Taylor Swift Read online

  Cover

  Title Page

  Introduction

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  The Wit and Wisdom of Taylor Swift: Her 10 Greatest Quotes

  Taylor Swift Discography

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  Picture Section

  Picture Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  As Taylor Swift looked back over the year 2013, she could hardly believe what a momentous twelve months it had been for her. Sales of her fourth album, Red, had taken her total record sales beyond 26 million. Meanwhile, her songs had now been downloaded 75 million times, making her the number-one digital singles artist of all time.

  Taylor’s achievements become ever more impressive when you measure them against those of other artists. For instance, at the start of the year she became the first artist since The Beatles to spend six or more weeks at number one with three consecutive albums.

  She notched up all these remarkable accomplishments before she turned 24. Yet young Taylor was treated like an industry veteran when, in November 2013, the Country Music Association Awards handed her its Pinnacle Award, which is its equivalent of the lifetime achievement gong. Most awards hand such honours to artists in their fifties or beyond. At the ceremony, a video tribute was aired, in which Julia Roberts, Justin Timberlake and Mick Jagger gushed over the youngster’s talent and influence.

  While the middle-aged country music industry treats Taylor like an elder stateswoman, the teenage-driven pop market screams its appreciation for her as one of its own. Serious music magazines treat her with reverence, while celebrity gossip rags obsess over her love life. And who else but Taylor could carry the banjo into the pop world with such effortless grace and hipness?

  She is the princess of paradox. While some artists feel constrained by the boundaries of music and image, she flutters lightly over them. As well as dipping her feet in the waters of pop, she has written bold arena rock tunes and even experimented with dubstep.

  This bewitching young lady of contrasts can, within one album, softly whisper lyrics which offer sweet, touching perspectives on love and romance, then spit out furious choruses of vengeance, defiance and denunciation. She is a conventionally stunning, leggy blonde who nonetheless plays the part of the perennial gawky outsider.

  In an era of X-rated stage productions from the likes of Rihanna and Lady Gaga, Taylor stands tall as a clean-cut wholesome American – a demure diva of apple-pie sweetness. Just weeks after her friend Miley Cyrus created a global storm by ‘twerking’ at an awards ceremony, the elegantly turned-out Taylor was grabbing the headlines her own way by sharing a microphone with Prince William and Jon Bon Jovi at a posh charity event in Kensington Gardens.

  And so a year that began with her kissing One Direction heart-throb Harry Styles in Manhattan ended with her high-fiving the man in line to be the future King of England. Meanwhile, the front cover of the influential New Yorker magazine named her ‘The biggest pop star in the world’. The respected – and rather serious – music monthly Rolling Stone was also joining in the cacophony of praise for Taylor. Focusing on her performances during the Red tour, it gushed: ‘Seeing Taylor Swift live in 2013 is seeing a maestro at the top of her or anyone’s game.’

  On the surface, Taylor played it cool and acted as if all these experiences were just a normal part of life. Inside, though, she could scarcely believe how thrilling her existence had become. It is all so far from the world in which she grew up.

  How different it could all have been … Taylor Swift was never meant to be a singer-songwriter; she was supposed to become a stockbroker. Her parents even chose her Christian name with a business path in mind. Her mother, Andrea, selected a gender-neutral name for her baby girl so that when she grew up and applied for jobs in the male-dominated finance industry no one would know if she were male or female. It was a plan that came from a loving place, but it was not one that would ever be realised. Instead, millions and millions of fans across the world would know exactly which gender Andrea’s firstborn was, without ever meeting her.

  In Taylor’s track ‘The Best Day’, which touchingly evokes a childhood full of wonder, she sings of her ‘excellent’ father whose ‘strength is making me stronger’. That excellent father is Scott Kingsley Swift, who studied business at the University of Delaware. He lived in the Brown residence hall. There, he made lots of friends, one of whom, Michael DiMuzio, would later cross paths with Taylor professionally. Scott graduated with a first-class degree and set about building his career in similarly impressive style. Perhaps a knack for business is in the blood: his father and grandfather also worked in finance.

