Share the Love of Taylor Swift


















Taylor Swift was born in Wyomissing, Pennsylvania. Swift's influences include her grandmother, who was an opera singer, and LeAnn Rimes. At the age of ten, Swift began to perform around her hometown, singing at karaoke contests, festivals, and fairs. Her first exposure to the music business consisted of recording demo tapes at a studio. At age 11, Taylor made her first trip to Nashville in hopes of attaining a record deal by handing out a demo tape she had made of her singing along to karaoke songs. Taylor returned to Pennsylvania without a record deal but remained confident in her ability, writing her first song, "Lucky You".

Her big break came at the U.S. Open tennis tournament, when her rendition of the national anthem moved the crowd. Within a few months she was featured as a rising star in an Abercrombie & Fitch campaign. The family decided to move to Hendersonville, Tennessee, an outlying Nashville suburb. When she performed at Nashville's premier songwriters' cafe, The Bluebird Cafe, she caught the attention of Scott Borchetta who signed her to his new label, Big Machine Records.

Swift's first single, "Tim McGraw", was released to radio in Summer of 2006. The video debuted in July 2006 on Great American Country. On October 24, 2006, her self-titled CD was released. The CD, on which Swift wrote or co-wrote all of the songs, peaked at #19 on the sales charts and sold more than 61,000 during its first week. The song "Tim McGraw" peaked at #6 on the chart week of January 27, 2007. The video set a record by appearing for 30 consecutive weeks on GAC's fan-voted weekly Top 20 music countdown show, and the video reached #1 on CMT's video charts.



Since her success, she has appeared on Good Morning America and at the 2006 Academy of Country Music Awards. She also won "Breakthrough Video of the Year" on the 2007 CMT Music Awards with "Tim McGraw". Her pursuit of country music stardom was the subject of "GAC Short Cuts", a part-documentary, part-music video series airing since the summer of 2006 on the country music channel Great American Country.

Swift sang the national anthem and performed at various events since then. One of her biggest mainstream performances was on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno on February 13, 2007, where she performed her single, "Tim McGraw."

On May 15, 2007, Swift performed her Gold single, "Tim McGraw," at the Academy of Country Music Awards. She sang the song to Tim McGraw in the audience, and introduced herself for the first time to him. Taylor has been an opening act for Tim McGraw and Faith Hill on their Soul2Soul 2007 tour.

A second time around. It’s hard to believe it’s already time for Taylor to follow up her triple platinum debut. Especially considering that, two years after its release, it is still near the top of the country charts.

What’s even harder to believe is that Taylor Swift has yet to turn nineteen.

And when it came time to put a name to her sophomore effort, Swift decided on one word that just might be the perfect adjective to describe her journey to this moment. FEARLESS.

"It’s a big deal to title your album, so I wanted to make sure that it was the right call," says Taylor. "I started thinking about the word ‘fearless’ and what it means to me. It isn’t that you’re completely unafraid. I think fearless is having fears, but jumping anyway."

Even now, with her life barreling down the country music fast lane, Taylor still makes it a priority to put the guitar, pen, and paper she keeps nearby to good use. And it’s not easy with her schedule. After signing her record deal, Taylor left her high school locker behind to be home-schooled out on the road. Now instead of English and Latin class, Taylor has been studying George Strait, Tim McGraw, Faith Hill, Brad Paisley and Rascal Flatts on tour. Instead of class pictures, she’s posing for the covers of Rolling Stone, Billboard and Seventeen.

Now, more than ever, making music has become her way of making sense of all the madness. Writing songs helps her stay grounded as her career launches into the stratosphere. But for listeners popping in Taylor’s new CD and expecting to hear a laundry list of lyrics on the plight of country music superstar rising through the ranks, FEARLESS is going to surprise you.

