Introduction
Taylor Swift is an American singer-songwriter. Her narrative songwriting, which often centers around her personal life, has received widespread media coverage. Born in West Reading, Pennsylvania, Swift relocated to Nashville, Tennessee in 2004 to pursue a career in country music. At age 14, she became the youngest artist signed by the Sony/ATV Music publishing house, and at age 15, she signed her first record deal. Her 2006 eponymous debut studio album was the longest-charting album of the 2000s on the Billboard 200. Its third single, "Our Song", made her the youngest person to single-handedly write and perform a number-one song on the Billboard Country Airplay chart. Swift's breakthrough second studio album, Fearless (2008), won four Grammy Awards, including Album of the Year, and was certified Diamond by the Recording Industry Association of America. It yielded the crossover hit singles "Love Story" and "You Belong with Me".
Early Life
Swift was born on December 13, 1989, in Reading, Pennsylvania. Swift spent her early years on her family's Christmas tree farm in nearby Wyomissing. Her grandmother had been a professional opera singer, and Swift soon followed in her musical footsteps. Before Taylor was a singer, she was a poet. She won a national poetry contest when she was only 9 years old, and by the age of 12 she was putting her poems to music. "If you can put words together the right way, and if you put the right rhymes at the end of the right sentences, you can make words bounce of a page. That's always been my favorite thing," she says. "I've made sure that in any situation and with any record label, I'm allowed to write my own music." By the age of 10, Swift was singing at a variety of local events, including fairs and contests. She sang "The Star-Spangled Banner" at a Philadelphia 76ers basketball game at the age of 11, and began writing her own songs and learning guitar at 12 years old. To pursue her music career, Swift often visited Nashville, Tennessee, the country music capital. There she co-wrote songs and tried to land a recording contract. Noting her dedication, Swift and her family moved to nearby Hendersonville, Tennessee, in an attempt to further Swift's career. At the age of 12, she was taught 3 chords by a computer repairman on a guitar. With these 3 simple chords she wrote her first song, ‘Lucky You’. She joined the Henderson High School in Tennessee at the age of to 14 where she would study only for 2 years. She now got a contract deal with RCA records where she would collaborate with other experienced songwriters. By the age of 15, she was not only good at singing and the guitar but had become a great songwriter. She was now hired as the youngest songwriter at 15 by Sony/ATV Tree publishing house to write songs for other singers. But in 2005, she joined Big Machine Records in order to create her own album. Within one year she was ready with her first album at the age of 16 in which she wrote 3 songs on her own and co-wrote the 8 remaining songs.
Music Career
A stellar performance at The Bluebird Café in Nashville helped Swift get a contract with Scott Borchetta's Big Machine Records. She released her first single, "Tim McGraw," in 2006, and the song became a Top 10 hit on the country charts. It also appeared on her self-titled debut album in October of that same year, which went on to sell more than 5 million copies. More popular singles soon followed, including "Our Song," a No. 1 country music hit. "Teardrops on My Guitar," "Picture to Burn" and "Should've Said No" were also successful tracks. Swift also received critical praise for her debut effort. She won the Horizon Award from the Country Music Association (CMA) and the Academy of Country Music (ACM) Award for Top New Female Vocalist in 2007. Swift next released Sounds of the Season: The Taylor Swift Holiday Collection that year. Her renditions of "Silent Night" and "Santa Baby" were modest hits on the country charts. Swift's third studio album, Speak Now (2010), spawned the two-time Grammy Award-winning single "Mean". Her cross-genre fourth studio album, Red (2012), earned Swift her first Billboard Hot 100 number-one single, "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together". Swift fully transitioned to pop music on her next studio album, 1989 (2014), which made her the first solo female artist to win the Grammy Award for Album of the Year twice. The album included three Billboard Hot 100 number-one singles, "Shake It Off", "Blank Space", and "Bad Blood". Preceded by her fifth U.S. number-one single "Look What You Made Me Do", Swift's hip hop-inspired sixth studio album, Reputation (2017), made her the first artist to have four albums each sell over one million copies in their opening week in the U.S. Its follow-up, Lover (2019), was the world's best-selling studio album of 2019. Swift incorporated indie folk and alternative rock on her eighth studio album, Folklore (2020). The album and its lead single, "Cardigan", made Swift the first artist to have an album and a single debut at number one on the Billboard 200 and Hot 100 simultaneously.
Taylor Swift’s 7 tips on career success
1. Don’t lose your self-awareness
It was after watching Behind the Music, a documentary series on VH1 that profiled music acts that made Swift realise what kept musicians in the game. “It would always seem like the decline of an artist was always attributed to a combinations of things, but I noticed the top elements were loss of self-awareness and making bad art, and usually one led to the other. When you lose your self-awareness you start thinking, ‘Oh I’m untouchable, everything around me loves everything I do, I have nothing left to prove’. That kind of loss of self-awareness can be so dangerous.” Plus, it helps her writing. “That’s why I have days where I have really healthy self-esteem and things are in a great place, and then I have days where self-doubt is my primary emotion and that’s ok, because that means you’re living a human, emotional, unaffected life... ups and downs as a songwriter are really important because what else are you going to write about if you honestly think you’re the greatest thing on earth.”