  Scott set up his own investment-banking firm called the Swift Group, which offered clear, well-informed financial advice under the Merrill Lynch umbrella. He had joined the world-renowned firm in the 1980s and rose quickly, eventually becoming the first vice president. He often travelled with his work and it was on one such trip, to Harris, in Texas, that he met a young lady, six years his junior, called Andrea Gardener Finlay. Like him, she worked in finance, as a marketing manager in an advertising agency, and was a determined and highly driven soul.

  Although the two found that they had a great deal in common, Andrea was focused more on her career than thoughts of marriage when Scott first crossed her path. She had needed to work hard to break into the finance industry, which in the late 1970s was an almost entirely male sector. Yet break in she did, and she could afford to feel immense satisfaction at having done so. As Taylor later told a television interviewer, her mother had, prior to meeting Scott, ‘a career on her own and lived alone’ and was financially independent. Taylor’s knowledge of this dimension of her mother’s past has filled her with respect for Andrea and shaped her own approach to work and life.

  Having worked so hard and been so strong, Andrea was not in the mood to take her eye off the ball. Yet when she met Scott he melted her heart and they quickly fell in love. They married in Texas on 20 February 1988 but moved to Pennsylvania, settling in West Reading in Berks County. Then, at the age of 30, Andrea found out she was pregnant with her first child. The girl was born on 13 December 1989 in Wyomissing. They named her Taylor Alison, and she showed very early signs of the star quality that would propel her to fame later in life. Within hours of her birth, the baby girl had already made quite an impression on a member of staff at the hospital. A paediatrician told Andrea: ‘She’s a really good-natured baby, but she knows exactly what she wants and how to get it!’ At the time, Andrea wondered what on earth the man was talking about. How could he possibly read the personality of a baby just a few hours old? In time, Andrea would have to agree that his description had been right on the money.

  For those who believe in ‘birth order’ – the theory that a significant amount of your character and life experience is determined by the order in which you are born into your family: as first, middle, last or only child – Taylor’s firstborn status is pertinent. Firstborns enjoy uninterrupted attention from their parents until a sibling arrives. Typical characteristics of firstborns are a pronounced eagerness to please, and an increased tendency to conform to rules. However, firstborns are likely to show responsibility or leadership in crisis situations.

  They can also be nurturing and caring, but are vulnerable to episodes of self-criticism and jealousy – emotions that were first sparked the day they realised they were no longer the only child of the household, and saw their parents’ attention and affections move in part towards someone else. As for astrolog
ers, they ascribe mixed traits to Taylor’s star sign of Sagittarius. Those born under this sign are said to be, on the positive side, honest, generous and oozing with charisma. Less positively, they can also be reckless, superficial and lacking in tact. Other famous Sagittarians include Nicki Minaj, Jimi Hendrix, Frank Sinatra and Brad Pitt.

  Taylor first lived on the 11-acre Christmas-tree farm that had been the property of Scott’s father in the past. Based in the town of Cumru, it provided a useful additional income for the family and allowed them to live in increasing splendour as Taylor grew up. To her, the place seemed enormous. ‘And it was the most magical, wonderful place in the world,’ she has said. She could run free and let her imagination run riot, which would prove key to her emotional and creative development. While some childhoods squeeze all artistic aspirations out of a youngster, Taylor’s childhood nurtured and encouraged her dreams. In her inspirational book The Artist’s Way, Julia Coleman outlines compellingly how important this is to any young creative. Had Taylor’s dreams been squashed as a child, she might well have ended up working in finance as her parents had originally envisaged; another would-be artist who slipped through the net.

  At three years of age, Taylor got a younger sibling in the form of brother Austin, who was born on 4 March 1993. Within two years of his arrival, Andrea decided to set her career to one side and become a full-time mother. Andrea’s influence on Taylor remained profound. ‘She totally raised me to be logical and practical,’ said Taylor. ‘I was brought up with such a strong woman in my life and I think that had a lot to do with me not wanting to do anything halfway.’ Taylor speaks about her parents in contrasting yet balancing tones. Andrea’s rational and down-to-earth nature is balanced by Scott, who, says Taylor, is ‘just a big teddy bear who tells me that everything I do is perfect’. Where Andrea is described as ‘realistic’, Scott is described as ‘head-in-the-clouds’ and optimistic.

