Taylor Swift Talks to Vogue About ‘Red Flags’ in Relationships

It’s often been said that if you cull a bunch of random teenage girls’ Facebook status updates, you will eventually have a Taylor Swift song.

Indeed, the quasi-country singer has a talent for narrating the souls of tweens, but Swift says recent experiences have schooled her in what makes a relationship worth pursuing. And perhaps not unintentionally trying to evoke Adele and her recent success with a break-up album, Swift says that a broken heart and the subsequent pain-processing was behind her most recent efforts in the studio.

The bubbly blonde sat down with Vogue to discuss what she had learned and what motivated her to write the album, citing a relationship that seems to have done a number on her. Swift explains:

“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.”

Boy trouble isn’t the only worry plaguing Swift at this point in her career- the singer also says that pressure mounts after a successful album to duplicate the success. She says:

“The stakes are really high if you mess up, if you slack off and don’t make a good record, if you make mistakes based on the idea that you are larger than life and you can just coast… If you start thinking you’ve got it down, that’s when you run into trouble- either by getting complacent or becoming mouthy. And nobody likes that.”