Taylor Alison Swift is one of the most singer and songwriter, and most beautiful singer.
Taylor Alison Swift
The Beauty Singer
' Some basic about TA Swift '
Taylor Alison Swift is an American singer-songwriter.She is known for narrative songs about her personal life, which have received widespread media coverage. At the age 14 ,Swift became the youngest artist signed by the Sony/ATV Music publishing house and, at the age 15 , she signed her first record deal. Her 2006 eponymous debut album was the longest charting album of the 2000s in the US . Its third single, "Our Song" , made her the youngest person to single handedly write and perform a number one song of the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart. Swift's second album, fearless, was released of 2009 and was certified diamond in the US . The album won four Grammy Awards, and Swift became the youngest album of the Year winner.
Swift was the sole writer of her 2010 album Speak Now, which won two Grammy Awards and was her first to debut with over a million copies sold in the first week in US. Her fourth album, Red, yielded her first Billboard Hot 100 number-one single, "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together"
For her fifth album and first all pop project,1989 , She won three Grammy Awards, including Album of the Year,
and became the first woman to replace at number one on the Hot 100, with the singles "Shake It Off" and "Blank Space". Her sixth album, Reputation made her the only act to have four consecutive albums each sell one million copies in their first week in the US, while yielding her fifth Hot 100 number one song, with"Look What You Made Me Do". With her seventh album,Lover, she became the second woman to achieve six consecutive number one albums on the Billboard 200.
Swift was the sole writer of her 2010 album Speak Now, which won two Grammy Awards and was her first to debut with over a million copies sold in the first week in US. Her fourth album, Red, yielded her first Billboard Hot 100 number-one single, "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together"
For her fifth album and first all pop project,1989 , She won three Grammy Awards, including Album of the Year,
and became the first woman to replace at number one on the Hot 100, with the singles "Shake It Off" and "Blank Space". Her sixth album, Reputation made her the only act to have four consecutive albums each sell one million copies in their first week in the US, while yielding her fifth Hot 100 number one song, with"Look What You Made Me Do". With her seventh album,Lover, she became the second woman to achieve six consecutive number one albums on the Billboard 200.
Life and career
1989-2003: Early life
Taylor Alison Swift was born on December 13 ,1989, in Reading Pennsylvania. Her father, Scott Kingsley Swift, was a stockbroker for Merrill Lynch; her mother, Andrea Gardener Swift, was a homemaker who had worked as a mutual fund marketing executive. Swift, who has said she has Scottish heritage, was named after the singer songwriter James Taylor. She
Younger brother named Austin Kingsley Swift, who is an actor. Swift spent her early years on a Christmas tree farm, which her father purchased from one of his clients. She attended preschool and kindergarten at Alvernia Montessori School, run by the Bernadine Franciscan sisters, before transferring to The Wyndcroft School. The family moved to a rented house in the suburban town of Wyomissing, Pennsylvania, where she attended Wyomissing Area Junior High School.
Taylor’s savvy parents — Andrea Swift, a successful businesswoman, and
Scott Swift, a stockbroker — wanted to make sure their daughter would have
every advantage possible, and named her appropriately. Andrea reasoned that
future employers wouldn’t know if Taylor was a boy or a girl if they saw her
name on a business card or résumé. Taylor explained to Rolling Stone, “She
wanted me to be a business person in a business world.” The platinum-selling
singer-songwriter may not work in a boardroom, but there’s no doubt Andrea
Swift is anything but disappointed.
In Wyomissing, Taylor grew up on an 11-acre Christmas tree farm, which
was the family’s secondary business. The farm was also home to several cats and
seven horses. Taylor was a young equestrian, and rode horses competitively as a
child. Taylor remembers, “I was raised on a little farm and for me when I was
little, it was the biggest place in the world. And it was the most magical,
wonderful place in the world.” She spent her time “running free and going
anywhere I wanted in my head.” When she was two she got a partner to play
with when Andrea and Scott brought brother Austin home to join the Swift
family. When Taylor was four, Andrea decided to set her career aside and focus
on her family.
As Taylor shared in “The Best Day,” her love song for her family, the Swifts
are a close-knit bunch. Telling Girls’ Life about her mom, Taylor explained,
“She’s one of my best friends. She’s always, always around. She’s the person in
my life who will just literally look me in the eye and say, ‘Look, snap out of it.’
You know? And I need that person.” Taylor also recognizes that her mother’s
influence was a major factor in achieving her astonishing success: “She totally
raised me to be logical and practical. I was brought up with such a strong woman
in my life and I think that had a lot to do with me not wanting to do anything
halfway.”
The special bond between mother and daughter doesn’t go unnoticed by Scott
Swift, who told the Tennessean: “People keep saying to me, ‘The relationship
between Andrea and Taylor is something pretty special.’ That is amazing. There
aren’t too many mother and daughters who work together as a business unit the
way those two do.” And while Scott may not be constantly by Taylor’s side now
that she’s often away from home, he still plays a major role in his daughter’s life.
Andrea’s approach is firm though loving, realistic, and honest, while Scott is a
softie. “My dad is just a big teddy bear who tells me that everything I do is
perfect,” said Taylor. Like his wife, Scott passes on his wisdom to his daughter,
helping her make sound financial decisions about her career independently.
“Business-wise, he’s brilliant,” says Taylor. “I’m constantly getting business
advice and what to invest in. I think you should be in charge of every single
aspect of your career.”
As a parenting team, Andrea and Scott balance each other out. Taylor told the
Tennessean, “I have a logical, practical, realistic mother, and a head-in-theclouds, kind and friendly, optimistic father. And so I’m a dreamer, and my
imagination goes to places where love lasts forever and everything is covered in
glitter, and that’s from my dad’s personality. Every time I walk off stage, he tells
me how much he loved it, or how he was standing at the soundboard, crying. But
my mom, she’ll tell me exactly what she saw.”
While Taylor may get her confidence and her business sense from her
parents, her musical talent comes from someone else: her late maternal
grandmother, Marjorie Finlay, a successful opera singer. Taylor reminisces, “I
can remember her singing, the thrill of it. She was one of my first inspirations,”
and she elaborated to the Sunday Times: “She would have these wonderful
parties at her house, and she would get up and sing. She always wanted to be
onstage, whether she was in the middle of her living room or in church; she just
loved it. And when she would walk into a room, everyone would look at her, no
matter what; she had this ‘thing,’ this It factor. I always noticed it — that she was
different from everyone else.” Marjorie traveled with her husband, who built oil
rigs around the world, and she performed in places like Singapore, Puerto Rico,
and Vietnam. When Andrea was 10, the family settled in America. Marjorie
appeared in operas like The Bartered Bride and The Barber of Seville and
musicals such as West Side Story. Scott Swift notices similarities that go beyond
musical ability between his daughter and his mother-in-law: “The two of them
had some sort of magic where they could walk into a room and remember
everybody’s name. Taylor has the grace and the same physique of Andrea’s
mother. Andrea’s mother had this unique quality; if she was going into a room,
literally everybody loved Marjorie.”
Taylor’s legacy from her grandmother appeared at a very young age. She had
an uncanny ability to memorize songs, and Taylor remembers that at age three or
four, “I would come out of these Disney movies and I’d be singing every single
song from the movie on the car ride home, word for word. And my parents
noticed that once I had run out of words I would just make up my own.” Taylor
admits, “I was that annoying kid who ran around singing for random strangers.”
The young girl was hooked on more than just singing; Taylor was addicted to
stories too. Taylor told Katie Couric, “All I wanted to do was talk and all I
wanted to do was hear stories. I would drive my mom insane driving down the
road [with her].” Like other children, Taylor demanded stories at bedtime, but
rather than reading the same books over and over, Taylor insisted on originals. “I
refused to go to bed without a story. And I always wanted to hear a new one,”
she says. No wonder Andrea admitted her energetic youngster “had the potential
to be exhausting.”
It wasn’t too long before Taylor started making up her own stories. She told
the Washington Post, “Writing is pretty involuntary to me. I’m always writing.”
Taylor’s love of language “started with poetry, trying to figure out the perfect
combination of words, with the perfect amount of syllables and the perfect
rhyme to make it completely pop off the page.” She loved Dr. Seuss and Shel
Silverstein, and told Rolling Stone: “I noticed early on that poetry was something
that just stuck in my head and I was replaying those rhymes and try[ing] to think
of my own. In English, the only thing I wanted to do was poetry and all the other
kids were like, ‘Oh, man. We have to write poems again?’ and I would have a
three-page long poem.” In the fourth grade she won a national poetry contest for
her composition “Monster in My Closet.” She even wrote a 350-page novel
during a summer vacation. Andrea remembers, “She wrote all the time. If music
hadn’t worked out, I think she’d be going off to college to take journalism
classes or trying to become a novelist.”
Beyond music and stories, Taylor demonstrated one more quality at a young
age that would prove useful on her rise to superstardom: she was at ease in front
of the camera and knew how to strike a pose that even Tyra Banks would call
fierce. Andrea told British magazine Sugar, “I got photos taken for family
Christmas cards when Taylor was five. She was really posing. The photographer
told me I should take her to L.A. to model, but I’m so glad I didn’t.” Millions of
fans are glad she didn’t too.
Entering the Spotlight
When Taylor was around 10, she decided she wanted to follow in her
grandmother’s footsteps and sing in front of an audience. She auditioned for the
local children’s theater company a week after she saw its production of Charlie
and the Chocolate Factory. Since she was tall, Taylor was given the lead roles,
and played such memorable parts as Sandy in Grease, Kim in Bye Bye Birdie,
and Maria in The Sound of Music, but Taylor admits, “My singing sounded a lot
more country than Broadway.” And though Taylor liked being onstage, what
really captured her heart was performing karaoke at the cast parties. The
songstress explains, “Singing country music on that karaoke machine was my
favorite thing in the world.” She sang the Shania Twain, Dixie Chicks, and Faith
Hill songs that she’d been listening to since a LeAnn Rimes album got her
hooked on country music at age six. Her inspiring performances didn’t go
unnoticed, and Taylor remembers, “One day, somebody turned to my mom and
said, ‘You know, she really ought to be singing country music.’” Taylor adds, “It
kind of occurred to all of us at the same time that that’s what I needed to be
doing.”
A young Taylor as Kim in a children’s theater production of Bye Bye Birdie.
Taylor started scouring the phone book for more places to perform. One of
her regular spots was the Pat Garrett Roadhouse in Strausstown, Pennsylvania,
which held frequent karaoke contests. Taylor started going every week, taking
her parents along with her. “They were kind of embarrassed by it, I guess,”
remembered Taylor. “This little girl singing in this smoky bar. But they knew
how much it meant to me so they went along with it.” A year and a half later, her
performance of LeAnn Rimes’ “Big Deal” earned her not only the prestige of
being karaoke champion, but also a spot opening for Grammy-winner and
country legend Charlie Daniels at the amphitheater across the street. In this case,
“opening” meant that Taylor went on at 10 a.m. while Charlie Daniels played at
8 p.m. Nevertheless, it was a pretty amazing feat for an 11-year-old.
Demonstrating business smarts that would make her parents proud, Taylor
discovered that another way to reach a large audience was to perform the
national anthem at sports games. She sent demo tapes out everywhere. She sang
regularly for her local minor league baseball team, the Reading Phillies, and
would take whatever other gigs she could get from local garden club meetings
all the way up to the U.S. Open tennis tournament when she was 12. “I figured
out that if you could sing that one song, you could get in front of 20,000 people
without even having a record deal,” Taylor told Rolling Stone. One of the
highlights of her anthem-singing career came at age 11 when she sang at a 76ers
game. Jay-Z was sitting courtside and, after her performance, the famous rapper
and hip hop mogul gave young T-Swizzle a high-five. “I bragged about that for
like a year straight,” Taylor admits.
As her career progressed, Taylor kept singing the anthem, though her
eventual record deal helped get her in front of considerably larger audiences. She
performed “The Star-Spangled Banner” at game three of the 2008 World Series
between the Philadelphia Phillies and the Tampa Bay Rays. Even though she’d
sung the anthem hundreds of times, performing at such an important game was
still a little daunting. Taylor explained, “The national anthem is not as
challenging range-wise, because I’ve been doing it for so long. The challenge for
me is the utter silence that comes over 40,000 people in a baseball stadium and
you’re the only one singing it. . . . It’s a really surreal moment for me.”
But before she was a household name performing at one of the nation’s most
important sporting events, Taylor was just trying to find an audience. She
watched a TV special about one of her heroes, Faith Hill, who talked about
making it in Nashville, the home of country music. Taylor realized, “That’s the
promised land for country music. That’s where I need to go.”
Taylor made a demo tape of her singing the country songs she had grown to
love backed by karaoke tracks, and convinced her mom to take her to the
legendary city on a spring break trip. Andrea packed up Taylor and Austin and
they drove down to Nashville. Taylor walked into the record-company offices on
Music Row, handed them her demo, and boldly announced, “Hi, I’m Taylor. I’m
11. I really want a record deal.” But as charming as the aspiring star’s courage
was, the companies weren’t wooed. “Basically all the record companies went,
‘Ah, how cute. She’s just a little kid.’ [and] ‘Give up your dreams. Go home and
come back when you’re 18,’” recalls Taylor. “I chose not to hear that. I wasn’t
prepared to accept that I wasn’t a relevant artist until I was 18.” The record
companies steadfastly believed that young people didn’t listen to country music.
Taylor was frequently told, “The country music demographic is 35-year-old
females and those are the only people who listen to country music,” but she
remembers, “I just kept thinking that can’t be true. That can’t be accurate
because I listen to country music and I know there have to be other girls
everywhere who listen to country music. . . . So I kept trying because I didn’t
believe that there was just one tiny demographic.” Of course, that younger
demographic did exist, and while the record execs might not have known it yet,
Taylor did, and in a few short years, she would prove it to them.
Guitar Hero, Social Outcast
Returning home to Wyomissing, Taylor knew she had to do something to
distinguish herself from all the other wannabe performers, and she came up with
two ways she could do that: she’d learn to play the guitar and she’d write her
own music. Taylor explained, “There are a lot of gorgeous voices and beautiful
women in Nashville, so I had to figure out a way to stand out. I thought if I could
walk into an audition and play a song that I had written, then I’d stand out. And
that has really made a difference.”
Taylor had a guitar already — she’d received an electric guitar at age eight,
and had actually started taking lessons but she had been discouraged quickly. It
was a less formal teacher who got her playing for good; she learned her first
three chords from a guy who came by to fix the family’s computer. Ten minutes
later, she’d written her first song, “Lucky You.” Each week, the computer guy
would teach his young pupil a few more chords. By age 12, she was playing
guitar four hours a day, every day. In classic T-Swift style, she decided to play on
the more challenging 12-string model, as opposed to a six-string, because her
first teacher had told her she wouldn’t be able to do it. She told Teen Vogue, “I
actually learned on a 12-string, purely because some guy told me that I’d never
be able to play it, that my fingers were too small. Anytime someone tells me that
I can’t do something, I want to do it more.” Andrea was floored by her
daughter’s commitment: “Her fingers would crack from so much playing. She
was driven beyond anything I had ever witnessed.”
Taylor’s single-minded commitment to music may have wowed her mother,
but it wasn’t something that made her popular at school. The other kids made fun
of her bleeding fingers and her love for country music, and were jealous of the
attention she received for performing. She remembers, “I kind of started to live
in fear when I would sing the national anthem at the 76ers game. If there was a
write-up about it the next day in our local paper, I knew it was gonna be a bad
day at school for me.” A group of popular girls who used to be friendly with
Taylor decided to exclude her: “When I’d sit down at the lunch table, they’d get
up and move. Or, as I was setting up my equipment to sing karaoke at the town
summer festival, the kids would shout horrible things.” Andrea recalls, “She was
shunned. After school, I’d hear what nightmare had occurred that day, what
awful thing was done to her. I’d have to pick her up off the floor.”
The budding performer also found her priorities were hugely different from
those of her classmates: “All the girls at school were going to sleepovers and
breaking into their parents’ liquor cabinets on the weekend, and all I wanted to
do was go to festivals and sing karaoke music.” Taylor still picks music over
drinking and parties, and since making that decision in junior high, the
songstress has retained the same values — she won’t let anything compromise
her music career.
Despite rejecting the more rebellious aspects of the social scene, the outsider
still desperately wanted to fit in, and Taylor tried to act just like everyone else.
She even attempted to tame her curly locks, imitating the straight-haired look of
the popular girls. “I tried so hard to be like everybody else and do what they did
and like the things they liked,” she said. “I tried so hard and it didn’t work. They
still didn’t want to be friends with me. . . . So I found that trying to be like
everyone else doesn’t work.” Looking back, Taylor can see what drove her need
to conform: insecurity. “Whatever makes you different in middle school makes
you uncool somehow. I hate that. I think that one thing I realized, after the fact,
was that everybody was insecure. Maybe it wasn’t the same insecurity that I had,
but it’s always something. It’s funny how after you get out of middle school, the
thing that you were the most insecure about can be the thing that sets you apart.”
With the wisdom of a few more years and a wildly successful career, Taylor
offered comfort to other teens who may be going through the same thing, saying,
“The only place where it’s cool to be the same as everyone else is junior high.”
Trapped in her school’s hallways, Taylor eventually came to terms with the fact
that she’d never be in-crowd material, and embraced what made her special,
even if that meant standing out, and ultimately, standing apart from everyone
else.
The straight-A student found herself in a lonely position on the outside,
observing rather than joining in the regular goings-on of middle school. She
recalls, “I was facing a lot of things at school where I found myself on the
outside looking in. I was not included. I would go to school some days, a lot of
days, and not know who I was going to talk to. And that’s a really terrifying
thing for somebody who’s 12.” Luckily, Taylor had an outlet for feeling alone
and excluded; she channeled it into her songwriting. She wrote the song “The
Outside” when she was 12 to capture that feeling, writing, “Nobody ever lets me
in I can still see you, this ain’t the best view On the outside looking in.” Her
point of view as an outsider became a great source of material for Taylor’s
songs: “The people around me provided all the inspiration I needed. Everything I
wrote [at that time] came from that experience, what I observed happening
around me.”
Later in her career, Taylor would learn to be grateful to the people who had
made her life so miserable and given her so much fuel for her songwriting. She
realized, “The only thing I can do is look back and thank [those classmates]. If I
hadn’t been so driven to music because I didn’t have anyone to hang out with, if
I hadn’t written songs because I didn’t have anyone to talk to, I wouldn’t be
sitting here right now.”
But at the time, hurting from rejection and loneliness, she channeled
everything into her music; writing songs became like a diary for Taylor, and it
still is. As her mother told the New York Times, “She simply has to write songs.
It’s how she filters her life.” Taylor was able to turn her schoolyard rejection into
something bigger, something that brought her closer to her goal of having a
record deal. Despite being a dreamer, Taylor knew achieving her goal wouldn’t
be easy, and that she had to keep writing, practicing, and performing to make it
happen. Part of this practicality came from her mother, who, Taylor explains,
“never said to me, ‘Taylor, you’re gonna be famous someday.’” Taylor
continues, “There are so many moms who tell their kids that. But my mom has
always been practical. She didn’t know if I would succeed. She’d say, ‘If you
want a chance at this, you’ve got to work really, really hard.’” And so Taylor did,
writing and practicing constantly and performing at all the music festivals,
karaoke competitions, and national-anthem gigs she could fit in around her
school schedule. Taylor told Cosmo Girl, “The reason I was so driven was that I
didn’t expect that anything would just happen for me. But that doubt fueled me
to work harder. My attitude was the opposite of people who are like, ‘It’s gonna
happen for me. It’s gonna happen for me.’ My mantra was always ‘It’s not gonna
happen for me. Go out and play the show or it won’t happen.’”
One such show made a huge difference in Taylor’s career — the U.S. Open,
one of the four most prestigious tennis tournaments in the world. Taylor belted
out “The Star-Spangled Banner” in front of a massive crowd of over 20,000
tennis fans. Among them was Dan Dymtrow, then manager of Britney Spears.
Impressed with Taylor’s talent, Dymtrow took her on as a client and worked to
promote the young artist. Dymtrow helped 13-year-old Taylor get a development
deal with RCA Records in Nashville. It seemed like a huge step forward, but
after holding onto her for a year, Taylor’s contract came up for review. Taylor
performed for RCA bigwigs, and the label decided to shelve her rather than have
her make a record immediately. “That means they want to watch you, but they’re
not promising to make an album with you,” explained Taylor. “Kind of like a
guy who wants to date you but not be your boyfriend.” It wasn’t enough for the
ambitious teen, who was in a hurry to share her music with the world. “I
genuinely felt that I was running out of time. I’d written all these songs and I
wanted to capture these years of my life on an album while they still represented
what I was going through.” But more than anything, Taylor was disappointed
that RCA didn’t have faith in her potential, so she walked away from the deal —
a bold move for a young singer without a fallback plan. She recalls, “I figured if
they didn’t believe in me then, they weren’t ever going to believe in me.”
Taylor still believed in herself, and she worked at convincing her family to
make a permanent move to the heartland of country music — Nashville,
Tennessee. Her persistence paid off, and before Taylor’s freshmen year the entire
Swift family moved south for a fresh start in Music City, USA.
Leaving Pennsylvania behind wasn’t too difficult for Taylor, who was literally
moving closer to her Nashville dream and away from her bullying classmates,
but it required a bigger sacrifice from the rest of her uprooted family, especially
her father, who had to transfer his business. Nevertheless, the Swifts never put
pressure on Taylor. She told Self magazine, “I knew I was the reason they were
moving. But they tried to put no pressure on me. They were like, ‘Well, we need
a change of scenery anyway’ and ‘I love how friendly people in Tennessee are.’”
Andrea had faith in her daughter and trusted her intentions, “It was never about
‘I want to be famous.’ Taylor never uttered those words. It was about moving to
a place where she could write with people she could learn from.”
Taylor was glad her family trusted her instincts. “Sometimes you don’t have
a sure answer as to where you’re going to go or where you’re going to end up,
but if you have an instinct as to where you don’t need to be, you need to follow it
and my parents let me make that decision completely,” recalls Taylor.
She didn’t have a label anymore, but she had experience working with one.
In 2004, Taylor was featured in an Abercrombie & Fitch “rising stars” campaign
and one of her songs appeared on a compilation album, the Maybelline-produced
Chicks with Attitude. “The Outside,” the song she’d written about feeling
excluded in middle school, had found a temporary home.
It wasn’t long before Taylor found a home as a songwriter at Sony/ATV
Records. She was the youngest songwriter they’d ever hired, which is an
impressive feat, but Taylor knew she’d still have to prove herself by acting with
maturity beyond her years. “I knew the stereotype people had when they heard
the words ‘14-year-old girl’ was that I wasn’t going to do the hard work, and I
wanted people to know that I was,” Taylor emphasized. “One of my first
songwriting sessions was with [accomplished songwriter and producer] Brett
Beavers, and I walked in with 15 different starts to songs. I love being prepared
and I love organization, and I need people to know that I care and that this is
important to me.”
Being a professional songwriter meant that Taylor had to lead a sort of
double life, going to high school in Hendersonville during the day and writing
songs in the afternoons in downtown Nashville, less than 20 miles away. Taylor
called her life back then “a really weird existence,” and elaborated, “I was a
teenager during the day when I was at school, and then at night it was like I was
45. My mom would pick me up from school and I’d go downtown and sit and
write songs with these hit songwriters.”
The social politics of high school in Tennessee turned out to be very similar
to those of junior high in Pennsylvania, but luckily for Taylor, there was one
major difference that made school tolerable — a great friend. Taylor met redhaired Abigail Anderson in ninth grade English, when the new girl wowed the
class with her sophisticated composition. “We were the ones in the back of the
class saying negative things about Romeo and Juliet because we were so bitter
toward that emotion at the time,” recalled Abigail. Neither girl was a member of
the popular clique, so the pair made their own rules, focusing on what they
actually cared about rather than what other people did. For Taylor, that was
music; for Abigail, competitive swimming: “When I was a freshman, I knew I
wanted to swim in college, at a Division 1 school, and she knew that she wanted
to go on tour.” Such focus set the girls apart from their classmates, and bonded
them together. Taylor explained to the New York Times, “It just dawned on me
that I had to love being different or else I was going to end up being dark and
angry and frustrated by school.” Being different meant staying away from the
popular-girl party scene, which Taylor had already decided didn’t appeal to her.
Taylor told Glamour, “I remember seeing girls crying in the bathroom every
Monday about what they did at a party that weekend. I never wanted to be that
girl.
Wellcome to Music City, USA
With her songwriting gig, Taylor was part of the rich music history of Nashville, a city that
has been home to music publishing since 1824 when Western Harmony, a book of
hymns, was produced there. It was in the 1920s that Nashville music really began to
flourish with the opening of the Grand Ole Opry. In the ’40s and ’50s, “Music Row”
developed as Capitol Records and RCA first opened outposts in the capital and every
other major label followed suit. Today, Nashville’s 16th and 17th Avenues South are
home to recording studios and labels galore.