  Yet he is not all dreamy glass-half-full chirpiness: his sound financial know-how has been of great help to Taylor, particularly since she became famous. ‘Business-wise, he’s brilliant,’ she said. Although her parents had a financial route already mapped out for Taylor in their minds, she had other ideas. At the age of three she began singing, even delivering an impressive rendition of the vocally tricky Righteous Brothers’ classic ‘Unchained Melody’. She enjoyed the feeling of sweetly singing the lyrics of songs, and she found she had a strong memory for words and melodies. When Scott and Andrea took her to see films at the cinema, she would sing songs from the soundtrack on the way home, having somehow been able to commit the lyrics and tune to memory during one listen. Taylor told the Daily Mail that her parents would be ‘freaked out’ by this feat of musical memory. ‘I retained music more than anything else,’ she added.

  Where had this magic come from? To find musical deftness in the family tree, we need to hop back a generation to Taylor’s maternal grandmother, Marjorie Finlay. A charismatic and lively lady, Finlay became a successful opera singer, admired in many countries across the world. She had married a man whose work in the oil industry took him around the world. This meant she performed in countries as far apart as America, Singapore and Puerto Rico.

  Ten years after giving birth to Andrea, Finlay and her family settled in America. Here, she was handed a host of new opportunities, including membership of the Houston Grand Opera. She appeared in musicals of an operatic bent – such as Rossini’s The Barber of Seville and Smetana’s The Bartered Bride – and in other, more mainstream productions, including Bernstein’s West Side Story. She also became a television presenter, working in Latin America as the hostess of a leading television variety show called The Pan American Show. She was a vivacious and occasionally comical figure. Taylor told Wood & Steel magazine that her grandmother’s Spanish was so bad that she became a joke among some viewers, who found her ‘hysterically funny’.

  Yet her charisma passed down the family tree to her granddaughter. Scott has noted several similarities between his mother-in-law and Taylor. ‘The two of them had some sort of magic where they could walk into a room and remember everyone’s name,’ he said. ‘Taylor has the grace and the same physique of Andrea’s mother. Andrea’s mother had this unique quality: if she was going into a room, literally everybody loved Marjorie.’ Taylor, who remembers the ‘thrill’ of hearing her grandmother sing, also noted Marjorie’s charisma – and she liked what she saw. ‘When she would walk into a room, everyone would look at her, no matter what,’ Taylor told the Sunday Times. For young Taylor, the ‘it factor’ she identified in Marjorie gave her something that many children are scanning people for. It made her grandmother, said Taylor, ‘different from everyone else’. The youngster keenly wanted to be the same.

  Yet despite this entertainment-industry heritage further up the family tree, Taylor grew up among a wholesome clan. The Swifts are a Catholic family. Taylor attended pre-school at Alvernia Montessori School, which is run by nuns. ‘She always liked to sing,’ the school’s head, Sister Anne Marie Coll, told the Reading Eagle. The family were regulars in church, and these services gave Taylor yet more experience of singing, as she joined in the hymns. When she was six years of age, Taylor began to listen to music seriously. An early artist to grab her attention was LeAnn Rimes, the country/pop singer who became famous at the age of 14.

  Swift had to go her own way to discover the charms of Rimes, as that sort of music was not commonplace in the family home. Andrea, for instance, was a fan of rockier sounds, such as Def Leppard. Taylor says that her mother listened to a lot of their music when she was pregnant with her. However, the Swifts were a ‘random family when it comes to musical tastes’, which meant Taylor could find her own place within it all. ‘LeAnn Rimes was my first impression of country music,’ she told The Guardian. ‘I got her first album when I was six. I just really loved how she could be making music and having a career at such a young age.’

