Taylor Swift Talks Kanye West in ‘Vanity Fair’: I Felt We Couldn’t Be Friends Until He Somewhat Respected Me

Taylor Swift graces the cover of Vanity Fair‘s September issue, and inside, the pop titan discusses Kanye West, her thoughts on streaming and her sisterhood with Lena Dunham, Gigi Hadid, Selena Gomez and more.

Check out a few interesting tidbits from Taylor’s cover story below.

On Kanye West:

“I feel like I wasn’t ready to be friends with [West] until I felt like he had some sort of respect for me, and he wasn’t ready to be friends with me until he had some sort of respect for me—so it was the same issue, and we both reached the same place at the same time,” Swift says. “I became friends with Jay Z, and I think it was important, for Jay Z, for Kanye and I to get along. . . . And then Kanye and I both reached a place where he would say really nice things about my music and what I’ve accomplished, and I could ask him how his kid’s doing.”

On streaming:

After receiving criticism for a Wall Street Journal op-ed Swift wrote last summer, about Spotify’s free-streaming service, Swift says she worried “people would say, ‘Why won’t she shut up about this?’. . . My fears were that I would be looked at as someone who just whines and rants about this thing that no one else is really ranting about.”

Swift says she consulted only one person before releasing the letter on the Internet. “I read it to my mom,” she says. “She’s always going to be the one. I just said, ‘I’m really scared of this letter, but I had to write it. I might not post it, but I had to say it.’”

On her sisterhood with Lena Dunham, Gigi Hadid, Selena Gomez and more:

“We even have girls in our group who have dated the same people,” Swift says. “It’s almost like the sisterhood has such a higher place on the list of priorities for us. It’s so much more important than some guy that it didn’t work out with.”

“When you’ve got this group of girls who need each other as much as we need each other, in this climate, when it’s so hard for women to be understood and portrayed the right way in the media. . . . now more than ever we need to be good and kind to each other and not judge each other—and just because you have the same taste in men, we don’t hold that against each other,” she says.

For more, head on over to Vanity Fair.