SHE’s the 21st Century’s biggest artist (read musician)!
Time magazine chose her as its Person of the Year – the first musician ever acknowledged thus!
Bloomberg News declared her a billionaire (worth $1.1 billion, as of October 26, 2023)!
She is a recipient of the Grammy Award for Album of the Year an unprecedented four times!
She routinely reaches No.1 on charts around the world every time she releases an album!
She boasts the highest grossing concert film ever made and one of the most successful films of any genre!
She regularly performs for audiences averaging 70 000 at a time and even commands a following of fans worldwide known as Swifties!
The Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley developed a course in acknowledging her business acumen and Queen Mary University of London offers one offering students an opportunity to reflect on how she became a cultural touchstone. In addition to her idyll status – her boyfriend happens to be (at the time of this review) a National Football League player and 2020, 2023 and 2024 Super Bowl winner! All of these realized whilst she’s still, at the time of this review, in her early thirties – she’s regarded as being more than superlatives could ever describe her!
To many across the globe who neither follow her career nor happen to be fans of her particular music genre, viz, country, they may remember her as the young lady in the centre of a now infamous incident at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards whose onstage moment as she was accepting an award for Best Female Video, was unceremoniously interrupted by musician, Kanye West – who claimed that the award ought to have gone to fellow nominee, Beyoncé!
Born on December 13, 1989, in the town of West Reading, her parents named her after a man – specifically a singer-songwriter, with a familial hint as to where her destiny lay being in the form of a maternal grandmother, Marjorie Finlay, being an opera singer.
The progeny, along with kid brother Austin, of a Merrill Lynch stockbroker dad, Scott, and mom, Andrea who ‘had a complete career of her own and was supporting herself’, Taylor Alison Swift grew up on Pine Ridge Farm which grew an 11-acre Christmas tree nursery in Cumru Township near the city of Reading.
‘It was on the farm that she ‘had the most magical childhood’ spent riding horses competitively and from age five tasked with the clearing of praying mantis pods off Douglas fir branches during tree season.
Additionally, her parents, who were materially secure enough to ensure a comfortable life for the family of four, owned a summer home in Stone Harbor, New Jersey which Taylor acknowledged as being ‘where most of my childhood memories were formed’. The Swifts were to move on to the small borough of Wyomissing in south-eastern Pennsylvania and later still, some 780 miles away to Hendersonville, outside the country music launchpad of Nashville – as an ultimate sign of the parents’ commitment to her career aspirations!
Having been singing since the age three and despite a cocooned childhood, Taylor also recalls her formative period as having been one in which she experienced almost physically palpable jealousy, teasing, ridicule and bullying from fellow scholars who included a group of girls who were envious of her growing success in music and regarded her as weird for singing country music.
The group – which she saw as defined by materialism and gossip – was obsessed with a film about high-school social cliques titled Mean Girls in which the queen of the shallow, bitchy top clique known as the Plastics owned a Lexus SC430. Then, upon saving enough money from writing songs and performing gigs, she ended up purchasing the same automobile that the queen they idolized had ‘as a kind of rebellion against that type of girl’ and as a form of revenge towards the group for having ostracized her!
(The real-life clique probably had reason for being envious of her since her stock continued rising in 2002 when she performed ‘America the Beautiful’ for 24 000 tennis spectators at the US Open at Flushing Meadows and sang ‘The Star Spangled Banner’ at a Philadelphia 76ers vs Detroit Pistons basketball game in Philadelphia!)
In September 2004, five months after the family had moved to Nashville, Taylor, then 14 years, walked away from a contract with one of the town’s Music Row’s notable labels, RCA, after she had deduced that its terms stymied her progress – only to land a promising one with Sony Music Publishing on January 20, 2005 which allowed provision for her to write songs she could either record herself or sell to other artists.
A phase of her development (which had her collaborating with reputable songwriters and becoming adept at playing the guitar) toward stardom during which she now had a manager named Dan Dymtrow – who also managed Britney Spears – culminated in her becoming a signed artist when a new label named Big Machine Records (in which Taylor’s dad, Scott bought a 3% stake) owned by an industry veteran named Scott Borchetta launched on September 1, 2005.
A crucial meeting Dymtrow had arranged between the teenage songstress and the recording executive on November 2, 2004 left Borchetta smitten, rendering him jotting the following notes: his prescience during that meeting was almost on a par with Brian Epstein’s when he caught a lunchtime pop show at a tiny Liverpool club in November 1961 and decided that this new band, The Beatles, had something about them . . .
The songwriter-singer’s debut album, viz Taylor Swift was recorded over four months and produced by Nathan Chapman – a then 28-year-old Nashville native who had previously produced a few demos for her. In the tome, it is described as an exceptional capture of a 16-year-old girl’s life encapsulating the daily grind of school, the bumpy roads of friendships and love relationships, and the tsunami of emotions that sometimes swamped her.
A single from the album titled, Tim McGraw (whose identity was seconded to the track since Borchetta reckoned that given that Taylor was a virtually unknown singer, her debuting with a song named after a real life country singer would arouse people’s curiosity enough to enquire: ‘Who’s this girl singing about Tim McGraw?’) dropped on June 19, 2006 – with the complete album brought out on October 24, 2006.
From the debut of the album, Taylor Swift, the tome’s author, Caroline Sullivan then journeys readers through the singer’s subsequent albums, viz: Fearless, Speak Now, Red, 1989, Reputation, Lover, et cetera – augmenting the timeline with curious narratives behind the catalogue of songs.
Inevitably, also included are tidbits on Swift’s romantic partners, notably her current one, Travis Kelce, a Kansas City Chiefs player she was filmed arm-in-arm with backstage pending her gig at Estadio River Plate in Buenos Aires on a fan’s video footage posted during November 2023.
Prior to this stardust coupledom, other high-profile romantic relationships the country-cum-pop megastar was involved in included, et al, one with actor, Joe Alwyn (with whom she spent the Covid period in London) which lasted six-years and singer, Joe Jonas of the Jonas Brothers – both of whom, upon her breaking up with, subsequently became subject of her future compositions!
A departure from her apolitical outlook is revealed in an Instagram post speculated to had been galvanized around the US’ midterm elections of 2018 in which Swift condemns systemic racism in America whilst simultaneously announcing that she’d vote for the Democratic candidates for Congress – in the process provoking this response from the then president, Donald Trump: ‘Let’s say I like Taylor’s music about 25% less now.’
Swift’s is an abuzz world in which her propulsion to pop icon status has also been via the universal following of ‘Swifties’ (her fans) who have grown up with her music whilst experiencing life alongside her and finding comfort and solace in her music and are widely considered responsible for her cultural influence.
Added to these are the singer’s ‘Squad’ – her circle of beautiful actresses and models which includes, et al, Cara Delevingne, Selena Gomez and Gigi Hadid.
A biography of one of the most influential artists of her generation, Taylor: Era by Era, is authored by pop-and-rock-focused music journalist, Caroline Sullivan.
Taylor: Era by Era, is a hardback published by Michael O’Mara and distributed in South Africa by Jonathan Ball Publishers.
Available at leading bookstores countrywide, it retails for R425.
