It is the day after the 2009 Grammy awards in Los Angeles, and the city is buzzing with talk of Chris Brown’s alleged attack on his girlfriend, the singer Rihanna. Sore heads are being nursed, conversations dimly recalled. A famous American band, encountered later that morning, clearly bear the scars of their hard-partying, 5am finish. Upstairs in a soothingly beige hotel suite, however, all is calm. Lolling on a sofa, her legs tucked beneath her, sits America’s biggest selling album artist of 2008. Her serenity is in stark contrast to the countenances of many other musicians who, like her, attended the awards ceremony. And her career statistics — more than 4m albums sold last year; approaching 1.1m friends and 78m profile views on MySpace; one of the most successful download artists of all time — also set her apart.
At the age of only 19, Taylor Swift is the newly crowned queen of country-pop. She wrote a novel and won a national poetry competition when she was 10, hawked demos around Nashville and played her first gigs when was 12, released her debut album at 16, and performed more than 300 shows in her first year on the circuit. So she’s going to be a crazed, gimlet-eyed monster straight out of the pages of Roald Dahl, surely? But she isn’t. If anything, she’s located far off at the opposite end of the spectrum, a reassuringly nonthreatening picture of normality, and her vast, multigenerational fan base seems to like it that way. As, apparently, does Swift. A Britney/Amy-style career car crash is not going to happen. Boyfriends are unlikely to be questioned about assault. Don’t count on Swift shaving her head any time soon.
If the huge appeal of her songs is chiefly down to the universally identifiable narratives about love and rejection that run through them, her persona has played the second largest part. She got it — success — because she wanted it; but she wanted it because she loves what she does. The merest hint that Swift might, in fact, be a carefully contrived machine, opportunistic and ruthless, would have slowed this trajectory. But people, millions of them, are convinced that she’s not.
“I’ve only ever written personal songs,” she says at one point. “I’ve only ever written about love — and I’ve been allowed to do that. It would have really taken a lot of the wind out of my sails, personally, if I had had to sing words that other people wrote; that would have killed me.”
Undoubtedly, she’s packaged: the artwork for her albums presents her as a glossy, air-brushed blonde; yet her natural demeanour — which, on the Grammys red carpet, saw her frocked-up and heeled, but with messily tied-up hair, as if she was only prepared to go so far in playing the game — breaks through. A more at-all-costs wannabe would by now be trilling bland platitudes penned by a team of hit-makers and writhing provocatively in videos. The only sign Swift shows of battle fatigue and the carapace she’s grown as a consequence is in the slightly abrupt, media-trained way she will end an anecdote and snap her mouth shut.
In every other respect, however, what you see seems to be what you get: a musician who deals with her issues in words and music (she writes almost all of her material on her own). Who may not be messily smiting demons as she does so, but nonetheless describes experiences and conveys feelings that resonate readily and profoundly, and sets them to optimistic, radio-friendly tunes. And who is, she says, motivated primarily by a desire to connect to people. Does she see why some might view all this as simply too good to be true?
“I’m not a big deal,” says Swift. “I am the same person that sat there in ninth grade. I still have insecurities, things I doubt about myself, I still have frustrations, things that confuse me.
I just look at it that I have a different schedule now. I love people, and personal conversations. If we were sitting here right now and I was all guarded and twisted about what you might ask me, and paranoid about the way people view me, I’d be putting myself in such a cage. It’s so much easier to like people, and to let people in, to trust them until they prove that you should do otherwise. The alternative is being an iceberg.”
She rejects suggestions that there was any clinically plotted game plan. “People sort of analyse my career,” she continues, “and they give me a lot of credit for things that have happened accidentally. I almost don’t want to pull back the curtain and be like, ‘Well, my MySpace is really big, and you think that that’s a brilliant promotional scheme that we’ve come up with?’ I created my MySpace page in eighth grade, because that’s how all my friends talked to each other, so I made one, too. Then, all of a sudden, my friends started putting my songs on their profiles, and then their relatives, their friends in different states did. And by the time I went to my first radio interview, I already had this grassroots following. But that was an accident.”
The path to that first radio interview began, she admits, when she was “three or four, and 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”. Her grandmother, a former opera singer, made a strong impression. “She would have these wonderful parties at her house, and she would get up and sing. She always wanted to be on stage, 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.”
Duly bitten by the bug, Swift carried her early attempts at poetry and the starring roles she won in a children’s theatre company over into songwriting when, aged 12, she was lent a guitar and taught her first three chords. “And, that night, I wrote my first song,” she laughs. “The next day, I wrote my second one; the next, my third one. I couldn’t put it down.”
Her view of herself, of why she was writing, and why she wanted to pursue it, was clear-cut, but her surrender to it was, she says, almost involuntary. An intense musicality seemed to command her to make music. That’s what happens, she says, when “music is always taking up half of your thoughts; in fact, more than that. If you’re in a room and there’s music playing, whether you’re intrigued by it or you’ve heard it a million times before, you have to really devote a lot of energy to being present in the conversation”.
Thus, when she describes devoting an entire summer vacation to writing a 350-page (unpublished) novel, or talks about walking into a cafe, aged 12, and asking for a gig there, she doesn’t come across as weird, but as someone doing what she always wanted to do. She’s centred, she insists: no entourage, no hissy-fits, no dark secrets, no kiss-and-tells (though her break-up with one of the Jonas Brothers, who left her for another woman, should provide her with rich material for future songs), and no temptation to have a good moan about the relentlessness of her new life.
“At the end of the day,” she says firmly, “I asked for this. I asked for the speculations, and people taking things out of context; for the, ‘Oh, do you love the dress she wore last night?’, and the pictures everywhere. I asked for it. I did. All my life, I asked for it. And I’m never going to be the girl who wants something, wants one thing her entire life, and then gets it — and complains.”
Swift’s first release in this country is the single Love Story, which is already all over radio like a rash. Fearless, the album from which it is taken, is packed with similarly immediate and confessional songs, equal parts Sheryl Crow, Fleetwood Mac and Rickie Lee Jones. You sort of want to categorise her as this slick and pliable crossover pop artist, but, as with her personality, the integrity of her writing prevents you. You’re tempted to see her lyrics as reading like pages from a teenager’s diary, but since when was there an age limit, or a shut-off point, on writing things down to make sense of them?
Yes, she crisscrossed America performing the national anthem at sports stadiums because she figured that was the quickest way to get to sing for 20,000 people. Yes, her parents felt compelled to move from Pennsylvania to Nashville when they realised how resolved their preteen daughter was on a career in music. And yes, some will no doubt find her music as beige as her hotel suite. You can call Taylor Swift what you like, she’s unlikely to care much. She wanted to connect with people, and those statistics suggest she’s doing just fine.
Love Story is released on March 2 on Mercury; Fearless follows on March 9
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