Finally, after all the anger, heartbreak and accusation, in ‘Mary’s Song (Oh My My My)’ Taylor offers some hope. In this redemptive song she tracks the life of a loving, happy couple. Inspiration for it struck after a real-life couple who lived next door came for dinner with the Swifts. As Taylor listened to their tales of how they met and stayed together, she wanted to set their story to song. The tales of the Swifts’ neighbours were a great boost to Taylor. They formed a warming contrast to what she saw elsewhere in the world. ‘I thought it was so sweet, because you can go to the grocery store and read the tabloids, and see who’s breaking up and cheating on each other – or just listen to some of my songs, ha-ha. But it was really comforting to know that all I had to do was go home and look next door to see a perfect example of forever.’
If ‘Mary’s Song (Oh My My My)’ lifted the mood of the album, then ‘Our Song’ lifts it even higher. It came about when she was at Henderson High and realised that she and her boyfriend did not have a song to define their relationship. So she put this right in the best possible style. Rather than choosing one for them, she ‘sat down one day with my guitar and got in the groove’. From this session came ‘Our Song’. The production is impish and fun, and the banjos and fiddles give the song a festive feel.
Most people, were they to look back at their teenage diaries later in life, would feel a little embarrassed by their adolescent feelings and ramblings. Luckily, they can keep what they created back then to themselves. For Taylor, her innermost thoughts, as recorded on this album, are forever public and known to millions of listeners. These songs reflect her feelings during her pre- and mid-teenage years.
It is nice for Taylor, then, that she regards this early part of her work with such pride. ‘I look back on the record I made when I was 16, and I’m so happy I made it,’ she told MTV in 2011. ‘I got to immortalise those emotions that when you’re so angry you hate everything. It’s like recording your diary over the years, and that’s a gift.’ The album has stood the test of time for Taylor, who is, as we have seen, the harshest of self-critics.
The press critics were impressed when the album was revealed to them. The New York Times admired how she wrote her debut ‘in diaristic fashion, with incriminating names and details left intact’. The authenticity of Taylor’s approach was being admired not only by listeners, but also by journalists. Jon Caramanica added: ‘The result was a small masterpiece of pop-minded country, both wide-eyed and cynical, held together by Ms Swift’s firm, pleading voice. Her best songs – “Picture to Burn”, “Should’ve Said No” – were a little vicious, too, animated by something sharper than traditional teenage angst.’
Chris Neal of Country Weekly magazine said that on her debut Taylor showed ‘an honesty, intelligence and idealism with which listeners of any age will be able to connect’. He also ventured that ‘the more thoughtful material suggests a talent poised to last well past high school’. The website AllMusic criticised elements of the album’s production, which it felt was a little too polished in parts. However, the reviewer separated this misgiving from the artist herself. ‘Swift has no trouble overcoming any blandness taking place around her,’ said the review. ‘She’s come up with a commendable starter album that’s as accomplished as any by a 10-year veteran who’s seen a lot more road and felt a lot more emotion.’
Country Standard Time magazine said that the album was a commendable balance between two genres, lending it ‘an iPod feel, with as much pop as country among the 11 cuts’. Rick Bell, the reviewer, continued: ‘Swift’s best efforts come on her deeply personal, self-penned songs, particularly “The Outside” and “Our Song”, which she sings with stirring conviction.’ He added: ‘It’s an impressive debut.’
The album was finally released on 24 October 2006 – a proud day for Taylor. An anxious one, too: she was so nervous that she woke up at 5 a.m. She was staying in a hotel in Manhattan, as she was booked to appear on the TV show Good Morning America. Such a high-profile promotional slot was a coup for her – many established artists try unsuccessfully to get such a spot themselves. Amid the promotional activity, Taylor wanted to do one other thing now her album was on sale – buy a copy of it. ‘I just want to do that and put it on the register face down,’ she said. ‘I can’t even express how excited/nervous I am. It’s such a cool day, because I am in New York City and it feels like that’s the place where your album should be released.’ Her own purchase would ultimately be lost in a sea of sales that would take the album to number 19 in the Billboard 200 chart.
So what can we learn from Taylor’s debut album about the lady herself? We can see how uncompromising she is: her songs are often sad or dark; there is a generous slice of anger in the album, too. As the New York Times reflected, her ire seems to reach beyond the angst that is so ‘traditional’ among adolescents. Despite her country/pop blend, there is an almost grunge or punk-rock dimension to her fury. In ‘Picture to Burn’ and ‘Should’ve Said No’ in particular, so much rage flies forth that the listener can’t help feeling it is a good thing Taylor has her musical outlet. Bottling up such anger would not have been healthy.
As we have seen, the people around Taylor began to feel nervous or excited at the thought that she might be writing about them in her songs. ‘I think it’s one of everybody’s favourite things to talk about – who my songs are written about,’ she told Entertainment Weekly. ‘There are definitely a few more people who think that I’ve written a song about them than there actually are,’ she added. However, she did not deny that her material was grounded in her own experiences – ‘It’s very autobiographical,’ she said. Therefore, her life and mind are laid bare in many of the song’s lyrics.
