Taylor Swift: The country-pop star on the secret of her success

By LOUETTE HARDING

'You learn lessons in how to treat people, and sometimes you learn them too late,' says Taylor


Precocious musical talent, model good looks, multimillionaire status – 20-year-old country-pop star Taylor Swift leads a charmed life. But, as she tells Louette Harding, it’s the rejection and heartbreak she pours into her songs that have driven her to succeed…

Earlier this year, Taylor Swift used some of the estimated $50 million she
earned by the age of 20 to buy herself

a three-bedroom condominium in Nashville, and over the months she has put her stamp on it. ‘There is this fish pond like a moat around the central fireplace,’ she says. ‘The chimney rises to the ceiling like a tower and on one side of it is a spiral staircase going to a landing/conservatory in the shape of a birdcage.

I sit in there all the time – it’s so fun.’ As a little girl, did she like fairy tales by any chance? ‘I was in love with the idea of fairy tales. My bedroom
has a balcony that overlooks the living area, Juliet-style,’ she adds. ‘Pretty shameless.’

The brazen girliness is but one aspect of this talented singer-songwriter whose country-pop second album was 2009’s bestseller in the US, and who already has three Grammys on display in that quirky living room. (There’s a fourth, but she gave it to her mum.) Her songs are heavily autobiographical, which adds a gossip-column frisson to the fun of decoding them. On her latest album, Speak Now, one track is about ‘running into a guy I used to be in a relationship with at an awards show’. (OK, I’m thinking – the subject of the song must be Joe Jonas of the pop-rock band the Jonas Brothers, or Taylor Lautner, the actor who plays the werewolf hunk in the Twilight vampire movies.)

‘He was sitting a few feet away from me. There was this horrible awkward silent fight going on between us, not even glancing in the other person’s direction.’ So you never got to be friends? ‘No, that song is about a relationship that ended pretty badly.’

(Must be Joe Jonas, then, who ended their relationship in a 27-second phone call, whereas Taylor S and Taylor L – Taylor Squared as the US press dubbed them when they dated – are now supposed to be friends.) Taylor Swift’s music has that effect, taking you back to the idiocies and idealism of youth with a sigh and a chuckle.


We are talking in a private members’ club in Nashville, the set for our photographs. In person, Taylor has the striking otherness of a supermodel: 5ft 11in, thin as a filament, with feline eyes which she has a bit of a complex about, thinking them too small, although in practice their imperfection saves her from mere prettiness. Already she is an old hand at interviews and has a few standard answers she rattles off, though she lacks the guile to disguise what she is doing. She is diligent and polite and bears the unmistakable reserve of the bullied child, wearing courtesy like an elegant armour. At least that’s how it seems to me, as the mother of a bullied daughter. When I mention this, Taylor’s guard drops like a curtain and there’s a sudden flash of raw affinity.

She is the sheltered product of doting parents, Scott, a stockbroker, and Andrea, who gave up her own high-flying career in financial marketing to raise Taylor and her younger brother Austin at their 15-acre hobby farm in Pennsylvania. Taylor remembers her early childhood as running free with tangled hair, riding horses. There were no close neighbours so theirs was a pretty self-contained family unit, with Andrea’s

opera-singer mother providing the thrill of showiness. It was this grandmother who got Taylor hooked on singing and performing, so that she became a regular in children’s musical theatre shows and competitions. But when the family moved to a suburban neighbourhood, life changed from idyllic to ‘trying to fit in’.

Aged 12, her efforts came crashing down. She thinks her peers found her ‘weird’. I suspect that they were jealous of her growing success at local festivals when they had her patronisingly tagged as the tall, thin, pale kid who was no good at sports.

One night, soon after she’d sung the national anthem at a professional basketball game, she rang round her friends to see if anyone wanted to hang out with her at the local mall. ‘That memory is one of those painful ones you’ll never fully get over,’ she says, emotionally. ‘At that point I’d been shunned from the group for whatever reason and I was still trying desperately to be included. That evening, I called them up and they each said no and Mom said, “You know what? You want to go to the mall, let’s go together.” And we ran into this entire group of girls who had told me they were busy that night. In situations like that my mum has known exactly the right time to run away. There are situations where you have to encourage someone to be tough and there are times when you should just run. So we got in the car and we drove to the mall that’s an hour and a half away but is a better mall.’

She says this with a small deprecatory laugh. ‘And we showed them in our own tiny way. We had a great time.’ And you wrote a song about it? ‘I did.’ ‘The Best Day’ reduced me to tears; Taylor is touched when I mention this – apparently it has the same effect on her own mother.

‘Any time I feel heartbreak, I say to myself, “I can write
a song about this”’

‘In school, I dealt with a bunch of different kinds of being alone,’ Taylor continues. ‘There’s being alone because no one talks to you. There’s feeling alone when you walk up to a table at lunch and you’re not welcome to sit down. There’s standing on a stage at a local festival with your acoustic guitar that’s as big as you and some kid from your grade screams obscenities at you. It’s school. It’s what everyone goes through at some point. And the only thing that got me through really tough days was writing songs about it. I would sit there on those lonely days and say, “It’s OK, because I can write a song about this later.” I’ve carried that mantra with me since: any time I feel pain, rejection, heartbreak, I subliminally say to myself, “I can write a song about this and then it will feel better.”’

She remains thin-skinned. She avoids reading blog comments about herself because of the random cruelty of the net. ‘It hurt me deeply in school and it hurts me deeply now.’ So Kanye West must have really touched a raw nerve: last year, the rapper stormed on to the stage to protest when she won ‘Best Female Video’ at the MTV Video Music Awards (he was rooting for Beyoncé). Did that feeling of public humiliation take her straight back to school? She shoots me a keen sideways glance and says by way of agreement, ‘It’s one of those things that impacted me really heavily and emotionally.’


