Taylor Swift

by Chas Newkey-Burden

  As her Blender cover was slotted into newsstands across America, it was time for her to attend another awards ceremony where she would, once more, clean up. The Country Music Television Awards, held in the middle of the month, provided a night of glory for her. She was the belle of the ball at the ceremony, winning two honours, including Video of the Year. The evening was hosted by Miley and Billy Ray Cyrus. ‘Are you sure? Are you serious?’ Swift said in disbelief as she accepted her first award for Female Video of the Year. Taylor later wrote that she would never forget the expression on Andrea’s face when she was announced as the winner. As the newly crowned Taylor looked out into the audience, she wrote later, she was thinking: how am I this lucky …? How did I get to live this life?

  She was barefoot for much of the evening, helping her to stand out even more on the night. This barefooted teenager cut through the corporate sterility that hung over the evening. Of her lack of footwear, she later told People, ‘I walked by Faith Hill and I was like, “This hurts so bad.” And she was like, “Take them off.” Faith Hill told me to. So I did it.’ Having accepted her award wearing a claret dress, she also performed that evening. Taylor changed into a black dress, fedora and cowboy boots to sing ‘Picture to Burn’. For the evening’s performance she added a vast, iconic bluesy introduction. She was delivering a statement: I am not merely a teenage gimmick; I am a serious artist. When the song properly kicked in she threw away the hat and flicked her hair. In the second verse she took her microphone on a walkabout and seemed out of breath. It was, though, a masterful and grand performance. With background pyrotechnics emphasising the fiery nature of the song, it made for a visually arresting experience.

  Where that performance was about fire, her next rendition at an industry bash was dominated by the opposite element: water. Taylor won the top new female vocalist award at the 43rd Annual Academy of Country Music Awards in Las Vegas in May. She dedicated the award to Andrea, saying: ‘Mom, thank you so much. I love you. This is for you!’ When she sang ‘Should’ve Said No’, it began as a tame performance. She sat in dark clothes, including a hooded black jumper, strumming her acoustic guitar and singing a gentle and slow version of the song. When it was time for the first chorus, she threw her guitar into the wings and stood at the microphone stand. For the second verse, her casual clothing was magically whipped from her by two dancers, leaving her in a black dress far more in keeping with the occasion. Gimmicks galore already, then. For the final chorus she stood under pouring water. Despite the drenching, she continued to strut defiantly, her body language echoing the song’s lyrics. As she took her bow at the end of the song, she giggled at the cheek of the production. The media were quick to play, with predictable headlines about what a ‘splash’ she had made.

  Then came the Grammys. In the end, it was British singer Amy Winehouse who won the trophy she and Taylor were both vying for. Indeed, the 24-year-old London songstress landed five awards on the night. She was not present at the ceremony, as her application for a visa to enter the United States had been delayed – ever the wild card. But Taylor quickly found consolation of sorts: she appeared in People magazine’s ‘100 Most Beautiful’ list. Not quite a Grammy, but better than a slap in the face.

  Her increasingly adult existence in public belied the fact that she was a girl who was still finishing her schooling. In the summer of 2008 she finally graduated and was bursting with excitement and pride. The latter feeling was heightened, because she had been tempted to ditch her education altogether as the lure of fame had grown. ‘Graduating high school is really, really cool,’ she said. ‘I’m so proud of it, because I stopped going to high school in tenth grade, but I started home schooling.’ For her, it had not ultimately been an either/or choice. With the encouragement of her parents, she had found a way to combine her musical ambitions and a traditional education. ‘It’s really good to know you don’t have to give up on your dreams to graduate high school, and you don’t have to quit your education to live your dreams,’ she said. ‘It’s really cool that you can do both.’

