Taylor Swift doesn’t bat a blue eye at rewriting history. Take the 18-year-old’s latest single, Love Story. It is about romance and destiny — two subjects that often occupy her teenage brain.
She even invokes the world’s most celebrated star-crossed lovers in this sunny hit that is climbing the singles chart in the United States.
It is Romeo and Juliet with a significant difference: Nobody dies.
“I was going through a situation like that where I could relate,” the energetic singer-songwriter said recently on a whirlwind visit to Los Angeles.
“I used to be in high school where you see [a boyfriend] every day. Then I was in a situation where it wasn’t so easy for me and I wrote this song because I could relate to the whole Romeo and Juliet thing. I was really inspired by that story.
“Except for the ending,” she quickly added.
“I feel like they had such promise and they were so crazy for each other. And if that had just gone a little bit differently, it could have been the best love story ever told.
"And it is one of the best love stories ever told but it’s a tragedy. I thought, why can’t you ... make it a happy ending and put a key change in the song and turn it into a marriage proposal?”
Whether it is Shakespeare, dating or the music business, Swift is only too willing to reshape the rules about how things ought to be.
She has demonstrated that repeatedly since she was a brazen 12-year-old who went door to door down Nashville’s famed Music Row of record company offices saying: “Hi, I’m Taylor! I write songs and I think you should sign me.”
When her peers were busy with after-school sports or drama club, she would head to her job at Sony/ATV Music Publishing where, at 14, she was hired to write more songs as a professional.
After selling more than 3 million copies of her 2006 debut album, Taylor Swift, the tall and perky blonde with thick curly tresses is gearing up for another onslaught of activity with her sophomore album, Fearless.
Although it is poised to be one of the big-gun releases of the holiday season, that does little to intimidate Swift or her record company.
“I think any time you’ve had this kind of success it starts to get weighty,” said Scott Borchetta, president of Big Machine Records, who signed Swift before his label was fully up and running. “But she’s delivered a brilliant record.”
Reaching the masses
For Swift, who co-produced the new album, it’s all about getting her material out to listeners.
“You have to hear the song we just recorded yesterday!” she says.
The song she is talking about, Forever and Always, was born near the end of the recording process and Swift pleaded with Borchetta to let her add it to the album just one day before she had to turn in the final version.
“It’s about watching somebody fade away in a relationship,” she said. “They said they were going to be with you forever, that they loved you, and then something changed in the relationship and you don’t know what it is, but you’re watching them slowly drift.
"That emotion of rejection, for me, usually starts out sad and then gets mad. This song starts with this pretty melody that’s easy to sing along with, then in the end ... I’m basically screaming it because I’m so mad. I’m really proud of that.”
Swift was a high school sophomore when her self-titled debut was released and before long she had exchanged public school for home schooling so she could keep up with the demands on her time.
She scored new-artiste honours from the Country Music Association and the Academy of Country Music. In December 2007, she was nominated for the Best New Artiste Grammy Award, a prize she ultimately lost to Amy Winehouse.
TV talk-show hosts love Swift. With her cover-girl beauty and effervescent personality, she is great on camera and brings songs that voice the perspective of a living, breathing and sometimes heartbroken teenager.
“I usually generalise it and say I like to write songs about boys but it’s more than that,” she said.
“I like to write songs about relationships and the steps that take us to a heartbreak or the steps that take us to falling in love and all that’s in between. It’s my favourite thing to write about because you never run out of material and you keep coming back to it.”
“It’s like moths to the flame — no matter how many times you’re hurt by love, no matter how many times you’ve gotten your heart broken, you’ll always come back, no matter how long it takes,” she added. “It could be years but you will be attracted to love again.”
That is the thing about being a teenager: Love is always a matter of life and death, every relationship either Sleeping Beauty and Prince Charming, or Tristan and Isolde.
Swift has figured out how to view her experiences with an artiste’s eye.
“I think as a songwriter you need to have a completely wild imagination about what could be and what might have been,” Swift said.
“Some of your most heartbreaking material is what could have been and some of your most romantic material is what could be.”
Her imagination takes her to different places on the new album. On You’re Not Sorry, she sees that the apologies from a wayward boyfriend are really those of a first-class liar.
White Horse addresses the sobering realisation that romantic fantasy doesn’t always pan out (I’m not your princess / This ain’t no fairytale) and You Belong With Me is the old story of someone who thinks she is the true love of a boy who is involved with someone else (She doesn’t get your sense of humour like I do / She’ll never know your story like I do).
The utterly endearing Fifteen rolls out good advice to an incoming high school freshman.
One for the family
Among the most touching new songs is The Best Day, a love letter to her mother, with shout-outs to her father, Scott, and younger brother, Austin. (Andrea Swift usually accompanies her daughter while she is on tour.)
As a whole, Fearless represents a major advance in her confidence and acumen as a songwriter and evinces complete faith in her conversational vocal style, one that positions her as the celebrity teenager that girls like to hang out with and boys would ask to the prom.
That is still something with which Swift struggles. In high school, she and her BFF Abigail, who is mentioned in Fifteen, thought of themselves as ugly ducklings.
“We kind of came to the conclusion in ninth grade that we were never going to be popular, so we should just stick together and have fun and not take ourselves too seriously,” Swift said.
“That’s why I had so much fun in high school, because I didn’t focus too much on the fact that I wasn’t really in the clique.”
Her signature look is a sundress and cowgirl boots, her wrists ringed with bracelets from fans. Her fashion sense is translating into a line of sundresses that will be sold at Wal-Mart stores.
“I always thought if I ever were to do a fashion line, I wouldn’t want to do [clothes] that girls like me and girls my age couldn’t afford,” she said.
It is one more expression of Swift’s powerful Everygirl connection with her audience.