The “Nashville Sound,” a blend of a pop music sensibility with the traditional
storytelling of folk and country artists, was popularized in the 1950s by legends like Jim
Reeves, Patsy Cline, and Eddy Arnold. Its legacy can be heard in Taylor’s song-crafting
style that mixes infectious melodies with memorable tales rooted in real-life experiences.
As Nashville recording artist Elvis Presley helped make rock ’n’ roll a craze, sales of
country music albums dropped, and “crossing over” from country to mainstream listeners
became hugely important for country artists. In the 1980s, the star of country crossover
was the Queen of Country Music herself, Dolly Parton, whose music and personality
made her a household name from coast to coast. Alongside the queen was the King of
Country, George Strait, who trails only the Beatles and Elvis Presley for the number of hit
albums he’s released; he holds the record for the most number-one singles of any artist
in any genre at 57, and he’s always stayed true to a traditional honky-tonk sound. The
’80s also saw the rise of hugely successful country acts such as Alabama and Reba
McEntire.
Like a certain blonde teenager would 20 years later, Garth Brooks started as a
Nashville songwriter before rapidly taking country music by storm with songs like “The
Thunder Rolls” in the 1990s, bringing with him the “new country” sound, over 36 top 10
hits, record-breaking tours, and millions of albums sold. Garth’s audience stretched well
beyond the traditional country music boundaries. It’s no surprise that Taylor Swift has
called Garth Brooks her “role model.”
But it was the female country musicians of the ’90s that most influenced young
Taylor, and it all started with then-14-year-old LeAnn Rimes’ 1996 album Blue, which
Taylor heard when she was just six years old. Recalls Taylor, “LeAnn Rimes was my first
impression of country music . . . I just really loved how she could be making music and
having a career at such a young age.” Taylor “started listening to female country artists
nonstop” from legends like Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn, Tammy Wynette, and Dolly Parton
to the stars of the ’90s like Shania Twain, Faith Hill, and the Dixie Chicks. As Taylor
explained to Rolling Stone, “I saw that Shania Twain brought this independence and this
crossover appeal; I saw that Faith Hill brought this classic old-school glamour and beauty
and grace; and I saw that the Dixie Chicks brought this complete ‘we don’t care what you
think’ quirkiness, and I loved what these women were able to do and what they were able
to bring to country music.”
Dolly Parton, Tim McGraw, and Faith Hill at the 2000 ACM Award nominations. Taylor loves
Dolly’s response to male fans who interrupt quiet performance moments: “Some guy screamed
from the crowd, ‘I love you, Dolly!’ and she goes, ‘I thought I told you to stay in the truck!’”
Taylor has measured her career’s progress by following in the footsteps of the
legends who sang the music she grew up listening to. At a Bakersville, California, show
shortly after Taylor’s first album came out, the son of the late country legend Buck
Owens presented her with a guitar: “I was on stage in front of 5,000 people and Buck
Owens’ son came out on stage with the red-white-and-blue guitar. Buck used to give
them to [musicians] that he really respected, and [his son] said that this was the first one
they had given away since we lost Buck. It blew my mind. I got really, really emotional. It
was just so different than any other sort of respect. It was being approved and embraced
by a country legend.”
Another early career milestone for Taylor was the opportunity to play a show at the
historic Grand Ole Opry. GAC filmed the experience (it’s included on the deluxe version
of her self-titled album). Taylor recounted, “There’s this circle in the middle of the stage.
It’s like everybody from Patsy Cline to Keith Urban to LeAnn Rimes to me, now, have
stood in this circle.” At that moment, walking in the footsteps of country music’s greats,
Taylor knew she’d made it.
Music & Lyrics
Now that she was in the home of country music and had a songwriting contract,
Taylor didn’t abandon her earlier confessional style to start writing about
stereotypical country music subjects. “I don’t sing about tractors and hay bales
and things like that because that’s not really the way that I grew up. But I do sing
about the lessons I’ve learned,” Taylor explained. She wanted to write for people
her age, those country-music fans the labels told her didn’t exist but she knew
did — they were just waiting for songs they could relate to. “I don’t try to write
for older than I am and I don’t try and write for younger than I am. I write in real
time,” noted the songwriter.
These real-time songs are, above all, personal and honest. They’re about
Taylor’s feelings, her friends, her dreams, her heartbreak. She told Seventeen,
“Honesty is a big part of my writing, because when I was younger and fell in
love with songs I’d hear, I would always wonder who that song was about. It
would totally have broken my heart to know it wasn’t about anyone and was just
written so it could be on the radio.”
Now that she was at Hendersonville High, Taylor was accumulating all kinds
of new material. She had her first flirtations with romance, and Taylor started to
write the songs she’d become most famous for — songs about boys, love, and
heartbreak. Since she is unafraid to name names, some of Taylor’s early
boyfriends are well known to her fans. These songs were a way for her to
process her feelings and sometimes she directly addressed the person who
inspired her words: “The only thing I think about when I’m writing a song is the
person I’m writing the song about. Music is very confessional to me. It’s a
chance for me to say things I wouldn’t be brave enough to say to the person’s
face.”
Taylor’s songs may be specific, but as millions of fans can attest, that doesn’t
mean they’re not relatable. At first this came as a surprise to the young
songwriter, who remembers, “I thought because my songs were so personal that
nobody would be able to relate to them. . . . But apparently they were more
significant to more people than just me.” As it turns out, though the names may
be different, the experiences Taylor writes about are fairly universal. Taylor
reasoned, “The hardest thing about heartbreak is feeling like you’re alone, and
that the other person doesn’t really care. But when you hear a song about it, you
realize you’re not alone — because the person who wrote it went through the
same thing. That’s what makes songs about heartbreak so relatable.”
Because her inspiration came from immediate feelings and emotions, Taylor
learned to write anytime and anywhere, not just in her after-school sessions at
Sony. Stuck in class, she’d escape to the bathroom to record a melody on her cell
phone, or scribble down lyrics alongside her lecture notes! Taylor admits, “When
teachers conducted random notebook checks they’d be freaked out — but they
learned to deal with me.” If inspiration came outside of class, she’d use anything
at hand to capture the words before she lost them. “I’ve seen her pull out a
Kleenex and write a song on it,” Abigail revealed.
Taylor doesn’t write all her songs singlehandedly. In fact, in those early
Nashville days she met one very important collaborator: Liz Rose. Liz started in
the industry with her own music publishing company, which she sold in 2001 to
focus more seriously on her writing. It turned out to be a great career choice.
Since then she’s penned hits sung by country stars such as Trisha Yearwood,
Bonnie Raitt, Tim McGraw, and Kellie Pickler. But Liz’s collaboration with
Taylor would prove to be her most prolific and successful. When the pair met,
Liz instantly saw something exceptional in Taylor: “Even then, you knew she
was going to do something. She was so driven and so talented.”
Taylor embraces Liz Rose as they collect a Grammy for Best Country Song on January 31, 2010.
Many fruitful songwriting sessions followed; Liz shares the writing credit on
seven songs on Taylor’s self-titled debut album and four on Fearless. She helped
write hits like “You Belong with Me,” “Teardrops on My Guitar,” and “White
Horse.” Liz humbly gives most of the credit to her young protégé: “My sessions
with Taylor were some of the easiest I’ve ever done. Basically, I was just her
editor. She’d write about what happened to her in school that day. She had such a
clear vision of what she was trying to say. And she’d come in with some of the
most incredible hooks.” The elder songwriter elaborates, “She’s a genius,
coming in with ideas and a melody. She’d come in and write with this old lady
and I never second-guessed her. I respect her a lot.”
As Taylor was writing up a storm, she also recorded demos with a producer,
Nathan Chapman, who was also just starting his career and was working in “a
shack behind the publishing company,” according to Taylor. She knew that
Nathan was the right producer for her music, saying “I just fell in love with what
he did with my songs.” Like her collaboration with Liz Rose, Taylor’s
partnership with Nathan would continue through her career, and she would take
the new producer with her on her rise to the top.
Songbird at the Bluebird
With hundreds of hours of guitar playing and songwriting under her belt, Taylor
was looking for a chance to show off her talents to the country music elite, and it
came in the form of a showcase at Nashville’s famous Bluebird Café. The café
auditions performers for songwriters’ nights, and those who are very successful
can be booked for a showcase night, an event that draws local industry
professionals hunting for new talent. A major country star had gotten his big
break at the Bluebird — in 1987 a young Garth Brooks was discovered there and
signed by Capitol Records after a showcase performance.
On Taylor’s night to shine, she took the stage and played an acoustic set, and
when she looked out at the audience, she noticed one person who was
completely absorbed in the music, listening with his eyes closed to take it all in.
“He was listening better than anyone in the room,” remembers Taylor. That
person was Scott Borchetta, a former executive at a Nashville division of
Universal Music Group, who Taylor had met once before, playing a few songs
for the exec before he left his DreamWorks Nashville office. “I was just smitten
on the spot. It was like a lightening bolt,” he told Great American Country.
After the show, Scott approached Taylor, and told her, “I have good news and
I have bad news. . . . The good news is that I want to sign you to a record deal.
The bad news is that I’m no longer with Universal Records.” But Scott Borchetta
had a plan for his own label and told the young songwriter, “I want you to wait
for me . . . I’m working on something.” Taylor remembers, “The way he said it
convinced me that there was something going on that I wanted to be a part of.”
A Short History of Big Machine Records
Scott Borchetta got his first taste of the music business at a young age, working in the
mailroom of his father’s independent promotion company. He also approached music
hands on, playing various instruments in several bands. But rather than trying to get his
name in lights, Scott decided to help other people reach musical stardom. He worked for
several labels including Mary Tyler Moore’s MTM Records and MCA Records, and
launched DreamWorks Nashville, which was part of Universal Music Group before the
division shut down in 2005.
Scott started Big Machine Records in September of that year, and the company had
its first number-one single, Jack Ingram’s “Wherever You Are,” eight months later. His
early roster included Dusty Drake, Jack Ingram, Danielle Peck, Jimmy Wayne, and, of
course, Taylor Swift. Though he jokes that when he told industry colleagues about his
new 16-year-old sensation, “People would look at me cross-eyed. I would feel like they
were deleting me from their BlackBerrys as I was telling them,” he knew Taylor was a
real talent. In 2006, he told Billboard, “I’ve had the good fortune of breaking everybody
from Trisha Yearwood all the way up to Sugarland with big stops in between. This feels
as big as any of them.”
Since it opened its doors in 2005, Big Machine has expanded steadily, and in 2007,
the CEO announced a new branch of Big Machine, Valory Music Group. The new
division launched famed singer-songwriter Jewel’s first country album, the debut album
of Billboard’s “New Country Artist of 2009” Justin Moore, and represents Reba McEntire.
In addition to Big Machine being distributed by Universal, Scott further re-established his
connections with the major label in 2009 with a shared imprint, Republic Records
Nashville, which represents acts such as The Band Perry and Sunny Sweeney. So how
does Scott select who will become part of the Big Machine family? “I either fall in love
with an artist’s music or I don’t,” he explains. Good thing it was a love story with Taylor
Swift’s songs from day one.
Taylor with LeAnn Rimes, the singer who first got her interested in country music. Says Taylor:
“Country music is the place to find reality in music, and reality in the stars who make that music.
There’s kindness and goodness and . . . honesty in the people I look up to, and knowing that
makes me smile. I’m proud to sing country music, and that has never wavered.”
An essential part of their deal was that Taylor would get to write all the songs
that would appear on her albums. A larger label might have forced her to record
tracks penned by other songwriters, but Taylor refused to compromise on what
had been the foundation of her career. She told the Sunday Times, “It would have
really taken a lot of the wind out of my sails, personally, if I had to sing words
that other people wrote; that would have killed me.” Scott Borchetta’s faith in
her and the independence he promised her were enough to seal the deal . . . even
if his company didn’t yet exist. “Obviously, creative control is the most
important thing for me, or I wouldn’t have left the biggest label in Nashville for
a label that didn’t have any furniture,” joked Taylor.
With a star-in-the-making like Taylor signed on, Scott now had even more
motivation to get the new label up and running. He knew he had found someone
incredibly special: “I was just killed on sight. She’s the full package, somebody
who writes her own songs, and is so good at it, so smart; who sings, plays the
guitar, looks as good as she looks, works that hard, is that engaging and so
savvy. It’s an extraordinary combination.”
With the support of Scott Borchetta and Big Machine Records, it was time for
Taylor to start working on her first album. She entered the studio with Nathan
Chapman, her demo producer, to record the tracks that would become her selftitled debut. Just like with Taylor’s collaboration with Liz, she came to the studio
with a definite idea of what her songs should sound like and Nathan’s role as a
producer was to translate those ideas into sonic perfection. She explained,
“When I write a song I hear it completely produced in my head. I know exactly
where I want the hook to be and I know what instruments I want to use. One of
my favorite things to do is to sit around and obsess about how my music is going
to sound. A lot of that goes on in the days following me writing a song. I will
bring it into the studio with my producer Nathan, who I met when I was 14, and
I will sing him the hook. We’ll decide what we want to be playing on that. We’ve
got it down to where we can understand each other before we even have to make
much sense.”
Over their many years of collaboration, Nathan has learned to trust Taylor’s
instincts: “Taylor knows just who she is. And she knows what she wants to say
with the lyrics of her songs and with the music. She knows who she wants to be
and where she fits in this big thing called the music business.”
Scott Borchetta, Taylor, and Nathan Chapman, triumphant at the 2009 CMAs. Only three years
earlier Taylor was in the studio with Nathan and Scott recording Taylor Swift.
Though recording can be nerve-wracking for some new artists, Taylor wasn’t
intimidated by it, and saw it as a new extension of her dedication to music. She
told GAC, “I love the recording process because I love singing, and it really
gives me a chance to hone in on every single word — make it count, make it
perfect.” Ever the perfectionist, the process doesn’t end for Taylor once her day
in the recording booth does. She explained, “I leave the studio but I don’t put it
down. I don’t stop listening and I don’t stop tweaking and critiquing.”
The tracks for the album were whittled down from a list of 40 songs to 11.
When it came time to choose her first single, one song stood out for Scott
Borchetta. Taylor had written it for a high school sweetheart, and she called it
“When You Think Tim McGraw.” Scott told Dateline, “She finished the song
and I said, ‘Do you realize what you just have written? Do you have any idea?’
That was that moment of ‘Oh my God.’ And the grenade dropped in the still
pond.” The song’s name was eventually shortened to “Tim McGraw,” since
that’s how everyone referred to it. A quick session with Liz Rose at the piano
perfected the song, Taylor recorded it, and her first single was released on June
19, 2006.
Over the next six months, “Tim McGraw” became almost as popular as its
namesake: it hit number six on the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart and
number 40 on the Hot 100 chart. Before the song hit the charts, Taylor got
instant gratification when she was out for a drive and she heard her song
requested on the radio for the first time. “I was, like, freaking out. I almost drove
off the road,” she told GAC.
When “Tim McGraw” was released, Taylor was finishing up her sophomore
year at Hendersonville High. With her career taking off, a difficult decision had
to be made: could she continue attending regular high school? She knew she
wouldn’t be able to dedicate herself 100% to her career if she had to keep a highschool timetable, so Taylor made the decision to homeschool. Abigail
remembers, “She called me one night and we had to have the talk about she’s not
coming back to school . . . we dealt with it, and we’ve actually gotten closer
since.” It was a hard transition for both girls. Said Abigail, “She had to do her
own thing out there and miss everything that had been her life for the previous
few years. But she just immediately started doing so well . . . you just couldn’t
really think about anything else.”
“My brother’s always calling me the drop-out of the family,” Taylor jokes.
“Drop-out” or not, Taylor continued her straight-A streak from her prehomeschooling days. In fact, Taylor’s scholastic success would become
something her fans try to emulate. Scott Swift recounted an experience to the
Tennessean about a man coming up to him and stating that his granddaughter
was a big fan of Taylor’s and that she was getting straight As. Scott thought this
was just typical grandfatherly pride until the man added, “She wasn’t getting
straight As, but she heard Taylor Swift is getting straight As.”
Taylor’s new educational arrangement allowed her to study anytime,
anywhere, which was especially useful as she embarked on a national radio tour.
These kinds of tours can be exhausting with long hours, lots of travel, and
endless interviews. She was “living in hotel rooms, sleeping in the backs of
rental cars as my mom drove to three different cities in one day.” But to Taylor,
it was a great time. About all those interviews, she wrote, “I loooooved it
because it’s just talking to people. I could talk to a door.” She brought her fiddle
player and close pal, Emily Poe, and a guitar player, Todd, with her on the road,
playing shows wherever they could.
Sometimes Taylor even went back to school — to play shows. Still selfconscious about her place in the high-school hierarchy, the experience could be
nerve-wracking. “I remember when I first started doing high-school shows I was
in the 10th grade,” she told the Washington Post. “So it was a little more
intimidating when I was 16 and first got on the road and started doing highschool shows and I’m like, ‘Oh, there are seniors out there!’”
Returning to high school meant remembering the little day-to-day
experiences that she’d sacrificed for her career, but Taylor has no regrets about
the path she chose. “You’re always going to wonder about the road not taken, the
dorm not taken, and the sorority not taken,” she told CMT. “But if I wasn’t doing
this, I would’ve missed out on the best moments I’ve ever known and the most
wonderful life that I still can’t believe I get to live.”
Taylor Swift
Taylor’s self-titled debut album came out on October 24, 2006. It sold 39,000
copies in its first week, giving it the second-highest first-week sales for the year.
(Taylor only fell behind friend Kellie Pickler, a defeat she’s likely okay with!) It
peaked at number one on the Billboard Top Country Albums chart and at number
five on the Billboard 200, remaining on the chart for an incredibly long time. In
fact, Taylor Swift set the record for the longest-charting album since Nielsen
SoundScan started tracking sales in 1991, and after 157 weeks Taylor Swift
passed Nickelback’s All the Right Reasons to achieve the longest chart reign of
the decade. The album went platinum a mere seven months after its release, and
Taylor became the first solo female country artist to write or co-write every song
on a platinum record.
At the time of its release Taylor’s album didn’t get as much media attention
as her later albums would, but Taylor Swift was still well received. AllMusic
reviewer Jeff Tamarkin noted that Taylor was equipped with “a fresh, still girlish
voice, full of hope and naïveté, but it’s also a confident and mature one,” and
added, “That Swift is a talent to be reckoned with is never in doubt.” An
About.com reviewer noted that Taylor “writes and sings with the passion and
conviction of a veteran of country music.” Later, the New York Times would hail
the album as a “small masterpiece of pop-minded country.”
Taylor followed up “Tim McGraw” with singles “Teardrops on My Guitar,”
“Our Song,” “Picture to Burn,” and “Should’ve Said No.” All of them hit the top
10 on the Country Songs chart, and each song also found a spot on the Hot 100
list. Taylor had achieved the gold standard (or, more accurately, platinum
standard) of music industry success — she had crossover appeal. Pop music
listeners took to her songs almost as eagerly as country fans did.
Nashville producer and performer John Rich explained, “You can hear great
pop sensibilities in her writing as well as great storytelling, which is the
trademark of old-school country song-crafting.” Since her days belting out Dixie
Chicks songs at karaoke contests, Taylor has known that her roots are in country
music, and she’s glad that her songs are drawing new fans to the genre. “I’d like
to think that country music is where I live, country music is who I am, but I’m
lucky enough to have other people listening who aren’t necessarily core country
music fans,” said the singer. With her solid presence on the pop charts, Taylor
has followed in the footsteps of the women she idolized as a child — LeAnn
Rimes, Shania Twain, the Dixie Chicks, and Faith Hill. Despite Taylor’s
crossover success, Scott Borchetta still makes the country music crowd the
label’s first priority when it comes to all things Taylor Swift. “They’re always
going to get the singles first, always going to be first in line at the meet-andgreets,” says the CEO. “We overthink everything. One thing we can’t do is chase
the moving target of pop radio.” And Taylor wisely notes, “I’m not about to snub
the people who brought me to the party.”
Remarkably, she’d also conquered the demographic Nashville bigwigs had
told her didn’t exist: young, female country music fans. “So many girls come up
and say to me, ‘I have never listened to country music in my life. I didn’t even
know my town had a country music station. Then I got your record, and now I’m
obsessed,’” relates the singer. “That’s the coolest compliment to me.” Astounded
by the ever-growing Taylor Nation comprised of young women, CMT exec
Brian Philips reflected, “From the moment ‘Tim McGraw’ hit the channel, she
began to amass an audience that traditional Nashville didn’t know or didn’t
believe existed, and that is young women, specifically teens. It’s as if Taylor has
kind of willed herself into being.” The path for Taylor’s success was also paved
by Carrie Underwood’s breakthrough in 2005. When then-22-year-old Carrie
won season 4 of American Idol, the Oklahoma native took her country-pop
sound to the top of the charts with her debut album Some Hearts, which has
since been certified seven-times platinum.
After Taylor’s first album experienced similarly staggering success, Scott
Borchetta had no difficulty forecasting a bright future for his young star: “My
fear is that she’ll conquer the world by the time she’s 19. She’ll get to the
mountaintop and say, ‘This is it?’ Because she’s just knocking down all of those
goals that we didn’t even have for the first album. . . . My job at this point is
really to protect her and not burn her out.” But with another album and tours
already in sight, Taylor wasn’t anywhere close to burning out. Instead, Taylor’s
success was spreading like wildfire.
Many of Taylor’s songs are about romantic relationships, but her very first and
longest love affair is with words, and “Swift Notes” analyzes the songs on her
albums just like Taylor dissects her past romances.
Behind the Music: Details on Taylor’s inspiration and writing process for the
song.
Between the Lines: Taylor’s an award-winning songwriter; find analysis of
her lyrics here.
Audience of One: Taylor often writes her songs with a very specific audience
in mind: “When I sit down and write a song the only person that I’m thinking
about in that room is the person that I’m writing the song about and what I want
them to know and what I wish I could tell them to their face, but I’m going to
say it in a song instead.” Wonder if she’s singing about someone in particular?
Find out in this section.
Fun Facts: These are extra tidbits about the song and Taylor.
Diary Decoder: Taylor encodes a secret message into the lyrics in her album
booklets; this section solves the puzzles and discusses why Taylor chose that
particular message.
You Saw It Live: Find details of some of Taylor’s special performances of a
particular song here.
Charting Success: Taylor’s been smashing sales records since her debut.
Find out how her singles did and info on awards she’s won.
1. “Tim McGraw”
Behind the Music: Taylor wrote this song during math class in a mere 15
minutes, polished it after school, added piano, and finished it up with Liz!
Between the Lines: Despite the fact that his name is mentioned six times,
this wistful ballad isn’t about the famous country singer, but rather uses Tim
McGraw as a sort of musical memento. The song is like a letter to her departed
boyfriend, and an actual letter is mentioned in the song’s second verse. The Tim
McGraw song Taylor sings about is her favorite, “Can’t Tell Me Nothin’” from
Live Like You Were Dying. “Tim McGraw” is about a relationship that ended
when the guy left for college (“September was a month of tears” because that’s
when he went away). The lyrics also reveal what would become part of Taylor’s
signature style: alternating between a “little black dress” and her more casual
“old faded blue jeans.”
Audience of One: Taylor went out with the boy this song’s about (rumored to
be Brandon Borello) when she was a freshman and he was a senior. Though they
may be broken up, he’s still a Taylor Swift fan: “He bought the album and said
he really loved it, which is sweet,” said Taylor. “His current girlfriend isn’t too
pleased with it, though.” And what did Tim McGraw himself have to say about
it? “It was awesome, except that I didn’t know if I should take it as a compliment
or if I should feel old,” said the country star. “But the more I hear it . . . I start
taking it as a compliment.”
Fun Facts: Since releasing “Tim McGraw,” Taylor’s become great friends with
Tim and his wife, Faith Hill. Tim and Faith even invite Taylor to stay in their
home when she visits Los Angeles.
Diary Decoder: The secret message is “Can’t Tell Me Nothin,” the Tim
McGraw song Taylor had in mind while writing her song.
You Saw It Live: At the 2007 ACM Awards, Taylor performed in front of the
song’s namesake, and finished up “Tim McGraw” standing right in front of Tim
McGraw, who was in the front row. She famously extended her hand and said,
“Hi, I’m Taylor,” only to be rewarded with a hug from the country music icon.
Charting Success: Taylor’s first single peaked at number six on the Billboard
Country Songs chart, and number 40 on the Hot 100. “Tim McGraw” was
certified gold on May 3, 2007, and later went platinum. Its video won the
Breakthrough Video of the Year award at the 2007 CMT Music Awards. Taylor
was shocked by its success, saying, “It never really occurred to me that that song
would be so relatable.”
Taylor introduces herself to Tim McGraw at the ACM Awards on May 15, 2007.
2. “Picture to Burn”
Behind the Music: One day Taylor arrived at her after-school job at Sony in a
rage about a boy. She started playing her guitar and venting, “I hate his stupid
truck that he doesn’t let me drive. He’s such a redneck! Oh my God!” Some of
those very words found their way into the song’s chorus.
