Taylor Swift‘s rise to the to top of the music industry is no accident, but don’t call her “calculating.”
The singer identified the criticism among the most “highly offensive” while being interviewed by Chuck Klosterman for the November issue of GQ.
“Am I shooting from the hip? Would any of this have happened if I was? In that sense, I do think about things before they happen. But here was someone taking a positive thing — 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,” Swift said in a new interview with GQ.
“Highly offensive,” she continued. “You can be accidentally successful for three or four years. Accidents happen. But careers take hard work.”
Swift also talked about the assumption that most of her songs have to deal with her personal relationships with men.
“You’re in a Rolling Stone interview, and the writer says, ‘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,” she said.
“So you say, ‘That was about losing a friend.’ And that’s basically all you say,” she said. “But then people cryptically tweet about what you meant. I never said anything that would point a finger in the specific direction of one specific person, and I can sleep at night knowing that… It was not a song about heartbreak. It was about the loss of friendship.”
Smith also talked about the now infamous incident when Kanye West rushed the stage when she was accepting the Video Music Award for artist of the year.
“When the crowd started booing, I thought they were booing because they also believed I didn’t deserve the award. That’s where the hurt came from. I went backstage and cried, and then I had to stop crying and perform five minutes later” she said.
“I just told myself I had to perform, and I tried to convince myself that maybe this wasn’t that big of a deal. But that was the most happenstance thing to ever happen in my career. And to now be in a place where Kanye and I respect each other–that’s one of my favorite things that has happened in my career.”
