Taylor was keen for more musical projects to get involved in and she was, initially, delighted when Dymtrow got her a deal with RCA Records. It seemed to be just what she wanted – recognition from a major label in Nashville. For a while, she felt that she had finally made the big step she had dreamed of. It felt so exciting. ‘I was elated,’ she told CMT Insider later. ‘I was just, “Oh my gosh! This huge record label wants to sign me to a development deal. I’m so excited!”’ There seemed to be, on the face of it, so much to be optimistic about. RCA gave her sponsorship money and recording time.
However, the agreement turned out to be not quite as exciting as she hoped. ‘A development deal is an in-between record deal,’ she told NBC. ‘It’s like a guy saying that he wants to date you but not be your boyfriend. You know, they don’t want to sign you to an actual record deal or put an album out on you. They want to watch your progress for a year.’ At 14 years of age she was being told by the label that they wanted to keep her on ice until she was 18. For a girl in her mid-teens this was unbearable – four years seemed so far away. She felt she was running out of time. For Taylor, her teenage years were not an inconvenience to get beyond before she could become a singer-songwriter. She wanted to be that creature there and then. ‘I wanted to capture these years of my life on an album while they still represented what I was going through,’ she recalled.
Her self-belief would soon be rewarded when her parents agreed to a more fixed move to Nashville in the wake of the RCA development. ‘My father had a job he could do from anywhere,’ she told Blender magazine. ‘My parents moved across the country so I could pursue a dream.’ Put like that, it slightly downplayed the sacrifice Scott and Andrea had made. Taylor was aware of the extent of that sacrifice, despite the fact that her parents went to some effort to minimise it. There was no pressure heaped on her, no guilt trips laid at her feet. Instead, they acted as if this was a choice they had made themselves, on their own terms.
It did not fool Taylor for a moment. 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.”’ Crucially, they took steps to ensure that as little expectation was placed on Taylor’s shoulders as possible. With the entire family moving hundreds of miles for her, it would be easy for Taylor to feel that she had let everyone down if she were not to hit the big time. But as Andrea told Entertainment Weekly, ‘I never wanted to make that move about her “making it”.’ She feared it would be too ‘horrible’ if Taylor had not succeeded.
As she house-hunted in Nashville, Andrea found a place on Old Hickory Lane that she liked the look of. She arranged for the rest of the family to go and look at it. Scott told the Sea Ray website how quickly he was sold on it. ‘We stopped at the dock on the way to check up on the house,’ he recalled. ‘I looked down the cove toward the lake, imagined my Sea Ray tied up there and said, “I’ll take it.”’ Even the estate agent was shocked: ‘Don’t you want to see the house first?’ she asked.
He felt at home and so did his children. Taylor and Austin joined a local high school called Hendersonville. Here, to Taylor’s relief, her fellow pupils were not suspicious or envious of her musical endeavours. Quite to the contrary – they were impressed by her efforts and delighted to help her make her dreams come true. ‘Everybody was so nice to me,’ she told the New Yorker later. ‘They’re all, like, “We heard you’re a singer. We have a talent show next week – do you want to enter?”’ What a breath of fresh air for her; she could hardly believe how well the move to Nashville was turning out. It felt a world apart from the troubled existence she’d had in Pennsylvania. ‘They were so supportive,’ she recalled of her new neighbours.
She had her first ever kiss at the age of 15. However, it was a subsequent boyfriend, called Brandon Borello, who inspired her to write a song. She was in the freshman year of high school when she was asked to write a song for a ninth-grade talent-show project. ‘I was sitting there thinking, I’ve got to write an upbeat song that’s going to relate to everyone,’ she told AOL. ‘And at the time I was dating a guy and we didn’t have a song. So I wrote us one, and I played it at the show. Months later, people would come up to me and say, “I loved the song you played.” They’d only heard it once, so I thought, there must be something here.’
On her first day at school she sat down next to a girl in English class. They began to chat and quickly became close friends. The girl’s name was Abigail Anderson. They felt an instinctive bond, grounded in the fact that they both felt like outsiders but both had defined ambitions: Anderson’s was to become a professional swimmer. Finally, Taylor had a friend she could relate to on several levels. They were the outsiders who wanted to become, in the widest sense, champions. They also shared an impish sense of humour.
Anderson was not the only good thing about English classes for Taylor. A lover of words and writing, she often enjoyed these lessons enormously. Among the books that they studied in these classes was that staple feature of so many youngsters’ education: Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird. This classic American novel inspired her greatly. ‘You know, you hear storytelling like in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird and it just … it makes your mind wander,’ she has said. ‘It makes you feel like it makes your world more vast. And you think about more things and greater concepts after you read something like that.’
After studying like any other schoolgirl during the day, in the evening she would enter a much more adult world, as she teamed up with established songwriters for creative sessions. She later described the curious duality of these days as ‘a really weird existence – 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.’
She told American Songwriter magazine that she realised what an opportunity these sessions were for her. Yet she was also aware that it was important for her to appear as confident as possible. ‘I knew that, being a 14-year-old girl, anybody would – understandably – think, I’m going to have to write a song for a kid today.’ She was determined that this would not happen. ‘So I would walk in with 10 or 15 almost-finished melodies or choruses. I just wanted to make sure that everybody knew I was serious about it.’
