Taylor Swift

Taylor Swift held a live web chat with fans on Monday night and announced that her new album, Red, will be coming out on October 22. Swift, who was aptly wearing a red dress and red lipstick, started off the chat by explaining the title of her fourth album.

"When I was coming up with the name for this album it seemed crazy because it was really simple," Swift said. "I wrote a song called 'Red' and thinking about what that song means to me and all the different emotions on this album -- they're all pretty much about the tumultuous, crazy, insane, intense, semi-toxic relationships I've experienced in the last two years, and all those emotions fanning from intense love, intense frustration, intense jealousy, confusion, all of that in my mind, all those emotions are red. There's nothing in between, there's nothing beige about those feelings and so I called my record that."

Swift also revealed that the album will feature 16 tracks, not including bonus tracks that will be available in various places. She also unveiled the first single, "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together," which then immediately went on sale digitally and shot directly to #1 on iTunes. With widespread national Top 40 radio exposure, "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together" is expected to be the most-added song at the Top 40 format this week.

As usual, the inspiration for most of her songwriting was the ups and downs of love and relationships. "I tend to skew in the direction of writing songs about love-related things, relationship- and feeling-related things, that's where I naturally go," Swift said when a fan asked about her inspiration for Red. "I ended up being inspired by a lot of zero-to-100 then it hits a wall and explodes- type relationships which are so fun to write about, really dysfunctional and not good generally but when you write about them it gives you a lot of inspiration. There are things that I went through personally and then there are stories I witnessed going on around me. When I'm writing an album, my world becomes a big storyboard and has the potential to become a character and all my family and friends around me know that. The last two years have been really inspirational and that's why there are so many songs on the album." 

Swift also inferred that she is hard at work planning her next world. "We're going to be doing lots of traveling all over everywhere," she told a pair of Swedish fans, before expressing a desire to head to South America soon. She also told her listeners to look forward to hearing album tracks co-written by some of her favorite artists and producers, including Max Martin and Ed Sheeran.