Taylor Swift is a pop legend now. She has millions of fans all over the planet, she has toured the world, and has won too many awards to count. She’s a world-class superstar. But how did she get here? Today we’re going to give you a short history of Taylor Swift and take a look at how she transformed into the woman she is now.
Taylor was born on December 13th, 1989 in Reading, Pennsylvania, and grew up in a little suburban town called Wyomissing of the same state. She had a very normal upbringing and a happy childhood. Her parents didn’t have anything to do with music, her father is a stockbroker and her mother used to work as a marketing executive for an investment fund.
Swift grew up on a Christmas tree farm because her father bought the house from one of his clients. She was really into horseback riding as a child and even took part in competitions when she was around 7 years old. She still has a love for horses and even has music videos in which she rides a horse.
When it comes to her love of music, she has always loved it, but she only learned to play guitar by chance. She had one in her room but never really played it. One day when she was around 12 a tech guy was fixing a computer in her room and saw the guitar. He asked Taylor if she plays often and when she said she hasn’t picked it up he offered to teach her a couple of chords. The rest is history.
She started playing little gigs around her hometown, and she loved country music. But as you know by now, Taylor quickly went from just admiring her idols to competing with them. These days when she tours, she makes sure to come back to her roots, visit the state she grew up in and it still blows her mind that her career started with local shows with a few people in the audience to sold-out stadiums.
But how did she break into the music industry? Well, believe it or not, little teen Taylor used to visit Nashville and go door to door in the neighborhood where music producers and people who work in the music industry lived and give them CDs of her covers and demos.
The first guy who signed her said that for a 14-year-old, the package that she presented him with was pretty smart. He instantly saw a few songs that could become hits. When she got signed her whole family moved to Nashville so that she could be closer to the heart of the country music industry. Her debut album “Taylor Swift” was certified gold 3 months after the release and even stayed in the top 5 of the charts 2 years later.
While Taylor was very happy about the success of her first album, she didn’t plan on slowing down. She worked hard and hoped that her second album would do at least as well with the public, and it did. “Fearless” won 4 Grammys, including the Album of the Year Awards. She was the youngest artist to ever win such an award at the time.
Everything was going great for Taylor, except the 2009 MTV Video Music Award happened and she won Best Female Video. That was a true rollercoaster of emotions for Taylor and her family. Because on one hand – she won, on the other hand, Kanye West happened and we all remember that incident too well. But many would agree Taylor dealt with it very professionally and with dignity.
Grammys brought on a whole new level of fame for Taylor, which also meant that she got a lot more exposure and therefore, some negativity and backlash. She was dealing with a lot of haters and a lot of criticism. People were saying that her songs aren’t even written by her because she had co-writers (which is standard practice btw). Some even criticized her voice. But Taylor took that criticism in stride and decided to just show people she can do better. She made it a point to write all her songs herself for the next album and work on her voice more and tour a lot to work up her stamina for the shows and test her abilities on tour.
Her fourth album “Red” was another breakthrough for Taylor. She moved further away from country and firmly in the direction of pop. Taylor says she felt like she needed a change at the time and it all started with her deciding to buy red lipstick in a store and wear it out. Before this, she would always be pretty modest with her makeup. So the red lipstick at the time felt like she was making a bold statement, it felt liberating.
Taylor’s next album “1989” was pop. Not that Taylor cared about the label or the genre, but this was the time when she realized it’s time to just call it what it is – a pop album. This was a time of her life when she moved to New York and the album is heavily inspired by that. It won the Grammy for Album of the Year and gave us famous hits like “Shake it Off,” “Bad Blood,” and “Blank Space.”
Between 2014 and 2017 was a strange time for Swift. It was the longest break between albums. But she stayed in the public eye, there was even a lot of speculation about her love life. She dated and publicly acknowledged her relationship with Calvin Harris in an award speech. But that relationship ended slightly over a year after it began. The speculation was that Taylor cheated on him with Tom Hiddleston. Taylor denies this and said it wasn’t a scandal, nothing horrible happened, no one cheated, sometimes things just don’t work out.
Her next album “Reputation” was another reinvention of Taylor. She was riskier, she was bolder, she was more daring. It was a huge pivoting time in her career, and it was also a massive commercial success.
In 2018 Taylor has a turbulent time with her record label and ultimately decided to leave it behind and sing with a new one. The gist of the problem was that she felt bullied by the label for years and that they wouldn’t even give her the rights to her own work. She was at a crossroads. Her choice was to either stay with the label and earn the right to her albums one at a time, with each new album she releases, or to leave them behind. She chose to leave the past behind and move on.
In 2019 she released her album “Lover” with a new label. It was another reinvention of Taylor. This album was in a way inspired by her tour with Reputation. She felt this connection with her fans, the people who saw who she is, even behind the caricature she was portraying for that tour. So the positive energy she felt on that tour inspired her to write the “Lover” album, which is way more positive.
2020 was a weird year for all of us, but Taylor was very inspired amid the pandemic. She surprised everyone by announcing the release of her album “Folklore” in the summer and just before her birthday in December of 2020 she released a second album called “Evermore.” Two albums in one year is pretty freaking impressive. But according to Taylor, she just couldn’t stop writing songs.