Country Sensation Taylor Swift: My Music, MySpace, My Life

NYT
November 9, 2008
Music
My Music, MySpace, My Life
By JON CARAMANICA

CHATTANOOGA, Tenn.

BY now Taylor Swift knows how to work all the different digital cameras, all the different camera phones. When surrounded by a group of fans clamoring for pictures, as she was here on a Saturday night in mid-October after a sold-out show at the McKenzie Arena, she warmly appropriated the camera of each one, struck a cute pose, snapped the picture and then handed it back, usually followed by a hug. All in all it was a fair trade: intimacy for control.

“Intimidation isn’t what I’m going for,” Ms. Swift, 18, said earlier in the day in the Zen-like tour bus she and her mother, Andrea, designed, from the leather on the sofas to the faux peacock feathers on the bathroom wall. “I don’t have big security guards,” she said as Fox News played mutely on the television. “I don’t have an entourage. I try to write lyrics about what’s happening to me and leave out the part that I live in hotel rooms and tour buses. It’s the relatability factor. If you’re trying too hard to be the girl next door, you’re not going to be.”

Thus far Ms. Swift, who spends much of her free time updating her MySpace page and editing personal videos to upload to the Internet, has not had a tough time finding the right balance. She has quickly established herself as the most remarkable country music breakthrough artist of the decade. In part that’s because she is one of Nashville’s most exciting songwriters, with a chirpy, exuberant voice. But mainly Ms. Swift’s career has been noteworthy for what happens once the songs are finished. She has aggressively used online social networks to stay connected with her young audience in a way that, while typical for rock and hip-hop artists, is proving to be revolutionary in country music. As she vigilantly narrates her own story and erases barriers between her and her fans, she is helping country reach a new audience.

Ms. Swift’s second album, “Fearless” (Big Machine), will be released Tuesday, and like her self-titled 2006 debut, it’s full of charming, clean-scrubbed songs about teenage love and heartbreak. Ms. Swift writes from her own experiences, names intact, giving her songs an almost radical intimacy, especially in a pop world of plasticized come-ons and impersonal brush-offs.

She has placed the concerns of young women at the center of her songs, subject matter that generally has been anathema in the more mature world of country singers. Most important, though, she very much sees country music as part of the larger pop panorama. A huge success on country radio, she has also found homes on pop stations and at MTV, including a gig hosting the MTV Video Music Awards preshow in September, an unheard-of slot for a country singer. This week an entire episode of “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” will be devoted to her album release party. Put more plainly, she has proved that there’s no reason a country singer can’t be a pop star too.

Just four years ago, when Ms. Swift and her family moved from Wyomissing, Pa., to Hendersonville, a Nashville suburb, this seemed an impossible proposition. It had been more than a decade since a teenager last made a true impact in town, but that singer, LeAnn Rimes, had been praised for sounding grown-up; Ms. Swift’s music was unabashedly youthful. When Scott Borchetta, president of Big Machine Records, would talk to Nashville insiders about his teenage signee, “people would look at me cross-eyed,” he said. “I would feel like they were deleting me from their Blackberrys as I was telling them.”

But Ms. Swift had been carefully honing her sound for a few years already. After a trip to Nashville when she was 11, she began writing songs and learning to play guitar in earnest. (She now often plays a Swarovski crystal-encrusted one.) By the time her family moved, in the summer before her freshman year of high school, she had already been singing at coffee shops and minor league baseball games.

Ms. Swift first signed a publishing deal with Sony/ATV Music Publishing, the youngest person the company had ever signed. Every day after school she would truck off to one of Nashville’s many studios on Music Row for writing appointments.

“I knew every writer I wrote with was pretty much going to think, ‘I’m going to write a song for a 14-year-old today,’ ” Ms. Swift said. “So I would come into each meeting with 5 to 10 ideas that were solid. I wanted them to look at me as a person they were writing with, not a little kid.”

It was during this time that Ms. Swift honed her songwriting strength: looking in the mirror. Relationships and their failures, the fodder for so much teenage pop, are her primary texts. “I have an obsession with knowing the answers to things,” she said. “When I don’t know what happened, it just bothers me, gets under my skin, and I need to write about it. For years.”

Her mother, Andrea, said: “She simply has to write songs. It’s how she filters life.” (Andrea, who was previously a stay-at-home mom, now travels with her daughter; Ms. Swift’s father, Scott, is a stockbroker.)

And so, around the play-by-play details of broken hearts and romantic dreams, Ms. Swift’s sound began to coalesce. She has an ear for the indelible chorus — “She’s one of those writers who won’t run away from a hook,” Mr. Borchetta said — but her music is appropriately loose. There are obvious country flourishes in the arrangements, but mainly her vocals, excitable and airy and hardly twangy at all, take center stage.

Whether anyone would accept Ms. Swift’s sound was an open question. “We felt it wasn’t likely that country radio would embrace it unless we had a story,” Mr. Borchetta said, so Ms. Swift made a series of biographical shorts to air on the GAC (Great American Country) cable network. Then came “Tim McGraw,” Ms. Swift’s canny first single, named after the country superstar. (In the lyrics Mr. McGraw is the singer of a special song she and a boy share.) “We put that out deliberately, so people would ask, who’s this new artist with a song called ‘Tim McGraw’?” said Mr. Borchetta, who likened its reception to that of “a grenade in a still pond.”

