Taylor Swift gives one of her first in-depth interviews to speak about her previous album Reputation and what's to come for this new era of music.

With Swift's previous records, she waited years between albums to release a new body of work. The release of "Me!" came quicker than her previous recording schedules. During her Reputation Stadium Tour Swift explains that her life had a different tone and a different backing soundtrack playing behind her life. Swift credits the fans to her enthusiasm for making new music so quickly. "I was looking out into the crowd and seeing so much love and care and these people really, really are so wonderful to me and they really were the ones that made me feel like no, I'm ready to put out new music."

During the album cycle, Swift did not do any interviews or media events. She reveals that everything was done purposefully. "This is a decision that I made at the beginning of that entire album process. I was very defiantly putting up a defense mechanism," she explains. "It was like reflecting on the persona you had felt had been crafted and constructed for you. And that was the first time I'd ever done that with an album. The album kind of had two different sides to it. You had very weaponized songs that were very much antsy. And then you had the real story of the album, which was basically about love and real love and real friendship and finding those things in and amongst feeling very, very misunderstood in a lot of ways in your life."

"But it's kind of taking those walls, taking that bunker down from around you that I felt like I had to put up because you know after a while in certain times in your career where if you say something it's going to be misconstrued. If you don't, it's going to be misconstrued. You might as well just make music and do what you do and keep your head down," Swift tells Lowe.

"At the very beginning of the album was pretty proud of coining the term, 'There will be no explanation. There will just be reputation,'" Swift says. Her fans quickly took to this quote and sentiment. "And so that was what I decided.was going to be the album and I stuck with it. I didn't go back on it. I didn't try to explain the album because I didn't feel that I owed that to anyone."

"There was a lot that happened over a couple of years that made me feel really, really terrible. And I didn't feel like expressing that to them. I didn't feel like talking about it. I just felt like making music, then going out on the road and doing a stadium tour and doing everything I could for my fans."  She continues, "Everything I did was for them. And I didn't need to try and get every headline or try to get the cover of this or the cover of that. I just needed to think of ways to reach out to them in ways I hadn't even thought of before."

Swift did find a multitude of ways to interact with her fans. She met fans at all of her tour stops, created listening sessions in various major cities, and spent countless hours online writing to them which resulted in inside jokes with thousands of her listeners. "So the relationship between me and fans really actually strengthened throughout the course of Reputation. And that was what made it something that I think I'll look back on and find to be one of the most beautiful times of my life, was when I realized that it's me and it's them and that's what makes this fun for me," she says.

Swift will be performing "Me!" for the first time with Brendon Urie at the 2019 Billboard Music Awards.

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