The farm also provided some gainful employment for Taylor during her childhood. She was given a peculiar odd job – picking the eggs of praying mantises off trees. This task was important to avoid local homes becoming infested with the creatures. So she would move between the many Christmas trees and remove as many of the eggs as she could. The importance of this job was highlighted when she forgot to check the trees on one occasion and praying mantises hatched in homes around the neighbourhood. ‘There were hundreds of thousands of them,’ she recalled during an interview with Jay Leno on The Tonight Show. ‘And they had little kids and they couldn’t kill them because that’d be a bad Christmas.’
However, despite mishaps such as this, she was rarely disciplined harshly as a child – mostly because she proved to be her own toughest critic, a self-disciplinarian of sorts. ‘When I was naughty as a kid, I used to send myself to my own room,’ she told the Daily Mail. Andrea was no pushover – far from it, in fact – but she hesitated to discipline Taylor because her daughter was ‘so hard on herself’. Taylor did not know at this stage what she wanted to do for a living when she grew up. She would often tell people she was going to become a stockbroker, but, despite her family heritage in that sphere, she admits that she did not even know what this meant. Friends of hers would say they wanted to become a ballerina or an astronaut. ‘And I’m, like, “I’m gonna be a financial adviser,”’ she said.
Adjusting to the realities of country life had been something of a strain for Scott and Andrea – particularly Scott, whose existence was one of stark contrasts: high-powered financial work in the city by day, and bumpkin duties in the countryside in the evening. As for Taylor, she thrived on rural life. She would ride ponies across trails, take rides on tractors, build forts in the hayloft, roam around the fruit orchards and adopt pets from the plentiful woodland creatures. This earthy existence and love of nature would influence her music in the years ahead. More immediately, though, it had the effect of influencing her appearance: her hair became tangled and messy. Taylor has since said that she is delighted she lived in a ‘space’ where she was free to be ‘a crazy kid with tangled hair’.
As she approached the childhood milestone age of 10, the country-keen Taylor was adding pop to her musical tastes – or trying to, at least. Among the acts she listened to were Natasha Bedingfield, the Spice Girls and Hanson. Hints of these three acts can be heard on her fourth studio album, Red. She also listened to Backstreet Boys and Britney Spears, choreographing dance moves to their biggest hits alongside a friend of hers. Pop was not a lasting flirtation for Taylor, but it was fun while it lasted.
At the age of 10, she decided she wanted to perform. She had already taken parts in small local productions, including a male character called Freddy Fast Talk in one such play. To Taylor, the fact that the character was a guy, and a bad guy at that, made no difference. ‘I was like, “I will dress up like a guy; I want to sing that song,”’ she said. The next push in that direction came when she saw a local children’s theatre, called the Berks County Youth Theater Association, put on a production of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, the Roald Dahl classic. She loved it when she went to watch, and felt drawn to being on the stage herself. Within days she was back at the theatre to audition for a part in a forthcoming production of Annie. She impressed enough to be welcomed into the group. There, she met other youngsters who were, in an important way, like her: they had a hunger to perform and to succeed. There was plenty of competitiveness and sometimes jealousy, too, yet at least the drive of these children would give Taylor a lift, ensuring that she upped her game and remained focused. It was within these walls that Taylor’s ambitions were nurtured.
In time, she would find she had several things going for her at the BYTA: she was tall, for one thing, so she could command the stage as required for lead roles. When she first arrived there, however, she found her height to be a disadvantage – it made her stand out awkwardly among her peers. This only added to the pangs of anxiety she felt in those early days. Fortunately, she still managed to get a part in Annie, albeit a very small one in the ensemble. According to one source, practically everyone who auditioned managed to get a part in the production.
Yet the confidence she drew from her experience in Annie helped her to land her first lead role – in the well-known musical The Sound of Music. She took to the part with aplomb – so much so that, contrary to usual BYTA procedures, she was not rested for half the weekend shows. Instead, she appeared in all of them. She then landed another starring role, as Sandy in the theatre’s production of Grease.
As she performed Sandy’s songs, Taylor found that her vocals were sounding distinctly country in flavour. ‘It was all I had listened to, so I guess it was just kind of natural,’ she told the Great American Country channel. It is from this moment that the rest of her story flows: she said she decided right there that ‘country music was what I needed to be doing’.
All the while, she was serious about making a go of it in musicals. She travelled to New York to audition for roles in Broadway and off-Broadway productions. Her voice teacher, Kirk Cremer, became her unofficial manager for such ventures. He had professional-looking headshots taken of Taylor and he would be at her side as she travelled to the Manhattan auditions. She would, she recalled during a chat with Inquirer Entertainment, ‘stand in line in a long hallway with a lot of people’. Later, back in her home town, she took another lead part, in a production of Bye Bye Birdie. In this play she took the role of Kim MacAfee, who has a secret crush on a rock star. This play was less successful than her previous outings and the production was struck with a number of problems. But by now she had decided that country music was her future, so she was able to cope with the disappointment.
