Taylor Swift Turns 20

"Hi, I'm Taylor." That was the plot twist. Until the moment that Taylor Swift introduced herself to Tim McGraw, immediately after singing the song "Tim McGraw" to him, I hadn't even considered the possibility that Taylor Swift hadn't met Tim McGraw. For all I knew, "Tim McGraw," the song, was just a brand-extension strategy for Tim McGraw, the guy. But no, apparently not.

Tim McGraw was on top of the country music universe in 2007. He'd been in the game for more than a decade. He already had two greatest-hits albums. He was (and is) married to fellow superstar Faith Hill, and they filled arenas together. He'd already made his crossover hit with Nelly and his cinematic debut in Friday Night Lights. And he got to sit there in the front row and watch a next-generation superstar, one whose career would soon eclipse his own in every conceivable way, turn his name into a reference. We should all be so lucky.

Taylor Swift met Tim McGraw in May 2007 at the ACM Awards, the less prestigious of the two annual mainstream country awards shows. Both Swift and McGraw went home empty-handed that night. McGraw lost Entertainer Of The Year, the night's big award, to Kenny Chesney. Swift lost Top New Female Vocalist Of The Year, the kind of award that could only exist on a show like the ACMs, to Miranda Lambert, who deserved her win. (I didn't write an Anniversary piece about Lambert's 2005 debut Kerosene, but that's a better album than the very good one that I'm writing about today.) Swift really should've met McGraw before that night. They lived in the same town and worked in the same business. She'd already named her debut single after him, and it had already been a top-10 country hit. If someone named a hit song after me, I would probably go out of my way to meet that person. Tim McGraw didn't do that.

The on-camera meeting between Swift and McGraw could be a lie, of course. It could be a cute little show-business story. Swift and McGraw could've met years earlier — maybe in 2004, when Swift, still in ninth grade, convinced her family to move from the Philadelphia suburbs to Nashville to advance her dreams of country music stardom. But I believe the story. We have the moment on tape, immortalized through innumerable YouTube clips. I have seen Swift's acting, and I don't think she could convincingly portray the compelling combination of nervous-kid jitters and psychotic confidence that radiates from the screen upon rewatch.

It goes down like this: Swift starts out alone onstage at the MGM Grand in Vegas, playing an acoustic 12-string and singing into the headset mic strapped into her head. Her hair is so big, so curly, so shiny. There's an unmistakable tremble audible through her fake twang, even though she's clearly put all of her considerable performance skills into masking it. The crowd whoops at every big moment — when she sings the chorus, when she slowly descends the staircase to the crowd, when the spotlight catches Tim McGraw and Faith Hill in the front row. McGraw and Hill dutifully clap for every chorus until the song ends, Swift hovering directly over them the whole time. It's awkward, but it's charming.

The moment that the song ends, with her guitar strings still buzzing, Swift introduces herself to McGraw and then to Hill, sticking her hand out like a class president getting to meet a state delegate on a field trip. McGraw pulls her in for a hug, and Hill does the same. Swift turns to the camera, her finger repeatedly stabbing the air between herself and McGraw, and stage-whispers, "That's Tim McGraw!" She does it twice. McGraw smiles serenely at her, as if to say, "Yes, I'm Tim McGraw." Thus begins a long career of mugging for award-show cameras.

I watched all of this live on my TV. I'd been a full-time music critic for a year and a half, and I considered it my duty to watch, and blog about, every single music-related awards show. That night, more than 500,000 Americans already owned copies of Taylor Swift, the first album from the singer of the same name. Within a few weeks, that number would hit a million. I probably wasn't one of those Americans yet. I definitely bought the CD at some point, but it took time. Five different songs from Taylor Swift became country radio hits between 2006 and 2008. I liked all of them. At a certain point, it seemed stupid not to own the album.