Between the Lines: Taylor told the Washington Post, “It’s about a guy I liked
who didn’t like me back, and I got really mad, you know?” The two never
officially dated because, Taylor explains, “It really bothered me that he was so
cocky and that’s where that song came from.”
Audience of One: Taylor’s not sure if he knows about this song, but if he
does, hopefully he’s learned a thing or two and now lets his girlfriend drive his
pickup truck.
Fun Facts: When she was younger, one of Taylor’s favorite karaoke songs was
the Dixie Chicks’ “Goodbye Earl,” a song with a similar message — don’t get
mad, get even. You’ll hear a slightly different version of this song on the radio
— the line “That’s fine, I’ll tell mine that you’re gay” is replaced with “That’s
fine, you won’t mind if I say,” since Taylor never meant to offend anyone.
Diary Decoder: “Date nice boys” — wise advice, indeed.
You Saw It Live: Taylor gave a blazing performance at the 2008 CMT Music
Awards as well as on Live with Regis and Kelly on April 20, 2008.
Charting Success: The fourth single from Taylor’s first album, “Picture to
Burn” hit number three on the Billboard Country Songs chart and number 28 on
the Hot 100. Looks like pop music fans like their country songs with a little fire
in them! “Picture to Burn” was also included on the 2008 compilation of country
hits Now That’s What I Call Country. The song was certified gold on June 11,
2008.
3. “Teardrops on My Guitar”
Behind the Music: Taylor wasn’t actually crying over her guitar when the
idea for this sad song came to her; she was on her way home from school.
Between the Lines: “Teardrops on My Guitar” is about Taylor’s crush on her
friend Drew Hardwick, who liked to talk to Taylor about his girlfriend all the
time. Taylor explained to Seventeen, “I had it bad for him. And I just kept
thinking, ‘Why am I so invisible to him? Why does he have to have a girlfriend?’
I never told him that I liked him, but I did write a song with his name on it.”
Taylor further explored this feeling of “girl-next-door-itis,” as she calls it, in
“You Belong with Me.” Teardrops on her guitar is a great image of Taylor
working through the tough stuff with music.
Audience of One: Two years after the song came out, Taylor was heading to
a hockey game with Kellie Pickler and Carrie Underwood when she got quite a
surprise: “[Drew] was standing there in my driveway. I haven’t talked to this guy
in two years. I was like, ‘Um, hi?’ It would have been really cool and poetic if he
had turned up at my house right after my album came out. But it was two years
later. A couple of things had happened in my life since then. I was like, ‘It’s
really great to see you. But you’re a little late.’”
Fun Facts: The striking cover image of this single made a second appearance
on Taylor’s 2007 Christmas album, Songs of the Season.
Diary Decoder: This message reads, “He will never know” but, of course,
after Drew showed up on her driveway, Taylor knows he does.
You Saw It Live: Taylor performed “Teardrops on My Guitar” with 14-yearold America’s Got Talent finalist Julienne Irwin on August 21, 2007, as well as
on TRL on February 27, 2008 and on NBC’s Today on May 29, 2009.
Charting Success: “Teardrops” rose to number two on the Billboard Country
Songs chart, and number 13 on the Hot 100. It also hit the top 10 on the Pop
Songs, Adult Pop Songs, and Adult Contemporary lists. “Teardrops on My
Guitar” won Song of the Year at the 2008 BMI Country Awards for getting the
most airtime of any country song that year. The song was certified gold in 2007
and hit double platinum in 2009.
4. “A Place in This World”
Behind the Music: Inspiration for this song struck Taylor as she walked the
streets of Nashville shortly after moving there. She told GAC, “I was just sort of
looking around at all these big buildings and these important people and
wondering how I was going to fit in.”
Between the Lines: Taylor wrote this song about trying to make it in
Nashville, but the song relates to any major life change, big risk, or just trying to
figure out where we fit in. As Taylor has shown her fans, pursuing goals despite
your trepidation can really pay off!
Audience of One: A lot of her songs are written for other people, but this one
is really written for Taylor, or for the Taylor she wanted to be. Looking back,
Taylor said, “I feel like I finally figured it out.”
Fun Facts: “A Place in This World” is also the name of the GAC Shortcuts
special on Taylor, included on the deluxe edition of Taylor Swift.
Diary Decoder: “I found it” — great reassurance that it’s worth taking a leap
of faith if you’re “ready to fly.”
5. “Cold as You”
Behind the Music: “Cold as You” emerged from a songwriting session with
Liz, and although Taylor thinks it contains “some of the best lyrics I’ve ever
written in my life,” she didn’t come up with the hook until halfway through the
songwriting process. She told Rolling Stone, “I love a line in a song where
afterward you’re just like burn.”
Between the Lines: In another track about unrequited love, Taylor explores a
relationship with someone who doesn’t appreciate her. “It’s about that moment
where you realize someone isn’t at all who you thought they were, and that
you’ve been trying to make excuses for someone who doesn’t deserve them. And
that some people are just never going to love you,” explains the songwriter.
Audience of One: Taylor chose not to single out the guy with the icy heart,
but the folks back in her hometown like to speculate. “You go out into this big
world, and you go back and it’s still a small town and they still gossip about it. I
think it’s one of everybody’s favorite things to talk about — who my songs are
written about,” said Taylor. “There are definitely a few more people who think
that I’ve written songs about them than there actually are.”
Diary Decoder: More great advice: “Time to let go.” Was the message for
Taylor herself?
6. “The Outside”
Behind the Music: This is one of the very first songs Taylor wrote, when she
was 12 and wasn’t fitting in at school.
Between the Lines: Most people feel like an outsider at some point, and for
Taylor that time was in middle school. She confided to Entertainment Weekly, “I
wrote that about the scariest feeling I’ve ever felt: going to school, walking
down the hall, looking at all those faces, and not knowing who you’re gonna talk
to that day. People always ask, ‘How did you have the courage to walk up to
record labels when you were 12 or 13?’ It’s because I could never feel the kind
of rejection in the music industry that I felt in middle school.” Being on the
outside did have its benefits: it fueled Taylor’s songwriting and encouraged her
to embrace what made her different. Taylor writes, “I tried to take the road less
traveled by,” a reference to the famous Robert Frost poem, “The Road Not
Taken,” in which he writes, “I took the one less traveled by, / And that has made
all the difference.” Looks like it did for Taylor too.
Audience of One: This is a song for all the people who made Taylor feel
excluded. Did they get the message? Hopefully. One thing’s for sure: many of
the mean girls who made her feel so alone had a change in attitude when Taylor
hit the big time. Taylor told Teen Vogue, “I played a hometown show about a
year into my career, and they showed up wearing my T-shirts and asking me to
sign their CDs. It was bittersweet, because it made me realize that they didn’t
remember being mean to me and that I needed to forget about it too. And really,
if I hadn’t come home from school miserable every day, maybe I wouldn’t have
been so motivated to write songs. I should probably be thanking them!”
(Not So) Fun Facts: A study found that almost 30% of kids and teens in the
U.S. are involved in bullying (that’s over 5.7 million people!). For more
information about bullying and support groups, go to bullying.org.
Diary Decoder: This secret message reads, “You are not alone.” Even though
being excluded can make you feel completely alone, people everywhere are
going through the same thing. So at the very least, it’s some comfort to know
that you’re never alone in feeling alone.
Charting Success: This song was not a single, but it was Taylor’s first-ever
release, appearing on Chicks with Attitude in 2004.
Taylor Swift: Deluxe Edition
On November 6, 2007, fans who were crying out for more Taylor were rewarded with the
release of a deluxe edition of Taylor Swift. The album contained three previously
unreleased songs that Taylor calls “some of my favorites” from her demo-making days at
age 14 and 15, plus a recording of Taylor’s first phone call with Tim McGraw. The first
new song, “I’m Only Me When I’m with You,” talks about finding a person who loves you
for who you are. It’s a philosophy that Taylor embraces 100%. She told Seventeen, “The
guy I’m looking for is the guy I can be me around, not a version of me I think he’d like.”
Taylor released a video for this song, which used home movie footage, and tided fans
over until the “Picture to Burn” video came out. She noted, “I think it’s the only video CMT
has probably ever played that cost, like, five dollars to make.” The second tune,
“Invisible,” revisits the themes of “Teardrops on My Guitar.” The third new track, “A
Perfectly Good Heart,” pleads with an unnamed heartbreaker as Taylor tries to figure out
how to make her heart whole again. The CD came with a DVD featuring Taylor’s
previously released videos, behind-the-scenes featurettes, performance footage, her
GAC Shortcuts series “A Place in This World,” and a special home video compiled by the
singer herself.
7. “Tied Together with a Smile”
Behind the Music: Taylor wrote this song after finding out a friend was
bulimic. It was a revelation that the songwriter describes as “one of those
moments when your heart kinda stops.” And though Taylor had written about
painful things before, she notes, “This one was tough to write, because I wasn’t
just telling some sad story. This was real.”
Between the Lines: “Tied Together with a Smile” explores the notion that
people aren’t always what they seem, that the most outwardly confident person
could actually be the most vulnerable. The friend who Taylor wrote it about was
a pageant queen, “the golden one” she references in the song. “Girls want to be
her and guys want to be with her,” said Taylor. Though “The Outside” explains
how hard it can be to be excluded from the in-crowd, “Tied Together with a
Smile” shows that being popular has its own set of challenges. “This song is
basically about the girls I know, and the difficult things I saw them go through,”
explained Taylor. “I’ve never seen this song as a lecture. It’s really about how no
matter what my friends go through, I’m always going to love them.”
Audience of One: This is a sad story with a happy ending — Taylor’s friend
got help and is healthy once again.
(Not So) Fun Facts: The National Institute for Mental Health found that one
in five women struggle with some kind of eating disorder. Luckily there are lots
of great organizations that can help. In the U.S., the National Eating Disorders
Association is a great source of information and also provides a referral service
(www.nationaleatingdisorders.org; 1-800-931-2237). In Canada, the National
Eating Disorder Information Centre provides similar services (www.nedic.ca; 1-
866-NEDIC-20).
Diary Decoder: People with eating disorders struggle with self-image and
self-worth; “You are loved” is one of the most important messages they can get.
8. “Stay Beautiful”
Behind the Music: Taylor’s songs may make it seem like she’s had a lot of
boyfriends, but she didn’t date all the boys she’s singing about. In “Stay
Beautiful,” the songwriter merely admired her crush from afar. She explains,
“This song is about a guy I thought was cute, and never really talked to much.
But something about him inspired this song, just watching him.”
Between the Lines: “Stay Beautiful” is a reminder of how perfect things
appear from a distance; you can imagine pictures in your mind rather than have
real pictures to burn when things turn sour! With “Stay Beautiful” following
“Tied Together with a Smile” it seems like the lyrics “You’re beautiful / Every
little piece love, don’t you know / You’re really gonna be someone, ask anyone”
are also wonderful reassurance for those, like Taylor’s friend, who can’t see that
for themselves.
Audience of One: This song’s for Cory, and there’s no doubt he’d be flattered
to hear it!
Fun Facts: Taylor has another song about admiring someone from afar on
Fearless: Platinum Edition, but in “SuperStar” that person is untouchable
because he’s a celeb.
Diary Decoder: Taylor’s not always serious, and the playful message “Shake
N Bake” is a bit of a mystery. Maybe she liked Cory as much as this savory
dinner staple?
9. “Should’ve Said No”
Behind the Music: Taylor penned this raging tune at the studio right after
confronting a boyfriend who was cheating on her. She wrote it just in time to
squeeze it onto the album at the last minute. She admitted on her blog, “I wrote it
about 20 minutes before we recorded it. It just kind of fell out of my mouth and
now it is in my CD player.”
Between the Lines: “Should’ve Said No” is the second angry anthem on the
album, but has a different message than “Picture to Burn.” In this case the focus
falls more on bad decision-making than on the guy. Taylor explains, “Just being
a human being, I’ve realized that before every big problem you create for
yourself, before every huge mess you have to clean up, there was a crucial
moment where you could’ve just said no.” Straight-as-an-arrow Taylor doesn’t
just preach it; she lives it and is often in the media spotlight for being a teen
performer who hasn’t gone off the rails. Taylor credits her folks for her good
decision-making, saying, “My parents have instilled a great level of trust in me
and I think that’s a huge, huge part of who I am. I can tell my mom everything,
and I do. Before I make decisions, I always think, ‘What is my mom going to
think if I tell her this? Is my mom going to be really upset if she finds out that I
did this?’ Usually I decide, ‘No, I’m not going to go through with this.’”
Audience of One: Thanks to the secret message, it’s clear this song’s for
Sam, and though he hasn’t commented about the public shaming, Taylor wasn’t
done with him after her first album. Before the release of Fearless, Taylor told
Girls’ Life: “I wrote a few more songs on this upcoming record about him just
because, you know, I wasn’t done being mad about it. I know he’s on the edge of
his seat waiting.”
Fun Facts: Sam should have followed Taylor’s lead — she says “no” eight
times in this song.
Diary Decoder: This message is a pointed finger: “Sam Sam Sam Sam Sam.”
You Saw It Live: Taylor belted out “Should’ve Said No” with the Jonas
Brothers in Jonas Brothers: The 3D Concert Experience. Taylor also performed
the song at the 2008 ACM Awards, starting in a hoodie and baggy jeans, which
were then ripped off to reveal a short black dress. And that performance’s finale
really made a splash — Taylor shocked the audience by getting soaked by an
onstage waterfall (an effect that became part of her Fearless Tour).
Charting Success: “Should’ve Said No” was Taylor’s second number one on
the Billboard Country Songs chart, and hit number 33 on the Hot 100. The song
was certified gold on September 3, 2008, and platinum on October 12, 2009.
10. “Mary
’s Song (Oh My My My)”
Behind the Music: Taylor wrote this song after the couple next door came
over for dinner and told the Swift family about how they met as children and
later fell in love.
Between the Lines: After the anger in “Should’ve Said No,” it’s nice to
follow with a song where a romance worked out. “Mary’s Song” follows the
couple as they go from being playmates to the beginning of their romance to the
proposal and wedding. It’s a song brimming with love and hope, and Taylor
noted, “I thought it was so sweet, because you can go to the grocery store and
read the tabloids, and see who’s breaking up and cheating on each other (or just
listen to some of my songs, haha). But it was really comforting to know that all I
had to do was go home and look next door to see a perfect example of forever.”
Audience of One: This song is for Mary and her husband; maybe one day
Taylor will write a new verse about their continued happiness.
Fun Facts: Taylor and Liz share their co-writing credit on this song with Brian
Dean Maher, a Nashville songwriter.
Diary Decoder: This romantic tune has an appropriately hopeful message:
“Sometimes love is forever.”
11. “Our Song
”
Behind the Music: In ninth grade, Taylor realized she and her boyfriend
didn’t have a song. Inspiration struck while she was sitting in her living room;
she “sat down one day with my guitar and got in a groove” and wrote him a
song, one that she would perform in front of all of Hendersonville High at the
talent show.
Between the Lines: Taylor chose to end the album on a high note with this
infectious tune about all the ordinary things that can be part of a great love.
Right at the end of the chorus, Taylor slyly says, “Play it again” in hopes that
listeners would give her record another spin!
Audience of One: With this final song, Taylor’s first high-school romance is
the focus of the first and last tracks on the album. And though she is no longer in
touch with that boyfriend anymore, he must be just as pleased with the album as
when he was in the audience at the talent show.
Fun Facts: This became Taylor’s third single because it was a fan favorite in
concert. Don’t confuse this song with another popular ballad, Elton John’s “Your
Song,” which is also about writing a song for a loved one.
Diary Decoder: The album’s last secret message, “Live in love,” applies not
just to “Our Song,” but Taylor Swift as a whole. The album features everything
from first love to fury, and these highs and lows are part of living life to the
fullest. And if life and love are just the way Taylor sings it, who would want to
miss a moment?
You Saw It Live: In one of her earliest award-show performances, Taylor sang
“Our Song” at the 2007 CMA Awards. In addition to singing this number on
Regis and Kelly and on Ellen, Taylor rocked out to “Our Song” from the middle
of the crowd on Today live from Rockefeller Center on May 29, 2009.
Charting Success: “Our Song” was Taylor’s first number one, and she
refused to give up her spot for six weeks! That six-week stay at the top of the
Country Songs chart ties her with one of her heroes, Faith Hill, and her song
“Breathe,” and both women are topped only by the reign of Connie Smith’s 1964
song “Once a Day.” “Our Song” also made Taylor the youngest person to write a
number-one single on her own. The song also hit number 16 on the Hot 100 and
number 24 on the Pop 100, continuing Taylor’s crossover success that began
with “Teardrops on My Guitar.” “Our Song” won Video of the Year at the 2008
CMT Music Awards. The “Our Song” single has earned double platinum
certification.
Songs of the Season: The Taylor Swift Holiday
Collection
A major celebration in the Swift home, Christmas is Taylor’s favorite holiday. She wrote
on her blog, “I love everything about this time of year, but mostly the way that people find
ways to be with the ones they love.” With her love of all things Christmas, it was a natural
choice for her to release a holiday album. On October 14, 2007, Big Machine released
the limited-edition album exclusively in Target and online. Despite these restrictions, the
album still climbed to number 14 on the Billboard Top Country Albums chart and to
number 20 on the Hot 200.
Taylor covered four Christmas classics: “White Christmas” (originally performed by
Bing Crosby), “Santa Baby” (originally performed by Eartha Kitt, and later by Madonna),
“Last Christmas” (originally performed by Wham!), and the traditional “Silent Night.”
Never one to only sing other people’s compositions, Taylor added a couple of original
songs that offered a twist on the usual seasonal fare. She insisted, “There’s got to be
something really original and different about it.” The heartbreaking “Christmases When
You Were Mine” (co-written with Liz Rose and producer Nathan Chapman) is about
remembering love from Christmases past, and “Christmas Must Be Something More”
encouraged people to see past the gifts to the sacred spirit of the season.
Though the album was supposed to be a one-time release, Taylor Swift fans who still
hope to see this album under the tree are in luck; it was re-released in October 2009.
“I just went to a show by a future superstar,” starts an About.com review of a
performance Taylor gave on May 30, 2007, at the Gold Country Casino. With a
hot new album on their hands, Big Machine was trying to give Taylor all the
exposure she could get, and Taylor played some of her first headlining shows.
Her career was picking up speed, and nowhere was that more evident than when
she returned to her hometown to play a concert at the Sovereign Performing Arts
Center in Reading, Pennsylvania. It was a place where Taylor had once been in
the audience, gazing at performers like Melissa Etheridge from afar. Now, just a
few years later, she was center stage, telling the crowd about her journey by
paraphrasing one of her favorite songs, Eminem’s “Lose Yourself.” “See, when I
left three years ago,” she told the crowd, “I had one shot, one opportunity to
seize everything I ever wanted. Y’all think I did alright?”
In April 2007, Taylor returned to Pennsylvania to play the Sovereign Performing Arts Center in
Reading.
Though she continued to do some headlining gigs where she could, Taylor
racked up most of her experience touring as an opener for country greats. In
October 2006, she hit the road with Rascal Flatts, the three-man country act
known for hits such as “What Hurts the Most,” “Bless the Broken Road,” and a
cover of Tom Cochrane’s “Life Is a Highway,” which was on the soundtrack to
Pixar’s Cars. Finding out she’d be part of her first major tour, Taylor wrote, “I’m
SO excited and I can’t even express to you how loud I screamed when I found
out.” She played nine acoustic shows with the group, and Taylor really meshed
with the trio, and she toured again with them two years later. During her 2008
tour with the band, she wrote on her blog, “The Rascal Flatts tour is SO much
fun. I’m loving it so much, and the guys are so cool. They’ll just walk onto my
bus and say hi. It’s so cool that the guys from Rascal Flatts are so down to
earth.” Though she dreamed of having a tour to call her own, Taylor wisely
realized that she could learn a lot from touring with industry pros. She explained,
“I didn’t mind opening for Rascal Flatts because you learn something from every
single tour you go on, and I felt I had more to learn.”
Says Taylor of Kellie Pickler: “She’s like a sister. People say we’re such opposites, but that’s what
makes us such good friends. She’s incredibly blunt. I love that about her. If some guy has said or
done something to me she doesn’t like, she’ll grab my cell phone and say, ‘I’m deleting his
number.’” The two co-wrote Kellie’s first top 10 hit “Best Days of Your Life,” with Taylor singing on
the track and appearing in its video.
The next stop on Taylor’s tour of country star tours was a gig opening for the
King of Country himself, George Strait, from January to March 2007. On her
blog, Taylor gushed, “I’m pretty much a George Strait superfan, so this is going
to be SO much fun.” Sure enough, playing with the legendary country icon was
thrilling for the young star. Taylor wrote, “I’m pretty sure the highlight of my
night last night (the first show of the tour, in Lafayette, LA) was that . . . George
Strait said my name . . . [We] were watching George’s show . . . and all of a
sudden he says, ‘I’m very happy to have the talented Miss Taylor Swift out here
with us.’ yesssss. It was pretty awesome, sort of a life changing moment.”
By 2009, Taylor was not just opening for country legends, she was sharing the stage with them.
Pictured here with Rascal Flatts, Carrie Underwood, Brooks & Dunn, and Sugarland at the ACMs
on April 5.
But her encounters with country music’s finest didn’t end there — Taylor’s
next tour would be with country rocker Brad Paisley on his 2007 Bonfires &
Amplifiers tour. Brad told Blender, “I was looking at a lot of artists to come out
on tour with us, but as soon as I downloaded her album, I knew we had to have
her. I was floored by the songwriting. I love the fact that she doesn’t pretend to
be 30 years old in her songs. She has a very genuine voice.” Taylor knew she
had a lot to learn from Brad, and noted, “I try to pick his brain and learn as much
as I can from him.”
If you missed Taylor when she was an opening act, here’s an example of her set list from
an April 10, 2008, show in Sacramento, CA.
• “I’m Only Me When I’m with You”
• “Our Song”
• “Teardrops on My Guitar”
• “Should’ve Said No”
• “Tim McGraw”
• “Picture to Burn”
Also on the Bonfires & Amplifiers tour were labelmate Jack Ingram and pal
Kellie Pickler. The three injected a lot of energy and more than a little silliness
into the tour like the night they decided to prank the headliner. Taylor ordered
tick costumes for her and Kellie, and Jack put together an exterminator suit.
When Brad started playing his new song “Ticks,” Kellie and Taylor emerged in
costume, and danced around Brad onstage. Out came Exterminator Ingram who
pretended to spray them with insecticide then the bugs faked an elaborate death.
Writing about it on her MySpace, Taylor recalls, “I was laughing so hard I could
barely breathe. Then I was laying there on the stage playing dead, and looked up
at Brad, and he looked down at me and said, ‘Nice work.’” Guess he was a little
bit “bugged.” Not to worry, Brad was a prankster himself, and forced Jack
Ingram into a cage and made him perform from there!
While Brad was on a break from touring, Taylor opened shows for another
country great, Kenny Chesney. Once again, the person she idolized did not
disappoint in real life. “Opening up for Kenny Chesney is one of the coolest
things I’ve ever done,” said Taylor. “His tour has this laidback vibe to it, and
everyone’s so cool to work with. And Kenny Chesney is so completely nice.
Genuinely nice.”
The rising star learned something from all of her mentors on tour, summing
up for USA Weekend, “Kenny is up at the crack of dawn, walking around the
venue, getting to know everyone from the sound-check guys to the people who
sell the souvenirs to the fans. Then Rascal Flatts stages this big production with
all the flash. And George Strait? It’s all about the music with him. He pays so
much attention to building up the song with the arrangements and the band and
his singing.”
In the summer of 2007, the rising star hit another major career milestone
when she toured with two people who inspired her love for country music in the
first place — Tim McGraw and Faith Hill. Taylor played a four-song acoustic set
before the dynamite duo performed on their Soul2Soul II tour. Getting to know
the artists she idolized could have been a real letdown, but Taylor found the
couple to be as wonderful as she’d always imagined them. Of Faith she wrote,
“As beautiful as she is, she is that nice.”
Even when Taylor only played a handful of songs as an opening act,
reviewers took note. When she opened for Rascal Flatts in early 2008, one
reviewer remarked, “If Swift’s performance last night was any indication of what
the future has to bring, surely there will be many more Grammy nominations,
and eventually wins for the young songstress.” What an accurate prediction!
Though Taylor confesses, “I’ve always wanted to be so busy I couldn’t stand
it,” she still managed to get the occasional break from touring, and would head
back to Hendersonville. On one such break, she wrote, “I just got back from a
five show run on the road. Now I’m sitting in my kitchen . . . on the counter.
Eating cool whip. And trying to think of things to do with my free time. Other
than talking to my cat and making playlists of sad songs.” Though it was nice to
be reunited with her entire family, the overachiever didn’t like to sit still too long
— there were charts to climb, airwaves to conquer, and crowds to entertain. She
admitted to Bliss, “I do love coming home, but after about a day I usually end up
calling my record label and bugging them for something to do.”