Throughout her waking hours she was on the hunt for new inspiration and for the opportunity to record it. When moments of lyrical inspiration struck she would scribble down the words on whatever came to hand: her school exercise books, a tissue. This sometimes caused awkward moments. Teachers would sometimes call in a random notebook check and they would be surprised to find Taylor’s scribbled lyrics of anguish alongside her schoolwork. ‘But they learned to deal with me,’ she said. Other times a melody would come into her head. She would record it by humming it into her mobile phone. It was not unheard of for her classmates to spot – and hear – her in the toilets, humming a rough tune into her phone.
Here, we turn to a crucial difference between her new school and her old one. Previously, her fellow pupils gave her inspiration only via the cruellest and most unintentional of routes. By excluding her and bullying her, they sent Taylor into such pits of unhappiness that she would compose her way out of them. Now, however, her schoolmates offered deliberate and positive inspiration. Groups of them would join Taylor around a campfire at night and listen to her singing her songs as she strummed her guitar. These youngsters were of the age that Taylor wanted to appeal to, so they were the perfect test audience for her songs and ideas.
This obsessive documentation and regular road testing meant that Taylor turned up to her writing sessions with plenty to put on the table. There would be no question of her being a young passenger, incomplete without the patronage of those older and wiser. For instance, she wrote with a fellow composer called Liz Rose. ‘I think she ended up just writing with me because I didn’t change what
she was doing,’ Rose told American Songwriter. ‘I tried to make it better and mould it and hone it, and [said] “hang on there” and “write it down”; that’s why it worked with us. I really respected her and got what she was trying to do, and I didn’t want to make her write in the Nashville cookie-cutter songwriting mould.’
Rose was impressed with her young collaborator. In time, she felt that she was little more than Taylor’s editor. ‘She’d write about what happened in school that day,’ Rose told Blender. ‘She had such a clear vision of what she was trying to say. And she’d come in with the most incredible hooks.’ The two found they complemented one another well in these sessions. Out of them came the song that would launch Taylor’s career properly – ‘Tim McGraw’. The earliest origins of the song came during a maths class. She began to hum a new melody in the lesson and then, Taylor said, it took her just a quarter of an hour to write the basic structure of the song. When she got home she smoothed it out and improved it a bit, adding some piano melody. Then she was ready to take it to a session with Rose.
The song, which was originally going to be entitled ‘When You Think Tim McGraw’, is a bittersweet affair in which Taylor looks back on a real-life relationship she had with a boy, who is widely believed to be her ex-boyfriend Brandon Borello. The lyrics take the form of a letter written to her former partner. Borello was a senior when he dated Taylor, who was then still a freshman. This leads to the month of tears in September in the song when they were parted.
Explaining what she felt was the power of the song, Taylor said: ‘It was reminiscent, and it was thinking about a relationship you had and then lost.’ She added: ‘I think one of the most powerful human emotions is what should have been and wasn’t. That was a really good song to start out on, just because a lot of people can relate to wanting what you can’t have.’ She knew what made a good song, intellectually as well as instinctively. ‘Tim McGraw’ would be track one on her debut album – and it had all started in a maths class.
Taylor soon felt that she was on a roll. She told the Washington Post that she could ‘draw inspiration from anything’. She expanded on what this meant for her. ‘If you’re a good storyteller, you can take a dirty look somebody gives you, or if a guy you used to have flirtations with starts dating a new girl or somebody you’re casually talking to says something that makes you sooooo mad – you can create an entire scenario around that.’
Another early track she wrote was called ‘Lucky You’. ‘It was about this girl who dares to be different,’ she said. The autobiographical parallels are clear. ‘At that time I was describing myself,’ she added. Following that and ‘Tim McGraw’, she then wrote a song about a guy called Drew Hardwick, on whom she had a ‘huge crush’, but an unrequited one. Speaking to Country Standard Time, she added: ‘[He] would sit there every day talking to me about another girl: how beautiful she was, how nice and how smart and perfect she was.’ It was as if she was back in her younger years, with her unrequited crush of her summer holiday. Again, she would do her best to fake smiles for him as he told her all about other girls, and wonder if he knew that she would think about him all night.
The song, which would namecheck Drew directly, would be called ‘Teardrops On My Guitar’. She began composing this track on her way home from school one day. Given its power, maturity and poise, it’s remarkable that the song was conjured out of this circumstance. In the song, she yearns for Drew’s flawless looks, which take her breath away. Taylor can only hope, with a slice of bitterness, that Drew’s perfect girl will look after him properly. The imagery of a guy being the song she sings in her car gives this track a universal appeal of the sort that drive-time radio shows adore. When the listener truly connects with Taylor’s lyrics and the emotions they describe, they will find themselves shedding a few teardrops, too.