2. Rely on your friends
“I think one of my main goals in trying to preserve my sense of reality has been to surround myself with friends who have their own careers, and who don’t need me for any sense of validation or social climbing, or a career statement.”
3. Be prepared to take criticism
“My friends have all solidified themselves in their own careers and so if they think that I shouldn’t put out a certain single as a first single, they’re going to tell me: ‘That wasn’t one of my favourites that you’ve played me Taylor’, and I’m going to respect that opinion. I think it works both ways; your friends have to be confident in your friendship in order to be honest with you, and then you have to be humble enough to accept honesty.”
4. Know when to take a break
Despite the success of her current album, Swift knows that it will come to a time when she will need to step back. “I’ll need to give people a certain breather from me because at a certain point they’re going to get a little sick of hearing about me, so then I’ll need to go away for a while and then depending on my gauge on how sick of me they are I’ll decide when to put out the next album.” She has the same perspective over the rest of her career. “If I were to say, ‘Ok what am I going to be when I hit 40?’ I have no way of knowing but I hope I would still have music in my life. If I were going to give you my best guess I’d say it would be creating music for other people to perform. Writing is always going to be something I need to do in order to stay happy, but you never know what’s going to change. A lot of what I do is based on what people want. We’re people pleasers, that’s why we became entertainers, so if people don’t want you to be on stage anymore in sparkly dresses singing songs to teenagers when I’m 40 then I’m just not going to do it. I’ll write songs for other people or I’ll create an album that hopefully is about what I’m going through at that point in my life. It’s just a goal of mine to not try and be something I’m not.”
5. Remember why you’re doing what you do – and stay excited by it
“There are days when I am so physically exhausted like if I’m playing a bunch of shows and dancing around in high heels for two hours. But my mind rarely gets tired of this whole exciting adventure that I get to be a part of,” she says to Vogue. “I think that enthusiasm is key to continuing to move forward in this business because even if you get knocked back a peg, or you put out something that people don’t like, or you have people saying stuff about you that’s negative, if you’re an enthusiastic person by nature you take that hit, you feel it, but then you think of a new idea and run towards it. Then, that new idea is all you think about, and you’re just fuelled by this relentless enthusiasm disguised as focus.”
6. Write down your ideas in a notebook
You never know when an idea will come in handy. She tells Vogue how lines from Blank Space came to her months before she started writing the song. “I’ll get these lyric ideas and I’ll jot down a line in a notebook. When I’m writing an album in six months I’ll open up the notebook and pull out these clever lines. I had written those lines over the course of two years and I had just pulled them out when it came time to write the song. ‘I’m a nightmare dressed as a daydream’ – I remember coming up with that seven months before – let’s put that in right before the second chorus.”
7. Don’t forget to forgive yourself
“I always have to work on being easier on myself because I overthink things... like when something doesn’t work out you think it’s my fault, or that I shouldn’t have done this or shouldn’t have done that. Overthinking is my greatest adversary. Some days you’re exhausted and some days you’re in a bad mood and that’s okay. I’ve been a little bit better lately at taking it easier on myself and realising when I’m having a really low self-esteem day that’s because of how I’m wired not because everybody hates me. Sometimes you have the best intentions but you make mistakes.”
Queen of Awards
Her accolades include ten Grammy Awards, an Emmy Award, and seven Guinness World Records; she is the most-awarded act and woman at the American Music Awards (29 wins) and Billboard Music Awards (23 wins), respectively. She has been included in multiple power rankings, such as Time's annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world (2010, 2015 and 2019), Rolling Stone's 100 Greatest Songwriters of All Time (2015), the Forbes Celebrity 100 (placing first in 2016 and 2019), and Billboard's Greatest of All Time Artists Chart (placing eighth). She was named Woman of the Decade (2010s) by Billboard and the Artist of the Decade (2010s) by the American Music Awards.
Taylor Swift Quotes
Just be yourself, there is no one better.
I'm intimidated by the fear of being average.
Giving up doesn't always mean your weak sometimes your just strong enough to let go
People haven't always been there for me but music always has.
In a relationship each person should support the other; they should lift each other up.
The only one who's got enough of me to break my heart.
Turns out freedom ain't nothing but missing you...
Music is my shining light, my favorite thing in the world. T get me to stop doing it for one second would be difficult!
If you're horrible to me, I'm going to write a song about it, and you won't like it. That's how I operate.
There's more to life than dating the boy on the football team.
Conclusion:
Life isn’t about how to survive the storm, but it’s about how to dance in the rain.
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