As an opener for major country music acts, Taylor spent a lot of her time playing
second fiddle to the legendary stars she toured with. But as her first awards
season approached in 2007, Taylor was about to prove that she had the chops to
be the main event.
With more and more people listening to Taylor’s music on MySpace or
requesting her songs on the radio, the Taylor Nation of devoted fans was
growing every day. And it couldn’t have been any clearer than on April 16,
2007, when Taylor took home the fan-voted CMT Music Award in the
Breakthrough Video category for “Tim McGraw.” Taylor’s first award was a
sign of the strength of her fans’ dedication, which would help raise Taylor to the
top of the music industry, and she knew it, offering a thank-you on her blog to all
the fans who helped make her dreams come true: “I’ve always been the girl
watching the award shows from the stands or from my couch, wishing like crazy
that someday if I worked hard enough and things really came together, that could
be me. You did that for me.” And as a special thank-you, she brought her award
(“The Buckle”) with her on the Brad Paisley tour, so fans could see the award
they helped her win.
Fans are one thing, but getting industry respect is another. Six months after
her CMT Music Award, it became abundantly clear that country music’s finest
were behind Taylor too. At the 2007 Country Music Association (CMA) Awards
on November 7, Taylor won the prestigious Horizon Award, which goes to the
most promising new artist of the year. As the previous year’s winner Carrie
Underwood explained as she presented it, “This is an award that means you have
truly arrived in country music.” Past winners include Garth Brooks, Keith
Urban, Brad Paisley, LeAnn Rimes, and the Dixie Chicks. In her acceptance
speech, Taylor was sure to thank the fans, tearfully insisting, “You have changed
my life!” before finishing, “This is definitely the highlight of my senior year,” a
comment that got chuckles from the crowd. On her blog, Taylor shared what was
going through her mind in this fairytale moment: “I remember it all in slow
motion . . . I’m running up the stairs in a ball gown and heels. My mom and dad
are crying. Everyone at my record label is screaming. My family and everyone I
love is watching from their living rooms. I’m crying on national television, and
thinking about [the fans].” She concluded, “And thank you for convincing me
that fairytale endings . . . Well, they happen sometimes.”
Fearless Songbird
When Taylor sat down in December 2007 to start planning her sophomore
album, she knew she had a tough act to follow — her self-titled debut had just
been certified double platinum. “Pressure is one of my favorite things in the
world,” Taylor told the Tennessean. “When I heard before my second album, ‘Is
she going to experience a sophomore slump?’ it made me more motivated to
make sure that didn’t happen. ‘Is she going to keep this fan base?’ ‘Is this thing
going to run off the tracks?’ Those things motivate me. My gut instinct has
worked so far, and I’m not going to mess with that.”
Beautiful Eyes
The wait between Taylor’s first and second albums was a long one for her dedicated
fans. So on July 15, 2008, Taylor released Beautiful Eyes, six songs packaged with a
DVD. The EP, which would only be available online and at Walmart, had two songs
which Taylor wrote when she was 13 (“Beautiful Eyes” and “I Heart ?”) as well as
alternate versions of “Should’ve Said No,” “Teardrops on My Guitar,” “Picture to Burn,”
and “I’m Only Me When I’m with You” (which was on the deluxe edition of Taylor Swift).
The DVD had all of Taylor’s videos, her ACM performance of “Should’ve Said No,” and a
special homemade video for “Beautiful Eyes” with footage from her 18th birthday party.
“I’ve gotten so many emails from people asking for new songs, and I thought this might
tide them over till the new album comes out in the fall,” Taylor explained on her MySpace
blog. This limited-run album still managed to top the Billboard Country chart just two
weeks after its release, with the number two spot going to Taylor Swift. Overwhelmed by
her one-two domination of the charts, the singer blogged, “I can’t believe it. My record
label is freaking out because apparently the last time this happened was in 1997??” The
person who accomplished that in 1997? None other than Taylor’s first inspiration, LeAnn
Rimes.
One of the positive side effects of her tremendous success is that the certified
country star had proven she was a girl who knew what she was doing, and she
was given even more creative control on her second record. Nathan Chapman,
who worked on her first record, was back in the studio to produce, but this time
Taylor officially stepped up as co-producer. A lucky 13 tracks would make the
cut and appear on Fearless, including the last-minute addition “Forever &
Always.”
Beyond supervising, writing, and recording the music, Taylor was heavily
involved in the album design as well. On her MySpace, Taylor wrote, “I’m
completely going crazy thinking of ideas for the album photo shoots and the CD
booklet and all of that stuff. I’m consumed and obsessed and so excited that I get
to make a second record. Hey, I’m still in awe of the fact that I got to make the
first one.” She and her label found the right photographer, Nashville’s Joseph
Anthony Baker, and Taylor played the album for him to see which songs spoke
to him. What resulted was a gorgeous array of photographs of Taylor inspired by
the songs. “We shot photos based on the energy of that song,” explained the
singer-temporarily-turned-model. And what about the album cover image of
Taylor’s face framed by a halo of windswept golden curls? “The photographer
put the wind machine on, like, hurricane mode,” said Taylor. “That’s how we got
the picture.” Taylor oversaw every aspect of the album down to the smallest
details, once again encoding secret messages in her lyrics.
Taylor kept her fans up to date on the album’s progress, writing, “This next
record is on my mind 24/7, all the time. It never stops. I’m always either
listening to a new mix of a song or scanning through pictures to make sure
we’ve chosen the right ones, or wondering which songs you guys are going to
like the best. I’m just so obsessed with it right now, all the planning.”
The album would be called Fearless, a name that Taylor explained in the
liner notes: “Fearless is not the absence of fear. It’s not being completely
unafraid. To me, fearless is having fears. fearless is having doubts. Lots of
them. To me, fearless is living in spite of those things that scare you to death.”
Despite her success, country music’s golden girl isn’t without her own fears.
She explained to Girls’ Life, “I think things on the record that are talked about
have a very fearless quality to them. It’s not about me being this fearless person
because I’m afraid of everything, you know? I’m afraid of finding the most
perfect love and losing it. I’m afraid of regretting things. I’m afraid of my career
becoming mediocre and not being able to excite people anymore. I’m afraid of
running out of things to write about. But I think there’s something fearless about
jumping, even when you’re really scared of where you might land.”
Taylor made that leap on November 11, 2008, with the release of Fearless,
launching it on Good Morning America, just as she had with her first record. In
its debut week, Fearless hit number one on both the Billboard 200 and the Top
Country Albums charts. It would go on to spend eight weeks at number one,
making it the first female country album to do so. Her sophomore album sold
217,000 copies on its first day alone, and after only one week in stores it was
over halfway to platinum certification, with 592,000 copies sold. One of those
copies was Taylor’s; she stopped in at the Hendersonville Walmart at midnight to
buy one the minute it was released. At that moment Taylor still had butterflies.
She admitted, “The night before it came out, I remember staying up all night and
thinking, ‘Is anyone going to buy it at all?’ You always have those last-minute
jitters.” But the overwhelming support from her fans was the best reassurance
Taylor could have ever hoped for. “I’ve never been more proud of anything in
my life . . . I wrote every song on it. I co-produced it. So to have people go out
and actually buy it? It’s wonderful,” she told Newsday.
“I think any time you’ve had this kind of success it starts to get weighty,”
Scott Borchetta told the LA Times. “But she’s delivered a brilliant record.” For
the most part, reviewers agreed. Rolling Stone (which honored her with a cover
story in March 2009) praised, “Swift is a songwriting savant with an intuitive
gift for verse-chorus-bridge architecture that, in singles like the surging ‘Fifteen,’
calls to mind Swedish pop gods Dr. Luke and Max Martin. If she ever tires of
stardom, she could retire to Sweden and make a fine living churning out hits for
Kelly Clarkson and Katy Perry.” The reviewer added, “Her music mixes an
almost impersonal professionalism — it’s so rigorously crafted it sounds like it
has been scientifically engineered in a hit factory — with confessions that are
squirmingly intimate and true.” Blender gave it four stars out of five, with the
reviewer noting, “Swift has the personality and poise to make these songs hit as
hard as gems like ‘Tim McGraw’ and ‘Our Song’ from her smash debut, and,
once again, she wrote or co-wrote them all.” More praise came from AllMusic,
which concluded, “Swift’s gentle touch is as enduring as her song-craft, and this
musical maturity may not jibe with her age, but it does help make Fearless one
of the best mainstream pop albums of 2008.”
1. “Fearless”
Behind the Music: The idea for this song came to Taylor while she was
touring. She didn’t have a boyfriend and she started thinking about her ideal first
date. She explained, “I think sometimes when you’re writing love songs, you
don’t write them about what you’re going through at the moment, you write
about what you wish you had. So this song is about the best first date I haven’t
had yet.”
Between the Lines: Taylor described “Fearless” as “about an incredible first
date when all your walls are coming down and you are fearlessly jumping into
love.” And what’s Taylor’s idea of a great first date? She told Girls’Life, “I live
on a lake, so it’s really fun to go out on the boat, and then hang out all night and
just talk. It wouldn’t have to be anything fancy or anything like that, but just
being with a person who gets you. It’s kind of funny because you don’t ever
have a lot of opportunities like that to be home and to go on a date in your
hometown, but that’s exactly what I would do.” Standing in the rain had been
associated with the stormy anger of her “Should’ve Said No” performance at the
2008 ACM Awards, but on the title track of her second album, it’s a sign of
reckless abandon, of overcoming trepidation for something worthwhile.
Audience of One: Since this one isn’t based on a real-life date, it’s not for a
specific lucky guy, but the message to be fearless is great advice for everyone.
Fun Facts: Taylor and Liz share co-writing credits for “Fearless” with Hillary
Lindsey, who’s penned songs for Bon Jovi, Miley Cyrus, and Martina McBride,
but is best known for her work with Carrie Underwood, including the Grammywinning single “Jesus, Take the Wheel.” Colbie Caillat, Taylor’s collaborator on
“Breathe,” also has a song called “Fearless” on her 2009 album, Breakthrough.
Colbie’s is about the end of a relationship and having the courage to carry on
after heartbreak.
Diary Decoder: This optimistic song’s message for a future sweetheart says,
“I loved you before I met you.”
You Saw It Live: Taylor debuted “Fearless” in a live performance on the Late
Show with David Letterman on November 10, 2008, the day before her album’s
release.
Charting Success: Before “Today Was a Fairytale” landed a higher spot,
“Fearless,” her fifth single from Fearless, was Taylor’s highest chart debut on
the Billboard Hot 100, sitting at number nine in its first week. “Fearless” also
peaked at number 15 on the Country Songs chart. Amazingly, “Fearless” was the
first song in Billboard history to be certified gold before it was officially
released.
2. “Fifteen”
Behind the Music: Taylor started writing this song with the lines, “Abigail
gave everything she had / to a boy who changed his mind,” which even critics
who weren’t head over heels for the album singled out as “a great, revealing line
about a friend’s lost innocence.”
Between the Lines: Taylor is often praised for speaking authentically about
people her age. Fellow country star Vince Gill said, “Every kid relates to Taylor
and those songs because they’re pointed right at them,” and “Fifteen” is a great
example of that. It looks back on those vulnerable years at the beginning of high
school when you feel like an outsider and social status can feel like it’s
everything, when love is the best thing and the worst thing that can happen,
when you have no idea where you’re headed or who you’ll become. “Fifteen”
offers great advice for those tumultuous times: this too shall pass. Taylor wisely
advised, “Don’t make high school everything. Because if high school is
everything, then you’ve got a long life to live, and I’d like to think that the best
years of my life are still ahead of me.” Taylor further explains, “It says, ‘I should
have known this, I didn’t know that, here’s what I learned, here’s what I still
don’t know.’” Taylor skillfully weaves together the two themes of the song —
fitting in and falling in love — in one line: “When all you wanted was to be
wanted,” getting to the heart of a teenager’s longing to belong.
Audience of One: “I think that the song ‘Fifteen’ is definitely advice to my
former self, but it could also be advice to any girl going into ninth grade and
feeling like you’re the smallest person on the planet,” says Taylor.
Fun Facts: In the summer of 2008, the guy who hurt Abigail came back into
her life with a grand gesture: he asked her to come talk to him, and he was
waiting in a field, inside a heart made of candles with a big bouquet of roses for
her. Taylor even lent a hand to the one-time heartbreaker, telling him all of
Abigail’s favorite songs so he could put them on a mix CD. But even when life
seems as perfectly orchestrated as a romantic movie, love isn’t easy, and Taylor
admits, “As usual, I had to clean up the mess the next day . . . But that’s okay. I
didn’t mind.”
Diary Decoder: “I cried while recording this” lets listeners know that this is a
song that made Taylor shed some teardrops on her guitar.
You Saw It Live: Taylor performed “Fifteen” at the 2009 Grammy Awards
with real-life pal Miley Cyrus. The pair sat on stools and Taylor played guitar, a
pared-down approach to the song that the singer would also use in concert.
Asked how then-16-year-old Miley looks back on her 15th year, she replied that,
like most teens, she spent that year “thinking you know everything,” before
realizing “the only thing you’re left with are your best friends.” “Fifteen” was
the second song Taylor performed at the 2009 CMA Awards. Three hundred
Hendersonville High students looked on from the audience; Taylor nabbed them
free tickets to the show. The singer also played the song on The View, Ellen, and
the U.K.’s Paul O’Grady Show.
Charting Success: “Fifteen” peaked at number seven on the Hot Country
Songs chart, number 10 on the Pop Songs chart, number 23 on the Hot 100, and
also appeared on the Hot Adult Contemporary and the Hot Adult Pop Songs list.
Though the song may contain advice for freshmen, adults relate to it too!
Miley and Taylor at the 51st Annual Grammy Awards on February 8, 2009.
3. “Love Story
”
Behind the Music: Taylor wrote this song lying on her bedroom floor in a
mere 20 minutes and recorded a rough cut of the track in 15 minutes of studio
time the next day. She said the song sprang from the line “This love is difficult /
but it’s real,” and she noted on her MySpace, “When I wrote that line, I knew it
would be my favorite line to sing every night. And it’s true, every time I sing
that, I can’t help but smile.”
Between the Lines: “Love Story” follows the plot of Romeo and Juliet fairly
faithfully. Taylor’s Juliet is on a balcony remembering when she met Romeo,
which in Shakespeare’s play is also at a party. The two lovers meet again in a
garden (in the play it’s an orchard), and Romeo must leave town, though in the
song it’s because Juliet’s family disapproves, whereas in R&J there’s a more
serious reason — Romeo kills Juliet’s cousin, Tybalt. Taylor’s love story ends
with a happy ending in marriage, and though Romeo and Juliet marry in
Shakespeare’s tale, it is done hastily and in secret without either family’s
approval. Discussing her rewrite of the famous double-suicide finale, Taylor
said, “I was really inspired by that story. Except for the ending. I feel like they
had such promise and they were so crazy for each other. And if that had just
gone a little bit differently, it could have been the best love story ever told. And
it is one of the best love stories ever told, but it’s a tragedy. I thought, why can’t
you . . . make it a happy ending and put a key change in the song and turn it into
a marriage proposal.” There’s a second literary reference in “Love Story” in the
line “’Cause you were Romeo, I was a scarlet letter.” The Scarlet Letter is a
famous novel by Nathaniel Hawthorne about Hester Prynne, a woman who
cheated on her husband and is outcast from her community. Though Taylor’s
Juliet has been faithful, the connection is that, like Hester, Juliet is in an
unpopular relationship that upsets the people around her. In the end, the message
of this uplifting love anthem comes down to Taylor’s favorite line, which means
to her that “sometimes you have to fight for love, but sometimes it’s worth
fighting for.”
Audience of One: Taylor told Time that this one’s about a guy she never
really dated (she calls these boys “nominees”) because her friends and family
didn’t approve. But no doubt her would-be Romeo approves of the happy ending
Taylor made up for them.
Fun Facts: “Love Story” has already been covered by many artists including
Intohimo, The Scene Aesthetic, Forever the Sickest Kids, Davedays, Tiffany
Giardina, and Savannah Outen and Josh Golden. Fittingly, “Love Story” plays in
the trailer for the 2010 film Letters to Juliet.
Diary Decoder: The secret message here is “Some day I’ll find this.” Even
though Taylor’s happy being single and despite having had her share of
heartbreak, she still believes in love. She told Seventeen, “I have to believe in
fairytales, and I have to believe in love — but not blindly. If you do meet your
Prince Charming, know he is going to have his good days and his bad days. He
is going to have days when his hair looks horrible, and days when he’s moody
and says something that hurts your feelings. You have to base your fairytale not
upon happily ever after, but on happy right now.”
You Saw It Live: Taylor performed the song at Children in Need, a charity
show in the U.K., and afterward donated £13,000 to the cause. She also
performed it amid screaming fans on Today, and on Dancing with the Stars,
Ellen, and at the 2008 CMA Awards.
Charting Success: Listeners across the globe officially fell in love with
“Love Story.” The song charted in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada,
Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands,
New Zealand, Norway, the Philippines, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the
United Kingdom. In the U.S., the single topped the Hot Country Songs, Top 40
Mainstream, and Hot Adult Contemporary Tracks charts, as well as hit number
three on the Adult Pop Songs chart and number four on the Hot 100. With over
four million downloads, “Love Story” is the most downloaded country song in
history, and ties Lady Gaga’s “Just Dance” for the highest number of downloads
for a song by a female artist. In 2008, it won Billboard’s Hot Radio Songs of the
Year award, and in 2009, it won Country Song of the Year at the BMI Awards,
Music Video of the Year at the CMA Awards, and Video of the Year and Female
Video of the Year at the CMT Music Awards.
4. “Hey Stephen”
Behind the Music: Taylor penned this playful love song for her crush,
Stephen Barker Liles, guitar player and vocalist for Love and Theft. The band
opened for Taylor as part of her ’08 tour, so it’s likely this one was written on the
road.
Between the Lines: This song is like a secret love letter, right from the
opening greeting of “Hey Stephen.” Some of Taylor’s cherished romantic images
return, including kissing in the rain and showing up at someone’s bedroom
window. If all these songs were based on real moments, Taylor’s bedroom
window would get as much traffic as Dawson Leery’s; this romantic gesture also
appears in “Our Song,” “Love Story,” and “Come In with the Rain.” And though
Taylor insists she never wants to write songs only about being on the road,
there’s just a hint of it here. The line “Hey Stephen, why are people always
leaving? / I think you and I should stay the same” suggests that a life on the road
sometimes means too many goodbyes.
Audience of One: When Fearless came out, Taylor texted Stephen saying,
“Hey, track 5!” and was rewarded with an email reply from her overwhelmed
crush. Stephen told People, “We’ve become great friends since Love and Theft
started opening shows for her. I think everyone would agree she’s a total
sweetheart and anyone would be lucky to go out with her.” For a snippet of
Taylor with Stephen, watch her October 19, 2008, MySpace video to see them
lip-synch to Katy Perry’s “Hot N Cold.”
Fun Facts: The finger snaps on this track are provided by Martina McBride’s
children and their friends, who were dying to meet Taylor, and jumped at the
opportunity during a recording session at John McBride’s Blackbird Studio.
Diary Decoder: “Love and Theft” reveals who the mystery Stephen is. The
band was signed to a record deal with Lyric Street Records in 2009, and has
released two singles. Perhaps when their full-length album appears, Taylor will
get a reply to her love letter.
5. “White Horse”
Behind the Music: According to Country Weekly, this song was written with
the guy from “Love Story” in mind. After Taylor composed the first verse, she
called Liz Rose, and in about 45 minutes the pair polished off the song that
would go on to win a Grammy.
Between the Lines: For pessimists, “White Horse” could be “Love Story:
Part 2.” It’s a song about the end of a relationship with no hope for recovery.
Taylor explained to Billboard, “It’s one of the songs that I am really proud of on
the record because it’s so sparse — guitar, piano, and cello . . . it talks about
falling in love and the fairytales that you are going to have with this person, and
then there is that moment where you realize that it is not going to happen. That
moment is the most earth-shattering moment.” Of course, “I’m not a princess /
This ain’t a fairytale” doesn’t mean that true love doesn’t exist, just not between
these two. Interestingly, Taylor mentions the “face of an angel” in this song,
which is also part of the chorus in “Hey Stephen.” Hopefully Stephen wasn’t the
one to let her down!
Fun Facts: Originally “White Horse” was going to be saved for Taylor’s third
album because Fearless already had its fair share of sad songs. That decision
changed when Grey’s Anatomy wanted the song for the premiere episode of
season 5, “Dream a Little Dream of Me.” And while “White Horse” may be
about disappointment, for Taylor having a song on her favorite show was a
dream come true: “You should’ve seen the tears streaming down my face when I
got the phone call that they were going to use that song. I have never been that
excited. This is my life’s goal, to have a song on Grey’s Anatomy. My love of
Grey’s Anatomy has never wavered. It’s my longest relationship to date.”
Diary Decoder: “All I ever wanted was the truth” hints that Taylor’s prince
was a liar and that their fairytale castle wasn’t built on solid ground.
You Saw It Live: Taylor offered an intimate performance of “White Horse” at
the 2008 American Music Awards where she was named Favorite Female
Country Artist.
Charting Success: This song earned Taylor two Grammy Awards — one for
Best Country Song and one for Best Female Country Vocal Performance. This
second single from Fearless peaked at number two on the Billboard Hot Country
Songs chart, number 13 on the Hot 100, and number 23 on the Pop 100, and also
charted in Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia. The “White Horse”
single received platinum certification.
6. “You Belong with Me”
Behind the Music: Taylor’s inspiration for this song came from
eavesdropping while hanging out on her band’s bus. Taylor told Self, “The guy
was going, ‘Baby, of course I love you more than music, I’m so sorry. I had to go
to sound check. I’m so sorry I didn’t stay on the phone.’ So immediately in my
head, I get this line, ‘You’re on the phone with your girlfriend she’s upset. She’s
going off about something that you said.’ And it all came to me at once. I bolted
to my bus [to write it down].” Taylor took the idea to a songwriting session with
Liz where the two fleshed out the story, and Taylor notes that “She wears short
skirts, I wear T-shirts” was their favorite line to write.
Between the Lines: Taylor says she never had a crush on her band member;
she just inserted herself into the situation and ran with it. But she does know
what it’s like to be the invisible girl, as she explored in “Teardrops on My
Guitar.” She explained, “Basically like ‘girl-next-door-itis.’ You like this guy
who you have for your whole life, and you know him better than she does but
somehow the popular girl gets the guy every time.”
Diary Decoder: “Love is blind so you couldn’t see me” is a clever
reinforcement of the idea that it’s often hard to see the good thing right in front
of you.
You Saw It Live: Taylor Swift performed “You Belong with Me” at the 2010
Grammy Awards accompanied by singer-songwriter and banjo whiz Butch
Walker. Butch got the gig in an unconventional way. He posted a cover version
of the song online and it caught Taylor’s notice (she tweeted, “I’m losing my
mind listening to it! Blown away. This weekend rules”). She called him up and
invited him to join her onstage at the Grammys. Butch agreed and played the
banjolin (a combination of a banjo and mandolin), just like he did in his cover.
He joined her again for the Fearless Tour’s stop at L.A.’s Staples Center. Taylor
also performed this tune live at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards, at the 2009
CMT Music Awards, on Today, and on The Jay Leno Show.
Charting Success: The third single from Fearless, “You Belong with Me,”
was nominated for Song of the Year, Record of the Year, and Best Female Pop
Vocal Performance at the 2010 Grammys, although it didn’t win. It had better
success at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards where it won Best Female Video.
“You Belong with Me” became Taylor’s fourth number one hit in the U.S.,
topping the Hot Country Songs chart and the Hot Adult Contemporary Tracks
chart, and scored a number three on the Canadian Hot 100. It also sat at number
two on the Pop Songs chart and on the Hot 100, and charted in top 100s all over
the world, including in Ireland, New Zealand, and the U.K. “You Belong with
Me” has been certified double platinum.
7. “Breathe”
Behind the Music: Taylor admired Colbie Caillat’s first album, Coco, so
much she was determined to work with her fellow up-and-coming artist. She
approached Colbie’s management, and Colbie ended up with a day off after a
radio-station promotional show in Nashville. After working on some pieces
Taylor had written, the two wrote “Breathe” together and Colbie contributed
vocals, recorded at Starstruck Studios. Taylor gushed to MTV, “I just think she’s
the coolest thing out there right now. So for her to be on my next album makes
me feel cooler.” Colbie has nothing but praise for Taylor: “She is so sweet, so
beautiful, so talented, and honestly just a really intelligent young women. She
knows what she is doing and she knows how to handle her career and take
charge. I love her.”
Between the Lines: Before “Breathe,” all of Taylor’s songs about breakups
fell into two categories: laced with anger (like “Picture to Burn” and “Should’ve
Said No”) or sad laments about being let down (as in “White Horse” and
“Forever & Always”). This down-tempo duet explores an ending with no rage
and no one to blame; it’s about the end of a friendship. She explains, “It’s a song
about having to say goodbye to somebody, but it never blames anybody.
Sometimes that’s the most difficult part. When it’s nobody’s fault.”
Audience of One: Taylor hasn’t said which former friend this heartwrenching tune is for, but on first listen, he or she must have found it a little hard
to breathe.
Fun Facts: “Breathe” shares a title with a famous song by one of Taylor’s
favorite performers — Faith Hill. Faith’s 1999 single was a huge country and
pop hit, landing number ones on three different charts. While Colbie didn’t win a
Grammy for this collaboration with Taylor, she had one in her pocket thanks to
her 2009 duet with Jason Mraz on “Lucky.”
Diary Decoder: “I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry” is both the secret message
and the soft closing vocals that Taylor added while recording, saying to Colbie,
“You never said it in the song, but that’s totally what the song’s about.” The
apology is not about taking the blame but rather a wish that things turned out
differently.
Charting Success: “Breathe” was nominated for Best Pop Collaboration with
Vocals at the 2010 Grammy Awards.
Colbie Caillat and Taylor at the BMI’s 57th Annual Pop Awards on May 19, 2009.
8. “Tel Me Why
”
Behind the Music: Sick of getting mixed signals from a guy, Taylor arrived at
Younger brother named Austin Kingsley Swift, who is an actor. Swift spent her early years on a Christmas tree farm, which her father purchased from one of his clients. She attended preschool and kindergarten at Alvernia Montessori School, run by the Bernadine Franciscan sisters, before transferring to The Wyndcroft School. The family moved to a rented house in the suburban town of Wyomissing, Pennsylvania, where she attended Wyomissing Area Junior High School.
Taylor’s savvy parents — Andrea Swift, a successful businesswoman, and
Scott Swift, a stockbroker — wanted to make sure their daughter would have
every advantage possible, and named her appropriately. Andrea reasoned that
future employers wouldn’t know if Taylor was a boy or a girl if they saw her
name on a business card or résumé. Taylor explained to Rolling Stone, “She
wanted me to be a business person in a business world.” The platinum-selling
singer-songwriter may not work in a boardroom, but there’s no doubt Andrea
Swift is anything but disappointed.
In Wyomissing, Taylor grew up on an 11-acre Christmas tree farm, which
was the family’s secondary business. The farm was also home to several cats and
seven horses. Taylor was a young equestrian, and rode horses competitively as a
child. Taylor remembers, “I was raised on a little farm and for me when I was
little, it was the biggest place in the world. And it was the most magical,
wonderful place in the world.” She spent her time “running free and going
anywhere I wanted in my head.” When she was two she got a partner to play
with when Andrea and Scott brought brother Austin home to join the Swift
family. When Taylor was four, Andrea decided to set her career aside and focus
on her family.
As Taylor shared in “The Best Day,” her love song for her family, the Swifts
are a close-knit bunch. Telling Girls’ Life about her mom, Taylor explained,
“She’s one of my best friends. She’s always, always around. She’s the person in
my life who will just literally look me in the eye and say, ‘Look, snap out of it.’
You know? And I need that person.” Taylor also recognizes that her mother’s
influence was a major factor in achieving her astonishing success: “She totally
raised me to be logical and practical. I was brought up with such a strong woman
in my life and I think that had a lot to do with me not wanting to do anything
halfway.”
The special bond between mother and daughter doesn’t go unnoticed by Scott
Swift, who told the Tennessean: “People keep saying to me, ‘The relationship
between Andrea and Taylor is something pretty special.’ That is amazing. There
aren’t too many mother and daughters who work together as a business unit the
way those two do.” And while Scott may not be constantly by Taylor’s side now
that she’s often away from home, he still plays a major role in his daughter’s life.
Andrea’s approach is firm though loving, realistic, and honest, while Scott is a
softie. “My dad is just a big teddy bear who tells me that everything I do is
perfect,” said Taylor. Like his wife, Scott passes on his wisdom to his daughter,
helping her make sound financial decisions about her career independently.
“Business-wise, he’s brilliant,” says Taylor. “I’m constantly getting business
advice and what to invest in. I think you should be in charge of every single
aspect of your career.”
As a parenting team, Andrea and Scott balance each other out. Taylor told the
Tennessean, “I have a logical, practical, realistic mother, and a head-in-theclouds, kind and friendly, optimistic father. And so I’m a dreamer, and my
imagination goes to places where love lasts forever and everything is covered in
glitter, and that’s from my dad’s personality. Every time I walk off stage, he tells
me how much he loved it, or how he was standing at the soundboard, crying. But
my mom, she’ll tell me exactly what she saw.”
While Taylor may get her confidence and her business sense from her
parents, her musical talent comes from someone else: her late maternal
grandmother, Marjorie Finlay, a successful opera singer. Taylor reminisces, “I
can remember her singing, the thrill of it. She was one of my first inspirations,”
and she elaborated to the Sunday Times: “She would have these wonderful
parties at her house, and she would get up and sing. She always wanted to be
onstage, whether she was in the middle of her living room or in church; she just
loved it. And when she would walk into a room, everyone would look at her, no
matter what; she had this ‘thing,’ this It factor. I always noticed it — that she was
different from everyone else.” Marjorie traveled with her husband, who built oil
rigs around the world, and she performed in places like Singapore, Puerto Rico,
and Vietnam. When Andrea was 10, the family settled in America. Marjorie
appeared in operas like The Bartered Bride and The Barber of Seville and
musicals such as West Side Story. Scott Swift notices similarities that go beyond
musical ability between his daughter and his mother-in-law: “The two of them
had some sort of magic where they could walk into a room and remember
everybody’s name. Taylor has the grace and the same physique of Andrea’s
mother. Andrea’s mother had this unique quality; if she was going into a room,
literally everybody loved Marjorie.”
Taylor’s legacy from her grandmother appeared at a very young age. She had
an uncanny ability to memorize songs, and Taylor remembers that at age three or
four, “I would come out of these Disney movies and I’d be singing every single
song from the movie on the car ride home, word for word. And my parents
noticed that once I had run out of words I would just make up my own.” Taylor
admits, “I was that annoying kid who ran around singing for random strangers.”
The young girl was hooked on more than just singing; Taylor was addicted to
stories too. Taylor told Katie Couric, “All I wanted to do was talk and all I
wanted to do was hear stories. I would drive my mom insane driving down the
road [with her].” Like other children, Taylor demanded stories at bedtime, but
rather than reading the same books over and over, Taylor insisted on originals. “I
refused to go to bed without a story. And I always wanted to hear a new one,”
she says. No wonder Andrea admitted her energetic youngster “had the potential
to be exhausting.”
It wasn’t too long before Taylor started making up her own stories. She told
the Washington Post, “Writing is pretty involuntary to me. I’m always writing.”
Taylor’s love of language “started with poetry, trying to figure out the perfect
combination of words, with the perfect amount of syllables and the perfect
rhyme to make it completely pop off the page.” She loved Dr. Seuss and Shel
Silverstein, and told Rolling Stone: “I noticed early on that poetry was something
that just stuck in my head and I was replaying those rhymes and try[ing] to think
of my own. In English, the only thing I wanted to do was poetry and all the other
kids were like, ‘Oh, man. We have to write poems again?’ and I would have a
three-page long poem.” In the fourth grade she won a national poetry contest for
her composition “Monster in My Closet.” She even wrote a 350-page novel
during a summer vacation. Andrea remembers, “She wrote all the time. If music
hadn’t worked out, I think she’d be going off to college to take journalism
classes or trying to become a novelist.”
Beyond music and stories, Taylor demonstrated one more quality at a young
age that would prove useful on her rise to superstardom: she was at ease in front
of the camera and knew how to strike a pose that even Tyra Banks would call
fierce. Andrea told British magazine Sugar, “I got photos taken for family
Christmas cards when Taylor was five. She was really posing. The photographer
told me I should take her to L.A. to model, but I’m so glad I didn’t.” Millions of
fans are glad she didn’t too.
Entering the Spotlight
When Taylor was around 10, she decided she wanted to follow in her
grandmother’s footsteps and sing in front of an audience. She auditioned for the
local children’s theater company a week after she saw its production of Charlie
and the Chocolate Factory. Since she was tall, Taylor was given the lead roles,
and played such memorable parts as Sandy in Grease, Kim in Bye Bye Birdie,
and Maria in The Sound of Music, but Taylor admits, “My singing sounded a lot
more country than Broadway.” And though Taylor liked being onstage, what
really captured her heart was performing karaoke at the cast parties. The
songstress explains, “Singing country music on that karaoke machine was my
favorite thing in the world.” She sang the Shania Twain, Dixie Chicks, and Faith
Hill songs that she’d been listening to since a LeAnn Rimes album got her
hooked on country music at age six. Her inspiring performances didn’t go
unnoticed, and Taylor remembers, “One day, somebody turned to my mom and
said, ‘You know, she really ought to be singing country music.’” Taylor adds, “It
kind of occurred to all of us at the same time that that’s what I needed to be
doing.”
A young Taylor as Kim in a children’s theater production of Bye Bye Birdie.
Taylor started scouring the phone book for more places to perform. One of
her regular spots was the Pat Garrett Roadhouse in Strausstown, Pennsylvania,
which held frequent karaoke contests. Taylor started going every week, taking
her parents along with her. “They were kind of embarrassed by it, I guess,”
remembered Taylor. “This little girl singing in this smoky bar. But they knew
how much it meant to me so they went along with it.” A year and a half later, her
performance of LeAnn Rimes’ “Big Deal” earned her not only the prestige of
being karaoke champion, but also a spot opening for Grammy-winner and
country legend Charlie Daniels at the amphitheater across the street. In this case,
“opening” meant that Taylor went on at 10 a.m. while Charlie Daniels played at
8 p.m. Nevertheless, it was a pretty amazing feat for an 11-year-old.
Demonstrating business smarts that would make her parents proud, Taylor
discovered that another way to reach a large audience was to perform the
national anthem at sports games. She sent demo tapes out everywhere. She sang
regularly for her local minor league baseball team, the Reading Phillies, and
would take whatever other gigs she could get from local garden club meetings
all the way up to the U.S. Open tennis tournament when she was 12. “I figured
out that if you could sing that one song, you could get in front of 20,000 people
without even having a record deal,” Taylor told Rolling Stone. One of the
highlights of her anthem-singing career came at age 11 when she sang at a 76ers
game. Jay-Z was sitting courtside and, after her performance, the famous rapper
and hip hop mogul gave young T-Swizzle a high-five. “I bragged about that for
like a year straight,” Taylor admits.
As her career progressed, Taylor kept singing the anthem, though her
eventual record deal helped get her in front of considerably larger audiences. She
performed “The Star-Spangled Banner” at game three of the 2008 World Series
between the Philadelphia Phillies and the Tampa Bay Rays. Even though she’d
sung the anthem hundreds of times, performing at such an important game was
still a little daunting. Taylor explained, “The national anthem is not as
challenging range-wise, because I’ve been doing it for so long. The challenge for
me is the utter silence that comes over 40,000 people in a baseball stadium and
you’re the only one singing it. . . . It’s a really surreal moment for me.”
But before she was a household name performing at one of the nation’s most
important sporting events, Taylor was just trying to find an audience. She
watched a TV special about one of her heroes, Faith Hill, who talked about
making it in Nashville, the home of country music. Taylor realized, “That’s the
promised land for country music. That’s where I need to go.”
Taylor made a demo tape of her singing the country songs she had grown to
love backed by karaoke tracks, and convinced her mom to take her to the
legendary city on a spring break trip. Andrea packed up Taylor and Austin and
they drove down to Nashville. Taylor walked into the record-company offices on
Music Row, handed them her demo, and boldly announced, “Hi, I’m Taylor. I’m
11. I really want a record deal.” But as charming as the aspiring star’s courage
was, the companies weren’t wooed. “Basically all the record companies went,
‘Ah, how cute. She’s just a little kid.’ [and] ‘Give up your dreams. Go home and
come back when you’re 18,’” recalls Taylor. “I chose not to hear that. I wasn’t
prepared to accept that I wasn’t a relevant artist until I was 18.” The record
companies steadfastly believed that young people didn’t listen to country music.
Taylor was frequently told, “The country music demographic is 35-year-old
females and those are the only people who listen to country music,” but she
remembers, “I just kept thinking that can’t be true. That can’t be accurate
because I listen to country music and I know there have to be other girls
everywhere who listen to country music. . . . So I kept trying because I didn’t
believe that there was just one tiny demographic.” Of course, that younger
demographic did exist, and while the record execs might not have known it yet,
Taylor did, and in a few short years, she would prove it to them.
Guitar Hero, Social Outcast
Returning home to Wyomissing, Taylor knew she had to do something to
distinguish herself from all the other wannabe performers, and she came up with
two ways she could do that: she’d learn to play the guitar and she’d write her
own music. Taylor explained, “There are a lot of gorgeous voices and beautiful
women in Nashville, so I had to figure out a way to stand out. I thought if I could
walk into an audition and play a song that I had written, then I’d stand out. And
that has really made a difference.”
Taylor had a guitar already — she’d received an electric guitar at age eight,
and had actually started taking lessons but she had been discouraged quickly. It
was a less formal teacher who got her playing for good; she learned her first
three chords from a guy who came by to fix the family’s computer. Ten minutes
later, she’d written her first song, “Lucky You.” Each week, the computer guy
would teach his young pupil a few more chords. By age 12, she was playing
guitar four hours a day, every day. In classic T-Swift style, she decided to play on
the more challenging 12-string model, as opposed to a six-string, because her
first teacher had told her she wouldn’t be able to do it. She told Teen Vogue, “I
actually learned on a 12-string, purely because some guy told me that I’d never
be able to play it, that my fingers were too small. Anytime someone tells me that
I can’t do something, I want to do it more.” Andrea was floored by her
daughter’s commitment: “Her fingers would crack from so much playing. She
was driven beyond anything I had ever witnessed.”
Taylor’s single-minded commitment to music may have wowed her mother,
but it wasn’t something that made her popular at school. The other kids made fun
of her bleeding fingers and her love for country music, and were jealous of the
attention she received for performing. She remembers, “I kind of started to live
in fear when I would sing the national anthem at the 76ers game. If there was a
write-up about it the next day in our local paper, I knew it was gonna be a bad
day at school for me.” A group of popular girls who used to be friendly with
Taylor decided to exclude her: “When I’d sit down at the lunch table, they’d get
up and move. Or, as I was setting up my equipment to sing karaoke at the town
summer festival, the kids would shout horrible things.” Andrea recalls, “She was
shunned. After school, I’d hear what nightmare had occurred that day, what
awful thing was done to her. I’d have to pick her up off the floor.”
The budding performer also found her priorities were hugely different from
those of her classmates: “All the girls at school were going to sleepovers and
breaking into their parents’ liquor cabinets on the weekend, and all I wanted to
do was go to festivals and sing karaoke music.” Taylor still picks music over
drinking and parties, and since making that decision in junior high, the
songstress has retained the same values — she won’t let anything compromise
her music career.
Despite rejecting the more rebellious aspects of the social scene, the outsider
still desperately wanted to fit in, and Taylor tried to act just like everyone else.
She even attempted to tame her curly locks, imitating the straight-haired look of
the popular girls. “I tried so hard to be like everybody else and do what they did
and like the things they liked,” she said. “I tried so hard and it didn’t work. They
still didn’t want to be friends with me. . . . So I found that trying to be like
everyone else doesn’t work.” Looking back, Taylor can see what drove her need
to conform: insecurity. “Whatever makes you different in middle school makes
you uncool somehow. I hate that. I think that one thing I realized, after the fact,
was that everybody was insecure. Maybe it wasn’t the same insecurity that I had,
but it’s always something. It’s funny how after you get out of middle school, the
thing that you were the most insecure about can be the thing that sets you apart.”
With the wisdom of a few more years and a wildly successful career, Taylor
offered comfort to other teens who may be going through the same thing, saying,
“The only place where it’s cool to be the same as everyone else is junior high.”
Trapped in her school’s hallways, Taylor eventually came to terms with the fact
that she’d never be in-crowd material, and embraced what made her special,
even if that meant standing out, and ultimately, standing apart from everyone
else.
The straight-A student found herself in a lonely position on the outside,
observing rather than joining in the regular goings-on of middle school. She
recalls, “I was facing a lot of things at school where I found myself on the
outside looking in. I was not included. I would go to school some days, a lot of
days, and not know who I was going to talk to. And that’s a really terrifying
thing for somebody who’s 12.” Luckily, Taylor had an outlet for feeling alone
and excluded; she channeled it into her songwriting. She wrote the song “The
Outside” when she was 12 to capture that feeling, writing, “Nobody ever lets me
in I can still see you, this ain’t the best view On the outside looking in.” Her
point of view as an outsider became a great source of material for Taylor’s
songs: “The people around me provided all the inspiration I needed. Everything I
wrote [at that time] came from that experience, what I observed happening
around me.”
Later in her career, Taylor would learn to be grateful to the people who had
made her life so miserable and given her so much fuel for her songwriting. She
realized, “The only thing I can do is look back and thank [those classmates]. If I
hadn’t been so driven to music because I didn’t have anyone to hang out with, if
I hadn’t written songs because I didn’t have anyone to talk to, I wouldn’t be
sitting here right now.”
But at the time, hurting from rejection and loneliness, she channeled
everything into her music; writing songs became like a diary for Taylor, and it
still is. As her mother told the New York Times, “She simply has to write songs.
It’s how she filters her life.” Taylor was able to turn her schoolyard rejection into
something bigger, something that brought her closer to her goal of having a
record deal. Despite being a dreamer, Taylor knew achieving her goal wouldn’t
be easy, and that she had to keep writing, practicing, and performing to make it
happen. Part of this practicality came from her mother, who, Taylor explains,
“never said to me, ‘Taylor, you’re gonna be famous someday.’” Taylor
continues, “There are so many moms who tell their kids that. But my mom has
always been practical. She didn’t know if I would succeed. She’d say, ‘If you
want a chance at this, you’ve got to work really, really hard.’” And so Taylor did,
writing and practicing constantly and performing at all the music festivals,
karaoke competitions, and national-anthem gigs she could fit in around her
school schedule. Taylor told Cosmo Girl, “The reason I was so driven was that I
didn’t expect that anything would just happen for me. But that doubt fueled me
to work harder. My attitude was the opposite of people who are like, ‘It’s gonna
happen for me. It’s gonna happen for me.’ My mantra was always ‘It’s not gonna
happen for me. Go out and play the show or it won’t happen.’”
One such show made a huge difference in Taylor’s career — the U.S. Open,
one of the four most prestigious tennis tournaments in the world. Taylor belted
out “The Star-Spangled Banner” in front of a massive crowd of over 20,000
tennis fans. Among them was Dan Dymtrow, then manager of Britney Spears.
Impressed with Taylor’s talent, Dymtrow took her on as a client and worked to
promote the young artist. Dymtrow helped 13-year-old Taylor get a development
deal with RCA Records in Nashville. It seemed like a huge step forward, but
after holding onto her for a year, Taylor’s contract came up for review. Taylor
performed for RCA bigwigs, and the label decided to shelve her rather than have
her make a record immediately. “That means they want to watch you, but they’re
not promising to make an album with you,” explained Taylor. “Kind of like a
guy who wants to date you but not be your boyfriend.” It wasn’t enough for the
ambitious teen, who was in a hurry to share her music with the world. “I
genuinely felt that I was running out of time. I’d written all these songs and I
wanted to capture these years of my life on an album while they still represented
what I was going through.” But more than anything, Taylor was disappointed
that RCA didn’t have faith in her potential, so she walked away from the deal —
a bold move for a young singer without a fallback plan. She recalls, “I figured if
they didn’t believe in me then, they weren’t ever going to believe in me.”
Taylor still believed in herself, and she worked at convincing her family to
make a permanent move to the heartland of country music — Nashville,
Tennessee. Her persistence paid off, and before Taylor’s freshmen year the entire
Swift family moved south for a fresh start in Music City, USA.
Leaving Pennsylvania behind wasn’t too difficult for Taylor, who was literally
moving closer to her Nashville dream and away from her bullying classmates,
but it required a bigger sacrifice from the rest of her uprooted family, especially
her father, who had to transfer his business. Nevertheless, the Swifts never put
pressure on Taylor. She told Self magazine, “I knew I was the reason they were
moving. But they tried to put no pressure on me. They were like, ‘Well, we need
a change of scenery anyway’ and ‘I love how friendly people in Tennessee are.’”
Andrea had faith in her daughter and trusted her intentions, “It was never about
‘I want to be famous.’ Taylor never uttered those words. It was about moving to
a place where she could write with people she could learn from.”
Taylor was glad her family trusted her instincts. “Sometimes you don’t have
a sure answer as to where you’re going to go or where you’re going to end up,
but if you have an instinct as to where you don’t need to be, you need to follow it
and my parents let me make that decision completely,” recalls Taylor.
She didn’t have a label anymore, but she had experience working with one.
In 2004, Taylor was featured in an Abercrombie & Fitch “rising stars” campaign
and one of her songs appeared on a compilation album, the Maybelline-produced
Chicks with Attitude. “The Outside,” the song she’d written about feeling
excluded in middle school, had found a temporary home.
It wasn’t long before Taylor found a home as a songwriter at Sony/ATV
Records. She was the youngest songwriter they’d ever hired, which is an
impressive feat, but Taylor knew she’d still have to prove herself by acting with
maturity beyond her years. “I knew the stereotype people had when they heard
the words ‘14-year-old girl’ was that I wasn’t going to do the hard work, and I
wanted people to know that I was,” Taylor emphasized. “One of my first
songwriting sessions was with [accomplished songwriter and producer] Brett
Beavers, and I walked in with 15 different starts to songs. I love being prepared
and I love organization, and I need people to know that I care and that this is
important to me.”
Being a professional songwriter meant that Taylor had to lead a sort of
double life, going to high school in Hendersonville during the day and writing
songs in the afternoons in downtown Nashville, less than 20 miles away. Taylor
called her life back then “a really weird existence,” and elaborated, “I was a
teenager during the day when I was at school, and then at night it was like I was
45. My mom would pick me up from school and I’d go downtown and sit and
write songs with these hit songwriters.”
The social politics of high school in Tennessee turned out to be very similar
to those of junior high in Pennsylvania, but luckily for Taylor, there was one
major difference that made school tolerable — a great friend. Taylor met redhaired Abigail Anderson in ninth grade English, when the new girl wowed the
class with her sophisticated composition. “We were the ones in the back of the
class saying negative things about Romeo and Juliet because we were so bitter
toward that emotion at the time,” recalled Abigail. Neither girl was a member of
the popular clique, so the pair made their own rules, focusing on what they
actually cared about rather than what other people did. For Taylor, that was
music; for Abigail, competitive swimming: “When I was a freshman, I knew I
wanted to swim in college, at a Division 1 school, and she knew that she wanted
to go on tour.” Such focus set the girls apart from their classmates, and bonded
them together. Taylor explained to the New York Times, “It just dawned on me
that I had to love being different or else I was going to end up being dark and
angry and frustrated by school.” Being different meant staying away from the
popular-girl party scene, which Taylor had already decided didn’t appeal to her.
Taylor told Glamour, “I remember seeing girls crying in the bathroom every
Monday about what they did at a party that weekend. I never wanted to be that
girl.
Wellcome to Music City, USA
With her songwriting gig, Taylor was part of the rich music history of Nashville, a city that
has been home to music publishing since 1824 when Western Harmony, a book of
hymns, was produced there. It was in the 1920s that Nashville music really began to
flourish with the opening of the Grand Ole Opry. In the ’40s and ’50s, “Music Row”
developed as Capitol Records and RCA first opened outposts in the capital and every
other major label followed suit. Today, Nashville’s 16th and 17th Avenues South are
home to recording studios and labels galore.
The “Nashville Sound,” a blend of a pop music sensibility with the traditional
storytelling of folk and country artists, was popularized in the 1950s by legends like Jim
Reeves, Patsy Cline, and Eddy Arnold. Its legacy can be heard in Taylor’s song-crafting
style that mixes infectious melodies with memorable tales rooted in real-life experiences.
As Nashville recording artist Elvis Presley helped make rock ’n’ roll a craze, sales of
country music albums dropped, and “crossing over” from country to mainstream listeners
became hugely important for country artists. In the 1980s, the star of country crossover
was the Queen of Country Music herself, Dolly Parton, whose music and personality
made her a household name from coast to coast. Alongside the queen was the King of
Country, George Strait, who trails only the Beatles and Elvis Presley for the number of hit
albums he’s released; he holds the record for the most number-one singles of any artist
in any genre at 57, and he’s always stayed true to a traditional honky-tonk sound. The
’80s also saw the rise of hugely successful country acts such as Alabama and Reba
McEntire.
Like a certain blonde teenager would 20 years later, Garth Brooks started as a
Nashville songwriter before rapidly taking country music by storm with songs like “The
Thunder Rolls” in the 1990s, bringing with him the “new country” sound, over 36 top 10
hits, record-breaking tours, and millions of albums sold. Garth’s audience stretched well
beyond the traditional country music boundaries. It’s no surprise that Taylor Swift has
called Garth Brooks her “role model.”
But it was the female country musicians of the ’90s that most influenced young
Taylor, and it all started with then-14-year-old LeAnn Rimes’ 1996 album Blue, which
Taylor heard when she was just six years old. Recalls Taylor, “LeAnn Rimes was my first
impression of country music . . . I just really loved how she could be making music and
having a career at such a young age.” Taylor “started listening to female country artists
nonstop” from legends like Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn, Tammy Wynette, and Dolly Parton
to the stars of the ’90s like Shania Twain, Faith Hill, and the Dixie Chicks. As Taylor
explained to Rolling Stone, “I saw that Shania Twain brought this independence and this
crossover appeal; I saw that Faith Hill brought this classic old-school glamour and beauty
and grace; and I saw that the Dixie Chicks brought this complete ‘we don’t care what you
think’ quirkiness, and I loved what these women were able to do and what they were able
to bring to country music.”
Dolly Parton, Tim McGraw, and Faith Hill at the 2000 ACM Award nominations. Taylor loves
Dolly’s response to male fans who interrupt quiet performance moments: “Some guy screamed
from the crowd, ‘I love you, Dolly!’ and she goes, ‘I thought I told you to stay in the truck!’”
Taylor has measured her career’s progress by following in the footsteps of the
legends who sang the music she grew up listening to. At a Bakersville, California, show
shortly after Taylor’s first album came out, the son of the late country legend Buck
Owens presented her with a guitar: “I was on stage in front of 5,000 people and Buck
Owens’ son came out on stage with the red-white-and-blue guitar. Buck used to give
them to [musicians] that he really respected, and [his son] said that this was the first one
they had given away since we lost Buck. It blew my mind. I got really, really emotional. It
was just so different than any other sort of respect. It was being approved and embraced
by a country legend.”
Another early career milestone for Taylor was the opportunity to play a show at the
historic Grand Ole Opry. GAC filmed the experience (it’s included on the deluxe version
of her self-titled album). Taylor recounted, “There’s this circle in the middle of the stage.
It’s like everybody from Patsy Cline to Keith Urban to LeAnn Rimes to me, now, have
stood in this circle.” At that moment, walking in the footsteps of country music’s greats,
Taylor knew she’d made it.
Music & Lyrics
Now that she was in the home of country music and had a songwriting contract,
Taylor didn’t abandon her earlier confessional style to start writing about
stereotypical country music subjects. “I don’t sing about tractors and hay bales
and things like that because that’s not really the way that I grew up. But I do sing
about the lessons I’ve learned,” Taylor explained. She wanted to write for people
her age, those country-music fans the labels told her didn’t exist but she knew
did — they were just waiting for songs they could relate to. “I don’t try to write
for older than I am and I don’t try and write for younger than I am. I write in real
time,” noted the songwriter.
These real-time songs are, above all, personal and honest. They’re about
Taylor’s feelings, her friends, her dreams, her heartbreak. She told Seventeen,
“Honesty is a big part of my writing, because when I was younger and fell in
love with songs I’d hear, I would always wonder who that song was about. It
would totally have broken my heart to know it wasn’t about anyone and was just
written so it could be on the radio.”
Now that she was at Hendersonville High, Taylor was accumulating all kinds
of new material. She had her first flirtations with romance, and Taylor started to
write the songs she’d become most famous for — songs about boys, love, and
heartbreak. Since she is unafraid to name names, some of Taylor’s early
boyfriends are well known to her fans. These songs were a way for her to
process her feelings and sometimes she directly addressed the person who
inspired her words: “The only thing I think about when I’m writing a song is the
person I’m writing the song about. Music is very confessional to me. It’s a
chance for me to say things I wouldn’t be brave enough to say to the person’s
face.”
Taylor’s songs may be specific, but as millions of fans can attest, that doesn’t
mean they’re not relatable. At first this came as a surprise to the young
songwriter, who remembers, “I thought because my songs were so personal that
nobody would be able to relate to them. . . . But apparently they were more
significant to more people than just me.” As it turns out, though the names may
be different, the experiences Taylor writes about are fairly universal. Taylor
reasoned, “The hardest thing about heartbreak is feeling like you’re alone, and
that the other person doesn’t really care. But when you hear a song about it, you
realize you’re not alone — because the person who wrote it went through the
same thing. That’s what makes songs about heartbreak so relatable.”
Because her inspiration came from immediate feelings and emotions, Taylor
learned to write anytime and anywhere, not just in her after-school sessions at
Sony. Stuck in class, she’d escape to the bathroom to record a melody on her cell
phone, or scribble down lyrics alongside her lecture notes! Taylor admits, “When
teachers conducted random notebook checks they’d be freaked out — but they
learned to deal with me.” If inspiration came outside of class, she’d use anything
at hand to capture the words before she lost them. “I’ve seen her pull out a
Kleenex and write a song on it,” Abigail revealed.
Taylor doesn’t write all her songs singlehandedly. In fact, in those early
Nashville days she met one very important collaborator: Liz Rose. Liz started in
the industry with her own music publishing company, which she sold in 2001 to
focus more seriously on her writing. It turned out to be a great career choice.
Since then she’s penned hits sung by country stars such as Trisha Yearwood,
Bonnie Raitt, Tim McGraw, and Kellie Pickler. But Liz’s collaboration with
Taylor would prove to be her most prolific and successful. When the pair met,
Liz instantly saw something exceptional in Taylor: “Even then, you knew she
was going to do something. She was so driven and so talented.”
Taylor embraces Liz Rose as they collect a Grammy for Best Country Song on January 31, 2010.
Many fruitful songwriting sessions followed; Liz shares the writing credit on
seven songs on Taylor’s self-titled debut album and four on Fearless. She helped
write hits like “You Belong with Me,” “Teardrops on My Guitar,” and “White
Horse.” Liz humbly gives most of the credit to her young protégé: “My sessions
with Taylor were some of the easiest I’ve ever done. Basically, I was just her
editor. She’d write about what happened to her in school that day. She had such a
clear vision of what she was trying to say. And she’d come in with some of the
most incredible hooks.” The elder songwriter elaborates, “She’s a genius,
coming in with ideas and a melody. She’d come in and write with this old lady
and I never second-guessed her. I respect her a lot.”
As Taylor was writing up a storm, she also recorded demos with a producer,
Nathan Chapman, who was also just starting his career and was working in “a
shack behind the publishing company,” according to Taylor. She knew that
Nathan was the right producer for her music, saying “I just fell in love with what
he did with my songs.” Like her collaboration with Liz Rose, Taylor’s
partnership with Nathan would continue through her career, and she would take
the new producer with her on her rise to the top.
Songbird at the Bluebird
With hundreds of hours of guitar playing and songwriting under her belt, Taylor
was looking for a chance to show off her talents to the country music elite, and it
came in the form of a showcase at Nashville’s famous Bluebird Café. The café
auditions performers for songwriters’ nights, and those who are very successful
can be booked for a showcase night, an event that draws local industry
professionals hunting for new talent. A major country star had gotten his big
break at the Bluebird — in 1987 a young Garth Brooks was discovered there and
signed by Capitol Records after a showcase performance.
On Taylor’s night to shine, she took the stage and played an acoustic set, and
when she looked out at the audience, she noticed one person who was
completely absorbed in the music, listening with his eyes closed to take it all in.
“He was listening better than anyone in the room,” remembers Taylor. That
person was Scott Borchetta, a former executive at a Nashville division of
Universal Music Group, who Taylor had met once before, playing a few songs
for the exec before he left his DreamWorks Nashville office. “I was just smitten
on the spot. It was like a lightening bolt,” he told Great American Country.
After the show, Scott approached Taylor, and told her, “I have good news and
I have bad news. . . . The good news is that I want to sign you to a record deal.
The bad news is that I’m no longer with Universal Records.” But Scott Borchetta
had a plan for his own label and told the young songwriter, “I want you to wait
for me . . . I’m working on something.” Taylor remembers, “The way he said it
convinced me that there was something going on that I wanted to be a part of.”
A Short History of Big Machine Records
Scott Borchetta got his first taste of the music business at a young age, working in the
mailroom of his father’s independent promotion company. He also approached music
hands on, playing various instruments in several bands. But rather than trying to get his
name in lights, Scott decided to help other people reach musical stardom. He worked for
several labels including Mary Tyler Moore’s MTM Records and MCA Records, and
launched DreamWorks Nashville, which was part of Universal Music Group before the
division shut down in 2005.
Scott started Big Machine Records in September of that year, and the company had
its first number-one single, Jack Ingram’s “Wherever You Are,” eight months later. His
early roster included Dusty Drake, Jack Ingram, Danielle Peck, Jimmy Wayne, and, of
course, Taylor Swift. Though he jokes that when he told industry colleagues about his
new 16-year-old sensation, “People would look at me cross-eyed. I would feel like they
were deleting me from their BlackBerrys as I was telling them,” he knew Taylor was a
real talent. In 2006, he told Billboard, “I’ve had the good fortune of breaking everybody
from Trisha Yearwood all the way up to Sugarland with big stops in between. This feels
as big as any of them.”
Since it opened its doors in 2005, Big Machine has expanded steadily, and in 2007,
the CEO announced a new branch of Big Machine, Valory Music Group. The new
division launched famed singer-songwriter Jewel’s first country album, the debut album
of Billboard’s “New Country Artist of 2009” Justin Moore, and represents Reba McEntire.
In addition to Big Machine being distributed by Universal, Scott further re-established his
connections with the major label in 2009 with a shared imprint, Republic Records
Nashville, which represents acts such as The Band Perry and Sunny Sweeney. So how
does Scott select who will become part of the Big Machine family? “I either fall in love
with an artist’s music or I don’t,” he explains. Good thing it was a love story with Taylor
Swift’s songs from day one.
Taylor with LeAnn Rimes, the singer who first got her interested in country music. Says Taylor:
“Country music is the place to find reality in music, and reality in the stars who make that music.
There’s kindness and goodness and . . . honesty in the people I look up to, and knowing that
makes me smile. I’m proud to sing country music, and that has never wavered.”
An essential part of their deal was that Taylor would get to write all the songs
that would appear on her albums. A larger label might have forced her to record
tracks penned by other songwriters, but Taylor refused to compromise on what
had been the foundation of her career. She told the Sunday Times, “It would have
really taken a lot of the wind out of my sails, personally, if I had to sing words
that other people wrote; that would have killed me.” Scott Borchetta’s faith in
her and the independence he promised her were enough to seal the deal . . . even
if his company didn’t yet exist. “Obviously, creative control is the most
important thing for me, or I wouldn’t have left the biggest label in Nashville for
a label that didn’t have any furniture,” joked Taylor.
With a star-in-the-making like Taylor signed on, Scott now had even more
motivation to get the new label up and running. He knew he had found someone
incredibly special: “I was just killed on sight. She’s the full package, somebody
who writes her own songs, and is so good at it, so smart; who sings, plays the
guitar, looks as good as she looks, works that hard, is that engaging and so
savvy. It’s an extraordinary combination.”
With the support of Scott Borchetta and Big Machine Records, it was time for
Taylor to start working on her first album. She entered the studio with Nathan
Chapman, her demo producer, to record the tracks that would become her selftitled debut. Just like with Taylor’s collaboration with Liz, she came to the studio
with a definite idea of what her songs should sound like and Nathan’s role as a
producer was to translate those ideas into sonic perfection. She explained,
“When I write a song I hear it completely produced in my head. I know exactly
where I want the hook to be and I know what instruments I want to use. One of
my favorite things to do is to sit around and obsess about how my music is going
to sound. A lot of that goes on in the days following me writing a song. I will
bring it into the studio with my producer Nathan, who I met when I was 14, and
I will sing him the hook. We’ll decide what we want to be playing on that. We’ve
got it down to where we can understand each other before we even have to make
much sense.”
Over their many years of collaboration, Nathan has learned to trust Taylor’s
instincts: “Taylor knows just who she is. And she knows what she wants to say
with the lyrics of her songs and with the music. She knows who she wants to be
and where she fits in this big thing called the music business.”
Scott Borchetta, Taylor, and Nathan Chapman, triumphant at the 2009 CMAs. Only three years
earlier Taylor was in the studio with Nathan and Scott recording Taylor Swift.
Though recording can be nerve-wracking for some new artists, Taylor wasn’t
intimidated by it, and saw it as a new extension of her dedication to music. She
told GAC, “I love the recording process because I love singing, and it really
gives me a chance to hone in on every single word — make it count, make it
perfect.” Ever the perfectionist, the process doesn’t end for Taylor once her day
in the recording booth does. She explained, “I leave the studio but I don’t put it
down. I don’t stop listening and I don’t stop tweaking and critiquing.”
The tracks for the album were whittled down from a list of 40 songs to 11.
When it came time to choose her first single, one song stood out for Scott
Borchetta. Taylor had written it for a high school sweetheart, and she called it
“When You Think Tim McGraw.” Scott told Dateline, “She finished the song
and I said, ‘Do you realize what you just have written? Do you have any idea?’
That was that moment of ‘Oh my God.’ And the grenade dropped in the still
pond.” The song’s name was eventually shortened to “Tim McGraw,” since
that’s how everyone referred to it. A quick session with Liz Rose at the piano
perfected the song, Taylor recorded it, and her first single was released on June
19, 2006.
Over the next six months, “Tim McGraw” became almost as popular as its
namesake: it hit number six on the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart and
number 40 on the Hot 100 chart. Before the song hit the charts, Taylor got
instant gratification when she was out for a drive and she heard her song
requested on the radio for the first time. “I was, like, freaking out. I almost drove
off the road,” she told GAC.
When “Tim McGraw” was released, Taylor was finishing up her sophomore
year at Hendersonville High. With her career taking off, a difficult decision had
to be made: could she continue attending regular high school? She knew she
wouldn’t be able to dedicate herself 100% to her career if she had to keep a highschool timetable, so Taylor made the decision to homeschool. Abigail
remembers, “She called me one night and we had to have the talk about she’s not
coming back to school . . . we dealt with it, and we’ve actually gotten closer
since.” It was a hard transition for both girls. Said Abigail, “She had to do her
own thing out there and miss everything that had been her life for the previous
few years. But she just immediately started doing so well . . . you just couldn’t
really think about anything else.”
“My brother’s always calling me the drop-out of the family,” Taylor jokes.
“Drop-out” or not, Taylor continued her straight-A streak from her prehomeschooling days. In fact, Taylor’s scholastic success would become
something her fans try to emulate. Scott Swift recounted an experience to the
Tennessean about a man coming up to him and stating that his granddaughter
was a big fan of Taylor’s and that she was getting straight As. Scott thought this
was just typical grandfatherly pride until the man added, “She wasn’t getting
straight As, but she heard Taylor Swift is getting straight As.”
Taylor’s new educational arrangement allowed her to study anytime,
anywhere, which was especially useful as she embarked on a national radio tour.
These kinds of tours can be exhausting with long hours, lots of travel, and
endless interviews. She was “living in hotel rooms, sleeping in the backs of
rental cars as my mom drove to three different cities in one day.” But to Taylor,
it was a great time. About all those interviews, she wrote, “I loooooved it
because it’s just talking to people. I could talk to a door.” She brought her fiddle
player and close pal, Emily Poe, and a guitar player, Todd, with her on the road,
playing shows wherever they could.
Sometimes Taylor even went back to school — to play shows. Still selfconscious about her place in the high-school hierarchy, the experience could be
nerve-wracking. “I remember when I first started doing high-school shows I was
in the 10th grade,” she told the Washington Post. “So it was a little more
intimidating when I was 16 and first got on the road and started doing highschool shows and I’m like, ‘Oh, there are seniors out there!’”
Returning to high school meant remembering the little day-to-day
experiences that she’d sacrificed for her career, but Taylor has no regrets about
the path she chose. “You’re always going to wonder about the road not taken, the
dorm not taken, and the sorority not taken,” she told CMT. “But if I wasn’t doing
this, I would’ve missed out on the best moments I’ve ever known and the most
wonderful life that I still can’t believe I get to live.”
Taylor Swift
Taylor’s self-titled debut album came out on October 24, 2006. It sold 39,000
copies in its first week, giving it the second-highest first-week sales for the year.
(Taylor only fell behind friend Kellie Pickler, a defeat she’s likely okay with!) It
peaked at number one on the Billboard Top Country Albums chart and at number
five on the Billboard 200, remaining on the chart for an incredibly long time. In
fact, Taylor Swift set the record for the longest-charting album since Nielsen
SoundScan started tracking sales in 1991, and after 157 weeks Taylor Swift
passed Nickelback’s All the Right Reasons to achieve the longest chart reign of
the decade. The album went platinum a mere seven months after its release, and
Taylor became the first solo female country artist to write or co-write every song
on a platinum record.
At the time of its release Taylor’s album didn’t get as much media attention
as her later albums would, but Taylor Swift was still well received. AllMusic
reviewer Jeff Tamarkin noted that Taylor was equipped with “a fresh, still girlish
voice, full of hope and naïveté, but it’s also a confident and mature one,” and
added, “That Swift is a talent to be reckoned with is never in doubt.” An
About.com reviewer noted that Taylor “writes and sings with the passion and
conviction of a veteran of country music.” Later, the New York Times would hail
the album as a “small masterpiece of pop-minded country.”
Taylor followed up “Tim McGraw” with singles “Teardrops on My Guitar,”
“Our Song,” “Picture to Burn,” and “Should’ve Said No.” All of them hit the top
10 on the Country Songs chart, and each song also found a spot on the Hot 100
list. Taylor had achieved the gold standard (or, more accurately, platinum
standard) of music industry success — she had crossover appeal. Pop music
listeners took to her songs almost as eagerly as country fans did.
Nashville producer and performer John Rich explained, “You can hear great
pop sensibilities in her writing as well as great storytelling, which is the
trademark of old-school country song-crafting.” Since her days belting out Dixie
Chicks songs at karaoke contests, Taylor has known that her roots are in country
music, and she’s glad that her songs are drawing new fans to the genre. “I’d like
to think that country music is where I live, country music is who I am, but I’m
lucky enough to have other people listening who aren’t necessarily core country
music fans,” said the singer. With her solid presence on the pop charts, Taylor
has followed in the footsteps of the women she idolized as a child — LeAnn
Rimes, Shania Twain, the Dixie Chicks, and Faith Hill. Despite Taylor’s
crossover success, Scott Borchetta still makes the country music crowd the
label’s first priority when it comes to all things Taylor Swift. “They’re always
going to get the singles first, always going to be first in line at the meet-andgreets,” says the CEO. “We overthink everything. One thing we can’t do is chase
the moving target of pop radio.” And Taylor wisely notes, “I’m not about to snub
the people who brought me to the party.”
Remarkably, she’d also conquered the demographic Nashville bigwigs had
told her didn’t exist: young, female country music fans. “So many girls come up
and say to me, ‘I have never listened to country music in my life. I didn’t even
know my town had a country music station. Then I got your record, and now I’m
obsessed,’” relates the singer. “That’s the coolest compliment to me.” Astounded
by the ever-growing Taylor Nation comprised of young women, CMT exec
Brian Philips reflected, “From the moment ‘Tim McGraw’ hit the channel, she
began to amass an audience that traditional Nashville didn’t know or didn’t
believe existed, and that is young women, specifically teens. It’s as if Taylor has
kind of willed herself into being.” The path for Taylor’s success was also paved
by Carrie Underwood’s breakthrough in 2005. When then-22-year-old Carrie
won season 4 of American Idol, the Oklahoma native took her country-pop
sound to the top of the charts with her debut album Some Hearts, which has
since been certified seven-times platinum.
After Taylor’s first album experienced similarly staggering success, Scott
Borchetta had no difficulty forecasting a bright future for his young star: “My
fear is that she’ll conquer the world by the time she’s 19. She’ll get to the
mountaintop and say, ‘This is it?’ Because she’s just knocking down all of those
goals that we didn’t even have for the first album. . . . My job at this point is
really to protect her and not burn her out.” But with another album and tours
already in sight, Taylor wasn’t anywhere close to burning out. Instead, Taylor’s
success was spreading like wildfire.
Many of Taylor’s songs are about romantic relationships, but her very first and
longest love affair is with words, and “Swift Notes” analyzes the songs on her
albums just like Taylor dissects her past romances.
Behind the Music: Details on Taylor’s inspiration and writing process for the
song.
Between the Lines: Taylor’s an award-winning songwriter; find analysis of
her lyrics here.
Audience of One: Taylor often writes her songs with a very specific audience
in mind: “When I sit down and write a song the only person that I’m thinking
about in that room is the person that I’m writing the song about and what I want
them to know and what I wish I could tell them to their face, but I’m going to
say it in a song instead.” Wonder if she’s singing about someone in particular?
Find out in this section.
Fun Facts: These are extra tidbits about the song and Taylor.
Diary Decoder: Taylor encodes a secret message into the lyrics in her album
booklets; this section solves the puzzles and discusses why Taylor chose that
particular message.
You Saw It Live: Find details of some of Taylor’s special performances of a
particular song here.
Charting Success: Taylor’s been smashing sales records since her debut.
Find out how her singles did and info on awards she’s won.
1. “Tim McGraw”
Behind the Music: Taylor wrote this song during math class in a mere 15
minutes, polished it after school, added piano, and finished it up with Liz!
Between the Lines: Despite the fact that his name is mentioned six times,
this wistful ballad isn’t about the famous country singer, but rather uses Tim
McGraw as a sort of musical memento. The song is like a letter to her departed
boyfriend, and an actual letter is mentioned in the song’s second verse. The Tim
McGraw song Taylor sings about is her favorite, “Can’t Tell Me Nothin’” from
Live Like You Were Dying. “Tim McGraw” is about a relationship that ended
when the guy left for college (“September was a month of tears” because that’s
when he went away). The lyrics also reveal what would become part of Taylor’s
signature style: alternating between a “little black dress” and her more casual
“old faded blue jeans.”
Audience of One: Taylor went out with the boy this song’s about (rumored to
be Brandon Borello) when she was a freshman and he was a senior. Though they
may be broken up, he’s still a Taylor Swift fan: “He bought the album and said
he really loved it, which is sweet,” said Taylor. “His current girlfriend isn’t too
pleased with it, though.” And what did Tim McGraw himself have to say about
it? “It was awesome, except that I didn’t know if I should take it as a compliment
or if I should feel old,” said the country star. “But the more I hear it . . . I start
taking it as a compliment.”
Fun Facts: Since releasing “Tim McGraw,” Taylor’s become great friends with
Tim and his wife, Faith Hill. Tim and Faith even invite Taylor to stay in their
home when she visits Los Angeles.
Diary Decoder: The secret message is “Can’t Tell Me Nothin,” the Tim
McGraw song Taylor had in mind while writing her song.
You Saw It Live: At the 2007 ACM Awards, Taylor performed in front of the
song’s namesake, and finished up “Tim McGraw” standing right in front of Tim
McGraw, who was in the front row. She famously extended her hand and said,
“Hi, I’m Taylor,” only to be rewarded with a hug from the country music icon.
Charting Success: Taylor’s first single peaked at number six on the Billboard
Country Songs chart, and number 40 on the Hot 100. “Tim McGraw” was
certified gold on May 3, 2007, and later went platinum. Its video won the
Breakthrough Video of the Year award at the 2007 CMT Music Awards. Taylor
was shocked by its success, saying, “It never really occurred to me that that song
would be so relatable.”
Taylor introduces herself to Tim McGraw at the ACM Awards on May 15, 2007.
2. “Picture to Burn”
Behind the Music: One day Taylor arrived at her after-school job at Sony in a
rage about a boy. She started playing her guitar and venting, “I hate his stupid
truck that he doesn’t let me drive. He’s such a redneck! Oh my God!” Some of
those very words found their way into the song’s chorus.
Between the Lines: Taylor told the Washington Post, “It’s about a guy I liked
who didn’t like me back, and I got really mad, you know?” The two never
officially dated because, Taylor explains, “It really bothered me that he was so
cocky and that’s where that song came from.”
Audience of One: Taylor’s not sure if he knows about this song, but if he
does, hopefully he’s learned a thing or two and now lets his girlfriend drive his
pickup truck.
Fun Facts: When she was younger, one of Taylor’s favorite karaoke songs was
the Dixie Chicks’ “Goodbye Earl,” a song with a similar message — don’t get
mad, get even. You’ll hear a slightly different version of this song on the radio
— the line “That’s fine, I’ll tell mine that you’re gay” is replaced with “That’s
fine, you won’t mind if I say,” since Taylor never meant to offend anyone.
Diary Decoder: “Date nice boys” — wise advice, indeed.
You Saw It Live: Taylor gave a blazing performance at the 2008 CMT Music
Awards as well as on Live with Regis and Kelly on April 20, 2008.
Charting Success: The fourth single from Taylor’s first album, “Picture to
Burn” hit number three on the Billboard Country Songs chart and number 28 on
the Hot 100. Looks like pop music fans like their country songs with a little fire
in them! “Picture to Burn” was also included on the 2008 compilation of country
hits Now That’s What I Call Country. The song was certified gold on June 11,
2008.
3. “Teardrops on My Guitar”
Behind the Music: Taylor wasn’t actually crying over her guitar when the
idea for this sad song came to her; she was on her way home from school.
Between the Lines: “Teardrops on My Guitar” is about Taylor’s crush on her
friend Drew Hardwick, who liked to talk to Taylor about his girlfriend all the
time. Taylor explained to Seventeen, “I had it bad for him. And I just kept
thinking, ‘Why am I so invisible to him? Why does he have to have a girlfriend?’
I never told him that I liked him, but I did write a song with his name on it.”
Taylor further explored this feeling of “girl-next-door-itis,” as she calls it, in
“You Belong with Me.” Teardrops on her guitar is a great image of Taylor
working through the tough stuff with music.
Audience of One: Two years after the song came out, Taylor was heading to
a hockey game with Kellie Pickler and Carrie Underwood when she got quite a
surprise: “[Drew] was standing there in my driveway. I haven’t talked to this guy
in two years. I was like, ‘Um, hi?’ It would have been really cool and poetic if he
had turned up at my house right after my album came out. But it was two years
later. A couple of things had happened in my life since then. I was like, ‘It’s
really great to see you. But you’re a little late.’”
Fun Facts: The striking cover image of this single made a second appearance
on Taylor’s 2007 Christmas album, Songs of the Season.
Diary Decoder: This message reads, “He will never know” but, of course,
after Drew showed up on her driveway, Taylor knows he does.
You Saw It Live: Taylor performed “Teardrops on My Guitar” with 14-yearold America’s Got Talent finalist Julienne Irwin on August 21, 2007, as well as
on TRL on February 27, 2008 and on NBC’s Today on May 29, 2009.
Charting Success: “Teardrops” rose to number two on the Billboard Country
Songs chart, and number 13 on the Hot 100. It also hit the top 10 on the Pop
Songs, Adult Pop Songs, and Adult Contemporary lists. “Teardrops on My
Guitar” won Song of the Year at the 2008 BMI Country Awards for getting the
most airtime of any country song that year. The song was certified gold in 2007
and hit double platinum in 2009.
4. “A Place in This World”
Behind the Music: Inspiration for this song struck Taylor as she walked the
streets of Nashville shortly after moving there. She told GAC, “I was just sort of
looking around at all these big buildings and these important people and
wondering how I was going to fit in.”
Between the Lines: Taylor wrote this song about trying to make it in
Nashville, but the song relates to any major life change, big risk, or just trying to
figure out where we fit in. As Taylor has shown her fans, pursuing goals despite
your trepidation can really pay off!
Audience of One: A lot of her songs are written for other people, but this one
is really written for Taylor, or for the Taylor she wanted to be. Looking back,
Taylor said, “I feel like I finally figured it out.”
Fun Facts: “A Place in This World” is also the name of the GAC Shortcuts
special on Taylor, included on the deluxe edition of Taylor Swift.
Diary Decoder: “I found it” — great reassurance that it’s worth taking a leap
of faith if you’re “ready to fly.”
5. “Cold as You”
Behind the Music: “Cold as You” emerged from a songwriting session with
Liz, and although Taylor thinks it contains “some of the best lyrics I’ve ever
written in my life,” she didn’t come up with the hook until halfway through the
songwriting process. She told Rolling Stone, “I love a line in a song where
afterward you’re just like burn.”
Between the Lines: In another track about unrequited love, Taylor explores a
relationship with someone who doesn’t appreciate her. “It’s about that moment
where you realize someone isn’t at all who you thought they were, and that
you’ve been trying to make excuses for someone who doesn’t deserve them. And
that some people are just never going to love you,” explains the songwriter.
Audience of One: Taylor chose not to single out the guy with the icy heart,
but the folks back in her hometown like to speculate. “You go out into this big
world, and you go back and it’s still a small town and they still gossip about it. I
think it’s one of everybody’s favorite things to talk about — who my songs are
written about,” said Taylor. “There are definitely a few more people who think
that I’ve written songs about them than there actually are.”
Diary Decoder: More great advice: “Time to let go.” Was the message for
Taylor herself?
6. “The Outside”
Behind the Music: This is one of the very first songs Taylor wrote, when she
was 12 and wasn’t fitting in at school.
Between the Lines: Most people feel like an outsider at some point, and for
Taylor that time was in middle school. She confided to Entertainment Weekly, “I
wrote that about the scariest feeling I’ve ever felt: going to school, walking
down the hall, looking at all those faces, and not knowing who you’re gonna talk
to that day. People always ask, ‘How did you have the courage to walk up to
record labels when you were 12 or 13?’ It’s because I could never feel the kind
of rejection in the music industry that I felt in middle school.” Being on the
outside did have its benefits: it fueled Taylor’s songwriting and encouraged her
to embrace what made her different. Taylor writes, “I tried to take the road less
traveled by,” a reference to the famous Robert Frost poem, “The Road Not
Taken,” in which he writes, “I took the one less traveled by, / And that has made
all the difference.” Looks like it did for Taylor too.
Audience of One: This is a song for all the people who made Taylor feel
excluded. Did they get the message? Hopefully. One thing’s for sure: many of
the mean girls who made her feel so alone had a change in attitude when Taylor
hit the big time. Taylor told Teen Vogue, “I played a hometown show about a
year into my career, and they showed up wearing my T-shirts and asking me to
sign their CDs. It was bittersweet, because it made me realize that they didn’t
remember being mean to me and that I needed to forget about it too. And really,
if I hadn’t come home from school miserable every day, maybe I wouldn’t have
been so motivated to write songs. I should probably be thanking them!”
(Not So) Fun Facts: A study found that almost 30% of kids and teens in the
U.S. are involved in bullying (that’s over 5.7 million people!). For more
information about bullying and support groups, go to bullying.org.
Diary Decoder: This secret message reads, “You are not alone.” Even though
being excluded can make you feel completely alone, people everywhere are
going through the same thing. So at the very least, it’s some comfort to know
that you’re never alone in feeling alone.
Charting Success: This song was not a single, but it was Taylor’s first-ever
release, appearing on Chicks with Attitude in 2004.
Taylor Swift: Deluxe Edition
On November 6, 2007, fans who were crying out for more Taylor were rewarded with the
release of a deluxe edition of Taylor Swift. The album contained three previously
unreleased songs that Taylor calls “some of my favorites” from her demo-making days at
age 14 and 15, plus a recording of Taylor’s first phone call with Tim McGraw. The first
new song, “I’m Only Me When I’m with You,” talks about finding a person who loves you
for who you are. It’s a philosophy that Taylor embraces 100%. She told Seventeen, “The
guy I’m looking for is the guy I can be me around, not a version of me I think he’d like.”
Taylor released a video for this song, which used home movie footage, and tided fans
over until the “Picture to Burn” video came out. She noted, “I think it’s the only video CMT
has probably ever played that cost, like, five dollars to make.” The second tune,
“Invisible,” revisits the themes of “Teardrops on My Guitar.” The third new track, “A
Perfectly Good Heart,” pleads with an unnamed heartbreaker as Taylor tries to figure out
how to make her heart whole again. The CD came with a DVD featuring Taylor’s
previously released videos, behind-the-scenes featurettes, performance footage, her
GAC Shortcuts series “A Place in This World,” and a special home video compiled by the
singer herself.
7. “Tied Together with a Smile”
Behind the Music: Taylor wrote this song after finding out a friend was
bulimic. It was a revelation that the songwriter describes as “one of those
moments when your heart kinda stops.” And though Taylor had written about
painful things before, she notes, “This one was tough to write, because I wasn’t
just telling some sad story. This was real.”
Between the Lines: “Tied Together with a Smile” explores the notion that
people aren’t always what they seem, that the most outwardly confident person
could actually be the most vulnerable. The friend who Taylor wrote it about was
a pageant queen, “the golden one” she references in the song. “Girls want to be
her and guys want to be with her,” said Taylor. Though “The Outside” explains
how hard it can be to be excluded from the in-crowd, “Tied Together with a
Smile” shows that being popular has its own set of challenges. “This song is
basically about the girls I know, and the difficult things I saw them go through,”
explained Taylor. “I’ve never seen this song as a lecture. It’s really about how no
matter what my friends go through, I’m always going to love them.”
Audience of One: This is a sad story with a happy ending — Taylor’s friend
got help and is healthy once again.
(Not So) Fun Facts: The National Institute for Mental Health found that one
in five women struggle with some kind of eating disorder. Luckily there are lots
of great organizations that can help. In the U.S., the National Eating Disorders
Association is a great source of information and also provides a referral service
(www.nationaleatingdisorders.org; 1-800-931-2237). In Canada, the National
Eating Disorder Information Centre provides similar services (www.nedic.ca; 1-
866-NEDIC-20).
Diary Decoder: People with eating disorders struggle with self-image and
self-worth; “You are loved” is one of the most important messages they can get.
8. “Stay Beautiful”
Behind the Music: Taylor’s songs may make it seem like she’s had a lot of
boyfriends, but she didn’t date all the boys she’s singing about. In “Stay
Beautiful,” the songwriter merely admired her crush from afar. She explains,
“This song is about a guy I thought was cute, and never really talked to much.
But something about him inspired this song, just watching him.”
Between the Lines: “Stay Beautiful” is a reminder of how perfect things
appear from a distance; you can imagine pictures in your mind rather than have
real pictures to burn when things turn sour! With “Stay Beautiful” following
“Tied Together with a Smile” it seems like the lyrics “You’re beautiful / Every
little piece love, don’t you know / You’re really gonna be someone, ask anyone”
are also wonderful reassurance for those, like Taylor’s friend, who can’t see that
for themselves.
Audience of One: This song’s for Cory, and there’s no doubt he’d be flattered
to hear it!
Fun Facts: Taylor has another song about admiring someone from afar on
Fearless: Platinum Edition, but in “SuperStar” that person is untouchable
because he’s a celeb.
Diary Decoder: Taylor’s not always serious, and the playful message “Shake
N Bake” is a bit of a mystery. Maybe she liked Cory as much as this savory
dinner staple?
9. “Should’ve Said No”
Behind the Music: Taylor penned this raging tune at the studio right after
confronting a boyfriend who was cheating on her. She wrote it just in time to
squeeze it onto the album at the last minute. She admitted on her blog, “I wrote it
about 20 minutes before we recorded it. It just kind of fell out of my mouth and
now it is in my CD player.”
Between the Lines: “Should’ve Said No” is the second angry anthem on the
album, but has a different message than “Picture to Burn.” In this case the focus
falls more on bad decision-making than on the guy. Taylor explains, “Just being
a human being, I’ve realized that before every big problem you create for
yourself, before every huge mess you have to clean up, there was a crucial
moment where you could’ve just said no.” Straight-as-an-arrow Taylor doesn’t
just preach it; she lives it and is often in the media spotlight for being a teen
performer who hasn’t gone off the rails. Taylor credits her folks for her good
decision-making, saying, “My parents have instilled a great level of trust in me
and I think that’s a huge, huge part of who I am. I can tell my mom everything,
and I do. Before I make decisions, I always think, ‘What is my mom going to
think if I tell her this? Is my mom going to be really upset if she finds out that I
did this?’ Usually I decide, ‘No, I’m not going to go through with this.’”
Audience of One: Thanks to the secret message, it’s clear this song’s for
Sam, and though he hasn’t commented about the public shaming, Taylor wasn’t
done with him after her first album. Before the release of Fearless, Taylor told
Girls’ Life: “I wrote a few more songs on this upcoming record about him just
because, you know, I wasn’t done being mad about it. I know he’s on the edge of
his seat waiting.”
Fun Facts: Sam should have followed Taylor’s lead — she says “no” eight
times in this song.
Diary Decoder: This message is a pointed finger: “Sam Sam Sam Sam Sam.”
You Saw It Live: Taylor belted out “Should’ve Said No” with the Jonas
Brothers in Jonas Brothers: The 3D Concert Experience. Taylor also performed
the song at the 2008 ACM Awards, starting in a hoodie and baggy jeans, which
were then ripped off to reveal a short black dress. And that performance’s finale
really made a splash — Taylor shocked the audience by getting soaked by an
onstage waterfall (an effect that became part of her Fearless Tour).
Charting Success: “Should’ve Said No” was Taylor’s second number one on
the Billboard Country Songs chart, and hit number 33 on the Hot 100. The song
was certified gold on September 3, 2008, and platinum on October 12, 2009.
10. “Mary
’s Song (Oh My My My)”
Behind the Music: Taylor wrote this song after the couple next door came
over for dinner and told the Swift family about how they met as children and
later fell in love.
Between the Lines: After the anger in “Should’ve Said No,” it’s nice to
follow with a song where a romance worked out. “Mary’s Song” follows the
couple as they go from being playmates to the beginning of their romance to the
proposal and wedding. It’s a song brimming with love and hope, and Taylor
noted, “I thought it was so sweet, because you can go to the grocery store and
read the tabloids, and see who’s breaking up and cheating on each other (or just
listen to some of my songs, haha). But it was really comforting to know that all I
had to do was go home and look next door to see a perfect example of forever.”
Audience of One: This song is for Mary and her husband; maybe one day
Taylor will write a new verse about their continued happiness.
Fun Facts: Taylor and Liz share their co-writing credit on this song with Brian
Dean Maher, a Nashville songwriter.
Diary Decoder: This romantic tune has an appropriately hopeful message:
“Sometimes love is forever.”
11. “Our Song
”
Behind the Music: In ninth grade, Taylor realized she and her boyfriend
didn’t have a song. Inspiration struck while she was sitting in her living room;
she “sat down one day with my guitar and got in a groove” and wrote him a
song, one that she would perform in front of all of Hendersonville High at the
talent show.
Between the Lines: Taylor chose to end the album on a high note with this
infectious tune about all the ordinary things that can be part of a great love.
Right at the end of the chorus, Taylor slyly says, “Play it again” in hopes that
listeners would give her record another spin!
Audience of One: With this final song, Taylor’s first high-school romance is
the focus of the first and last tracks on the album. And though she is no longer in
touch with that boyfriend anymore, he must be just as pleased with the album as
when he was in the audience at the talent show.
Fun Facts: This became Taylor’s third single because it was a fan favorite in
concert. Don’t confuse this song with another popular ballad, Elton John’s “Your
Song,” which is also about writing a song for a loved one.
Diary Decoder: The album’s last secret message, “Live in love,” applies not
just to “Our Song,” but Taylor Swift as a whole. The album features everything
from first love to fury, and these highs and lows are part of living life to the
fullest. And if life and love are just the way Taylor sings it, who would want to
miss a moment?
You Saw It Live: In one of her earliest award-show performances, Taylor sang
“Our Song” at the 2007 CMA Awards. In addition to singing this number on
Regis and Kelly and on Ellen, Taylor rocked out to “Our Song” from the middle
of the crowd on Today live from Rockefeller Center on May 29, 2009.
Charting Success: “Our Song” was Taylor’s first number one, and she
refused to give up her spot for six weeks! That six-week stay at the top of the
Country Songs chart ties her with one of her heroes, Faith Hill, and her song
“Breathe,” and both women are topped only by the reign of Connie Smith’s 1964
song “Once a Day.” “Our Song” also made Taylor the youngest person to write a
number-one single on her own. The song also hit number 16 on the Hot 100 and
number 24 on the Pop 100, continuing Taylor’s crossover success that began
with “Teardrops on My Guitar.” “Our Song” won Video of the Year at the 2008
CMT Music Awards. The “Our Song” single has earned double platinum
certification.
Songs of the Season: The Taylor Swift Holiday
Collection
A major celebration in the Swift home, Christmas is Taylor’s favorite holiday. She wrote
on her blog, “I love everything about this time of year, but mostly the way that people find
ways to be with the ones they love.” With her love of all things Christmas, it was a natural
choice for her to release a holiday album. On October 14, 2007, Big Machine released
the limited-edition album exclusively in Target and online. Despite these restrictions, the
album still climbed to number 14 on the Billboard Top Country Albums chart and to
number 20 on the Hot 200.
Taylor covered four Christmas classics: “White Christmas” (originally performed by
Bing Crosby), “Santa Baby” (originally performed by Eartha Kitt, and later by Madonna),
“Last Christmas” (originally performed by Wham!), and the traditional “Silent Night.”
Never one to only sing other people’s compositions, Taylor added a couple of original
songs that offered a twist on the usual seasonal fare. She insisted, “There’s got to be
something really original and different about it.” The heartbreaking “Christmases When
You Were Mine” (co-written with Liz Rose and producer Nathan Chapman) is about
remembering love from Christmases past, and “Christmas Must Be Something More”
encouraged people to see past the gifts to the sacred spirit of the season.
Though the album was supposed to be a one-time release, Taylor Swift fans who still
hope to see this album under the tree are in luck; it was re-released in October 2009.
“I just went to a show by a future superstar,” starts an About.com review of a
performance Taylor gave on May 30, 2007, at the Gold Country Casino. With a
hot new album on their hands, Big Machine was trying to give Taylor all the
exposure she could get, and Taylor played some of her first headlining shows.
Her career was picking up speed, and nowhere was that more evident than when
she returned to her hometown to play a concert at the Sovereign Performing Arts
Center in Reading, Pennsylvania. It was a place where Taylor had once been in
the audience, gazing at performers like Melissa Etheridge from afar. Now, just a
few years later, she was center stage, telling the crowd about her journey by
paraphrasing one of her favorite songs, Eminem’s “Lose Yourself.” “See, when I
left three years ago,” she told the crowd, “I had one shot, one opportunity to
seize everything I ever wanted. Y’all think I did alright?”
In April 2007, Taylor returned to Pennsylvania to play the Sovereign Performing Arts Center in
Reading.
Though she continued to do some headlining gigs where she could, Taylor
racked up most of her experience touring as an opener for country greats. In
October 2006, she hit the road with Rascal Flatts, the three-man country act
known for hits such as “What Hurts the Most,” “Bless the Broken Road,” and a
cover of Tom Cochrane’s “Life Is a Highway,” which was on the soundtrack to
Pixar’s Cars. Finding out she’d be part of her first major tour, Taylor wrote, “I’m
SO excited and I can’t even express to you how loud I screamed when I found
out.” She played nine acoustic shows with the group, and Taylor really meshed
with the trio, and she toured again with them two years later. During her 2008
tour with the band, she wrote on her blog, “The Rascal Flatts tour is SO much
fun. I’m loving it so much, and the guys are so cool. They’ll just walk onto my
bus and say hi. It’s so cool that the guys from Rascal Flatts are so down to
earth.” Though she dreamed of having a tour to call her own, Taylor wisely
realized that she could learn a lot from touring with industry pros. She explained,
“I didn’t mind opening for Rascal Flatts because you learn something from every
single tour you go on, and I felt I had more to learn.”
Says Taylor of Kellie Pickler: “She’s like a sister. People say we’re such opposites, but that’s what
makes us such good friends. She’s incredibly blunt. I love that about her. If some guy has said or
done something to me she doesn’t like, she’ll grab my cell phone and say, ‘I’m deleting his
number.’” The two co-wrote Kellie’s first top 10 hit “Best Days of Your Life,” with Taylor singing on
the track and appearing in its video.
The next stop on Taylor’s tour of country star tours was a gig opening for the
King of Country himself, George Strait, from January to March 2007. On her
blog, Taylor gushed, “I’m pretty much a George Strait superfan, so this is going
to be SO much fun.” Sure enough, playing with the legendary country icon was
thrilling for the young star. Taylor wrote, “I’m pretty sure the highlight of my
night last night (the first show of the tour, in Lafayette, LA) was that . . . George
Strait said my name . . . [We] were watching George’s show . . . and all of a
sudden he says, ‘I’m very happy to have the talented Miss Taylor Swift out here
with us.’ yesssss. It was pretty awesome, sort of a life changing moment.”
By 2009, Taylor was not just opening for country legends, she was sharing the stage with them.
Pictured here with Rascal Flatts, Carrie Underwood, Brooks & Dunn, and Sugarland at the ACMs
on April 5.
But her encounters with country music’s finest didn’t end there — Taylor’s
next tour would be with country rocker Brad Paisley on his 2007 Bonfires &
Amplifiers tour. Brad told Blender, “I was looking at a lot of artists to come out
on tour with us, but as soon as I downloaded her album, I knew we had to have
her. I was floored by the songwriting. I love the fact that she doesn’t pretend to
be 30 years old in her songs. She has a very genuine voice.” Taylor knew she
had a lot to learn from Brad, and noted, “I try to pick his brain and learn as much
as I can from him.”
If you missed Taylor when she was an opening act, here’s an example of her set list from
an April 10, 2008, show in Sacramento, CA.
• “I’m Only Me When I’m with You”
• “Our Song”
• “Teardrops on My Guitar”
• “Should’ve Said No”
• “Tim McGraw”
• “Picture to Burn”
Also on the Bonfires & Amplifiers tour were labelmate Jack Ingram and pal
Kellie Pickler. The three injected a lot of energy and more than a little silliness
into the tour like the night they decided to prank the headliner. Taylor ordered
tick costumes for her and Kellie, and Jack put together an exterminator suit.
When Brad started playing his new song “Ticks,” Kellie and Taylor emerged in
costume, and danced around Brad onstage. Out came Exterminator Ingram who
pretended to spray them with insecticide then the bugs faked an elaborate death.
Writing about it on her MySpace, Taylor recalls, “I was laughing so hard I could
barely breathe. Then I was laying there on the stage playing dead, and looked up
at Brad, and he looked down at me and said, ‘Nice work.’” Guess he was a little
bit “bugged.” Not to worry, Brad was a prankster himself, and forced Jack
Ingram into a cage and made him perform from there!
While Brad was on a break from touring, Taylor opened shows for another
country great, Kenny Chesney. Once again, the person she idolized did not
disappoint in real life. “Opening up for Kenny Chesney is one of the coolest
things I’ve ever done,” said Taylor. “His tour has this laidback vibe to it, and
everyone’s so cool to work with. And Kenny Chesney is so completely nice.
Genuinely nice.”
The rising star learned something from all of her mentors on tour, summing
up for USA Weekend, “Kenny is up at the crack of dawn, walking around the
venue, getting to know everyone from the sound-check guys to the people who
sell the souvenirs to the fans. Then Rascal Flatts stages this big production with
all the flash. And George Strait? It’s all about the music with him. He pays so
much attention to building up the song with the arrangements and the band and
his singing.”
In the summer of 2007, the rising star hit another major career milestone
when she toured with two people who inspired her love for country music in the
first place — Tim McGraw and Faith Hill. Taylor played a four-song acoustic set
before the dynamite duo performed on their Soul2Soul II tour. Getting to know
the artists she idolized could have been a real letdown, but Taylor found the
couple to be as wonderful as she’d always imagined them. Of Faith she wrote,
“As beautiful as she is, she is that nice.”
Even when Taylor only played a handful of songs as an opening act,
reviewers took note. When she opened for Rascal Flatts in early 2008, one
reviewer remarked, “If Swift’s performance last night was any indication of what
the future has to bring, surely there will be many more Grammy nominations,
and eventually wins for the young songstress.” What an accurate prediction!
Though Taylor confesses, “I’ve always wanted to be so busy I couldn’t stand
it,” she still managed to get the occasional break from touring, and would head
back to Hendersonville. On one such break, she wrote, “I just got back from a
five show run on the road. Now I’m sitting in my kitchen . . . on the counter.
Eating cool whip. And trying to think of things to do with my free time. Other
than talking to my cat and making playlists of sad songs.” Though it was nice to
be reunited with her entire family, the overachiever didn’t like to sit still too long
— there were charts to climb, airwaves to conquer, and crowds to entertain. She
admitted to Bliss, “I do love coming home, but after about a day I usually end up
calling my record label and bugging them for something to do.”
As an opener for major country music acts, Taylor spent a lot of her time playing
second fiddle to the legendary stars she toured with. But as her first awards
season approached in 2007, Taylor was about to prove that she had the chops to
be the main event.
With more and more people listening to Taylor’s music on MySpace or
requesting her songs on the radio, the Taylor Nation of devoted fans was
growing every day. And it couldn’t have been any clearer than on April 16,
2007, when Taylor took home the fan-voted CMT Music Award in the
Breakthrough Video category for “Tim McGraw.” Taylor’s first award was a
sign of the strength of her fans’ dedication, which would help raise Taylor to the
top of the music industry, and she knew it, offering a thank-you on her blog to all
the fans who helped make her dreams come true: “I’ve always been the girl
watching the award shows from the stands or from my couch, wishing like crazy
that someday if I worked hard enough and things really came together, that could
be me. You did that for me.” And as a special thank-you, she brought her award
(“The Buckle”) with her on the Brad Paisley tour, so fans could see the award
they helped her win.
Fans are one thing, but getting industry respect is another. Six months after
her CMT Music Award, it became abundantly clear that country music’s finest
were behind Taylor too. At the 2007 Country Music Association (CMA) Awards
on November 7, Taylor won the prestigious Horizon Award, which goes to the
most promising new artist of the year. As the previous year’s winner Carrie
Underwood explained as she presented it, “This is an award that means you have
truly arrived in country music.” Past winners include Garth Brooks, Keith
Urban, Brad Paisley, LeAnn Rimes, and the Dixie Chicks. In her acceptance
speech, Taylor was sure to thank the fans, tearfully insisting, “You have changed
my life!” before finishing, “This is definitely the highlight of my senior year,” a
comment that got chuckles from the crowd. On her blog, Taylor shared what was
going through her mind in this fairytale moment: “I remember it all in slow
motion . . . I’m running up the stairs in a ball gown and heels. My mom and dad
are crying. Everyone at my record label is screaming. My family and everyone I
love is watching from their living rooms. I’m crying on national television, and
thinking about [the fans].” She concluded, “And thank you for convincing me
that fairytale endings . . . Well, they happen sometimes.”
Fearless Songbird
When Taylor sat down in December 2007 to start planning her sophomore
album, she knew she had a tough act to follow — her self-titled debut had just
been certified double platinum. “Pressure is one of my favorite things in the
world,” Taylor told the Tennessean. “When I heard before my second album, ‘Is
she going to experience a sophomore slump?’ it made me more motivated to
make sure that didn’t happen. ‘Is she going to keep this fan base?’ ‘Is this thing
going to run off the tracks?’ Those things motivate me. My gut instinct has
worked so far, and I’m not going to mess with that.”
Beautiful Eyes
The wait between Taylor’s first and second albums was a long one for her dedicated
fans. So on July 15, 2008, Taylor released Beautiful Eyes, six songs packaged with a
DVD. The EP, which would only be available online and at Walmart, had two songs
which Taylor wrote when she was 13 (“Beautiful Eyes” and “I Heart ?”) as well as
alternate versions of “Should’ve Said No,” “Teardrops on My Guitar,” “Picture to Burn,”
and “I’m Only Me When I’m with You” (which was on the deluxe edition of Taylor Swift).
The DVD had all of Taylor’s videos, her ACM performance of “Should’ve Said No,” and a
special homemade video for “Beautiful Eyes” with footage from her 18th birthday party.
“I’ve gotten so many emails from people asking for new songs, and I thought this might
tide them over till the new album comes out in the fall,” Taylor explained on her MySpace
blog. This limited-run album still managed to top the Billboard Country chart just two
weeks after its release, with the number two spot going to Taylor Swift. Overwhelmed by
her one-two domination of the charts, the singer blogged, “I can’t believe it. My record
label is freaking out because apparently the last time this happened was in 1997??” The
person who accomplished that in 1997? None other than Taylor’s first inspiration, LeAnn
Rimes.
One of the positive side effects of her tremendous success is that the certified
country star had proven she was a girl who knew what she was doing, and she
was given even more creative control on her second record. Nathan Chapman,
who worked on her first record, was back in the studio to produce, but this time
Taylor officially stepped up as co-producer. A lucky 13 tracks would make the
cut and appear on Fearless, including the last-minute addition “Forever &
Always.”
Beyond supervising, writing, and recording the music, Taylor was heavily
involved in the album design as well. On her MySpace, Taylor wrote, “I’m
completely going crazy thinking of ideas for the album photo shoots and the CD
booklet and all of that stuff. I’m consumed and obsessed and so excited that I get
to make a second record. Hey, I’m still in awe of the fact that I got to make the
first one.” She and her label found the right photographer, Nashville’s Joseph
Anthony Baker, and Taylor played the album for him to see which songs spoke
to him. What resulted was a gorgeous array of photographs of Taylor inspired by
the songs. “We shot photos based on the energy of that song,” explained the
singer-temporarily-turned-model. And what about the album cover image of
Taylor’s face framed by a halo of windswept golden curls? “The photographer
put the wind machine on, like, hurricane mode,” said Taylor. “That’s how we got
the picture.” Taylor oversaw every aspect of the album down to the smallest
details, once again encoding secret messages in her lyrics.
Taylor kept her fans up to date on the album’s progress, writing, “This next
record is on my mind 24/7, all the time. It never stops. I’m always either
listening to a new mix of a song or scanning through pictures to make sure
we’ve chosen the right ones, or wondering which songs you guys are going to
like the best. I’m just so obsessed with it right now, all the planning.”
The album would be called Fearless, a name that Taylor explained in the
liner notes: “Fearless is not the absence of fear. It’s not being completely
unafraid. To me, fearless is having fears. fearless is having doubts. Lots of
them. To me, fearless is living in spite of those things that scare you to death.”
Despite her success, country music’s golden girl isn’t without her own fears.
She explained to Girls’ Life, “I think things on the record that are talked about
have a very fearless quality to them. It’s not about me being this fearless person
because I’m afraid of everything, you know? I’m afraid of finding the most
perfect love and losing it. I’m afraid of regretting things. I’m afraid of my career
becoming mediocre and not being able to excite people anymore. I’m afraid of
running out of things to write about. But I think there’s something fearless about
jumping, even when you’re really scared of where you might land.”
Taylor made that leap on November 11, 2008, with the release of Fearless,
launching it on Good Morning America, just as she had with her first record. In
its debut week, Fearless hit number one on both the Billboard 200 and the Top
Country Albums charts. It would go on to spend eight weeks at number one,
making it the first female country album to do so. Her sophomore album sold
217,000 copies on its first day alone, and after only one week in stores it was
over halfway to platinum certification, with 592,000 copies sold. One of those
copies was Taylor’s; she stopped in at the Hendersonville Walmart at midnight to
buy one the minute it was released. At that moment Taylor still had butterflies.
She admitted, “The night before it came out, I remember staying up all night and
thinking, ‘Is anyone going to buy it at all?’ You always have those last-minute
jitters.” But the overwhelming support from her fans was the best reassurance
Taylor could have ever hoped for. “I’ve never been more proud of anything in
my life . . . I wrote every song on it. I co-produced it. So to have people go out
and actually buy it? It’s wonderful,” she told Newsday.
“I think any time you’ve had this kind of success it starts to get weighty,”
Scott Borchetta told the LA Times. “But she’s delivered a brilliant record.” For
the most part, reviewers agreed. Rolling Stone (which honored her with a cover
story in March 2009) praised, “Swift is a songwriting savant with an intuitive
gift for verse-chorus-bridge architecture that, in singles like the surging ‘Fifteen,’
calls to mind Swedish pop gods Dr. Luke and Max Martin. If she ever tires of
stardom, she could retire to Sweden and make a fine living churning out hits for
Kelly Clarkson and Katy Perry.” The reviewer added, “Her music mixes an
almost impersonal professionalism — it’s so rigorously crafted it sounds like it
has been scientifically engineered in a hit factory — with confessions that are
squirmingly intimate and true.” Blender gave it four stars out of five, with the
reviewer noting, “Swift has the personality and poise to make these songs hit as
hard as gems like ‘Tim McGraw’ and ‘Our Song’ from her smash debut, and,
once again, she wrote or co-wrote them all.” More praise came from AllMusic,
which concluded, “Swift’s gentle touch is as enduring as her song-craft, and this
musical maturity may not jibe with her age, but it does help make Fearless one
of the best mainstream pop albums of 2008.”
1. “Fearless”
Behind the Music: The idea for this song came to Taylor while she was
touring. She didn’t have a boyfriend and she started thinking about her ideal first
date. She explained, “I think sometimes when you’re writing love songs, you
don’t write them about what you’re going through at the moment, you write
about what you wish you had. So this song is about the best first date I haven’t
had yet.”
Between the Lines: Taylor described “Fearless” as “about an incredible first
date when all your walls are coming down and you are fearlessly jumping into
love.” And what’s Taylor’s idea of a great first date? She told Girls’Life, “I live
on a lake, so it’s really fun to go out on the boat, and then hang out all night and
just talk. It wouldn’t have to be anything fancy or anything like that, but just
being with a person who gets you. It’s kind of funny because you don’t ever
have a lot of opportunities like that to be home and to go on a date in your
hometown, but that’s exactly what I would do.” Standing in the rain had been
associated with the stormy anger of her “Should’ve Said No” performance at the
2008 ACM Awards, but on the title track of her second album, it’s a sign of
reckless abandon, of overcoming trepidation for something worthwhile.
Audience of One: Since this one isn’t based on a real-life date, it’s not for a
specific lucky guy, but the message to be fearless is great advice for everyone.
Fun Facts: Taylor and Liz share co-writing credits for “Fearless” with Hillary
Lindsey, who’s penned songs for Bon Jovi, Miley Cyrus, and Martina McBride,
but is best known for her work with Carrie Underwood, including the Grammywinning single “Jesus, Take the Wheel.” Colbie Caillat, Taylor’s collaborator on
“Breathe,” also has a song called “Fearless” on her 2009 album, Breakthrough.
Colbie’s is about the end of a relationship and having the courage to carry on
after heartbreak.
Diary Decoder: This optimistic song’s message for a future sweetheart says,
“I loved you before I met you.”
You Saw It Live: Taylor debuted “Fearless” in a live performance on the Late
Show with David Letterman on November 10, 2008, the day before her album’s
release.
Charting Success: Before “Today Was a Fairytale” landed a higher spot,
“Fearless,” her fifth single from Fearless, was Taylor’s highest chart debut on
the Billboard Hot 100, sitting at number nine in its first week. “Fearless” also
peaked at number 15 on the Country Songs chart. Amazingly, “Fearless” was the
first song in Billboard history to be certified gold before it was officially
released.
2. “Fifteen”
Behind the Music: Taylor started writing this song with the lines, “Abigail
gave everything she had / to a boy who changed his mind,” which even critics
who weren’t head over heels for the album singled out as “a great, revealing line
about a friend’s lost innocence.”
Between the Lines: Taylor is often praised for speaking authentically about
people her age. Fellow country star Vince Gill said, “Every kid relates to Taylor
and those songs because they’re pointed right at them,” and “Fifteen” is a great
example of that. It looks back on those vulnerable years at the beginning of high
school when you feel like an outsider and social status can feel like it’s
everything, when love is the best thing and the worst thing that can happen,
when you have no idea where you’re headed or who you’ll become. “Fifteen”
offers great advice for those tumultuous times: this too shall pass. Taylor wisely
advised, “Don’t make high school everything. Because if high school is
everything, then you’ve got a long life to live, and I’d like to think that the best
years of my life are still ahead of me.” Taylor further explains, “It says, ‘I should
have known this, I didn’t know that, here’s what I learned, here’s what I still
don’t know.’” Taylor skillfully weaves together the two themes of the song —
fitting in and falling in love — in one line: “When all you wanted was to be
wanted,” getting to the heart of a teenager’s longing to belong.
Audience of One: “I think that the song ‘Fifteen’ is definitely advice to my
former self, but it could also be advice to any girl going into ninth grade and
feeling like you’re the smallest person on the planet,” says Taylor.
Fun Facts: In the summer of 2008, the guy who hurt Abigail came back into
her life with a grand gesture: he asked her to come talk to him, and he was
waiting in a field, inside a heart made of candles with a big bouquet of roses for
her. Taylor even lent a hand to the one-time heartbreaker, telling him all of
Abigail’s favorite songs so he could put them on a mix CD. But even when life
seems as perfectly orchestrated as a romantic movie, love isn’t easy, and Taylor
admits, “As usual, I had to clean up the mess the next day . . . But that’s okay. I
didn’t mind.”
Diary Decoder: “I cried while recording this” lets listeners know that this is a
song that made Taylor shed some teardrops on her guitar.
You Saw It Live: Taylor performed “Fifteen” at the 2009 Grammy Awards
with real-life pal Miley Cyrus. The pair sat on stools and Taylor played guitar, a
pared-down approach to the song that the singer would also use in concert.
Asked how then-16-year-old Miley looks back on her 15th year, she replied that,
like most teens, she spent that year “thinking you know everything,” before
realizing “the only thing you’re left with are your best friends.” “Fifteen” was
the second song Taylor performed at the 2009 CMA Awards. Three hundred
Hendersonville High students looked on from the audience; Taylor nabbed them
free tickets to the show. The singer also played the song on The View, Ellen, and
the U.K.’s Paul O’Grady Show.
Charting Success: “Fifteen” peaked at number seven on the Hot Country
Songs chart, number 10 on the Pop Songs chart, number 23 on the Hot 100, and
also appeared on the Hot Adult Contemporary and the Hot Adult Pop Songs list.
Though the song may contain advice for freshmen, adults relate to it too!
Miley and Taylor at the 51st Annual Grammy Awards on February 8, 2009.
3. “Love Story
”
Behind the Music: Taylor wrote this song lying on her bedroom floor in a
mere 20 minutes and recorded a rough cut of the track in 15 minutes of studio
time the next day. She said the song sprang from the line “This love is difficult /
but it’s real,” and she noted on her MySpace, “When I wrote that line, I knew it
would be my favorite line to sing every night. And it’s true, every time I sing
that, I can’t help but smile.”
Between the Lines: “Love Story” follows the plot of Romeo and Juliet fairly
faithfully. Taylor’s Juliet is on a balcony remembering when she met Romeo,
which in Shakespeare’s play is also at a party. The two lovers meet again in a
garden (in the play it’s an orchard), and Romeo must leave town, though in the
song it’s because Juliet’s family disapproves, whereas in R&J there’s a more
serious reason — Romeo kills Juliet’s cousin, Tybalt. Taylor’s love story ends
with a happy ending in marriage, and though Romeo and Juliet marry in
Shakespeare’s tale, it is done hastily and in secret without either family’s
approval. Discussing her rewrite of the famous double-suicide finale, Taylor
said, “I was really inspired by that story. Except for the ending. I feel like they
had such promise and they were so crazy for each other. And if that had just
gone a little bit differently, it could have been the best love story ever told. And
it is one of the best love stories ever told, but it’s a tragedy. I thought, why can’t
you . . . make it a happy ending and put a key change in the song and turn it into
a marriage proposal.” There’s a second literary reference in “Love Story” in the
line “’Cause you were Romeo, I was a scarlet letter.” The Scarlet Letter is a
famous novel by Nathaniel Hawthorne about Hester Prynne, a woman who
cheated on her husband and is outcast from her community. Though Taylor’s
Juliet has been faithful, the connection is that, like Hester, Juliet is in an
unpopular relationship that upsets the people around her. In the end, the message
of this uplifting love anthem comes down to Taylor’s favorite line, which means
to her that “sometimes you have to fight for love, but sometimes it’s worth
fighting for.”
Audience of One: Taylor told Time that this one’s about a guy she never
really dated (she calls these boys “nominees”) because her friends and family
didn’t approve. But no doubt her would-be Romeo approves of the happy ending
Taylor made up for them.
Fun Facts: “Love Story” has already been covered by many artists including
Intohimo, The Scene Aesthetic, Forever the Sickest Kids, Davedays, Tiffany
Giardina, and Savannah Outen and Josh Golden. Fittingly, “Love Story” plays in
the trailer for the 2010 film Letters to Juliet.
Diary Decoder: The secret message here is “Some day I’ll find this.” Even
though Taylor’s happy being single and despite having had her share of
heartbreak, she still believes in love. She told Seventeen, “I have to believe in
fairytales, and I have to believe in love — but not blindly. If you do meet your
Prince Charming, know he is going to have his good days and his bad days. He
is going to have days when his hair looks horrible, and days when he’s moody
and says something that hurts your feelings. You have to base your fairytale not
upon happily ever after, but on happy right now.”
You Saw It Live: Taylor performed the song at Children in Need, a charity
show in the U.K., and afterward donated £13,000 to the cause. She also
performed it amid screaming fans on Today, and on Dancing with the Stars,
Ellen, and at the 2008 CMA Awards.
Charting Success: Listeners across the globe officially fell in love with
“Love Story.” The song charted in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada,
Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands,
New Zealand, Norway, the Philippines, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the
United Kingdom. In the U.S., the single topped the Hot Country Songs, Top 40
Mainstream, and Hot Adult Contemporary Tracks charts, as well as hit number
three on the Adult Pop Songs chart and number four on the Hot 100. With over
four million downloads, “Love Story” is the most downloaded country song in
history, and ties Lady Gaga’s “Just Dance” for the highest number of downloads
for a song by a female artist. In 2008, it won Billboard’s Hot Radio Songs of the
Year award, and in 2009, it won Country Song of the Year at the BMI Awards,
Music Video of the Year at the CMA Awards, and Video of the Year and Female
Video of the Year at the CMT Music Awards.
4. “Hey Stephen”
Behind the Music: Taylor penned this playful love song for her crush,
Stephen Barker Liles, guitar player and vocalist for Love and Theft. The band
opened for Taylor as part of her ’08 tour, so it’s likely this one was written on the
road.
Between the Lines: This song is like a secret love letter, right from the
opening greeting of “Hey Stephen.” Some of Taylor’s cherished romantic images
return, including kissing in the rain and showing up at someone’s bedroom
window. If all these songs were based on real moments, Taylor’s bedroom
window would get as much traffic as Dawson Leery’s; this romantic gesture also
appears in “Our Song,” “Love Story,” and “Come In with the Rain.” And though
Taylor insists she never wants to write songs only about being on the road,
there’s just a hint of it here. The line “Hey Stephen, why are people always
leaving? / I think you and I should stay the same” suggests that a life on the road
sometimes means too many goodbyes.
Audience of One: When Fearless came out, Taylor texted Stephen saying,
“Hey, track 5!” and was rewarded with an email reply from her overwhelmed
crush. Stephen told People, “We’ve become great friends since Love and Theft
started opening shows for her. I think everyone would agree she’s a total
sweetheart and anyone would be lucky to go out with her.” For a snippet of
Taylor with Stephen, watch her October 19, 2008, MySpace video to see them
lip-synch to Katy Perry’s “Hot N Cold.”
Fun Facts: The finger snaps on this track are provided by Martina McBride’s
children and their friends, who were dying to meet Taylor, and jumped at the
opportunity during a recording session at John McBride’s Blackbird Studio.
Diary Decoder: “Love and Theft” reveals who the mystery Stephen is. The
band was signed to a record deal with Lyric Street Records in 2009, and has
released two singles. Perhaps when their full-length album appears, Taylor will
get a reply to her love letter.
5. “White Horse”
Behind the Music: According to Country Weekly, this song was written with
the guy from “Love Story” in mind. After Taylor composed the first verse, she
called Liz Rose, and in about 45 minutes the pair polished off the song that
would go on to win a Grammy.
Between the Lines: For pessimists, “White Horse” could be “Love Story:
Part 2.” It’s a song about the end of a relationship with no hope for recovery.
Taylor explained to Billboard, “It’s one of the songs that I am really proud of on
the record because it’s so sparse — guitar, piano, and cello . . . it talks about
falling in love and the fairytales that you are going to have with this person, and
then there is that moment where you realize that it is not going to happen. That
moment is the most earth-shattering moment.” Of course, “I’m not a princess /
This ain’t a fairytale” doesn’t mean that true love doesn’t exist, just not between
these two. Interestingly, Taylor mentions the “face of an angel” in this song,
which is also part of the chorus in “Hey Stephen.” Hopefully Stephen wasn’t the
one to let her down!
Fun Facts: Originally “White Horse” was going to be saved for Taylor’s third
album because Fearless already had its fair share of sad songs. That decision
changed when Grey’s Anatomy wanted the song for the premiere episode of
season 5, “Dream a Little Dream of Me.” And while “White Horse” may be
about disappointment, for Taylor having a song on her favorite show was a
dream come true: “You should’ve seen the tears streaming down my face when I
got the phone call that they were going to use that song. I have never been that
excited. This is my life’s goal, to have a song on Grey’s Anatomy. My love of
Grey’s Anatomy has never wavered. It’s my longest relationship to date.”
Diary Decoder: “All I ever wanted was the truth” hints that Taylor’s prince
was a liar and that their fairytale castle wasn’t built on solid ground.
You Saw It Live: Taylor offered an intimate performance of “White Horse” at
the 2008 American Music Awards where she was named Favorite Female
Country Artist.
Charting Success: This song earned Taylor two Grammy Awards — one for
Best Country Song and one for Best Female Country Vocal Performance. This
second single from Fearless peaked at number two on the Billboard Hot Country
Songs chart, number 13 on the Hot 100, and number 23 on the Pop 100, and also
charted in Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia. The “White Horse”
single received platinum certification.
6. “You Belong with Me”
Behind the Music: Taylor’s inspiration for this song came from
eavesdropping while hanging out on her band’s bus. Taylor told Self, “The guy
was going, ‘Baby, of course I love you more than music, I’m so sorry. I had to go
to sound check. I’m so sorry I didn’t stay on the phone.’ So immediately in my
head, I get this line, ‘You’re on the phone with your girlfriend she’s upset. She’s
going off about something that you said.’ And it all came to me at once. I bolted
to my bus [to write it down].” Taylor took the idea to a songwriting session with
Liz where the two fleshed out the story, and Taylor notes that “She wears short
skirts, I wear T-shirts” was their favorite line to write.
Between the Lines: Taylor says she never had a crush on her band member;
she just inserted herself into the situation and ran with it. But she does know
what it’s like to be the invisible girl, as she explored in “Teardrops on My
Guitar.” She explained, “Basically like ‘girl-next-door-itis.’ You like this guy
who you have for your whole life, and you know him better than she does but
somehow the popular girl gets the guy every time.”
Diary Decoder: “Love is blind so you couldn’t see me” is a clever
reinforcement of the idea that it’s often hard to see the good thing right in front
of you.
You Saw It Live: Taylor Swift performed “You Belong with Me” at the 2010
Grammy Awards accompanied by singer-songwriter and banjo whiz Butch
Walker. Butch got the gig in an unconventional way. He posted a cover version
of the song online and it caught Taylor’s notice (she tweeted, “I’m losing my
mind listening to it! Blown away. This weekend rules”). She called him up and
invited him to join her onstage at the Grammys. Butch agreed and played the
banjolin (a combination of a banjo and mandolin), just like he did in his cover.
He joined her again for the Fearless Tour’s stop at L.A.’s Staples Center. Taylor
also performed this tune live at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards, at the 2009
CMT Music Awards, on Today, and on The Jay Leno Show.
Charting Success: The third single from Fearless, “You Belong with Me,”
was nominated for Song of the Year, Record of the Year, and Best Female Pop
Vocal Performance at the 2010 Grammys, although it didn’t win. It had better
success at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards where it won Best Female Video.
“You Belong with Me” became Taylor’s fourth number one hit in the U.S.,
topping the Hot Country Songs chart and the Hot Adult Contemporary Tracks
chart, and scored a number three on the Canadian Hot 100. It also sat at number
two on the Pop Songs chart and on the Hot 100, and charted in top 100s all over
the world, including in Ireland, New Zealand, and the U.K. “You Belong with
Me” has been certified double platinum.
7. “Breathe”
Behind the Music: Taylor admired Colbie Caillat’s first album, Coco, so
much she was determined to work with her fellow up-and-coming artist. She
approached Colbie’s management, and Colbie ended up with a day off after a
radio-station promotional show in Nashville. After working on some pieces
Taylor had written, the two wrote “Breathe” together and Colbie contributed
vocals, recorded at Starstruck Studios. Taylor gushed to MTV, “I just think she’s
the coolest thing out there right now. So for her to be on my next album makes
me feel cooler.” Colbie has nothing but praise for Taylor: “She is so sweet, so
beautiful, so talented, and honestly just a really intelligent young women. She
knows what she is doing and she knows how to handle her career and take
charge. I love her.”
Between the Lines: Before “Breathe,” all of Taylor’s songs about breakups
fell into two categories: laced with anger (like “Picture to Burn” and “Should’ve
Said No”) or sad laments about being let down (as in “White Horse” and
“Forever & Always”). This down-tempo duet explores an ending with no rage
and no one to blame; it’s about the end of a friendship. She explains, “It’s a song
about having to say goodbye to somebody, but it never blames anybody.
Sometimes that’s the most difficult part. When it’s nobody’s fault.”
Audience of One: Taylor hasn’t said which former friend this heartwrenching tune is for, but on first listen, he or she must have found it a little hard
to breathe.
Fun Facts: “Breathe” shares a title with a famous song by one of Taylor’s
favorite performers — Faith Hill. Faith’s 1999 single was a huge country and
pop hit, landing number ones on three different charts. While Colbie didn’t win a
Grammy for this collaboration with Taylor, she had one in her pocket thanks to
her 2009 duet with Jason Mraz on “Lucky.”
Diary Decoder: “I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry” is both the secret message
and the soft closing vocals that Taylor added while recording, saying to Colbie,
“You never said it in the song, but that’s totally what the song’s about.” The
apology is not about taking the blame but rather a wish that things turned out
differently.
Charting Success: “Breathe” was nominated for Best Pop Collaboration with
Vocals at the 2010 Grammy Awards.
Colbie Caillat and Taylor at the BMI’s 57th Annual Pop Awards on May 19, 2009.
8. “Tel Me Why
”
Behind the Music: Sick of getting mixed signals from a guy, Taylor arrived at
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