The Big Read: Taylor’s Swift rise to the top
She was only 16 when she released her first single and now she's the biggest pop star in the world, her lyrics fearlessly personal. She plays Croke Park this week, says
IN the summer of 2006, a frizzy-haired 16-year-old released her debut single. She had written the song in her final year of school, as she and her boyfriend were breaking up. The lyrics were plaintive and a little gooey, but with a bittersweet kick that belied both her youth and the fact that she was operating in the deeply unfashionable genre of American country music.
“I wanted it so badly to get into the top 10 at iTunes,” Taylor Swift would later tell USA Today. “So when it was sitting at 11, I downloaded it and it went into the top 10. Then, I really wanted it to be top-five, so I downloaded it again when it was sitting at six. Then, I really wanted it to be No 1 when my album came out, so I downloaded it again, and then it went No 1.”
Few outside of the Nashville pop scene had heard of Swift, when, in June of that year, she put out her first single, ‘Tim McGraw’, named after the country star of whom she and her boyfriend were fans (it’s one of the things her beau would remember about her, she observed).
Twelve years later, she is perhaps the biggest pop star on the planet and is counting down to two nights at Croke Park, a feat only U2 have previously matched (even the Rolling Stones had to draw the line at one evening in the Dublin monolith).
Swift has ascended on her own terms. She’s never pursued controversy, not in her songs and not on social media. Nor has she sexualised herself. And rather than singing, fluffily, about love or friendship, her songs have taken a figurative blade to ex-boyfriends, as well as lacerating her detractors. Swift has, in other words, broken all the rules, even declining to give any interviews promoting last year’s Reputation album, a commentary on the media industry complex and its love of deconstructing celebrities until there is nothing left. She is one of the world’s most popular singers, and a phenomenon that refuses to be pigeonholed.
She is a perfect pop star for our age. In 2013, years before the MeToo movement against sexual harassment, she spoke out about a country music DJ who sexually assaulted her at a meet-and-greet. He got fired and sued her.
Having to relive the incident was immensely stressful for Swift and her family. Her mother, Andrea, was so upset that she threw up. However, Swift never doubted that she was doing the right thing. She was not for turning.
“I’m not going to let you, or your client, make me feel in any way that this is my fault,” she said from the witness stand.
“Here we are, years later, and I’m being blamed for the unfortunate events of his life that are the product of his decisions — not mine.”
Swift was standing up for herself, but also for other women in the entertainment industry, as she would tell Time magazine, which put her on the cover of its ‘Me Too’ issue, last Christmas.
“I was headlining a major arena tour and there were a number of people in the room that saw this, plus a photo of it, happening,” she said.
“I figured that if he would be brazen enough to assault me under these risky circumstances and high stakes, imagine what he might do to a vulnerable, young artist, if given the chance. It was important to report the incident to his radio station, because I felt like they needed to know”.
A young woman walking tall in the music industry is, alas, not an everyday sight. Swift, predictably, has not always been appreciated for her strength and candour. She was, for instance, accused of putting her image under lockdown, when she didn’t promote Reputation in the media, while the snarling tenor of her single, ‘Look What You Made Me Do’, was misinterpreted as “catty”, “bitchy”, and various other misogynistic adjectives.
YET, if Swift was angry — and she certainly sounded like it on ‘Look What You Made Me Do’ — who could blame her? Her personal life has been the subject of a hyper-scrutiny few other artists have had to endure. Outside the TMZ newsroom, nobody truly cares who Beyonce dated in high school or what happened between Katy Perry and ex-husband, Russell Brand, in the run-up to their divorce.
Swift, by contrast, is a bug under a jar. Her relationship with One Direction’s Harry Styles was subject to more think-pieces than Brexit; when she split from actor Tom Hiddleston, the news-quake could be felt across the globe (social media couldn’t believe ‘Hiddleswift’ was over). Swift isn’t just a pop star — she is the focus of the entire planet’s prurience.
Critics argue she has only herself to blame. ‘Tim McGraw’ was just the first of many songs written about boyfriends. ‘Back to December’ is alleged to be about Twilight star Taylor Lautner, whom she briefly dated (“Your guard is up and I know why/Because the last time you saw me is still burned in the back of your mind”). She skewered the musician John Mayer on ‘Dear John’ nd actor, Jake Gyllenhaal, who
reportedly broke up with her by text message, on ‘We Are Never, Ever Getting Back Together’. If she puts her personal life out there, goes such logic, surely it’s fair game for the media to tuck in, too?
Swift’s counter-argument is that she is merely setting the record straight. The gossip media — or, as it is otherwise known, the entire internet — salivates over her latest romance. With that sort of clamour going on, she is entirely within her rights to present her life from her perspective.
“I like the way the stories of my relationships sound to music more than the way they look in print, in gossip columns, or in me talking about them in interviews,” Swift said in 2012.
“I think it’s a better way of telling the stories.”