The songs are largely about real-life experiences, in keeping with Taylor’s insistence that her music is as authentic as possible. This approach is a growing trend among twenty-first-century female artists. Amy Winehouse famously – or infamously, perhaps – wrote her two albums about specific lovers. Back to Black – the track and the album of the same name – chronicled her tumultuous relationship with Blake Fielder-Civil. Pain and heartache pour out of the tracks, which are all the more heart-rending to listen to in the wake of Winehouse’s untimely death. It is tempting to speculate that there was a degree of self-sabotage in Amy’s life, so as to inspire her all the more to write breathtaking tracks of heartbreak and despair. What an ugly price such musical beauty came with for her. (This is not quite so outlandish a proposition as it might seem: singer Lily Allen admitted in an interview with the Radio Times that she had broken up with boyfriends purely for musical inspiration. ‘When I hit a period of not being able to write music, I get up and walk away,’ she said. ‘It’s pretty mean, but it’s true.’)
Adele – in some musical senses a successor to Winehouse – also believes that music should always reflect real-life experiences. Since recording her memories of heartache in her albums 19 and 21, Adele has found considerable personal stability and happiness. She is in a settled relationship and has a young son to complete the bliss. While this is great news for Adele personally, it remains to be seen what it means for Adele the artist. Songs such as ‘Rolling in the Deep’ and ‘Someone Like You’ came out of sorrow and loneliness. What sort of music – if any – will spring forth from happier times for the much-adored London singer?
This is a longstanding issue for musicians. Eminent British songwriter Noel Gallagher – formerly of Mancunian rock band Oasis and now a successful solo artist and elder statesman of British rock – has reflected on how much easier it was to write relatable songs when he was a hungry youngster, on the dole and dreaming of oblivion at the weekend. When he became a famous multi-millionaire, living in glamour and comfort while basking in the adoration of millions, he suddenly found his life experiences were not so much ones that his everyday fanbase could relate to. And while the decline in his band’s critical success was for a number of reasons, this songwriting dilemma was certainly one of them.
Taylor was aware o
f the concern. She was asked whether this might cause a problem for her in the future, but she nonchalantly shrugged off the matter. ‘You know, songwriting is all about being able to paint a story and tell a story, and sometimes that’s telling a story to yourself,’ she said. ‘Sometimes that’s using your imagination to transplant yourself back to when you got lied to. I write when I’m happy, too. The number-one song that I had, I wrote when I was in a relationship.’ Now we know that her confidence was well placed. Famously, Taylor continues to have an eventful and turbulent personal life deep into her years of fame and fortune. This means her songs have continued to pack a hefty emotional punch, even as her career has seen her life become much more comfortable in material terms. It was by putting her foot down early in her career, insisting that she would aim to write as authentically as possible, that her knockout delivery was set up.
She has outlined the extent of her own autonomy in her career. ‘When I’m in management meetings, when we’re deciding my future, those decisions are left up to me,’ she said in an interview with Harper’s Bazaar. ‘I’m the one who has to go out and fulfil all these obligations, so I should be able to choose which ones I do or not. That’s part of my life where I feel most in control.’ She also took, she said, a hands-on role in the promotion of her album. She had been very mindful of the power of the internet and social networking for several years, as she later explained during a Q&A interview with Billboard. ‘I was, like, 12 when we secured taylorswift.com and started putting up different versions of a website,’ she said. ‘And when we moved to Nashville, my mom and I got really proactive with trying to make it really, really cool. We went to Mad Dancer Media, and we told them we wanted it to look like a scrapbook. And there are all these buttons on it and it opens the book and there are all these tabs and pages and we wanted it to be really interactive and really appropriate for where I was in my life at that point. I didn’t want a sleek, too-cool site. I wanted it to be reflective of who I was as a person and who I am as a person. And that’s kind of casual.’
Another aspect of her online presence was her account on the then-hip social-networking website MySpace. The website had been used to great effect to launch two of the biggest UK artists, in the shape of Lily Allen and Arctic Monkeys. Both acts had used it to create and maintain a following, thus bypassing to a great extent the mainstream media. By the time Taylor became a recognised young artist, MySpace had passed its peak. Too many would-be stars had flooded the network, hoping some magic dust would come their way. Also, Facebook had made its first steps onto the internet, gradually putting a dent into MySpace’s popularity.
Therefore, for any user to make their name via the site – famous, non-famous or somewhere in between – they would need to use it cleverly. Taylor stepped up to the challenge. She’s admitted that she spent ‘so much time on MySpace’, and went on to explain that, here, she was personally responsible for her image. ‘My MySpace is something that I made,’ she said. ‘The background that you see on there, I went to a website and copied the code and copy-and-pasted my “About me” section. I upload all the pictures, I check the comments, I am in charge of everything on that page. It really is important to me and really special to me when someone comes up to me and says, “I’m your friend on MySpace.” I’ve always taken so much pride in it, just because it’s really personal to me.’ She also used the social network as a fan. She loved discovering new artists on it. Many of those she went on to love she had first seen recommended on the MySpace page of her friend Abigail. ‘Whatever [she] has playing on her MySpace is usually something new and cool that I’ll most likely end up downloading,’ said Taylor.
