Taylor Swift owns homes across the country, but she has made New York City her permanent home base since March. She wants to further show her appreciation to the city that helped inspired much of her new album "1989" with a generous donation.
"The song 'Welcome to New York' actually, I don't think I've told anyone this before, but the fans were wonderful enough to make it No. 1 on iTunes and it's selling really really well, which is good because I'm donating all of my proceeds to New York City public schools," Swift told the ladies of "The View" on Oct. 29.
Her dreams of moving to New York and making her dreams a reality weighed heavily on the making of her new album "1989."
"New York has been an important landscape and location for the story of my life in the last couple of years. I dreamt about moving to New York. I obsessed over moving to New York and then I did it," Swift told ABC News. "And the inspiration that I found in that city is kind of hard to describe and hard to compare to any other force of inspiration I've ever experienced in my life. It's like an electric city."
New York has showed its appreciation for its new resident by naming her the "Global Welcome Ambassador for the Big Apple." She made several tourism videos explaining all the things she loves and has discovered about the city.
"Welcome to New York" kicks off the album track list, which could sell more than 1 million copies by the end of the week. When Swift surpasses that mark, she will become the only artist this year to have her album go platinum.
Critics everywhere gave Swift high marks on her first all-pop album. Billboard called it a "sophisticated pop tour de force." Rolling Stone compared her to the great '80s pop stars, who knew you didn't follow one epic album (in this case 2012's "Red) with another, but rather "you surprise everybody with a quick-change experiment."
