In 2006, I was 15 years old and in a complicated friendship with a girl who did not acknowledge my existence.
Every day after school, before netball or orchestra or four episodes of Friends or three hours on MSN messenger, and certainly before any passing consideration was given to my GCSEs, I had a responsibility to log on to Myspace – the social media phenomenon soon to be eclipsed by Facebook – and write a comment or six on this girl’s profile, to remind her of my devotion and to play the numbers game. Odds were, eventually she would notice me, and the day would surely come when it would be my turn to receive and treasure a comment back.
“Hey Taylor, I hope you had an amazing day. I can’t wait to hear the full album – I am counting down the days until October and have pre-ordered the signed CD. I already know I will love it. My favourite songs so far are ‘Teardrops on My Guitar’ and ‘Our Song’ but all of them are so good. Please come to the UK for a concert soon!! I am your biggest fan. lovelovelove, Sarah.” I had not yet heard of Stephen King’s Misery.
I would love to say that I was an early adopter because at a young age I had prophetically good taste and an astute antenna for potential talent. In fact, it was like a lot of teenage affectations: it made me different.
Radio 1 was still the reigning tastemaker in the UK, and it was dominated by indie men: The Kooks and Snow Patrol were never off the air, and Arctic Monkeys were looking like the most exciting British band since Oasis. Lily Allen and Amy Winehouse were proving how much the charts had been lacking female songwriters, and sharing music on the internet had started to take off, meaning American emo bands like Fall Out Boy and My Chemical Romance had begun to reach the bedrooms of moody teenagers.
I liked all that, but I’d started leaning more into the Americana and bluegrass music I’d heard at home, and advertising my favourite band as the Dixie Chicks was a way of carving out an identity, albeit not a very cool one in the Leicester suburbs where country music was something to be ridiculed and written off as redneck, Bible-Belt twang.
I got one of my best friends Caitlin into them, too, and then Myspace suggested she listen to a teenage country singer who was inspired by the Dixie Chicks and had just released a single called “Tim McGraw” – I suppose now we’d call this the “algorithm” – and she sent Taylor Swift’s page to me. It was chance, really, and I wonder sometimes whether we would have latched on to someone else with such fervour. But it felt like this girl had been created perfectly and only for us.
The profile’s background was pale pink with a pattern of white flowers, the “About Me” told us she’d played a 12-string guitar since she was 12 years old, that she loved the number 13, that her middle name was Alison, that she was single and not the kind of girl who needed a boyfriend. “I have beautiful friends. Be one.”
We memorised her life story as if it was precious lore. She grew up on a Christmas tree farm in Pennsylvania, fell in love with music, convinced her parents to take her to Nashville aged 11 and marched into record label offices with her demo CD. She realised she needed to learn to play music and write her own songs – “I knew I had to be different. In fact, I had to be different than anything they’d ever seen” – and by the time she was 14, her family moved to Tennessee because she’d got a publishing deal at Sony/ATV. And so began an obsession our parents, and everyone else we knew and evangelised to – she’s almost our same age! She could be us! She understands us! – expected us to grow out of.
Twenty years after the release of her debut album, it feels ridiculous to imagine that being a Taylor Swift fan ever used to make us different. What actually made us different was that our commitment to her and her songs about teenage romance was an obstacle to us having many experiences of teenage romance of our own. But that hadn’t mattered to Taylor – she gave us permission to imagine, because, as she said in a very early interview with the The Buffalo News: “I was writing songs about relationships when I was 13, but I wasn’t in any relationships. I was writing about things I’d watched in the movies or just watching how people communicate.”
And anyway, we didn’t notice. We were part of something bigger. We were in a special club, recruiting, seeking out and befriending other members on the internet, overseeing forums, sincerely rejoicing every time her name was mentioned in the media or her song was on the radio (in the USA – it would take a couple of years before her first play in the UK, when we listened together screaming and immediately called in with our thanks).
We’d gather press clippings when she featured in stories with headlines like “Former area summer resident releases CD, appears on TV”, was described as “Hendersonville High School sophomore, making a go of it in the music business” or “a 16-year-old with tons of charisma and potential, who apparently gets revenge on high school boys who dump her by writing songs about them”. Back then, they were so few and so rare we were able to print all of them off and collect them in a ringbinder.
It felt like we were part of her creation – Taylor made us feel like that, too. She met her fans after every show, wrote back to their letters when she could. She was an internet native, like us, and kept us updated with her life on the road as an opening act on bigger artists’ tours and told us what the process was like, recording an album.
That July, she wrote a blog post about being recognised in public for the first time and couldn’t understand why. “The lady said ‘Because I listen to radio and I watched your video’. This was the first time someone had actually KNOWN who I was and MY NAME. wow.”
