As we previewed last week, Taylor Swift got her first-ever cover of GQ for the November issue. The issue will be on newsstands October 26th, but GQ has just released their cover story. I have to give it to Swifty: she has a profound understanding of the various tiers within the media. She doesn’t give her really great, bitchy interviews to just any outlet. She saves them for the big ones, like Rolling Stone or Vanity Fair or GQ. You can read the full GQ piece here. Swifty chats about the real inspiration for “Bad Blood” (as in, she tries to say it wasn’t really about Katy Perry) and how it’s totally not her fault that people figure out who her thinly veiled blind-item songs are about.

What “Bad Blood” is really about: “You’re in a[n] 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. So you say, ‘That was about losing a friend.’ And that’s basically all you say. 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. I knew the song would be assigned to a person, and the easiest mark was someone who I didn’t want to be labeled with this song. It was not a song about heartbreak. It was about the loss of friendship.”

Her blind item songs: “I’ve never named names, so I feel like I still have a sense of power over what people say­­­—even if that isn’t true, and even if I don’t have any power over what people say about me. The fact that I’ve never confirmed who those songs are about makes me feel like there is still one card I’m holding.”

What she thinks about being called “calculating”: “Am I shooting from the hip? Would any of this have happened if I was? … You can be successful for three or four years. Accidents happen. But careers take hard work.”

Confidence: “[T]o me, the safest thing I could do was take the biggest risk. I know how to write a song. I’m not confident about a lot of other aspects of my life, but I know how to write a song.”

Her self-awareness: “I used to watch Behind the Music everyday. When other kids were watching normal shows, I’d watch Behind the Music. And I would see these bands that were doing so well, and I’d wonder what went wrong… And what I established in my brain was that a lack of self-awareness was always the downfall… So self-awareness has been such a huge part of what I try to achieve on a daily basis. It’s less about reputation management and strategy and vanity than it is about trying desperately to preserve self-awareness, since that seems to be the first thing to go out the door when people find success.”

Whether she’s lonely: “I’m around people so much. Massive amounts of people… So then when I go home and turn on the TV, and I’ve got Monica and Chandler and Ross and Rachel and Phoebe and Joey on a Friends marathon, I don’t feel lonely.”

Creative license: “You take your creative license and create things that are larger than life. You can write things like I get drunk on jealousy but you’ll come back each time you leave, ‘cause darling I’m a nightmare dressed like a daydream. That is not my approach to relationships. But is it cool to write the narrative of a girl who’s crazy but seductive but glamorous but nuts but manipulative? That was the character I felt the media had written for me, and for a long time I felt hurt by it. I took it personally. But as time went by, I realized it was kind of hilarious.”

Taylor is nuanced: “A nuanced sense of humor does not translate on a general scale and I knew that going in. I knew some people would hear ‘Blank Space’ and say, See, we were right about her. And at that point, I just figure if you don’t get the joke, you don’t deserve to get the joke.”

[From GQ]

I actually haven’t finished reading the full story yet – it’s very long and my eyes are very tired from all the rolling they had to do to get through these excerpts, plus the fact that the story opens on Justin Timberlake calling Swifty on her cell and she sits there and chats with him for 15 minutes in front of the journalist. As for the rest of it… I do think she’s calculating, but if she was a dude, we would be using a different descriptor. I do think she’s hyper-self-aware and that’s not really a bad thing… except when it is. It’s a bad thing when she believes she’s the center of the universe, when her self-awareness becomes chronic narcissism.

As for the “Bad Blood” stuff… she’s absolutely full of it. Utterly and completely.

Photos courtesy of Michael Thompson/GQ.