Taylor Swift Gets Candid on Kanye West, Apple Music Takedown: ‘I Had to Write It’

Pop phenom also reveals importance of her friendship with Lena Dunham, Selena Gomez

Mario Testino/Vanity Fair

Taylor Swift spoke candidly about her open letter to Apple, revealing what it was like the night she decided to stand up to the tech company on behalf of indie musicians.

“I wrote the letter at around four A.M. The contracts had just gone out to my friends, and one of them sent me a screenshot of one of them. I read the term ‘zero percent compensation to rights holders,’” Swift told Vanity Fair. “Sometimes I’ll wake up in the middle of the night and I’ll write a song and I can’t sleep until I finish it, and it was like that with the letter.”

Swift also said that she read the letter to only one person before posting it online. “I read it to my mom,” she said. “She’s always going to be the one. I just said, ‘I’m really scared of this letter, but I had to write it. I might not post it, but I had to say it.’”

She went on to say that, years after he interrupted her acceptance speech at the 2009 VMA’s, she now considers Kanye West a friend. “I feel like I wasn’t ready to be friends with [West] until I felt like he had some sort of respect for me, and he wasn’t ready to be friends with me until he had some sort of respect for me. So it was the same issue, and we both reached the same place at the same time,” Swift said.

“I became friends with Jay Z, and I think it was important, for Jay Z, for Kanye and I to get along,” she continued. “And then Kanye and I both reached a place where he would say really nice things about my music and what I’ve accomplished, and I could ask him how his kid’s doing.”

Throughout it all, Swift has maintained close-knit friendships with other female stars like Lena Dunham, Selena Gomez, and Gigi Hadid. “We even have girls in our group who have dated the same people,” Swift said. “It’s almost like the sisterhood has such a higher place on the list of priorities for us. It’s so much more important than some guy that it didn’t work out with.”

“When you’ve got this group of girls who need each other as much as we need each other, in this climate, when it’s so hard for women to be understood and portrayed the right way in the media. . . . now more than ever we need to be good and kind to each other and not judge each other–and just because you have the same taste in men, we don’t hold that against each other,” she said.

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