There is no doubt that Swift had a very strategic and savvy marketing team around her, and affluent, protective parents, all orchestrating her promotion and media-training a squeaky-clean image, but she really did feel to us like a normal girl, and one we’d have been friends with if only we’d lived in Hendersonville, Tennessee. She cared about doing well at school, she had silly in-jokes with her friends, she wrote her own music and understood teenage girls’ feelings. She knew what she wanted, worked really hard to get it, and was genuine and humble and, well, nice. It was a departure from very other hyper-sexualised teen star that had dominated noughties pop culture so far.
On 24 October 2006, after a summer during which her first single “Tim McGraw” had become unavoidable on country radio, she released her self-titled debut album. It was a tender, pop and bluegrass-infused chronicle of high-school heartbreak, full of longing and devastation and scorn. It combined lyrical simplicity, depth of sincere emotion and irresistible melodies – there was angst about cheating, feeling overlooked, feeling confused about friendships and boys – and displayed real, dawning wisdom about the complications of true love.
To us, it was perfect, and lyrics like “I’m just a girl trying to find a place in this world” were immediately plastered on our Myspace profiles and put in our MSN “screen names”. She’d hidden secret messages in the liner notes of her songs – a trick she’d pinched from The Beatles, and one she would repeat on every record after as she encouraged the curiosity of her fans. She bought it herself over and over, trying to help it rise the charts.
Reviews trickled out in the weeks after its release. The Chicago Tribune described it as “a slick package, pleasant enough but devoid of anything resembling gritty traction… This debut goes down like Kool-Aid. Anyone looking for a stiffer drink will want to take a pass.” Newsday called her “a little Carrie Underwood, a little LeAnn Rimes and a bit of Avril Lavigne mixed together”. A very entertaining critic in the Palm Beach Post wrote: “I felt like I was being force-fed the sweet-voiced blonde. And I was skeptical. She’s only 16. What could she have to say to me?… Could this ringleted child reproduce that 11 times? Could I love an album of songs written by someone so young? Could Taylor Swift be the real deal? Yes, yes, yes!”
“Rosanne Cash said melody is the tip of the arrow that lets the lyrics pierce your heart. Swift knows this instinctively. Swift looks at life with a simplicity I abandoned a long time ago, but the songs have a musical maturity that prevents them from becoming country bubblegum music.”
The acceleration of her career from 2006-2008, when she released her true breakout album Fearless, was astonishing. She was booked onto bigger and bigger tours, released bonus songs and a Christmas CD, became a regular on national TV and a mainstay of country radio. All along, she made us feel like every TV appearance, every bit of praise, every time her record climbed higher in the charts, was our success to share.
Nobody else was yet using social media to communicate directly with their fans, and the terms “authentic” or “personal brand” were more than a decade away from becoming common parlance. But Taylor said she “just wanted to give anyone who bought my music as much of me as I could”. She was still adding her fans on Myspace, still blogging about Thanksgiving, in which “the coolest part of the holiday was the fact that I found a Law and Order SVU marathon and watched like 19 episodes in a row til I was about to go blind and had sleep deprivation. AWESOME.”
Being goofy and nerdy was what made her feel familiar. What made her inspiring, though, was the composure with which she conducted herself at an extraordinarily young age in a world full of adults, and often men, who underestimated her. Asked if she was too young for a record deal, she said: “People go to college for four years to find out what they love doing – I’m doing it now and it floors me.” Asked if she deserved to write her own songs, she said, “I didn’t come in to this to be babysat.” Asked if she was intimidated by the music industry, she said: “Not by any measure. I’m intimidated by the fear of being average.”
Looking back, it all feels both prescient, and portentous. Taylor Swift’s combination of talent, authenticity and ambition made her the most successful musician in the world; she has challenged herself as an artist, the critics who doubt her and the male-dominated music industry over and over and has triumphed every time, changing what is possible for the songwriters and the women who have come after her, and the control they’re allowed to wield over their careers. But it has also made her so all-powerful, so famous and so rich, with fans even more maniacal than we were, so innocently, that it can be hard to believe she was ever that relatable teenage girl who felt like an outsider. At least until you see her singing, exposed, on stage.
To watch her transform so quickly from an unknown teenager to one of the biggest stars in the world, to see her do the unthinkable and make country music cool, to make her fans participants, rather than spectators – it felt like something magical. In her very first print interview, she told the Knoxville News-Sentinel: “I want to take this as far as I can possibly take it.” We idolised her because she made us believe that if her dreams could come true, then maybe every other teenage girl’s could too.