  What was cooler still was the day that she was told she was occupying both the first and second position on the Billboard Country Album Chart. Her CD and DVD pairing Beautiful Eyes and her eponymous debut album, which had since gone triple platinum, proudly stood in the number-one and number-two slots respectively. Taylor found it all very amusing. ‘It was really, really funny to read the headlines the next day that said, “Taylor Swift gets bumped out of number one – by herself,”’ she said. She quipped: ‘We’re gonna have problems, me and that girl, whoever that is!’ Beautiful Eyes was an EP released by Taylor in July 2008. It was released exclusively to Walmart stores and online sales. It included an accompanying DVD, which featured promotional videos, an interview with Taylor and footage of a live performance.

  In promoting the release, Taylor was at pains to emphasise that this was not her second album. She was also aware that she was releasing material at quite a prolific rate. ‘This is not my new album that I’ve been working on all year,’ she wrote on her MySpace blog. ‘I’m only letting my record company make a small amount of these,’ she continued. ‘The last thing I want any of you to think is that we are putting out too many releases.’ The EP’s cover was rich with red and yellow colouring. It featured Taylor in a yellow dress holding a red flower, her own eyes doing justice to the collection’s title. Beautiful Eyes peaked at number nine on the US Billboard 200 and, as we have seen, topped Billboard’s Top Country Albums chart, knocking her debut off its perch.

  As well as success in the charts, she found herself enjoying increasing recognition from the teenage market. For instance, in the summer she was named Choice Breakout Artist by Teen Choice magazine. This was a doubly satisfying moment for Taylor. Although she was collecting awards at a rapid rate, such honours still had enough of a novelty factor for her to enjoy them – particularly so with this gong, as it vindicated her insistence that, as a country music artist, she could pitch to and appeal to a teenage market. Kids were lapping up the distinctly Nashville flavour of her music and enjoying how she blended it with very adolescent lyrical themes.

  She was handed the chance to return to her roots, in a sense, when she was booked to sing the national anthem at a World Series tie between the Tampa Bay Rays and the Philadelphia Phillies. It was a milestone moment for both Taylor and some of the players. Some in the line-ups had previously played for the minor-league Reading Phillies and recalled Taylor singing ahead of their ties. It was a delicious symmetry: both they and Taylor had now made it to the big time. As she sang, Taylor was preparing to reach for a new championship moment of her own, in the form of the release of her second album, Fearless.

  Eventually, it was time for her actual second album to hit the stores – or to ‘drop’, as the US market puts it. It would make quite a noise. In working on the album, she had been able to collaborate with some fantasy figures. She wanted something new and felt that to get it she would need new faces around her. As she later recalled: ‘My absolute dream collaborators were Shellback and Max Martin on the last project. I’ve never been so challenged as a songwriter. I’ve never learned so much.’ The first single to be released from the collection was ‘Love Story’, which hit the stores on 12 September 2008. ‘This isn’t a fairytale, it’s Shakespeare, but Romeo and Juliet were always my favourite couple, because they didn’t care, and they loved each other no matter what. And it was always my favourite – except for the ending. So with “Love Story”, I just took my favourite characters and gave them the ending that they deserve.’

  More significantly, it addressed the question the media had been increasingly asking her. For the song also represented the romantic experience Taylor had been having since she had become famous – or rather the lack of it. ‘I used to be in high school where you see [a boyfriend] every day,’ she explained to the Los Angeles Times. ‘Then I was in a situation where it wasn’t so easy for me and I wrote this song because I can relate to the whole Romeo
and Juliet thing.’ Musically, the song has a poise that is emblematic of the journey Taylor had made between albums one and two. This is the sound of an artist quite in control of her craft, who is harnessing it with confidence. The concept had been inspired by the central lyric ‘This love is difficult but it’s real’. This has become her favourite line to sing live. She smiles with pride as the words roll off her tongue. Yet behind the song is a story of unfulfilled desire: she wrote it about a guy she liked, but who she never got together with properly because she feared that her friends and family would disapprove of him.

