Taylor Swift


Taylor Alison Swift is an American singer-songwriter. An influential figure in popular culture, she is known for her autobiographical songwriting and artistic reinventions. Swift is the highest-grossing live music artist, the wealthiest female musician, and one of the best-selling music artists of all time.
Swift signed with Big Machine Records in 2005 and debuted as a country singer with the albums Taylor Swift and Fearless. The singles "Teardrops on My Guitar", "Love Story", and "You Belong with Me" found crossover success on country and pop radio formats. Speak Now expanded her country pop sound with rock influences, while Red explored electronic influences. Swift recalibrated her artistic identity from country to pop with the synth-pop album 1989 ; ensuing media scrutiny inspired the hip-hop–imbued Reputation. Through the 2010s, she accumulated the US Billboard Hot 100 number-one singles "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together", "Shake It Off", "Blank Space", "Bad Blood", and "Look What You Made Me Do".
Shifting to Republic Records in 2018, Swift released the eclectic pop album Lover and re-recorded four of her first six albums due to a dispute with Big Machine. She explored indie folk on the 2020 albums Folklore and Evermore, synth-pop on Midnights and The Tortured Poets Department, and soft rock on The Life of a Showgirl. The singles "Cardigan", "Willow", "All Too Well ", "Anti-Hero", "Cruel Summer", "Is It Over Now?", "Fortnight", and "The Fate of Ophelia" topped the Hot 100. Her Eras Tour and its associated film, Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour, are the highest-grossing concert tour and concert film of all time.
Swift is the only artist to have been named the IFPI Global Recording Artist of the Year five times. A record eight of her albums have each sold over a million copies first-week in the US. Publications such as Rolling Stone and Billboard have ranked Swift among the greatest artists of all time. She is the first individual from the arts to be named Time Person of the Year and the youngest woman to be inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame. Her accolades include 14 Grammy Awards—including a record four Album of the Year wins—and a Primetime Emmy Award. Swift is the most-awarded artist of the American Music Awards, the Billboard Music Awards, and the MTV Video Music Awards. A subject of extensive media coverage, she has a global fanbase called Swifties.

Life and career

Early life

Taylor Alison Swift was born on December 13, 1989, in West Reading, Pennsylvania. She is named after the singer-songwriter James Taylor; her parents chose a unisex name, hoping it would help her succeed in business. Her father, Scott Kingsley Swift, was a stockbroker for Merrill Lynch, and her mother, Andrea Gardner Swift, worked as a mutual fund marketing executive. Swift's younger brother, Austin, is an actor. The siblings are of Scottish, English, and German descent, with distant Irish and Italian ancestry - they are paternal great-great-grandchildren of Charles Carmine Antonio Baldi, a prominent Philadelphia businessman. Their maternal grandmother, Marjorie Finlay, was an opera singer whose singing in church became one of Swift's earliest memories of music.
During childhood, Swift spent her holiday seasons on a Christmas tree farm in Pennsylvania, and summers at her family's vacation home in Stone Harbor, New Jersey, where she occasionally performed acoustic songs at a local coffee shop. Raised Christian, she attended preschool and kindergarten at a Montessori school run by the Bernardine Sisters of St. Francis before transferring to the Wyndcroft School in Pottstown. When her family moved to Wyomissing, she attended Wyomissing Area Junior/Senior High School. At age nine, she aspired to a career in musical theater, performing at local festivals and in Berks Youth Theatre Academy productions, and traveling regularly to New York City for vocal and acting lessons. After watching a documentary about Faith Hill, she changed her goal and became determined to pursue a country music career in Nashville, Tennessee.
At the age of 11, Swift traveled to Nashville with her mother to visit record labels and submit demo tapes of Dolly Parton and Dixie Chicks karaoke covers. She was rejected by all the labels, which led her to focus on songwriting. She started learning the guitar at the age of 12 with the help of a computer repairman and local musician who assisted Swift with writing an original song. In 2003, she and her parents started working with the talent manager Dan Dymtrow. With his help, Swift modeled for Abercrombie & Fitch, had an original song included on a Maybelline compilation CD, and was given an artist development deal from RCA Records at 13. To help Swift break into the country music scene, her father transferred to Merrill Lynch's Nashville office when she was 14 years old, and the family relocated to Hendersonville, Tennessee. Swift attended Hendersonville High School for two years before transferring to Aaron Academy, which offered homeschooling.