"I didn’t want to write songs about being on the road and being in hotels and missing your family and missing your friends," insists Taylor. "When I was like 14 or 15 and I would hear those things on an album...being alone, living out of a suitcase... and I was always like, ‘Ugh, skip!’ I’m inspired by boys and love. Those are my favorite things to write about and I don’t think that that is limited to high school. I’d rather write songs about how I’m feeling and the relationship side of things."

The album’s first single, "Love Story," offers up a countrified version of Shakespeare’s play that is anything but a tragedy. In Taylor’s world, Romeo is still breathing when the curtain closes...and Juliet has a ring on her finger. And in the incredibly infectious "Hey Stephen," Taylor proves she truly is FEARLESS by singing about a secret crush – who will most assuredly not remain a secret for long. Yes, the boy really exists. And yes, Stephen is his real name. "He has no idea the song is written about him," Taylor says with laugh. "It’s someone who I’ve always been friends with and always kind of had a thing for...and he doesn’t know. It’s always fun for me to put something on the album that is personal. Something I know I’m going to have to deal with when the record comes out."

She even leaves listeners with a positive vibe. The album’s final track is a song Taylor wrote to inspire her during some of the tougher moments in the early going of her career. "There were times I was working so hard that I didn’t realize that every single day our numbers were getting bigger," Taylor remembers. "Every single day, our fan base was growing. Every single day, the work that we were doing was paying off. Then, during the 2007 CMA Awards, when they called out my name as the Horizon Award winner, I looked over and saw the president of my record label crying. Walking up those stairs, it just occurred to me that that was the night things changed. It changed everything."

Some things for Taylor, however, have stayed the same. Her steady creative partner Liz Rose is back on board. Rose was a co-writer with Taylor on seven songs from her debut album, and was the first person to encourage her to release "Tim McGraw" out into the world.

And the final pairing brought two country forces of nature together in the same Music City studio. Taylor Swift, meet John Rich.

"It was always one of my goals to write with John," says Taylor. "I had heard so many things about him. I just wanted to see what it was like to get into a room with him because I know I’m a very opinionated writer and I knew he was a very opinionated writer. So I knew this was either going to be the best thing in the world or was just going to be a complete train wreck." Not only does the song they created stay on the tracks, it’s proof that two great cooks can rock a kitchen. Taylor and John clicked in a big way recording "The Way You Loved Me," a song about the age-old story of a good girl pining after a bad boy.

As if writing every song on the album and living the life of a country superstar wasn’t enough, Taylor added even more to her workload when recording FEARLESS. She joins Nathan Chapman, the main man behind the board for her debut album, as a co-producer on the record. "All the songs for the second record, it’s like they were already produced in my head," recalls Swift. "When I was writing a song, I knew what every instrument was doing. The strings, mandolin, banjo, or dobro. I heard it all. It was just really cool to have all those instruments I heard end up on the album."

But even as she experiments with new sounds and new directions for her music, Taylor Swift knows the power of a song begins and ends with its lyrics. And it is in two of the softer, more stripped down moments on FEARLESS – the tracks "Fifteen" and "Best Day" -- that Taylor’s extraordinary gift for writing shines the brightest as she remembers fondly moments from her past.

We’ve always known Taylor was an old soul, but songs with this level of reflection from someone still so young – they can leave you shaking your head in amazement. Then you remember she’s just a few years removed from her own freshman year - and you understand why her fans, including her over 1 million friends on her MySpace page, love her. She puts to music exactly what they are feeling.

"I want my fans to know – I’m the same girl I was when the first album came out," says Taylor. "I’m just not in high school and I have a different schedule. I feel the same things, I feel the same way. And my songs are where I’ll never hold back."

That is music to a Taylor Swift fan’s ears.



Here are some things I DON'T want in the thread:
1) NO RAMS.
2) DO NOT TALK BAD ABOUT HER!

In this thread, you CAN talk about Taylor Swift. What are your favorite songs? Favorite line of the song, what do you like about her, etc. You can talk about anything of Taylor Swift. But... No talking bad about her. Enjoy!