the same thing about me, it becomes fact in the eyes of the general public. So I monitor what people say about me, and if I see a theme, I know what that means. I’ve had it happen twice before. In 2010, it was, She’s too young to get all these awards. Look how annoying she is when she wins things. Is she even good? And then in 2013, it was, She just writes songs to get revenge. She’s boy crazy. She’s a problematic person. It will probably be something else again this year.”

  How you view this level of consciousness is proportional to how you feel about Swift as a public figure. There is a perpetual sense that nothing about her career is accidental and that nothing about her life is unmediated. These are not unusual things to think about young mainstream stars. But what’s different with Swift is her autonomy. There is no Svengali directing her career; there is no stage mother pushing her toward the spotlight. She is in total control of her own constructed reality. If there was a machine that built humans out of millennial stereotypes, Swift would be its utopian creation.

  “I used to watch Behind the Music every day,” she says. (Her favorite episode was the one about the Bangles.) “When other kids were watching normal shows, I’d watch Behind the Music. And I would see these bands that were doing so well, and I’d wonder what went wrong. I thought about this a lot. And what I established in my brain was that a lack of self-awareness was always the downfall. That was always the catalyst for the loss of relevance and the loss of ambition and the loss of great art. So self-awareness has become such a huge part of what I think about. It’s less about reputation management and strategy and vanity than it is about trying to desperately preserve my self-awareness, since that seems like the first thing to go the moment people achieve success.”

  The upside of this self-focused fixation is clear. Swift is allowed to make whatever record she wants, based on the reasonable argument that she understands her specific space in the culture more deeply than anyone around her. The making of 1989 is a prime example: She insists everyone at her label (the Nashville-based Big Machine) tried to convince her not to make a straightforward pop album. She recounts a litany of arguments with various label executives over every possible detail, from how much of her face would appear on the cover to how cowriter Max Martin would be credited in the liner notes.

  As far as I can tell, Swift won every one of these debates.

  “Even calling this record 1989 was a risk,” she says. “I had so many intense conversations where my label really tried to step in. I could tell they’d all gotten together and decided, ‘We gotta talk some sense into her. She’s had an established, astronomically successful career in country music, and shaking that up would be the biggest possible mistake.’ But to me, the safest thing I could do was take the biggest possible risk. I am confident that I can write a song. I’m not confident about a lot of other aspects of my life, but I know how to write songs. I’d read a review of [2012’s] Red that said it wasn’t sonically cohesive. So that was what I wanted on 1989: an umbrella that would go over all of these songs, so that they all belonged on the same album. But then I’d go into the label office, and they were like, ‘Can we talk about putting a fiddle and a steel guitar solo on “Shake It Off” to service country radio?’ I was trying to make the most honest record I could possibly make, and they were kind of asking me to be a little disingenuous about it. ‘Let’s capitalize on both markets.’ No, let’s not. Let’s pick a lane.”

  * * *

  —

  LIKE ALMOST ALL FAMOUS PEOPLE, Swift has two ways of speaking. The first is the way she talks when she’s actively shaping the interview—optimistic, animated, and seemingly rehearsed (even when that’s impossible). The second is the way she talks when she cares less about the way the words are presented and more about the message itself (chin slightly down, brow slightly furrowed, timbre slightly deeper). The first way is how she talks when she’s on television; the second is more unequivocal and less animatronic. But she oscillates between the two styles fluidly, either because (a) this dissonance is less intentional than it appears or (b) she can tell I’m considerably more interested in anything delivered in the second style.

  Late in our lunch, I mention something that happened several years ago: By chance, I’d found myself having dinner with a former acquaintance of Swift’s who offhandedly described her as “calculating.” This is the only moment during our interview when Swift appears remotely flustered. She really, really hates the word “calculating.” She despises how it has become tethered to her iconography and believes the person I met has been the singular voice regurgitating this categorization. As she explains these things, her speech does not oscillate from the second mode.

  “Am I shooting from the hip?” she asks rhetorically. “Would any of this have happened if I was? In a sense, I do think about things before they happen. But here was someone taking a good quality—the fact that I think about things and that I care about my work—and trying to make that into an insinuation about my personal life. Highly offensive. You can be accidentally successful for three or four years. Accidents happen. But careers take work.”

  Here we see Swift’s circuitous dilemma: Any attempt to appear less calculating scans as even more calculated. Because Swift’s professional career has unspooled with such precision, it’s assumed that her social life is no less premeditated. This even applies to casual, nonromantic relationships. Over the past three years, Swift has built a volunteer army of high-profile friends, many of whom appear in her videos (for free) and serve as special guests at her concerts (for free). In almost any other circumstance, this would be seen as a likable trait; Leonardo DiCaprio behaved similarly in the ’90s and everyone thought it was awesome. But it’s somehow different when the hub of the wheel is Swift. People get skeptical. Her famous friends are marginalized as acquisitions, selected to occupy specific roles, almost like members of the Justice League (“the ectomorph model,” “the inventive indie artist,” “the informed third-wave feminist,” etc.). Such perceptions perplex Swift, who is genuinely obsessed with these attachments. “I really think my lack of female friendships in high school and middle school is why my female friendships are so important now,” she says. “Because I always wanted them. It was just hard for me to have friends.”

  It’s not uncommon for popular people to claim they were once unpopular, so I ask Swift for a specific example. She tells a story about junior high, when she called several of her peers on the phone and asked if they wanted to go shopping. Every girl had a different excuse for why she couldn’t go. Eventually, Swift’s mother agreed to take her to the local mall. When they arrived, Swift saw all of the girls she had called on the phone, goofing around in Victoria’s Secret. “I just remember my mom looking at me when this happened and saying, ‘We’re going to King of Prussia Mall, right now.’ Which is the biggest mall in Pennsylvania, forty-five minutes away. So we left and went to the better mall. My mom let me escape from certain things that were too painful to deal with. And we talked about it the whole way there, and we had a good time shopping.”

  This incident appears to be the genesis for a verse in her 2008 song “The Best Day,” a connection she doesn’t note when she tells me the story. A cynical person could read something into this anecdote and turn it into a metaphor about capitalism or parenting or creativity or Pennsylvania. But in the framework of our conversation, it did not seem metaphoric of anything. It just seemed like a (very real) memory that might be more internally motivating than ordinary logic would suggest.

  So is it unfair to categorize Swift as “calculating”? Maybe, and particularly if you view that term as exclusively pejorative. But calling her “guileless” would be preposterous. Swift views her lyrics as the most important part of her art (“The lyrics are what I want you to focus on,” she asserts), so we spend some time parsing specific passages from specific songs. Here is how she dissects that conjecture over “Bad Blood,” a single universally assumed to be about Katy Perry.

  You never say who your songs are about, but you concede that if enough people believe something it essentially becomes fact. So by not saying who you’re writing about, aren’t you allowing public consensus to dictate the meaning of your work? If everyone assumes that “Bad Blood” is about a specific person, aren’t you allowing the culture to create a fact about your life?

  You’re in a Rolling Stone interview, and the reporter asks, “Who is that song about? That sounds like a really intense moment from your life.” And you sit there, and you know you’re on good terms with your ex-boyfriend, and you don’t want him—or his family—to think you’re firing shots at him. So you say, “That was about losing a friend.” And that’s basically all you say. But then people cryptically tweet about what you meant. I never pointed a finger in any specific direction, and I can sleep at night knowing that. I mean, I knew the song would be assigned to someone, and the easiest mark would be someone that song was definitely not about. It was not a song about heartbreak. It was about the loss of friendship.