2004–2008: Career beginnings and ''Taylor Swift''

Swift signed to Sony/ATV Tree Music Publishing in 2004; at 14, she became the youngest person in that publishing company's history. In Nashville, she worked with experienced Music Row songwriters, including Liz Rose. Rose and Swift would write songs every Tuesday afternoon after school. After one year on the development deal, she left RCA Records, who decided to keep her in development until she turned 18. Swift made this decision because she wanted to release the songs immediately, to make sure that they still resonated with her teenage experiences.
Swift organized a showcase concert at Bluebird Cafe on November 3, 2004; among the attendees were Scott Borchetta, a music executive who was planning to establish an independent record label, Big Machine Records. She signed a recording contract with Big Machine two weeks after the concert, on the condition that her albums would be written by herself; her father purchased a three-percent stake in the company. The contract was finalized by July 2005, when Swift ended the working relationship with Dymtrow. She spent four months near the end of 2005 recording her debut album, Taylor Swift, with the producer Nathan Chapman.
Swift's debut single, "Tim McGraw", was released in June 2006. She and her mother spent mid-2006 sending promotional copies of the song to country radio stations across the US. Taylor Swift was released on October 24, 2006. On the US Billboard 200 chart, the album peaked at number five and was on the chart for 157 weeks—the longest chart run by an album in the 2000s. With Taylor Swift, she became the first female country music artist to write or co-write every track on a platinum-certified debut album. The album was promoted by a six-month radio tour and Swift's opening for other country artists, including Rascal Flatts in 2006, and George Strait, Brad Paisley, and Tim McGraw and Faith Hill in 2007. She opened for Rascal Flatts again in 2008, when she dated the singer Joe Jonas.
Taylor Swift was supported by four more singles in 2007 and 2008: "Teardrops on My Guitar", "Our Song", "Picture to Burn", and "Should've Said No". "Our Song" and "Should've Said No" reached number one on the Hot Country Songs chart; with the former single, Swift became the youngest person to single-handedly write and sing a number-one country single. "Teardrops on My Guitar" was Swift's breakthrough single on mainstream radio and charts, reaching the top 10 of the Pop Songs, Adult Pop Songs, and Adult Contemporary charts. Her next releases were the Christmas extended play The Taylor Swift Holiday Collection in October 2007, and the Walmart-exclusive EP Beautiful Eyes in July 2008. Swift became the youngest person to be awarded with Nashville Songwriters Association's Songwriter/Artist of the Year in 2007.

2008–2010: ''Fearless''

Swift's second album, Fearless, was released on November 11, 2008, in North America, and in March 2009 in other markets. Fearless spent eleven weeks at number one on the Billboard 200, becoming her first chart topper and the longest-running number-one female country album; it was the best-selling album of 2009 in the US. The album's lead single, "Love Story", became the first country song to top the Pop Songs chart, and its third single, "You Belong with Me", was the first country song to top Billboard all-genre Radio Songs chart; both reached the top five of the Billboard Hot 100 chart and peaked atop the Hot Country Songs chart. Three other singles—"White Horse", "Fifteen", "Fearless"—all reached the top 10 of Hot Country Songs. In 2009, Swift opened for Keith Urban's tour and embarked on her first headlining tour, the Fearless Tour.
Fearless became the most-awarded country album of all time. It won the three highest awards for a country album: Album of the Year by both the Country Music Association Awards and Academy of Country Music Awards in 2009, and Best Country Album by the Grammy Awards in 2010. At the Grammys, it also won Album of the Year, and "White Horse" won Best Country Song and Best Female Country Vocal Performance. Also in 2009, Swift was named Artist of the Year by both the American Music Awards and Billboard, and Entertainer of the Year by the Country Music Association Awards, becoming the youngest person to win the honor. "You Belong with Me" won Best Female Video at the MTV Video Music Awards. Her acceptance speech was interrupted by the rapper Kanye West, an incident that became the subject of controversy and widespread media coverage.
Swift collaborated with other musicians in 2009. She featured on "Half of My Heart" by John Mayer, with whom she was romantically linked later that year. She wrote "Best Days of Your Life" for Kellie Pickler, co-wrote and featured on Boys Like Girls' "Two Is Better Than One, and wrote and recorded "You'll Always Find Your Way Back Home" and "Crazier" for the soundtrack of Hannah Montana: The Movie, in which she had a cameo appearance. She had her acting debut in the 2010 rom-com Valentine's Day and wrote "Today Was a Fairytale" for its soundtrack. "Today Was a Fairytale" reached number one on the Canadian Hot 100. While shooting Valentine's Day in October 2009, Swift dated co-star Taylor Lautner. On television, she made her debut as a rebellious teenager in a CSI: Crime Scene Investigation episode and hosted and performed as the musical guest on Saturday Night Live; she was the first host to write their own opening monologue.