That's how it used to happen with big records. You'd hear them one song at a time, as the singles dipped into and out of rotation on radio stations and music-video channels. Maybe one song was enough to convince you to buy the CD, or maybe it took three or four. Taylor Swift arrived in stores 20 years ago; its anniversary is Saturday. A good handful of people bought Taylor Swift right away. The record sold 40,000 copies in its first week, enough to debut at #19 on the Billboard album chart. "Tim McGraw" had already been percolating on country radio, though it was still a few months away from reaching its peak. For a debuting teenage country singer, Swift was already doing quite well for herself. But nobody could've possibly anticipated the number of hits that would come from Taylor Swift, let alone from Taylor Swift.

"Tim McGraw" was the first of those hits, and it was probably also the best. It's sly and graceful and heartfelt and economical. It feels like teenage love, even if teenage love couldn't be more distant from your own experience. Swift packed everything you could want into that opening salvo: Place, time, aching romanticism, sly self-awareness. She was 16 years old when she released that song, and she was already capable of conveying the weird nostalgia that actual children feel more acutely than anyone. Swift and her soon-to-be ex woke up to find that summer gone, but when he thinks Tim McGraw, she hopes he thinks her favorite song, the one they danced to all night long, the moonlight a spotlight on the lake.

It's hard not to find it all a little bittersweet. Before she became a benignly oppressive cultural force, Taylor Swift was a scarily mature baby songwriter. As the story goes, she started writing "Tim McGraw" one day in math class, then finished it in one of her after-school sessions with Nashville pro Liz Rose, still the best co-writer that Swift has ever had. Swift was in ninth grade, and she was dating a senior who was about to go away to college. They weren't even broken up yet, but Swift knew it would happen. "Tim McGraw" was her memento of that moment, a nice little reminder of a nice little relationship. (Supposedly, the particular Tim McGraw song that Swift was thinking about was "Can't Tell Me Nothin'," a 2004 deep cut that Travis Tritt had already recorded two years earlier. Just think: "Tim McGraw" could've been "Travis Tritt.")

"Tim McGraw" was the calling card. When Swift wrote that song, she'd already become the youngest songwriter ever to sign a deal with Sony/ATV Publishing, and she'd already walked away from an RCA developmental deal when she realized that the label wasn't keen on her writing her own songs. Swift had been a precocious kid who got very into stage musicals when she was young — you can tell — and then fell in love with country after someone gave her a LeAnn Rimes CD as a present. (Rimes, herself a precocious teenage superstar who crossed over to pop audiences, was the blueprint for Swift, at least at first.) Swift's parents had money, and they were willing to support and indulge her clearly evident talents, but they weren't the kind of stage parents who push their kids into the spotlight. Instead, Swift was her own stage parent. As a child, she willed herself into the position where she could write and release a song like "Tim McGraw."

Swift was on MySpace. This was quietly revolutionary at the time. Country singers weren't on MySpace. I don't think Tim McGraw had a MySpace page. Maybe a label set one up for him, but even then, I feel confident in saying he didn't use it. Swift had one, and she used it to get her "friends" to call radio stations and request "Tim McGraw," leaning on the parasocial relationships that she formed with her fans from the very beginning. She also personally sent copies of "Tim McGraw" to country radio stations, along with handwritten letters. She didn't have to do that. Labels paid people to do that job. But Swift understood how important it was to get people invested in her rise, to feel like they were part of something. "Tim McGraw" was a great first impression.

"Teardrops On My Guitar" was the second impression. Swift wrote her follow-up single with Liz Rose, too. It's not quite as elegant as "Tim McGraw," but it does pull the clever trick of reminding you that Swift has a guitar. At the time, the dominant young blonde woman in country music was Carrie Underwood, who'd won American Idol the previous year. Swift never had Underwood's big voice, but if Underwood owned a guitar, she didn't sing about it. Swift wrote (or co-wrote) her own songs. That set her apart. She had a guitar, and the guitar had teardrops on it. This was the song where she told us the reason.

