Holy crap, Taylor Swift’s cover story for New York Magazine is long. It’s really, really long. You can read it here if you want to spend twenty minutes of your day on a time-suck article that I can sum up for you quickly: Tay-Tay is the reigning queen of pop music and she’s a shrewd businesswoman and a control-freak about her sparkles-and-ponies image. There. Done. I skim so you don’t have to, and you’ll thank me later. Taylor did talk about some interesting stuff and she made some cryptic remarks about (I guess) Jake Gyllenhaal and Harry Styles. Some highlights:

She’s from Pennsylvania & she’s super-country: “Country radio is much more like a family than any other group of people that I’ve met. They just say, ‘Look, we’ve known each other for years. You’ve stood by us, and we’ve stood by you. That’s how this works.’ ”

She gives back: In October, the singer attended a gala ribbon-cutting ceremony for the Taylor Swift Education Center at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, which she personally endowed with a $4 million donation. “I love being a part of the country-music community,” she told me.

Someday she’ll quit music: “When I’m 40 and nobody wants to see me in a sparkly dress anymore, I’ll be, like: ‘Cool, I’ll just go in the studio and write songs for kids.’ It’s looking like a good pension plan.”

The “spin” on how she writes slam-songs about exes: “There’s a spin on every single celebrity out there. I know that one of my spins is: ‘Oh, Taylor’s heartbroken. Oh, Taylor fell in love and the guy broke her heart. She’s sad all the time, and lonely.’ I mean, they can say that all they want. Those are real feelings that every single person goes through. I think that it’s okay to be mad at someone who hurt you. This isn’t about, like, the pageantry of trying to seem like nothing affects you. I’m a songwriter. Everything affects me.”

Is this Jake Gyllenhaal? “I heard from the guy that most of Red is about,” Swift said. “He was like, ‘I just listened to the album, and that was a really bittersweet experience for me. It was like going through a photo album.’ That was nice. Nicer than, like, the ranting, crazy e-mails I got from this one dude. It’s a lot more mature way of looking at a love that was wonderful until it was terrible, and both people got hurt from it—but one of those people happened to be a songwriter.” She rolled her eyes. “So what are you going to do? Did you not Wikipedia me before you called me up?”

Her next album: “I have a lot of things to draw from emotionally at the moment. But I have to draw from them with a different perspective than on Red. I can’t say the same things over and over, you know? I mean, I think it’s just all the more important that I don’t ever allow myself to coast. At the same time, there’s a mistake that I see artists make when they’re on their fourth or fifth record, and they think innovation is more important than solid songwriting. The most terrible letdown as a listener for me is when I’m listening to a song and I see what they were trying to do. Like, where there’s a dance break that doesn’t make any sense, there’s a rap that shouldn’t be there, there’s like a beat change that’s, like, the coolest, hippest thing this six months—but it has nothing to do with the feeling, it has nothing to do with the emotion, it has nothing to do with the lyric. I never want to put things in songs just because that might make them popular, like, on the more rhythmic stations or in dance clubs. I really don’t want a compilation of sounds. I just need them to be songs.”

She’s always going to write about love: “I only write songs about crazy love. If I go on two dates with a guy and we don’t click, I’m not writing a song about that. It didn’t matter in the emotional grand scheme of things. There’s a lot that goes on in daily life that isn’t really worth turning into a verse and a chorus.”

[From Vulture]

Let’s parse! I think “the guy that most of Red is about” is definitely Jake Gyllenhaal. I think Jake is all over Red and that was her biggest relationship at the time she was writing the album. But who is this? “Nicer than, like, the ranting, crazy e-mails I got from this one dude.” John Mayer? Harry Styles? One of them, right? Would Harry Styles send her ranting, crazy emails? I doubt it. I think Harry is over it, right? Now, John Mayer… he seems like a great candidate for an email ranter. As for: “So what are you going to do? Did you not Wikipedia me before you called me up?” Seriously. I kind of agree with her on that one – you know what you’re getting with Taylor Swift. If you’re a dude and you want to date her, just know that she has stalker eyes and she’ll sh-t talk you in a song.

Also – MSN has an interesting “exclusive” about Tay-Tay and Harry Styles maybe kind of getting back together – you can read the story here. Allegedly, they are going to spend the Hew Year together and a source says, “Harry has never really gotten over Taylor and thinks she is gorgeous. He is going to spend some serious time with her in the run up to Christmas and New Year.”

Photos courtesy of NY Magazine, WENN.