Taylor Swift is renowned for wearing her glittery heart on her sparkly sleeve, so it shouldn't be any big surprise that her upcoming album is all about a heart-wrenching breakup. The country singer tells Vogue in her cover interview that she's been inspired by "absolute crash-and-burn heartbreak." Interesting!
Also in music news, Rihanna's been waking and baking in Hawaii, Katy Perry teased an acoustic version of her latest hit on her Facebook page, LeAnn Rimes got a tattoo in her husband's honor, and Adele had the most-sung karaoke song in the U.K. with "Someone Like You."
• Taylor Swift comes across as some sort of Nashville Grace Kelly in her cover interview for the latest issue of Vogue, but beneath the sequins and matte red lipstick there's a girl whose musical inspirations are pretty transparent. She makes it so:
There's just been this earth-shattering, not recent, but absolute crash-and-burn heartbreak, and that will turn out to be what the next album is about. The only way that I can feel better about myself—pull myself out of that awful pain of losing someone—is writing songs about it to get some sort of clarity.
Swift didn't say who, exactly, caused the heartbreak, but it's clearly implied in Jonathan Van Meter's piece that it's likely Jake Gyllenhaal, with whom Swift broke up during the holidays in 2010. When explaining her current love situation, she hinted, "I got nothing going on! I just don't really feel like dating. I really have this great life right now, and I'm not sad and I'm not crying this Christmas, so I am really stoked about that."
Swift, 22, says she's learned there are some things she just can't put up with in relationships. She steers clear of men wary of her security team ("I don't have security to make myself look cool, or like I have an entourage. I have security because there's a file of stalkers who want to take me home and chain me to a pipe in their basement."), men who put her down (duh), and privacy obsessives ("People kind of care if there are two famous people dating. But no one cares that much"). We can't rely on Taylor to ever come clean with a name, unless she decides to fit another acrostic poem into her song lyrics again. That's always cute.