"Teardrops On My Guitar" is not about Swift's ninth-grade boyfriend. It's about another guy who, intentionally or not, put Swift in the friendzone. We know his name was Drew because Swift wrote it right into the song. Like basically all of her early singles, it's classic high-school romance shit, and it speaks the language of mid-'00s pop-country so fluently. The traditional instruments on the track, the banjo and fiddle and pedal steel, are pure ornamentation. They're not necessary, maybe, but they're pretty. The song doesn't announce itself as a country song; it's just that country is the idiom that made the most sense to Swift at the time. She didn't have to use her fake Southern accent on that one. Maybe she didn't even sing that song for country fans. Maybe she just sang it for kids.

I still remember seeing Swift's face, right next to those of Miley Cyrus and the Jonas Brothers, on a billboard for Radio Disney in Brooklyn's Sunset Park neighborhood. That really struck me. At the time, I knew who Swift was because I had a vaguely perverse interest in big-time Nashville country, the thing that most of my Brooklyn music critic peers absolutely did not take seriously. New York in general wasn't a country town; that's part of the reason I had so much fun writing about the stuff. The city famously had no country radio station. Brad Paisley would play arenas everywhere else in the US, but when he came to New York, he'd stuff his arena-sized show, Jumbotrons and all, into a mid-sized club.

Country stars simply did not appear on New York billboards. But the soft-focus ache of a song like "Teardrops On My Guitar" could go beyond country audiences. It could resonate with the middle schoolers who were preemptively nostalgic for the teenage romances they hadn't had yet. "Teardrops On My Guitar" was for them, and the song became a full-on pop crossover, something that still didn't happen in country music very often back then. In time, "Teardrops" reached #2 on the country chart and #13 on the Hot 100. Nashville has a habit of abandoning artists who seem too hungry for the pop crossover, so Swift had to make sure to keep her country base on board. She needed a straight-up country song. She had one. It's called "Our Song."

Just like "Tim McGraw," "Our Song" is a song about songs. Maybe more accurately, it's a song about no songs. Swift reflects on the fact that she and her boyfriend don't have a song of their own, and he comes back with the perfect retort: "Our song is a slammin' screen door, sneakin' out late, tappin' on your window/ When we're all alone and you talk real slow/ 'Cause it's late and your mama don't know." Swift's real boyfriend almost certainly never said any of that. Instead, she put those words into his mouth, writing what she wanted to hear. She wrote "Our Song" entirely by herself, no co-writers, specifically for a ninth-grade talent show.

On "Our Song," Swift leans so hard into the fake Southern accent, and the production leans just as hard on the banjos and fiddles. The track is too big and bright to qualify as old-timey country music, and its drums sound fully programmed. But the song has traditionalism baked into its arrangement, its storytelling, its outlook. After all, Swift sings some of the track to God himself, asking him to play that song again. In the waning days of the George W. Bush years, Swift played into the character that she knew audiences wanted her to be. More than a year after Taylor Swift came out, "Our Song" became her first #1 hit on the country chart.

The banjo on "Our Song," as well as the electric guitar, are played by Nathan Chapman, the guy who produced Taylor Swift. Chapman had never produced a big country album before that. He'd just been recording demos for the songwriters who shopped their tracks around Nashville. Chapman was still in his twenties at the time. Scott Borchetta, the music exec who started the indie label Big Machine essentially as a vehicle to release Swift's music, wasn't sure about that decision. But Swift liked working with Chapman, and she made the final call. She did that a lot. She wrote songs about teenage romantic indecision and confusion, but she knew exactly how she wanted to present those songs to the world. Right from the beginning, her vision was laser-focused. She knew exactly what she was doing. It's almost scary.

