During a live web chat on Monday evening (August 13), Taylor Swift unveiled the title and cover image for her upcoming fourth album.

Titled Red, the album includes 16 songs (“a lot for an album,” she admitted, “I have a really nice record label”), and it will hits stores Oct. 22.

The album cover features a head shot of Taylor, though her eyes are downcast and in shadow–which implies a darker, sadder tone to this album, something Taylor herself has hinted at in interviews as far back as last year.

“I wrote a song called ‘Red,’” Taylor explained during to her fans–both in person and watching online–during the live webcast. And “thinking about what that means to me, and all the different emotions that are written about on this album, they’re all about crazy, intense, semi-toxic relationships I’ve experience in the last two years. In my mind, all those emotions are ‘red.’ There’s nothing beige about any of those feelings. So I called the record Red.”

Image courtesy Big Machine Records

Despite the subject matter of the album, Taylor was enthusiastic and upbeat throughout the half-hour chat. The same was true for the fans of hers in the room and online–asking questions, laughing, and hanging on every word, they fully echoed her enthusiasm.

Young and nearly all female, they asked questions about her tour plans (“that will be a whole [other] conversation”); they were curious about collaborations, specifically a song she’d written and recorded with Ed Sheeran (“we wrote a song while sitting on a trampoline that was so much fun we ended up recording it as a duet–and it will be on the album”); and they wanted to know what she likes to do in her spare time (“baking and cooking and watching TV”).

They also asked how her day-to-day life had changed in the last six years. “Everywhere I go it’s a more social situation now,” Taylor explained, with the smarts and the poise of a woman who’d not only accepted the extremely public nature of life, but was fully comfortable with it. “But once you adjust your brain to that, it seems normal.”

The grand finale of the chat was the world premiere of her first single from Red.

Image courtesy Big Machine Records

Titled “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together,” the melody is immediately catchy, and the lyrics are about…well, exactly what the title says. The song was written by Taylor along with Max Martin and Johan Shellback, and you can grab a copy for yourself right now on Google Play or iTunes.

- Kurt Wolff, CBS Local