Image Credit: Joseph Anthony BakerTaylor Swift has emerged as one of the biggest pop stars of the MP3 age, but deep down, the 20-year-old singer is an old-fashioned vinyl collector. Swift personally made sure that her third album, Speak Now, would be available as a vinyl record as well as a CD and a digital download. The double LP will arrive Nov. 16, a few weeks after the album’s Oct. 25 release date in other formats. “The vinyl is really important to me,” Swift tells EW, “because I’m so in love with the concept of an album — a collection of memories from your life that you’re giving to people. It’s a piece of you. Buying them on vinyl is just taking that one step further and acknowledging that albums are important.”
Swift’s love for vinyl is no joke. She says she has a record player in a “central, prominent location” in her kitchen at home, and she brought a turntable with her on tour so she could rock out on the road. At a recent trip with EW to Nashville’s Great Escape Music Store, she snapped up LPs by Bruce Springsteen (Working on a Dream, Magic), Ryan Adams (Easy Tiger), the Black Keys (Rubber Factory), and more. (Check out the latest issue of EW, on stands tomorrow, to read the full story of Swift’s record-buying expedition.)
Big, beautiful cover art is one reason why Swift loves vinyl. “There’s something so fascinating about the cover art — every single one of those was a decision by somebody and people put a lot of time and effort into it,” she says. “With my albums, I have a lot of fun with the art direction and a lot of what I do is trying to visually express what the song says. You take the lyrics and you see what picture it paints and you try to do a photo set up that looks like it… We’re incorporating the same art in the vinyl album as we do in the CD, but it’s done in a different format. It’s really put forth in its own way.”
Shortly after that record-buying spree, EW was with Swift when she tore off the brown paper covering and sees Speak Now‘s vinyl edition for the first time. “It’s like Christmas,” she says. “Oh my God, whoa! This is so crazy. It feels unreal. I’m so happy about this.” —Reporting by Eileen Finan
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John Lennon‘s entire solo catalog was just reissued to mark what would have been his 70th birthday. Want to check out the remastered sound and handsome packaging without reaching for your wallet? You just might be in luck. The Music Mix is giving away a whole bunch of the new Lennon reissues today: Three Signature box sets (featuring all of his remastered solo albums), 10 copies of Power to the People (a new greatest hits CD), and 10 copies of the new Double Fantasy Stripped Down 2-CD (featuring the original 1980 album and a new alternate mix).
