Taylor Swift on Her New Album ‘Speak Now’ and Growing Up

When Taylor Swift released her previous album, she was still a teen–now she’s twenty. Has her music matured with her?
Swift recently spoke in Nashville with the Wall Street Journal about her new album “Speak Now,” and how she’s changed since her last release.
“I’ve kind of lived my life trying to be the age that I am in the right way,” Swift says. “Like, trying to be 18 the right way, trying to be 19 the right way, 20 the right way. That’s what I’m working on now—trying to be 20 the right way. I feel like growing up, and musical evolution, should happen naturally, in the time they’re supposed to happen.”


Scott Borchetta, the president of Big Machine, the record label that puts out Swift’s music, says the country star has matured since her last release–but she’s not going to start spicing up her image with the kind of sexual imagery the industry typically expects from young female stars.
“Taylor will do things on her own terms,” Borchetta says. “There’s a lot of photo shoots she does that are, in her way, very sexy. If sexy to you means taking off her clothes, or doing a Rolling Stone cover in her underwear, I don’t think we’ll ever see that. That’s not who she is.”
“Some people argue that the Katy Perry cover of Rolling Stone is very sexy,”  Borchetta says. “It’s all about taste. Katy Perry fans expect that from the girl who sang “I Kissed a Girl.” They don’t expect it from the girl who wrote ‘You Belong With Me.’”
Swift’s new album features a track about disrupting a love interest’s wedding ceremony (“Speak Now”) and a melancholy look back at an ex-boyfriend who could have been the love of her life (“Back to December”). In general, the songwriting is about more mature topics. “We’ll probably lose the low end, but her real fans will grow with her,” Borchetta says.
Then again, Swift may gain a lot of new fans. More than 2 million copies of “Speak Now” were shipped to stores, about twice the initial shipment of her prior album, “Fearless.”
What do you think of the new album? Has Swift matured? Leave your thoughts in the comments.