Taylor Swift To Paint The Town Red In October

Taylor Swift’s highly-anticipated fourth studio album will be released worldwide on October 22nd, Taylor herself announced this evening during a live YouTube web chat with her fans. Entitled Red, the album will be released on Big Machine Records and contains 16 tracks. After writing her last album (Speak Now) entirely by herself, for this record Taylor collaborated with several artists, producers, and songwriters she had always wanted to work with. Both Max Martin, best known for his work with Britney Spears and Pink, and Ed Sheeran, who has written hits for One Direction, as well as has his own solo career, collaborated with Swift on the new set, which she recorded over a two-year period.  Martin co-wrote first single, “We Are Never, Ever Getting Back Together,” with Swift and Shellback. Swift debuted the stompy, up-tempo pop tune today during a YouTube chat with fans and it is already available on iTunes.

“For the last two years, I've been working on an album called Red,” Taylor says. “I called it Red because of the tumultuous, crazy adventures in love and loss that it chronicles. In my mind, when you experience love that's fast paced and out of control and mixes infatuation, jealousy, frustration, miscommunication, and all of those lovely emotions…in retrospect, it all looks red.”

“I tend to skew in the direction of writing about love-related things,” she said. “That’s kind of where I naturally go. I ended up being inspired by a lot of ‘zero-to-200, then hits a wall and then explodes relationships,’ which are so fun to write about. Really dysfunctional.”

She hastened to add that while some of the songs were personal, others were observational. When she’s writing a new album, everyone in her life “becomes a character or has the potential” to become one.

As to why she decided to co-write on this album after going solo on “Speak Now” (and collaborating with Liz Rose on the first two albums), Swift says, “I thought, why not call all my songwriting and producing heroes and see if they want to work together. I got the opportunity to work with some of my absolute favorite people in music.”

Swift’s YouTube chat can be viewed below: