Taylor in Kellie’s “Best Days of Your Life” Video

The Tennessean: What’s the latest news on Taylor Swift?

Teen country star Taylor Swift will announce some news on Monday morning, The Tennessean has learned. Check back at TuneInMusicCity.com tomorrow morning to find out what it is.

Swift — who is featured on the most recent issue of Allure — now has career sales that top 7 million from two albums. She sold more albums than any other artist from any genre of music in 2008.

NOTE: Post your ideas about what the news will be in the comments below. If anyone gets it right, I’ll give them a shout out on the site!

Houston Chronicle: Taylor Swift and a fierce RodeoHouston spirit

The glittery girl power was in full effect hours before Taylor Swift made her revolving-stage debut at theHouston Livestock Show and Rodeo.

Girls with Taylor-made curls raced through the carnival grounds. Several — it seemed like thousands — sported Swift’s trademark look of fresh-faced makeup, flowing sundresses and cowboy boots. Large groups posed for photos in front of haystacks and horse statues.

The crossover princess herself met with several fans backstage, just before her Friday show. Cameras flashed. T-shirts were signed. Hugs were exchanged. Mom (who attended Memorial High School and the University of Houston) and dad watched proudly from the sidelines.

“I am so excited about this show,” Swift said during a pause. “We were doing soundcheck earlier, and I looked out at all the seats — 70,000 people. Oh my gosh.”

It was 72,658 to be exact, helping her break Jonases’ mark by 183 frenzied fans.

Much of Swift’s appeal comes from her disarmingly sweet enthusiasm. She seems genuinely excited, and often awestruck, by all her good fortune.

But she’s also adept at turning on the star power, as showcased during her fierce, spirited RodeoHouston set (a warm-up of sorts for her first headlining tour, which starts in April).

It was after so many days of established rodeo acts, a jolt of electric youth. She was alternately sassy and demure, working the stage like a seasoned pro. And her voice has gotten stronger and more commanding.

Swift’s entrance was preceded by home-video footage that chronicled her rise from singing baby to grownish-up superstar. She literally bounced onstage and launched into a rocked-up You Belong With Me, a cut off her maddeningly catchy Fearless disc. She quickly traded a black T-shirt and jeans for a gold minidress and matching guitar.

“I’m Taylor — class of 2008,” she shouted after zippy hit Our Song. Sweet, but she suddenly hit all the “cute Texas boys” in attendance with a warning.

“If I have a conversation with you that lasts more than five minutes, I’m probably going to write a song about you,” she said.

“If you don’t want me to write a song about you, then don’t do bad things.”

Cue the bitter chorus of Forever and Always, a tune Swift wrote about ex Joe Jonas. You’ve been warned.

Teardrops On My Guitar, a wispy ballad, was given a gentle pop pulse. When it was done, Swift took a step back, listened to the deafening roars and mouthed, “Oh my God.”

Her sweet spirit overcame any rough notes and filled the stadium with a real sense of joy. It resonated throughout her setlist, including White Horse, her gorgeously understated current single; and a thunderingShould’ve Said No, which ended with Swift banging on a trash can and whipping her curls into a rock frenzy.

Swift asked the crowd to hold up their cell phones during Tim McGraw, her nostalgic breakout single. So many twinkling lights and a twirling stage made for another sweet moment. It continued during a poppy take on monster hit Love Story, which earned one of the night’s most enthusiastic sing-alongs.

It could have ended — perfectly — there, but Swift notched things up further with Change and its anthemic “We sing hallelujah” hook. She turned the potentially sappy message into a triumphant tour-de-force.

And, in a flash, she returned to wronged-girlfriend role with searing set closer Picture to Burn. All in a day’s work for the world’s most famous country-pop teenager.

PAID ATTENDANCE: 72,658 (eighth all-time record)

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CMT Blog: Taylor Swift Is Daydreaming About Songs

Taking her time to daydream, write, obsess and get into every single detail of a song. That’s howTaylor Swift likes to make her brand of music. It’s exhausting, though. She says in her latest MySpace blog that she had been in the studio all day. And even though she just put that big deal of a Fearless album out, she cannot stop writing songs. “It’s so much fun knowing that you can take your time, because you have like a year and a-half to make something you’re really proud of. I love recording a few songs, waiting a few months, recording a few more,” she says. Then she adds that she likes to drag it out and be meticulous about every detail. It sounds like she’ll be just as compulsive about her upcoming tour which is going to feature a stage that was inspired from a drawing Swift made a few years ago. I can’t wait to see what kind of stage she was doodling while she was still just a high school girl.

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MSNBC: Fake Taylor Swift tickets lead to two arrests

By Jackson Holtz Herald Writer

The Everett Herald

updated 5:17 p.m. PT, Fri., March. 13, 2009

LOCAL NEWS – LAKE STEVENS — Lake Stevens police worked with some fans of country singer Taylor Swift to set up a sting operation this week and bust a ticket counterfeiting operation that was advertising on Craigslist.

Police believe two Pierce County women, 21 and 20, were creating fake tickets to Swift�s sold-out May 15 concert at Key Arena in Seattle. The pair listed the bogus tickets on Craigslist, a popular Internet classified advertising site, said Lake Stevens Police Sgt. Julie Jamison.

People would arrange face-to-face meetings with the women, purchase the tickets in cash and later learn the tickets were fake, Jamison said. The fraudulent tickets are nearly identical to the real tickets.

 

A Lake Stevens resident called police after purchasing fake tickets. Police set up a meeting to buy more tickets on Wednesday and just before 2 p.m., the two women were arrested.

Police obtained search warrants and found evidence that more fake tickets were created and sold.

Detectives believe there are additional victims throughout the Puget Sound area. Anyone who may be a victim is asked to call 911. Local police will coordinate with Lake Stevens detectives.

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The Australian: Swift mania has arrived

Taylor Swift. Tivoli Brisbane, March 5. Billboard, Melbourne, today and tomorrow; Factory Theatre, Sydney, March 12; Sound Relief, Sydney Cricket Ground, March 14.

AMERICAN sensation Taylor Swift made her Australian concert debut playing to a full house at the Tivoli Theatre. Unsure initially of the numbers Swift would draw, the promoter favoured smaller venues when the tour was booked last year. But with CD sales heading upwards of fivemillion units in the US, Swift is converting fans at lightning speed. Playing to a room that holds 1200 people was, in relative terms, intimate mode for Swift.

With her album Fearless, released in October, quickly heading for platinum status in this country, Swift was granted a roaring reception. Influenced by LeAnn Rimes, and with a penchant for Def Leppard, Swift is a country artist with the crossover appeal of Shania Twain. While one guitarist sports a glam tie, the other has an emo haircut; at the core of Swift’s music are the banjo and fiddle player who join her on stage.

The 19-year-old Swift, who writes her own material, is a master of the teen narrative. It’s her clever eye for relationship minutia that has her predominantly female fan base squealing with delight. Swift isn’t afraid to name names, just ask the luckless Drew in Teardrops On My Guitar.

Opening with You Belong With Me, Swift was met by a virtual sea of mobile phones and digital cameras. Wearing a black shirt and denim skirt, Swift made a surprise costume change mid-song and was in gold lame for the rest of the evening.

With Australia the first country to break Swift’s records outside the US, there was a genuine sense of appreciation coming from the stage. The audience sang the verses to Our Song in unison with Swift as Caitlin Evanson impressed on violin.

Swift alternated between acoustic guitar and a rock-chick stance. By Forever and Always she was hitting the high notes with ease while the audience revelled in the artist seemingly bringing her relationship diary to life. An acoustic set, replete with stand-up bass, turned into a mass singalong as Swift played Hey Stephen and White Horse. Swift connected with an audience that, like her, aren’t strictly country. They’ve embraced a performer who has an everywoman quality. A minor qualm was Swift’s stage patter, which was, on occasion, too contrived.

With Should’ve Said No, Swift and her seven-piece band entered a terrain best described as Zeppelin-lite. There’s a hint of Pat Benatar as Swift arms herself with an electric guitar and the band cranks out the opening riff. By Fearless, Swift became possibly the first artist since Little Richard to toss her jewellery into the crowd.

Judging by the audience reaction, Swift mania has arrived.

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Fans Camp Out For Taylor Swift

NORTH CHARLESTON, SC (WCSC) – If you were hoping to get tickets for Taylor Swift’s concert at the North Charleston Coliseum, you will have to pay extra online because the concert is soldout.

Dave McBee traveled from Columbia to get in line yesterday, for him, nineteen hours was well worth the wait.

“I got little girls man. And this is extra credit bonus points for daddy.”

Tickets went on sale at 10am online and inline.  While parents were looking for extra credit some had other reasons for waiting it out.

“Girls, want to go see the girls” said Bobby Patton.

“I feel special man that’s awesome! I’m psyched, it’s Taylor Swift man” added John Gainey.

Not everyone was as lucky, some late comers could buy two seats but they wouldn’t be next to each other.

“It’s ten o’clock and I was here. When I walked up the lady said they were sold out. How can you be sold out when you just put the tickets up for sale” added a dejected Renee Heissenbuttle.

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Nashville Scene: The Music City Star

By Steve Haruch

Published on February 25, 2009 at 2:21pm

If our experience is the norm, reporters who talk to Taylor Swift get two interviews in the bargain. You get a professional entertainer, poised and practiced, who’s already been the music guest on SNL and a featured performer on the Grammys before her 20th birthday. And sometimes, even in the same breath, you get a guest appearance by the not-atypical Tennessee teen you probably passed on Second Avenue without a second look.

Take the oft-raised question of whether she is really country or pop. “I don’t sit down, start writing a song and freak out, and say, ‘not country enough,’ or ‘not pop enough,’ or, ‘I’m going for this demographic or that demographic,’ ” Swift says, now rehearsing for her imminent summer tour. “I just write music. And I try not to overcomplicate things with how people might perceive it.”

That’s Taylor Swift the multiplatinum hit machine, who just last night was singing her anthem “Fifteen” before the music world’s glitterati and a global audience. Then Taylor Swift the teenager adds an emoticon: “Y’know, it’s all good.”

If anyone’s been able to master life as a dual citizen—teenager/celebrity, country girl/pop star, and of course singer/songwriter—it’s Swift, perhaps country music’s brightest hope. When her second album, Fearless, was released in November 2008, the Hendersonville 19-year-old found herself in two places at once: No. 1 on the country chart and No. 1 on the Billboard Top 200.

What got her there, says her frequent writing partner Liz Rose, is an ability to talk to her peers in their own voice without faking it. Even in writing sessions. “For about two minutes she’s just…high school,” says Rose, who co-wrote four songs on Fearless, including the single “You Belong With Me.” “She’ll be like, ‘Give me some chocolate!’ Then we’ll close the door, and she’ll say, ‘OK, here’s my idea.’ ”

Those ideas tend to be good—like the time she told Rose she wanted to write a song about Tim McGraw. The result, her first single “Tim McGraw,” reached No. 6 on the country chart. Thus far, Swift has managed to flesh out her ideas without play-acting or patronizing. When she sings, “She wears short skirts / I wear T-shirts / She’s cheer captain and / I’m in the bleachers” (in “You Belong With Me”), she’s easy to imagine in either role. Asked the same question about Swift’s genre identity, country or pop, Rose says it’s immaterial.

“Taylor’s heart is country,” Rose says. “The fact that we ran off our younger demographic a long time ago—people should be thanking Taylor. She’s brought back a lot of fans we lost that went to pop and Disney.” As for Swift’s crossover appeal, she says simply, “Taylor didn’t ask for pop. Pop asked for Taylor.”

And pop keeps asking. Swift sold more than 4 million albums in 2008. If success has given her what Koreans call kongju-byeong (“princess syndrome”), she’s hiding it in a way every overnight country-pop-whatever superstar should study.

“When I’m home, I like to get to know my brother,” Swift says. “Other than that, Abigail and I”—you may remember Abigail as her friend in “Fifteen” who “gave everything she had to a boy who changed his mind”—”we’ll go to, like, the Old Spaghetti Factory. We literally do that. Just go to Broadway and do touristy stuff, because it’s fun.”

As for success, she says, “Every day feels like a bonus day for me, because I never thought I was gonna get to do this…. I’ve always approached it like, ‘You probably won’t get this, but if you’re lucky, you might.’ And that goes for everything.”

Maybe “lucky” isn’t quite the right word. Like many teenagers, Swift is big into social networking—she just happens to have, quite literally, a million friends on MySpace. She owes at least some of her success to utilizing online networks better than anyone else in country music, because it came naturally. “I love my MySpace,” she says. “I’m on there all the time.”

Last year, Swift spent eight weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard 200—the first female country artist ever to do so—and became the first artist in SoundScan history to land two albums in the year-end Top 10. What can she possibly do for an encore? Her first headlining tour, of course.

“You have to come out and see it!” she exclaims. If anything, she sounds like she might consider stapling flyers on Elliston Place the week before the show. “Putting together a tour,” she says, “I think to myself, y’know, ‘What if nobody shows up?’ ” That won’t be a problem. The first show that went on sale for the Fearless Tour—at L.A.’s Staples Center—sold out in two minutes. “[That] really blew my mind,” she says.

Aside from the tour, which stretches from March to October, Swift is “always writing” for an eventual third album. With one boot atop the country world and a stiletto at the top of the pops, Swift now seems as indomitable as she is unclassifiable. But she’s not getting ahead of herself.

“You have to realize that you know nothing compared to what you’re going to know two weeks from now,” she says. “And that’s just how I live my life.”

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Maybe you can see Taylor Swift at Plant City Strawberry Festival

Maybe you can see Taylor Swift

So you think you can’t get into the Taylor Swift show Sunday because it’s sold out? Think again. Reserved tickets are gone, but there are still about 3,000 free (with gate admission) bleacher seats that are available on a first-come, first-seated basis. Paul Davis, general manager of the Florida Strawberry Festival, says that Swift’s concert was “probably the quickest sellout we’ve ever had.” So, Davis said, it will probably be important to line up for her 7:30 p.m. show at least by the start of the Rodney Atkins show, which begins at the GTE FCU Soundstage at 3:30 p.m. Everyone will be cleared out after the Atkins concert — so don’t think you can just stay there and wait for the Swift concert to begin. Still, some people likely will be turned away.

Sherry Robinson, Times staff writer

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Note: If you are going to this, or any other Taylor show, PLEASE send in a review or any media you might have. You will, of course, be credited and Taylor fans everywhere will be appreciative!

KAIT: Taylor Swift Ticket Scalping Soars

02.24.09

JONESBORO —  Tickets to a Jonesboro performance by teen singing sensation Taylor Swift are making for “swift” and expensive sales on the internet.  It seems the very same tickets purchased two weeks ago are now on sites like eBay for hundreds of dollars over the original price.  How is that legal since Arkansas has a law against ticket scalping?

“It’s a love story, just say yes,” sings Taylor Swift, dressed in a princess gown as she gazes into the eyes of a young man dressed the part of a prince.

The crossover artist sings of being a princess and tickets to her performance are like gold.  Seven thousand tickets to her Jonesboro performance sold out in two and a half hours. Now some of those same tickets are showing up again on the internet.

Taylor Swift tickets for the Jonesboro concert are now selling for $200, $300, $400–even $600 dollars for two tickets.

“I can assure you that every venue that has this show that’s coming up, there are tickets out there on the secondary market for sale for a price that is substantially higher than what the individuals paid for,” said Tim Dean, director of the Convocation Center. 

  So, is this considered scalping?  Ticket scalping is illegal in the state of Arkansas.

  “We take the position that selling tickets at a price above face value–except for a small handling fee–but certainly four and five hundred dollars for these tickets is in violation of Arkansas law and is a crime under Arkansas law,” said Justin Allen, Chief Deputy, Arkansas Attorney General’s Office.

Prosecuting it is a different story.  Take the Hannah Montana ticket fiasco back in December of 2007.  The Attorney General’s office launched an investigation after computer software known as “bots,” or robots bought up hundreds of tickets at once for resale–knocking the average consumer out of the opportunity on-line.  That investigation is still on-going.  It’s difficult to find out just who’s selling the tickets on the internet.

“These people are to a large extent able to hide over the internet and Ii like I said, people like eBay, Stub Hub, etc–these resale sites are very protective of their users and we’re having a difficult time getting them to share information with us that will allow us to identify for instance in the Hannah Montana situation the people who bought up large amounts of tickets and then turned around and sold them,” said Allen.

Consumers should beware when buying tickets over the internet.  The AG’s office says fraud is always a major concern.

For some people there’s no price too high to pay for what they want.  Just getting a ticket is music to their ears.

“We are selling a product and once that product leaves our hands–it’s not anything any different than if you happened to pick up an antique at an antique store at a really good buy and you go out and sell it for three times what you paid for it,” explained Dean.

If someone buys a ticket on eBay, do they have to worry about being prosecuted?  The answer is no.  The AG’s office doesn’t have the resources to go after one or two people.   What they are focusing on are those people who buy up large quantities of tickets for re-sale.  Trying to make money that way is a direct violation of Arkansas civil law–of what’s called the Deceptive Trade Practices Act.

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