Last thursday, Billboard Magazine’s online hub posted an article that left us with a blank space in our hearts: after the 1989 tour concludes in December, Taylor Swift will be taking a break from music. In a recent interview for the U.K. magazine, NME, Taylor says, “I think I should take some time off.” She elaborated, “I think people might need a break from me. I’m going to… I don’t know. Hang out with my friends. Write new music. Maybe not write new music. I don’t know.” Cue the horrified gasps of millions of Taylovers across the globe. How could Taylor think we’d ever get tired of singing along to her heartbreak anthems, liking her catstagram pics and most importantly, seeing her dance like millions of people aren’t watching?
This is not to say she’ll disappear altogether (remember, she said break, not exuent) and I’m sure we’ll see her again in more than just our wildest dreams, but, for right now, she’s taking a sabbatical from the spotlight. Of course we’ll miss getting a killer new album every two years and filling huge stadiums just to watch her slay on the stage, but it’s also important to remember that she has a life outside of music. She’s been in the business for over ten years now (the best ten years of our music listening lives, amiright?), launching herself onto the radar in 2006 with her debut album, Taylor Swift. Now, five albums and seven Grammy Awards later, she’s almost twenty-six years old and is likely ready to start refocusing on her private life, something that must be unimaginably difficult when your life is constantly under public scrutiny. I’ll bet that Taylor Swift is excited to just be Taylor for a while.
I guess my point here, is that her break from music might not necessarily be a bad thing.
If we start looking at it the way an industry mogul might, it all starts to make a lot of sense. As she says in the NME article, “…she can’t expect her next album to be as big as 1989 has been.” And let’s face it, 1989 has been huge. In a world where no one seems to pay for music anymore, Swift’s 1989 managed to become the best-selling album of 2014, selling 3.66 million copies (over a million of those being sold within the first week) between its release on October 27th up until the end of the year. Based on its astronomical success, the “Shake It Off” singer seems to understand that nothing she could produce right now would live up to that. Like the brilliant musician and savvy businesswoman that she is, Taylor Swift knows that it’s much smarter to hold off on releasing another album until the likeliness of it being directly compared to 1989 decreases, and when the music world is starting to grow ravenous for the next installation of the Taylor Swift Chronicles.
So while we may not get another Taylor Swift album for a few more years than we’d originally planned, we might get records produced by Taylor Swift, which, when you think about it, is almost just as good. It’ll be interesting to see if and how she adapts from being inside the booth to being on the other side of the glass. She’s also said that she’s really looking forward to working with other artists. Maybe we’ll finally get that Kanyalor collab after all.
But when those stage lights go out on December 12th, and Taylor takes her final bow of the 1989 World Tour, just remember that being a Swiftie will never go out of style and that someday, we’ll be out of the woods once again.
Photo courtesy of billboard.com