  She also fell in love with other artists including Shania Twain and Dixie Chicks. Then she explored the history of country music, digging deep enough to discover, to her joy, older acts such as Patsy Cline and Dolly Parton. She became, she said, ‘infatuated’ with the sound and the ‘storytelling’ of the genre. ‘I could relate to it. I can’t really tell you why. With me, it’s instinctual.’ At the age of 10 she was bowled over with admiration for Shania Twain. Taylor was impressed by Twain’s independent nature, and the fact that she ‘wrote all her own songs’. She told Time magazine: ‘That meant so much to me, even as a 10-year-old. Just knowing that the stories she was telling on those songs – those were her stories.’

  Meanwhile, Taylor was continuing to show flashes of the same star quality that her famous ancestor possessed. Perhaps it was her grandmother who directly bequeathed Taylor her charisma. Andrea still remembers how, when Taylor was five years of age, she arranged for family photographs to be taken for Christmas cards. Her daughter was, recalled Andrea in an interview with Sugar magazine, ‘really posing’ in the snaps. So much so, in fact, that the photographer suggested that Taylor could have a career as a child model in Los Angeles. Mindful of the potentially seedy elements of that industry, Andrea decided that this was not the path she wanted her girl to follow.

  Instead, Taylor continued to tread a more artistic path – but not one that was solely musical. She told the Washington Post that writing became an obsession for her from an early age. ‘Writing is pretty involuntary to me,’ she said. ‘I’m always writing.’ That obsession began with a fascination for poetry, and ‘trying to figure out the perfect combination of words, with the perfect amount of syllables and the perfect rhyme to make it completely pop off the page’. As with music, she found that poems she read would stay with her; she would replay the catchy rhymes she had read and then try and conjure up some of her own. In English classes at school, many of Taylor’s classmates would groan when the teacher asked them to write poems of their own. Not Taylor. Before she knew it, she had written three pages of rhymes. Many of these were stro
ng efforts.

  In fourth grade, she entered a national poetry contest with a piece of work she had written entitled Monster In My Closet. She was so excited to compete. It included the lines: ‘There’s a monster in my closet and I don’t know what to do / Have you ever seen him? / Has he ever pounced on you?’ It turned into a long poem and one that Taylor selected carefully from her collection. ‘I picked the most gimmicky one I had; I didn’t want to get too dark on them,’ she said. She was delighted to win and became ‘consumed’ with building on the success to write ever more impressive couplets.

  She also loved stories: reading them, including The Giving Tree, a children’s picture book written and illustrated by Shel Silverstein. First published during the 1960s, it is a story about a female tree and a male human who become friends. Taylor also enjoyed the Amelia Bedelia series, which was written by Peggy Parish and, more recently, by her nephew Herman Parish. Stories became a passion for the young Swift; she loved hearing them and telling them. ‘All I wanted to do was talk and all I wanted to do was hear stories,’ she told journalist and talk-show host Katie Couric. ‘I would drive my mom insane,’ she added. She usually refused to go to bed unless a story was read to her. ‘And I always wanted to hear a new one,’ she said. These readings lit a creative spark in the girl. Andrea remembered that Taylor ‘wrote all the time’ as a child. She believes that if her daughter had not made it as a musician she would have tried to become an author or journalist. It is conceivable that she may still take the former path. One summer, during the long holidays from school, Taylor even wrote a novel. It was a 350-page effort that she has scarcely elaborated on. But neither has she ruled out publishing it one day, so Swifties may yet get to read her story. It would be guaranteed plenty of attention and sales.

  Readers should not be surprised if her novel turns out to have a dark side to it. As a kid she often dreamt up imaginary conversations and storylines involving the dead squirrels and birds that had been killed near the house by barn cats. These morbid moments suggest a darker side to her character, beneath the blonde-haired wholesome American girl. She also wrote short stories, which impressed her tutors, who felt she had a strong grasp of English far beyond her years. She credits her surroundings at the Christmas-tree farm for her creative imagination. There, as she ran free, she could ‘create stories and fairy tales out of everyday life’, she remembered.