  The song takes the sad literary and real-life inspirations as springboards and leaps from them into happier terrain. That late key change makes everything warm and glowing with optimism. Yet even within that upbeat tone, Taylor was keen not to enter happy-clappy territory, or to come across as naive. ‘I have to believe in fairytales, and I have to believe in love – but not blindly,’ she told Seventeen. ‘If you do meet your Prince Charming, know he is going to have his good days and his bad days. He is going to have days when his hair looks horrible, and days when he’s moody and says something that hurts your feelings. You have to base your fairytale not upon happily ever after, but on happy right now.’

  The single’s most significant legacy was that it took her outside the US and Canada: it reached number three in New Zealand, number one in Australia and number two in Britain. This was a big moment for Taylor, akin to her leaving the country music ghetto. The richness and maturity of the single whetted the fans’ appetites for the album itself. When they heard it, they were confronted with a deft, beautiful yet strangely dark body of songs. ‘Fearless’, the title track, is a strong album opener. The drums and guitars are robust, the production lush and the overall feel is, well, fearless. She says she was inspired to write the title track while she was on tour, in common with several tracks on the album. The lyrical concerns were reflecting, in this sense, the changing life of their composer. Single, due in large part to her focusing on her career, Taylor began to imagine what an ideal first date would be like for ‘Fearless’. It led to a song about the courage of returning to the romantic fray. It is what happens after a heart-broken soul has picked themselves up and dusted themselves down. ‘This is a song about the fearlessness of falling in love,’ she said. ‘No matter how many break-up songs you write, no matter how many times you get hurt, you will always fall in love again … I think sometimes, when you’re writing love songs, you don’t write them about what you’re going through at that moment, you write them about what you wish you had.’

  Track two is one of the most discussed songs of her career. ‘Fifteen’ is, said Taylor at the time, ‘the best song I have ever written’. It has provoked a great deal of admiration for its composer. Country singer Vince Gill said that ‘Fifteen’ was a ‘great example’ of how Taylor writes songs that are ‘pointed right at’ her young fans. Here again, Taylor was like an elder sibling for many of her listeners, taking on the music mantle of ‘spokeswoman for a generation’ that she had been handed. Again, she carried it off with commendable grace. ‘It says, “I should have known this, I didn’t know that, here’s what I learned, here’s what I still don’t know.”’ She added that it was advice ‘to my former self’, but also ‘advice to any girl going into ninth grade and feeling like you’re the smallest person on the planet’.

  It is an emotional track. The challenges and heartaches that Taylor describes had happened to her and await many of her fans: the listener is weighed down by the pain of it all. So is the singer: Taylor admits that she cried while recording the song. Listeners of all ages are vulnerable to tears themselves as they mull over the message of the music. The younger ones can relate to what Taylor is telling them, the elders can remember the pain and then feel it afresh as they imagine their own daughters, nieces or other relatives facing it. Ultimately, there is little anyone can do to guard their younger relatives from these sorts of heartaches. This song goes some way towards addressing that; Taylor shows girls that at least they are not alone in feeling these things.

  The song has a real-life inspiration. Taylor’s friend Abigail went through a painful break-up when she and Taylor were in ninth grade. It was that experience that led Taylor to write the song. As she told CMT, she had never gone through heartbreak as painful as Abigail’s. ‘Maybe I haven’t had that break-up yet,’ she said. ‘Maybe there will be a break-up where I’ll just cry every time I think of it – but the things that make me cry are when the people I love have gone through pain and I’ve seen it. “Fifteen” talks about how my best friend Abigail got her heart broken … and singing about that absolutely gets me every time.’ It was Abigail who was left feeling like she was the smallest person on the planet.

  After the aforementioned ‘Love Story’, the album’s tracklist turns to ‘Hey Stephen’. This is an entertaining song about a crush she developed while on the road with Love and Theft, who opened for her at some shows during 2008. She went weak at the knees over their singer and guitarist Stephen Barker Liles and penned this song. When the album was released she texted him to let him know. He was flattered and emailed her back to say thanks. He later spoke to People magazine about their friendship. ‘We’ve become great friends since Love and Theft started opening shows for her,’ he said. ‘I think everyone would agree she’s a total sweetheart and anyone would be lucky to go out with her.’

