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She’d have many occasions to gently correct interviewers who tried to peg her narration as literal reportage. HA.”Īlready Swift had found her artistic identity balancing diaristic purging with savvy pop craft, chaste romanticism with scolding wit, and amplifying small slights into high drama. The printed lyrics contained easy-to-crack codes (strategically capitalized letters that spelled out the names of song subjects), and the acknowledgements ended with a postscript that captured the cheeky specificity of the autobiographical authority she claimed: “To all the boys who thought they would be cool and break my heart, guess what? Here are 14 songs written about you. Once she had her debut collection of 11 songs to discuss, she was fond of pointing out that she’d dreamed one up in math class and written another for a school talent show.Įven now that Swift’s entire catalogue is finally available on Spotify and everywhere else, her self-titled 2006 album is best listened to on CD, because you’ll want to be able to flip through its scrapbook-style booklet.
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She showed up to co-writing appointments with seasoned Music Row pros expecting to be underestimated, then persuaded them of her seriousness by presenting a dozen song ideas prepared in advance. Swift, though, insisted on writing and delivering her own imaginings in a voice that sounded her age, and proved that a young, female perspective could carry emotional weight in country music.
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With that model, how un-kid-like a kid singer sounds is the selling point. Had she acquiesced, she might’ve found herself pressed into the LeAnn Rimes and Tanya Tucker template for teen country stardom. On paper, Swift seemed poorly positioned to carve out a place for herself in this thoroughly adult world, a teenage girl who’d signed to an indie upstart after daring to walk away from a development deal with RCA because the major label wanted her to record other people’s songs. The country-music business didn’t yet see the point in courting younger listeners, major labels had a lock on radio airplay, and Nashville’s old-school division of creative labor, which defined “singer” and “songwriter” as two separate jobs, was still the rule. By the time she arrived on the scene in the mid-’00s, the pop-country divas who’d been so dominant throughout the ’90s had largely receded from view, and those programming the radio format had it in their heads that their core demographic of grown women preferred to hear grown male singers. When was the last time you really bought into the idea that Taylor Swift was an underdog? She’s been such a dominant pop force for years that it’s easy to forget she started out as an unlikely country contender, defying industry wisdom about what would sell.