Fans “know whatever I’m going through now, they’ll hear about it on a record someday”, she said. “They’ll hear the real story. There’s a little bit of lag time. It’s not as instant as going on a gossip blog. But it’s much more accurate.”
Along with a talent for twisting the knife, Swift retains elements of the girl next door who can’t quite believe how far she has come. Even well into her career, she remained more than a little astonished by her stardom. A 2015 profile in GQ magazine opens with the singer being driven through Los Angeles in an SUV when Justin Timberlake calls. Afterwards, she can’t help hugging herself, such is her excitement at having spoken to him — no matter that, in pop terms, she’s the heavyweight champion, not he.
Then, her story was deeply unconventional from the start. Swift was born into relative wealth. Her father was a successful hedge fund manager, while her mother had, prior to Swift’s birth, worked as marketing executive at a financial corporation. The apocryphal story of Swift and younger brother, Austin, growing up on a Christmas tree farm in Pennsylvania, tends to gloss over the fact that her dad bought the farm from a client.
STILL, privilege can be its own curse, as Swift discovered when she went to a fancy private school in Wyomissing, Pennsylvania. Quiet and gawky in that adolescent way, she became a target for bullies. “My worst time of day was when I used to pick Taylor up from school,” her mother would recall. “I would know things hadn’t been great. Literally, the shunning that would take place at school — she would sit down at lunchtime and everyone would move.”
“A lot of girls thought I was weird,” Swift recollected. “Actually, the word they liked to use was annoying. I’d sit at their lunch table and they’d move to a different one.”
Rather than be beaten down, Swift took strength.
“The whole reason I started writing songs is I was alone a lot of the time,” Swift would say. “I’d sit there in school and I wouldn’t be invited to stuff and I’d think, ‘it’s okay — I can write a song about this later’.”
Her feelings about bullying and victimisation define her life. When a fan wrote online about her fears of going back to school because of bullies, Swift went on Instagram to give her heartfelt perspective.
“I hate thinking about your pretty face covered in tears, but I know why you’re crying, because I’ve been in your place. This isn’t a high school thing or an age thing. It’s a people thing. A life thing,” she wrote.
“It doesn’t stop. It doesn’t end or change. People cut other people down for entertainment, amusement, out of jealousy, because of something broken inside them. Or for no reason at all.”
Ever since those formative experiences, Swift has never allowed herself be pushed around, a point she made clear in 2014 single, ‘Shake It Off’, her first ‘pop’ hit and the moment she explicitly left behind her country rock persona.
She expanded on that message on the accompanying tour, telling an audience in Dublin’s 3Arena, in 2015, that they should not allow themselves be reduced to other people’s idea of who or what they are.
“When you start to compare yourself to other people, please change the channel in your mind to something else,” she said from the stage. “When it comes to how we see ourselves, other people are really mean, but we are really mean to ourselves. It’s easy to get confused — when you do get confused, and you start feeling like you’re not special…or you have nothing important to say… we all feel like that sometimes.” Convinced Swift was uncommonly talented, when she was 14 her family upped sticks for Nashville, beating heart of the country music industry (though only after Scott Swift had found a job at the local offices of Merrill Lynch). Still, in school Swift would hand demo tapes to producers and play every open mic evening she could. Rejection was a daily occurrence. Somehow, she never lost hope.
“I took my demo CDs of karaoke songs, where I sound like a chipmunk — it’s pretty awesome — and my mom waited in the car with my little brother, while I knocked on doors up and down Music Row,” she recalled.
“I would say, ‘Hi, I’m Taylor… I want a record deal. Call me’.”
Here, her experience of being bullied stood to her. She’d been ostracised and called names in school. What was the worst that could happen to her out in the real world?
“A lot of people ask me, ‘how did you have the courage to walk up to record labels when you were 12 or 13 and jump right into the music industry’? It’s because I knew I could never feel the kind of rejection that I felt in middle school. Because in the music industry, if they’re gonna say no to you, at least they’re gonna be polite about it.”
THE hard work paid off, though, and she was offered a development deal by Universal, the world’s largest record label. But there was a complication.
The executive who had championed her was about to leave to start his own, independent record company. Swift could go with Universal, or she could take a chance on someone who believed completely in her.
”People laughed at me,” said Scott Borchetta, who would go on to form Big Machine, the label on which Swift found fame (and to which she is still signed). ”They said, ‘You’re starting a new record label and you signed a 15-year-old female country singer — good for you! You have a teenager — there’s a lot of those on country radio. You have a new female artist — there’s a lot of those on country radio.’ They were looking at me like I had two strikes.” Yet, somehow, it’s all worked out. Swift, through hard work and an unusually close relationship with her audience (in lieu of giving interviews, she launched Reputation by hanging out with fans) has become the biggest and most fascinating pop star on the planet.
She opens a new chapter this Friday when she joins the elite group of musicians to headline Croke Park. But, even now, there is a suspicion that she’s just getting started.
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