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Taylor Swift’s proud of Reputation’s reputation. Almost a decade after its release, Reputation has held it spot as Swift’s most controversial record, but the Grammy winner is embracing its legacy. “I’m very proud of it when I look back on it,” she said during her Grammy Museum Icon Sessions interview. “The things that I look back on now, when I’ve gone through something that was sort of an attempt to drive me insane, when you don’t allow that to happen, and you use art and music as a way to barrel-roll out of that, those are the moments I’m the most proud of.”
Swift has had a contentious relationship with Reputation over the years. Her reaction to the Album of the Year snub at the 2018 Grammys was captured in her Miss Americana documentary. “This is good,” she says in the doc. “This is fine.” She then adds that she just needs “to make a better record.” Rep is also only one of two album that she didn’t rerecord as part of her Taylor’s Versions releases. (The other was her least-successful album, her self-titled debut record.)
Speaking about that era now, she doesn’t explicitly mention Kanye West, Kim Kardashian, or her then-new beau, Joe Alwyn, but she is clear about the narrative. “The fun part of that album is that it had a lot of sides to it,” she said. “If you look deeper into that album, it’s an album about feeling so upset about this mass shaming that you felt like you were going through, that you find this little cave. You crawl in there and you try to find a tiny bit of warmth, and that warmth sustains you for the entire time that you feel massively misunderstood by people who don’t know you.” On songs like “Gorgeous” and “Getaway Car,” it is clear that the warmth is a British man she may not want to name at the moment, but at least she likes the album she wrote about him.
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