Case in point: "Picture To Burn." If memory serves, that's the one that finally got me to cave and fork over money for the Taylor Swift CD, which means I was pretty late to the party. The "Picture To Burn" single didn't come out until February 2008, which means I probably didn't buy the album until it was a year and a half old and had already gone double platinum. (It's octuple platinum now.) Back then, a big record like that could remain culturally present for a really long time; you wouldn't just forget about it two weeks after its release. Part of the reason that Swift is able to do such absurd numbers now is that she's a relic of the time when new artists were able to stick around and keep reminding you of their existence, to convince you that they were worthy of your attention. Before "Picture To Burn," I liked all of Swift's singles, but that was the one where I was like, "Damn, yeah, OK."

Fun fact: Nashville teenagers and future collaborators Taylor Swift and Paramore were both nominated for the Best New Artist Grammy in 2008. (They both lost to Amy Winehouse, as did Feist and Ledisi.) "Picture To Burn" was the clearest evidence that Swift learned something from the bright, sticky pop-punk bands who were running the teen-cultural roost when she first blew up. "Picture To Burn," another Liz Rose co-write, has twangy guitars and hyperactive banjos and fake twang, but it's only country in the most superficial ways. On a deeper level, it's a fully era-specific pop-punk song, right down to the stupid lyric that quickly left Swift embarrassed. (By the time she released "Picture To Burn" as a single, Swift replaced the line "Go and tell your friends that I'm obsessive and crazy/ That's fine, I'll tell mine you're gay.")

The pissed-off post-breakup song is a tradition that goes far beyond pop-punk and country music; it's one of the tropes that unites pretty much every version of popular music in history. What makes "Picture To Burn" pop-punk, just as much as the catchily crunchy guitar riff, is the energized brio that Swift brings to the song. She loves getting mad at this guy. She's excited to tell him how much he sucks. Its anger comes through as sheer exuberance. At the time, the story was that Swift decided to release the song as a single when she saw how much fans liked singing along at her shows. (By that point, she'd already opened a bunch of tours for arena-level country stars like her guy Tim McGraw.) I don't buy that story. Some people accidentally write hits and then get surprised when the world latches onto those songs. Taylor Swift is not one of those people. When she writes a hit, she knows it.

There's a bit of pop-punk bite in the fifth and final Taylor Swift single, too. "Should've Said No" is yet another post-breakup fuck-you, this time shaming the guy who cheated on her in what he called "a moment of weakness." It was another #1 country hit for Swift, but she was operating outside of country by the time it came out — touring with the Jonas Brothers, dating one of them, and preparing to drop another blockbuster album of even more finely calibrated pop-as-country upon the world.

So that's Taylor Swift: Five singles, all huge, plus a bunch of other potential hits that could've been huge, from a terrifying baby genius who was only just beginning her carefully plotted takeover of the collective imagination. (That album cycle could've kept going longer. "I'm Only Me When I'm With You" was right there.) Kanye West's line about "I made that bitch famous" was only true true in the sense that he meant "people who are famous to Kanye West." Maybe it's a "Choosin' Texas" situation, where something can be huge in one part of the country and a distant rumor in another. But when we're talking about pure numbers, Swift was already outselling West before her first album cycle ended.

It's crazy to think that Taylor Swift was 20 years ago. A few weeks ago, I scoffed at a magazine with a "20 years of Taylor Swift" cover in the supermarket checkout line, and my daughter had to be like, "No dad, it was 2006." She's right. Taylor Swift came out about six weeks before Taylor Swift turned 17. That means Taylor Swift is turning 20, but Taylor Swift was still a long way away from 20 when she made Taylor Swift.

It's worth noting that Taylor Swift is the only early country-era album that Taylor Swift did not re-record and re-release when she was having her legal and public-opinion battle against the people who bought her Big Machine masters. Maybe she knew that she couldn't conjure her old fake Southern accent after all those years, or maybe she simply felt distant from the raw teenage energy that powered those songs. Two decades after that album's release, Swift has been an insanely successful superstar for more than half of her life. I just wish she could still write songs as good as what she was banging out eons ago, back when she was babysitting Jeff Jarrett's kids and Tim McGraw didn't know who she was.