From this realisation, she began a process that, in increasingly voluminous form, continues to this day: she sought out opportunities to sing her favourite songs in front of a live audience. This began with karaoke, initially using the theatre’s own karaoke unit. She chose songs she liked and sang them to her fellow cast members at parties, loving the experience so much that it felt like ‘my favourite thing in the world’. She received plentiful praise for her karaoke performances. One evening, as Taylor stood there belting out another country classic, someone approached her mother and said that this was what Taylor should be doing for a living. It was a sentiment that Taylor and her family increasingly felt themselves.
She just needed to get out there and sing to new audiences. One venue she turned up at was the Pat Garrett Roadhouse, where she took part in karaoke competitions. This smoky bar was an incongruous place for a pre-teen girl to be, but her parents understood what it meant to her and allowed her to go and compete, provided they were physically accompanying her every inch of the way. Although one parent at the BYTA reportedly accused Taylor’s mother and father of being that dreaded species, the ‘pushy parents’, Taylor prefers to view their encouragement as ‘empowerment’ rather than pressure.
Speaking to Country Music Television, she expanded on her view of parenting and pressure. She felt that simply telling a child that they can be whatever they want to be and that they should chase their dreams was only half of the process. The other half was for the parents to genuinely believe those sentiments – ‘My parents actually believed it,’ she said. She is clear, however, that her mother and father ‘never pushed’ her. Indeed, she added, had they done so, she would probably have been a lot less, rather than more, successful.
So she continued to turn up at Pat Garrett’s venue every week. Her parents might not have been pushy, but Taylor was – proudly so. ‘I was kind of like an annoying flag around the place,’ she told CMT News. ‘I would not leave them alone. What they would do is have these karaoke contests … I would go until I won.’ She also played her guitar at a wide range of other venues, including coffee shops, and even at Boy Scout meetings.
Her persistence paid off and further success was quickly coming her way. On one significant occasion, she won a k
araoke contest singing the LeAnn Rimes song ‘Big Deal’. As part of her victory, she was given a slot opening for the country music legend Charlie Daniels. Having wowed the often-sparse audiences at her karaoke performances, Taylor then began to target larger crowds. High on her target list were sports teams who needed someone to sing the national anthem at their matches. The Reading Phillies, the local baseball outfit, were one of the first teams to invite her to sing. With a handful of performances for them under her belt, she aimed even higher. For her, this was a simple equation. ‘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,’ she would tell Rolling Stone later.
She sang at the US Open tennis tournament and then at a Philadelphia 76ers match. It was April 2002. Taylor looked marvellously patriotic as she took to the stage with a top covered in small American flags. When she looked back on the night later, she laughed at how nervous she had seemed. She was indeed ‘nervous’, she said, but she still found it to be an ‘awesome’ experience.
As she left the court after this latter performance, she saw the famous rapper Jay-Z sitting in the audience. As she walked past, he leaned in and gave the youngster a congratulatory high-five. She was so thrilled: she has said that she boasted about that encounter ‘for, like, a year straight’. What a badge of honour for a budding singer to have! Singing the national anthem became easier for her the more she did it, but she admitted that she did feel nerves when she sang at a World Series tie between the Philadelphia Phillies and the Tampa Bay Rays. She said the ‘challenge’ came due to the ‘utter silence that comes over 40,000 people in a baseball stadium and you’re the only one singing it’. Taylor recalled how that first moment of silence would be ‘surreal’. Then she would do what all artists yearn to do, however terrifying it can feel: she would fill the silence with her own sweet voice.
‘It was a little scary at first,’ she told Elle Girl magazine. What she would learn in time was that the best answer for nerves was simply to keep performing. ‘Every time you play another show it gets better and better,’ she added. This worked better for her than other coping strategies. When she tried the technique of imagining each member of the audience wearing just underpants, she found it did not work for her – ‘at all’. News of her nerves will be a surprise for some who knew her back then, as she portrayed an air of utter confidence on the surface.
Her de facto manager Kirk was so impressed with her continued progress that he arranged for her to record some tracks at the studio owned by his older brother Ronnie. Among the songs she recorded were cover versions of those by some of her favourite artists, including: ‘Here You Come Again’ (Dolly Parton); ‘One Way Ticket’ (LeAnn Rimes); ‘There’s Your Trouble’ (Dixie Chicks) and more. She loved being in a recording studio, standing at the microphone with her headphones on, and when she saw the banks of controls at the mixing desk she wondered what they all did; but, most of all, she felt as if she was becoming a professional artist, much like her heroes.
Those heroes influenced her in different ways. She had taken inspiration and guidance from three different stars, as she would later explain during an interview with Rolling Stone magazine. ‘I saw that Shania Twain brought this independence, 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. I loved what all of those women were able to do and what they were able to bring to country music.’ She was being inspired as a musician and a female; this was girl power, but with a country drawl.
