As Rolling Stone reported earlier this year, for the past six months, Taylor Swift has been writing the follow-up to her quadruple-platinum album Red. She recently opened up further to the Associated Press, saying it's a record that will show off a different side of her.
"I think the goal for the next album is to continue to change, and never change in the same way twice," she explained in an interview that took place after receiving her sixth songwriter-artist of the year award from Nashville Songwriters Association International. "How do I write these figurative diary entries in ways that I've never written them before and to a sonic backdrop that I've never explored before?"
She answers her own question later in the interview, after she praises her songwriting partners and "dream collaborators" on Red, Shellback and Max Martin. She answers a question about what she has planned for her new album, by describing how those writers pushed her when they wrote the hits "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together" and "22." "I'll bring in ideas and they'll take such a different turn than where I thought they were going to go, and that level of unexpected spontaneity is something that really thrills me in the process of making music," she said. "What if we did this? What if we made it weirder? What if we took it darker? I love people who have endless strange and exciting ideas about where music can go."
It's no wonder she's elated, since her fusion of pop and country led to six CMA nominations this year, where she said the genre has "pushed the boundaries more than ever before." Her success is what led her to open the Taylor Swift Education Center at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, an endeavor that cost a reported $4 million.
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But despite superstar moves like that, she protests being labeled a "pop star," when AP likens her to Madonna. "I would never see myself that way," she said. "I see myself as kind of this girl who writes songs in her bedroom."