"This time around I feel more comfortable being brave enough to be vulnerable, because my fans are brave enough to be vulnerable with me. Once people delve into the album, it’ll become pretty clear that that’s more of the fingerprint of this — that it’s much more of a singer-songwriter, personal journey than the last one."
-- Taylor Swift
"Lover" is Taylor's first release with Republic Records, after leaving Big Machine in November 2018. Fans began speculating about the album as early as February 2019, and Taylor alluded to this in a speech at the 2019 iHeartRadio Music Awards the next month, saying that fans “will be the first to know” about new music.
COMPOSITION
Taylor described the album as a romantic one, stating that it was "not just simply thematically, like it’s all love songs or something. The idea of something being romantic, it doesn’t have to be a happy song. You can find romance in loneliness or sadness or going through things in your life… it just looks at those things through a romantic gaze."