Taylor Swift Confronts Mayer, Laments Lautner In New Album

Whatever the reactions to Taylor Swift's third full-length album, Speak Now, might be, there are two critics whose responses we can easily pin down in advance.Taylor Lautner is going to love it.
John Mayer? Not so much.
The hotly anticipated album, which comes out Oct. 25, has been held tightly under wraps until now, with only a handful of songs made available for advance listening even to journalists who have been doing interviews with Swift. Now that her label is finally starting to play the album for select critics, it's easy to fathom why its contents have been closely guarded, all fears of leakage aside. Some of the lyrics are startlingly candid, even by the standards of Taylor "Naming Names, Taking No Prisoners" Swift.
And listening to "Dear John," the scorching song that is-from all appearances-aimed at Mayer, all we can say is: Joe Jonas, you got off easy.
When I talked with Swift last month after hearing a few of the new songs, she didn't hesitate to frame Speak Now as her diary of the last two tumultuous years. The general public might have to guess which relationships or incidents most of the songs are about, but the subjects of the lyrics will quickly recognize themselves, she feels confident.
"They're all made very clear," Swift told me. "Every single song is like a roadmap to what that relationship stood for, with little markers that maybe everyone won't know, but there are things that were little nuances of the relationship, little hints. And every single song is like that. Everyone will know, so I don't really have to send out emails on this one."
But, I said, by necessity of her fame and that of her recent boyfriends, she is past the point of using proper names in the lyrics now.
"Um," she responded, "there's still names that I used. Wait till you hear those."
Actually, there's only one actual name called out anywhere in the 14 songs. So if you were thinking that "Dear John" takes its title strictly from the old expression "a dear John letter," you might want to think again. Swift is nothing if not extremely literal.
With most serious singer-songwriters, it might seem voyeuristic to speculate on the personal situations being reflected upon in song. But Swift has lived her life as a fairly open book, all but inviting her fans to relate her well-known relationships to their own as she evidences a gift for writing in both autobiographical and universal terms.


BACK TO DECEMBER
This song, which was already released on iTunes, doesn't leave many doubts about who it's addressed to, since Swift broke up in Lautner last December. It's been widely noted that it's her first "apology" song. She is, after all, known more as the singer of "Picture to Burn" than for writing songs acknowledging that maybe it's her picture that should've been burned. But she emphasizes that, for her, repentance was no mere lyrical exercise.
"I've always sort of felt like I try to write songs that the people that they're about deserve," she told me. "And up until now I haven't really felt like I really, really needed to apologize to someone and someone deserved that from me. It's just necessary. From knowing the situation and writing honestly, I can't leave that part out, and I don't think I should. And I think that you should be able to say that you're sorry to someone, and sometimes the best way I know how to say anything is in a song... I think that for me, especially playing that song for the first time for people around me, like my family and my friends, they made that point right away-like, ‘You realize you've never done this before. You've never really apologized to someone in a song.' I guess I wasn't conscious of that when I was writing it, because it just was exactly what I needed to say. It wasn't like ‘Oh, I haven't covered this emotion yet.' It was just a new emotion for me to feel."
read the reat over at new.music.yahoo~Robstenfan