Released in late 2006, Ms. Swift’s debut album sold a modest 39,000 copies in its first week, but as Ms. Swift gained attention and released more singles, it did not stop selling. It has now moved well over three million copies. Last year Ms. Swift won the Country Music Association’s Horizon Award for best new artist, and this year she is nominated for female vocalist of the year. She will also perform at the ceremony, which is Wednesday.

“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,” said Brian Philips, executive vice president and general manager of CMT (Country Music Television). “It’s as if Taylor has kind of willed herself into being.”

She has willed herself beyond the country music world too. After landing at No. 2 on the Billboard Hot Country Singles chart, “Teardrops on My Guitar,” the third single on her first album, became a crossover hit, peaking at No. 13 on the Hot 100. “In a lot of cities the pop stations will take a chance because there’s been exposure in that market on the country station,” said Sharon Dastur, program director of the New York Top 40 station Z100 (WHTZ-FM), which played the song in a medium-level rotation last year after it had been broken at Top 40 stations in more country-friendly markets like Greensville, S.C.; Wichita, Kan.; and Austin, Tex.

Ms. Swift is not without forebears. In the past 15 years female country stars like Faith Hill, Shania Twain, Lee Ann Womack and the Dixie Chicks have all experienced some degree of pop success. And Ms. Swift’s ability to straddle both country and pop was facilitated by the recent crossover success of Carrie Underwood, the “American Idol” winner.

Monte Lipman, president and chief executive of Universal Republic Records, which joined with Big Machine to work Ms. Swift’s records to pop radio, said: “We don’t want to alienate country radio at all because we’ve found pop success. Scott is always superserving the country marketplace first, and we work for him.”

Mr. Borchetta said that country radio would always be the top priority. “They’re always going to get the singles first, always going to be first in line at the meet-and-greets,” he said. “We overthink everything. One thing we can’t do is chase the moving target of pop radio. It could be all emo next year, all urban next year.”

No one much complains when a rapper or indie rocker crosses over to the pop charts, but a country singer perceived as trying to go pop can still raise eyebrows. Nashville remains a fiercely hermetic town and is unusually protective, or possessive, of its own.

“I’m not about to snub the people who brought me to the party,” said Ms. Swift, who when she speaks of her plan to manage her crossover fame sounds like a well-seasoned executive. “We went back and studied other cases where it had failed every way that it can fail, and we tried to avoid those things.”

Ms. Swift is, by all accounts, an extremely good-natured micromanager. “She’s a very competitive person, and she’s always got her game face on,” said the country singer Kellie Pickler, one of Ms. Swift’s closest friends. “And she’s a really smart businesswoman, smarter than a lot of 40-year-olds I know.”

Right before the show in Chattanooga, as she does before every performance, Ms. Swift loaded up her wrists with bracelets that she would later toss out to fans, allowing them to take home a small piece of her. And after she finished singing “Should’ve Said No,” about a boy who cheated on her, she dropped to her knees and bent forward, holding her head still as fans in the front rows patted it concernedly. It was a scarily intimate moment but essential to her self-presentation that there is no barrier between her and her songs, and their listeners, the consumers. That insistence informs every aspect of her work.

It has also led to the decimation of her privacy. “Every single one of the guys that I’ve written songs about has been tracked down on MySpace by my fans,” she said, a little giddy. “I had the opportunity to be more general on this record, but I chose not to. I like to have the last word.”

That may become less tenable, though, as Ms. Swift’s personal life makes its way into the tabloids, as it lately has in regards to her never-confirmed romance with Joe Jonas, the would-be rake of the Jonas Brothers. On this subject, at least, Ms. Swift is uncharacteristically mum: “He’s not in my life anymore, and I have absolutely nothing to say about or to him.”

At least until the next album, maybe, which Ms. Swift insists will detail her life just as thoroughly as the first two. “When I knew something was going on in someone’s personal life and they didn’t address it in their music, I was always very confused by that,” Ms. Swift said. “I owe it to people from letting them in from Day 1.”

But eventually, if things continue as they are, walls will have to be erected. Jakks Pacific has just released a line of Taylor Swift dolls, making her even more of an abstract idol and less of a real person. She is also the face of the l.e.i. clothing brand, carried exclusively at Wal-Mart, one of what is certain to be many endorsements to come. And next year she will be spending time in England, Japan and Australia in hopes of facilitating Taylor Swift, the global brand, a move that few country acts have been able to pull off.

That she’s likely to become only less accessible is a problem that Ms. Swift is, naturally, very attuned to. “All I can do,” she said, “is put up a MySpace video where I don’t have any makeup on and am wearing a periodic table of the elements T-shirt.”

That and continue to make connections, one person at a time. The night before Chattanooga, Ms. Swift was at Sommet Center in Nashville, opening a charity gig for Rascal Flatts. After emptying her wrist during “Tim McGraw,” she took in the sold-out crowd. “I am so proud to live in Nashville, Tennessee,” she said, “and I hope to run into you at the grocery store.”