She says when she wrote her first song, aged 12 – a kid who loved writing poetry mucking about with three chords on a guitar – she knew instantly, ‘This was all I wanted in life. There wasn’t going to be a back-up plan.’ When I ask her what she wants in the medium-term, she says a stable relationship and to write books or songs, even if she is no longer recording them herself. And she suffers from the true writer’s ambivalence and detachment. ‘Sometimes in situations where life is happening to me, I’m looking for the metaphor and I’m wondering how to express my feelings in a chorus,’ she admits.

She was only 14 when Sony/ATV Music Publishing in Nashville signed her as a staff
writer. Her parents, who had nightly endured her nagging about moving to the country-music capital, then agreed to relocate, yanking an ever-tolerant Austin out of his school too. For a while Taylor co-wrote in her publishers’ offices after school (where her experience was less unhappy this time), then she spent her final year
‘home-schooled’ (in reality studying in the back of cars) while she completed a radio tour. In 2006, her eponymous debut album was released on the independent label Big Machine Records, whose founder Scott Borchetta was prepared to take a risk on her. It went quadruple platinum.

‘I’d been shunned by my peer group and was desperate to be included’
The follow-up album, Fearless, was even more successful. As a teetotal girl who shuns scandal she was condescendingly dubbed the ‘anti-Britney’. Speak Now is pitched at an older listener, but she is not about to lead her younger fans astray. During our photo shoot, as she reclined in a gothic dress slit to the thigh, her PR Paula whispered, ‘Too much leg!’ and Taylor immediately pulled the skirt closed.

But she’s more than just a transient teeny phenomenon. She is an alchemical combination. As well as the pleasing voice, the nice image, the songwriting brilliance, she is also an astonishingly intuitive businesswoman. She has created a Taylor Nation (an affiliation of fans’ websites) and her website encourages them to ‘pre-sell’ her new album online, with the promise of a meeting with their idol-princess for the most successful. It’s marketing that’s finely tuned to the youthful enthusiasms of the core of her fanbase. She has a management team of four, including her mother, who convene weekly to discuss the way ahead, but Taylor has the final say and many of the ideas are hers. ‘I don’t know if I would feel right handing decisions to other people and living with the consequences. Taking responsibility for your career is important if you want it to go in the direction you have in your mind,’ she says. There are Taylor backpacks, dolls, T-shirts, greetings cards. Her schedule to launch Speak Now involves crisscrossing the Atlantic and features all the big-hitting US television shows including Today and the Late Show with David Letterman.


She feels she can only offer a boyfriend ‘what’s left over’, after giving ‘heart and soul on stage every night’. She admits she has only had three real relationships. She dated Jonas in 2008 and the breakup inspired her hit ‘Forever and Always’, to which he retorted with a song called ‘Paranoid’, like an adolescent revenge battle conducted through iTunes. A year later, she teamed up with Taylor Lautner on screen and off when she made Valentine’s Day, a brief and not entirely successful foray into acting. Rumour has it that the track ‘Back to December’ on the new album is a song of apology for dumping him. She says to me, ‘In relationships, you learn lessons in how to treat people, and sometimes you learn them too late. If you’re me, you go over in your head a million times what you would have done differently. This is a song expressing regret. Sometimes every voice in your head is screaming, “You need to apologise. This was not handled well. You hurt somebody.”’ So has the subject heard the song yet? ‘No.’ So you don’t know how he’ll react? ‘I don’t,’ she says in a small voice.

She senses my amusement that so many tracks have been written about so few Romeos. Just three relationships? (The third was with an anonymous schoolboy.) ‘I wasn’t factoring in the almost-relationships, and they’re almost more inspiring,’ she adds, wryly self-knowing. ‘Almost-relationships are very important to the writing process.’ This switch from girl to adult is an endearing trait: ‘I love not really knowing if
I’m a grown-up,’ she says winningly.


Taylor in New Orleans performing at the opening game of the American football season in September


We carry on with the song-inspiration game by talking about the title track on Speak Now. ‘One of my friends was talking about how her ex was marrying another girl and how she was heartbroken over it. I said, “Are you going to speak now?” You know, speak now or for ever hold your peace; burst into the church. I then went home and had this terrible dream about an ex-boyfriend getting married and I woke up and immediately wrote my game plan should it become reality.’ She is laughing. I do not think Jonas or Lautner need to worry that she is truly going to interrupt a future wedding service. So is she single? ‘Yes. I’m not a mopy single girl. I wake up in the morning and think, “What do I need to do today?” and at no point do I think, “I need to find a boyfriend.”’ It’s a nicely acerbic comment and one prickling with the tension between naivety and independence.

Actually, the very mechanism behind her writing is a struggle towards maturity. She says, ‘For me, writing songs is a way of justifying things that happen in my life and making it seem as if they happened for a reason – if only to teach me something. If I can write a song then it almost becomes this golden-framed memory. It not only helps me understand why we feel pain, it makes me celebrate it afterwards.’

She says she would not be so driven if she hadn’t felt the need to scream ‘I’ll show you all!’ at the six girls who decided to reject her. ‘There are two ways you can go with it. You can let it destroy you…or you can use it as fuel to drive you: to dream bigger, work harder. I wasn’t invited to parties and I look back now and I’m so thankful that I was at home, playing the guitar until my fingers bled.’

What about the girls involved? Have they ever been in touch? She nods. ‘I don’t think they even remember what happened. And when I see them sitting in line at my meet-and-greets wearing my T-shirts, I’m not going to walk up to them and say, “How could you do that?” Because look at how life has gone. They were there for a reason, and I’m happy about it.’

Taylor’s new album Speak Now is out now on Mercury Records





source: dailymail

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