Red hits

RED ALERT: As you can see from the iTunes album chart, Taylor Swift’s Red is out and sitting at #1, where it has been since soon after midnight ET—and this with no preorder. Tracks from Red also occupy 14 of the top 22 chart positions at iTunes. This is the week we find out whether Swift’s latest will do what her last album Speak Now did in 2010—break a million units in its first week. In a big-picture sense, it’ll also be interesting to see whether her fans are willing to come along for the ride as she continues her evolution from country wunderkind to grown-up superstar on a stylistically diverse effort containing the results of collaborations with the likes of Max Martin and Shellback, Ed Sheeran, Jeff Bhasker and Dan Wilson, among others. What motivated her to mix it up after the previous album, which she wrote and produced on her own ? Big Machine honcho Scott Borchetta provided the answer in Randy Lewis’ excellent L.A. Times profile of the ambitious 22-year-old artist. "I think the 24 guests she had on the Speak Now tour really opened her mind to a lot of things," said Borchetta. "It really opened her mind musically and sonically." Swift confirmed this assertion in the piece, explaining, "I reached a moment in making this album where I just wanted to get into the studio with people who do things differently than I do and see how they do it. It was really more of an experience decision. I really never want to get stuck making the same album more than once." (10/22a)