Taylor was interviewed by NPR All Things Considered. It’s a great interview and you can read it or listen to the audio below!
Melissa Block: I enlisted some expert outside counsel for this interview: My 12-year-old daughter. And I want to start with a question from her. “In your hit song ‘Shake It Off,’ why’d you address the song to your haters and not your motivators?”
Taylor Swift: That’s amazing. With the song ‘Shake It Off,’ I really wanted to kind of take back the narrative, and have more of a sense of humor about people who kind of get under my skin — and not let them get under my skin. There’s a song that I wrote a couple years ago called “Mean,” where I addressed the same issue but I addressed it very differently. I said, “Why you gotta be so mean?”, from kind of a victimized perspective, which is how we all approach bullying or gossip when it happens to us for the first time. But in the last few years I’ve gotten better at just kind of laughing off things that absolutely have no bearing on my real life. I think it’s important to be self-aware about what people are saying about you, but even more so, be very aware of who you actually are, and to have that be the main priority.