  However, he has since come out with mixed noises about Taylor and the song. He told Yahoo! Music the inspiration for the song was ‘probably just a crush, or lack of people to write about’. Yet later he would write a song about Taylor in return. Not only that, he would state that ‘Taylor genuinely loves people in a way only the Lord would,’ while speaking to internet TV channel Planet Verge. A bizarre turn of events.

  But the song is great fun, lending some light relief to the album. It kicks off with some playful rhyming, while the ‘Mmmm’ at the end of the chorus is raunchy and was the most adult moment of Taylor’s music up to that point. It seems that singing about someone who was just a passing fancy, rather than anything more serious than that, brings out her playful side. Several commentators pointed out that the song is rich in already-familiar Taylor motifs: kissing a partner in the rain and turning up at their bedroom window.

  The festive feel does not last long. Where ‘Hey Stephen’ is all fun and in-jokes, ‘White Horse’ is Taylor at her sombre best. It concerns, as Taylor put it, the ‘earth-shattering moment’ when you realise that the fairytales you had dreamed of enjoying with someone are not going to come true. She sings that this is not ‘Hollywood’, but a ‘small town’. She sings painfully about the number of dreams and happy endings she had in mind with her guy. All she ever wanted, she complains, was the truth.

  Interestingly, Taylor has described the studio version as being musically ‘sparse’; in reality it is by no means a soft-production track. The guitar, piano and cello combine densely. Taylor’s voice – here at its saddest, disappointed best – blends beautifully. On an album not short of sad songs, this is a really gloomy track. The man is no prince, and it is too late, she concedes, for his white horse to come into her life. Few artists do broodingly disappointed as well as Taylor – here, she does it brilliantly.

  Although ‘White Horse’ was originally earmarked for her third album, it was brought onto Fearless after the producers of the smash-hit television show Grey’s Anatomy phoned Taylor’s management to ask if they could feature it on the opening episode of Season Five. It was an ‘easy yes’ for Taylor to sign off the song to them – Grey’s Anatomy is her favourite television show. An easy ‘yes’, and an emotional one, as she explained later. ‘You should’ve seen the tears streaming down my face when I got the phone call that they were going to use that song,’ she said. ‘I have never been that excited. This is my life’s goal, to have a song on Grey’s Anatomy. My love of Grey’s Anatomy has never wavered. It’s my longest relationship to date.’ She could hardly believe her fortune.

>   ‘You Belong With Me’ is another playful track, both musically and thematically. The inspiration for the song came when she was travelling on a tour bus. She heard a male musician placating a girlfriend over the telephone. ‘The guy was going, “Baby, of course I love you more than music, I’m sorry. I had to go to sound check. I’m so sorry I didn’t stay on the phone.”’ In the song, Taylor wonders why the guy cannot realise that he has more in common with her than with this distant girl. Lyrically, the song is clever, including a couplet about how the other woman wears ‘short skirts’, while Taylor wears ‘T-shirts’. Musically, it is a decent, functional effort.

  A central motif in Taylor’s work is the concept of invisibility. We have seen it, of course, in the song ‘Invisible’, but it also appears in other songs of hers, including ‘Teardrops On My Guitar’. It features, too, in ‘You Belong With Me’. She sings about how hard it is to see something brilliant right in front of you. While this idea of a great girl being essentially invisible to a man is clearly a driving force for Taylor romantically and musically, it can also be seen as fuelling her overall energy and determination. Her lyrical obsession with the concept suggests that she is inherently haunted by the idea of being invisible to the world, and therefore puts much time and effort into getting as many people as possible to notice her, to see the great thing standing right in front of them. We will see this theme again in subsequent tracks released by Taylor.