Her songs were proving to be rich little numbers. Word soon spread around town about this incredible kid who was writing with such aplomb and deftness. Soon, she would be contacted by the mighty Sony. They snapped her up as a songwriter to compose potential tracks for their existing artists. She agreed and duly became the youngest staff songwriter ever hired by the esteemed Sony/Tree publishing house. The significance and symbolism of this is stark: a girl in her mid-teens was signed by one of the world’s biggest record labels to compose songs for artists many years older than her.
So came the bold move: Taylor decided to leave RCA and go in search of a label that would truly believe in her. This was a difficult decision and one she only reached after much soul-searching. What courage and self-belief it showed to reject a major label’s interest in her. However, the fault line between artist and label was significant: she felt she was ‘good to go’ right then. The label felt she needed time and development, not least because it was the country music market she wanted to move into – complete with its world-weary lyrics and ageing fanbase – rather than pop, which is far more geared for teenage stars.
But Taylor was quite sure. ‘I figured, if they didn’t believe in me then, they weren’t ever going to believe in me,’ she said. She took a deep breath, walked away and continued to prepare for the day when she would make it big. She even spent ages practising her autograph, filling a notebook with her scrawl in preparation for the day when she would be famous enough to sign her name for fans. Even though the humble autograph would have been surpassed by the smartphone photograph as the favoured proof of a celebrity encounter by the time she made it big – particularly for Taylor’s generation – these signature rehearsals showed that she was determined to be an authentic star.
Again, her courage was rewarded. The moment soon came that changed everything: enter Scott Borchetta, the man who would make her a queen. For him, the decision to sign her would be a no-brainer. ‘I fell in love with her,’ he said. ‘It’s really that simple.’ Born in the 1960s, Borchetta was always a competitive and driven soul. In middle school he competed in car races with friends. He found, he told Forbes later, that he had a ‘race devil’ inside him. After school he decided to try to make it in the music industry. He took a job in the mail room of his dad’s independent promotion company. He was not the first record company executive to have joined the industry via the mail room – the famed Simon Cowell took a similar route. Borchetta moved from California to Nashville and took a job working for the promotional department of Mary Tyler Moore’s MTM record label. He then ran his own independent promotions firm for a while before joining MCA Records.
Then he joined Universal Music Group, under whose umbrella he launched DreamWorks Nashville. Here, he was part of one of the planet’s biggest record labels. However, in 2005, his division was closed down. He was looking for a new star to really launch his next label. Taylor, who would be the perfect person, crossed his path at the famous Nashville showcase, the Bluebird Café. This regular event was an exciting prospect for Taylor, who would get to play in front of an audience of local record industry talent hunters. The institution had its success stories, and none – prior to Taylor’s arrival – came bigger than Garth Brooks. He was spotted there in 1987 and signed up to Capitol Records. The rest is history.
History would be made the night that Taylor showed up for her own slot. She carried her guitar onto the stage and performed an acoustic set. By now she was comfortable with live performance, but she was also aware that this was no usual audience. Somewhere out there, she hoped, would be a record label figure able to make her dreams come true. Borchetta, meanwhile, had turned up with a corresponding dream. He wanted to find a talent he could turn into an international star.
When Taylor first sat down onstage, both she and Borchetta – who were at this point more or less strangers to one another, despite a brief encounter during his days at DreamWorks Nashville – took a deep breath and hoped for the best. Borchetta remembers sitting with his eyes closed and wondering: ‘Is this going to hit me? And it absolutely did.’ He told Great American Country: ‘I was just smitten on the spot. It was like a lightning bolt.’ St
raight afterwards he arranged to meet Taylor and the Swifts to pitch what he could do for them.
He told Taylor: ‘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.’ He explained that he wanted her to wait for him, as he was about to launch a new record label of his own. ‘I’m working on something,’ he said. Taylor found him convincing; he made her feel that he had something up his sleeve that she would want to take part in.
Looking back on how she won him over, Borchetta told NBC: ‘I think it was in August of 2005. Taylor played me a song called “When You Think Tim McGraw”. She finished the song and I said, “Do you realise what you have just written? Do you have any idea?” That was that moment of, “Oh my God.” And the grenade dropped in the still pond.’ Inspired, he went away and told friends that he had found a future country music sensation. When he went on to tell them that she was a teenage schoolgirl, he could see the scepticism draw across their faces. ‘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.’ To him, though, Taylor seemed as great a prospect as his previous big catches, Sugarland and Trisha Yearwood.
So what was this project Borchetta had up his sleeve for Taylor? The new label he was working on would be called Big Machine Records. (‘The name Big Machine is kind of a joke,’ he said during an interview with Fast Company, ‘because, really, we’re anything but.’) He started it within months of his DreamWorks Nashville label coming to an end. His criteria for whether to sign an artist for Big Machine has always been the same: ‘I either fall in love with an artist’s music or I don’t,’ he said. He also set out a bold mission statement for his new label, which would, he hoped, put ‘the music first and the artist first’. He added: ‘It’s the music business. It’s not the business of music.’ Borchetta has also happily defined himself and his team as dedicated workaholics. ‘There are no shortcuts,’ he told an industry gathering. ‘We work 24/7, and we love it.’
Taylor Swift Page 4