Her existence was proving exciting on the road, and her family life was pleasant and comfortable, too. Her parents’ hard work in business had paid off and delivered a wonderful life for the Swifts. The family’s new six-bedroom home was a comfortable and enviable building in a grand location, at 78 Grandview Boulevard, Reading, Pennsylvania, 19609. It had, according to reports, an elevator and an inside pool, complete with hot tub. The classical-revival building was large and spacious, measuring 5,050 square feet. A later listing of the property described a ‘bright study’, where Taylor would play guitar. When it hit the market in the summer of 2013, it was listed at $799,500. Back then, she was given the attic. Given the stature of the house, this effectively meant she had an entire floor to herself, comprising three rooms, including one bedroom. It was almost as if she had her own apartment at the age of 11. Indeed, when her friends and colleagues from the theatre group visited the house there was a lot of shock and a fair amount of envy among them as they saw the splendour she lived in. The theatre group included kids from a broad range of social backgrounds – some of them barely knew that people could live in such luxury.
Taylor had it good, and did her best to shrug off the envious glances. In the summer, the family would move to their gorgeous holiday home in Stone Harbor, New Jersey. Americans flock there on vacation from several east-coast regions and beyond. The New York Times describes the area as featuring ‘block after block of gleaming McMansions and elegant shops’, and it is among the richest towns in the United States. It has now gained wider recognition thanks to its place on the trashy and fun reality television show Jersey Shore. For Taylor, it proved to be a pivotal part of her upbringing: ‘That’s where most of my childhood memories were formed,’ she has said.
Taylor – who once told Sea Ray magazine that she had ‘lived in a life jacket’ since the age of four – loved this seaside resort, where the family first bought property the year she turned two. She found Stone Harbor ‘magical’ and loved to swim in the sea as well as take part in water-sports, including jet-skiing and sailing, even though, in general, she was not a natural at sport. Sometimes they would see a dolphin and it felt so wonderfully life-affirming to be near such natural beauty. ‘There were so many places to explore, whether it was finding a new island in the inlet or walking to 96th Street for ice cream,’ she said. As she entered Springer’s, the ice-cream place she so loved, she would be struck by indecision. As she gazed upwards at the long list of flavours, it was so hard to choose just one. However, cookies ‘n’ cream became a flavour she would regularly settle upon. The outlet, run proudly by the Humphreys family, was a firm favourite for Taylor. She also enjoyed visiting an Italian restaurant on the same street, where she would devour Caesar salad and pizza. She says that, thanks to the Swifts’ long summers in Stone Harbor, ‘I could not have had a cooler childhood.’
The family’s home was opposite a bird sanctuary, meaning that Taylor could enjoy the sights of our feathered friends without even leaving the house. She would just open her window, put her binoculars to her eyes and delight in the birds. Some days she did little else but this, so entranced was she by them. On other days she got up to mischief, chiefly at the annual boat parade that she watched on Independence Day. ‘We used to all gather together on the dock when the boat parades would go by on 4 July and we’d shoot water balloons at them,’ she told Philly.com. She also found renewed creative inspiration during these summers, though. Many artists feel that being near water is a magical, creative experience, and it certainly seemed to work for Taylor. ‘I was allowed to be kind of weird and quirky and imaginative as a kid, and that was my favourite part of living at the Shore,’ she said.
Some of this creative energy showed itself in the form of musical experiments and literary endeavours, including the aforementioned novel. She was moved to write it because she was missing her friends. Putting them on the page made her feel closer to them. ‘I would send them back chapters of it,’ she said. However, some of it was more domestically orientated. Taylor showed early signs of being a homemaker. She took over the room above the garage and turned it into her own private den, a sanctuary in which she could reign. ‘I painted the whole room different colours and used to spend all day in there, just doing nothing but sitting in my little club,’ she said, ‘because it was mine.’
There was one thing – or, to be precise,
one person – that she could not consider hers, however badly she wanted to. A boy who lived next door to the Swifts’ holiday home had captured her imagination. He would spend a lot of time in the Swift household, as his parents were friends with Taylor’s parents. Soon, she felt strong yearnings for them to become an item. In fact, she decided she wanted to marry him. While Taylor wished that he would ask her out, he instead would tell her at agonising length about other girls he had his sights set on. The rejection she felt over this unrequited crush was the creative spark that led to one of her first songs. ‘I felt, well, invisible,’ she said. ‘Obviously. So I wrote that song about it.’ As we shall see, this made it onto her first album, albeit as a bonus track. She also wrote a second track, called ‘Smoky Black Nights’. She describes that song, about life at the Shore, as ‘a little demo I made when I was 11’.
Despite this heartbreak and the sad song that it spawned, she was relaxing and having lots of fun, but her hunger for new opportunities to perform in front of an audience did not dissipate during the summer breaks. She found fine venues on Third Avenue and 98th Street. ‘I used to sing karaoke at Henny’s and play acoustic shows for hours on end at Coffee Talk, a little café on 98th Street,’ she said. ‘I used to drag my parents into those places all the time, and all of their friends would show up and put dollars in my tip jar.’ She played really long sets on occasion, and would run out of songs after a while. Not wanting to leave the spotlight, she would make up new songs on the spot. Live performances, dolphins, pranks and an unrequited crush: these were idyllic summers for the Swifts, and Taylor truly basked in the fun and drama of it all.
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