However, the most important dimension of her MySpace activity was how it completed the promotion of her debut single and album. The way that Scott Borchetta got her single added to the playlists of country music radio stations shows how wise this tactic was. He made sure that her online presence was strong. He also released the video for ‘Tim McGraw’ before the single. As a result, by the time he visited the all-important country music stations to ask them to add the single to their playlists, he could do so from a position of strength. ‘We said: “We have you surrounded and you don’t even know it,”’ he said. Most artists, particularly those at the beginning of their career, arrive to meet radio stations in a far less confident and more servile frame of mind.
In fact, he presents a somewhat more brutal and aggressive approach than the reality. Taylor added some sweet charm to the mix. For instance, she wrote personal, hand-written notes to any station that played her song. These charming teenage notes melted the hearts of many a cold scheduler and disc jockey. It had a spiritual authenticity to it, too. Taylor and Andrea had personally hand-packed many of the demo CDs of the single that had been sent out. As she packed each one, Taylor had personally whispered a good-luck message to it. With radio stations on-song, the single sold well. It made number six on the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart and stayed in the top 10 for 35 weeks. In the main Billboard chart it went to number 40.
Her life had changed as a result of her newfound fame and fortune, but Taylor tried to eschew the temptation to complain about it. Many modern celebrities have become infamous for moaning about their life in the spotlight. Robbie Williams, for instance, veered between chirpy, can’t-believe-my-luck delight in his fame and life-is-terrible-when-you-are-famous self-pity. Taylor trod a more measured path, even though she had to combine schoolwork into the mix. ‘Balancing all this is not hard,’ she said. ‘I mean, what do I have to complain about? I have the best time in the world. I’m so lucky. When I go out in public and I go to a mall, yeah, it’s a lot different than it was two years ago, but it’s a beautiful kind of different. It’s the kind of different that I’ve wanted my entire life. I’m a strong believer that if you work your entire life for something, and you work so hard and you want this one thing so much, you should never complain once you get it.’
However, there were changes all the time. One of them was that she would have to leave school and take the home-schooling option. It became unfeasible for her to promote her music properly and conform to traditional school hours and demands. There was also a concern that her fame and increasingly exciting lifestyle might spark envy among classmates. Nobody in the family wanted to risk Taylor returning to the dark days when she was cruelly targeted by her fellow pupils. However, this was perhaps an overly cautious move, as she was leaving a school where she had many friends and much fun. Taylor was sad to be leaving and her best friend Abigail Anderson had to adjust to life at school without her dear Tay. Anderson admits that it took a lot of adjustment: ‘I mean, any girl knows that if your best friend leaves you in tenth grade, it’s just like, “Okay, what do I do now?” So, it was hard for both of us,’ she told the newspaper Lawrence Journal-World. ‘I had to kind of make a new name for myself around school, and she had to do her own thing out there and miss everything that had been her life for the previous few years. But she just immediately started doing so well … you just couldn’t really think about anything else.’
During her summer holidays, she set off on a radio tour to promote her music. With 2,500 stations to target, it would require a breathless effort on her part. She was following a simple equation she had been offered by an adviser: if you want to sell 500,000 records, then you should aim to meet 500,000 people. She slept in the back of the car as Andrea drove them from station to station. Andrea said it was ‘a lot of work’ to help promote her daughter – ‘but a lot of fun, too’. To add another personal touch, Taylor baked cookies to hand to the radio teams.
She will always remember where she was when she first heard one of her songs on the radio. ‘I was driving down the road and somebody called in and requested it, and I almost drove off the road – literally,’ she told Seventeen magazine. ‘My record label president still has the message of me screaming at the top of my lungs, screeching; you can barely hear what I’m saying because I was crying – it was amazing.’ This was such
a milestone for Taylor – suddenly the bullying and isolation she had endured just a few years before at school seemed a long way away. It felt like everybody was taking notice of her now.
During her radio tour she had been delighted with the impression she had made on the programmers. She also received a separate boost when she took a call from the country band Rascal Flatts. The popular three-piece, known for hits including ‘Bless the Broken Road’ and ‘What Hurts the Most’, were in a pickle after their support act for their tour had parted company with them. They asked Taylor if she would replace him. The good news was that this gave her the chance to play in front of large live audiences. The bad news was that she would have just 48 hours to prepare. Taylor stepped up to the plate, however, and took on the challenge. ‘I’m so excited and I can’t even express to you how loud I screamed when I found out,’ she wrote on MySpace. She played a six-song mini-set in front of the fans, warming them up for the main act. Critics noted that she built the sort of connection with the audience that only a much older and more experienced artist would usually be able to manage. A typical set list for Taylor around this time would begin with ‘I’m Only Me When I’m With You’ and end with ‘Picture to Burn’. Between these two, she would sing ‘Our Song’, ‘Teardrops On My Guitar’, ‘Should’ve Said No’ and – of course – her signature hit, ‘Tim McGraw’.
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