Starting with her determination as a talented teenage songwriter,
Taylor Swift's personal story has been filled with heartbreaks, drama, and personal triumphs.
But how much do you really know about the prolific superstar? Here's the truth about Taylor Swift.
Taylor Swift started her career as a country music star. But she didn't grow up in the South.
In fact, Swift is from Reading in Southeastern Pennsylvania,
where she grew up on a Christmas tree farm.
When Swift played a show in Philadelphia during her 2018 tour, she said,
"This is what I call a hometown show."
She told the audience about her recent stop by the house she grew up in, saying,
"It's not my family farm anymore. We sold it when we went to Nashville.
I've been thinking about how cool it is to be back where I started writing songs."
On Swift's Instagram account, she posted a photo of herself standing in front of a white barn at
the farm. The singer is holding a photo of herself as a little girl in front of that same barn.
Taylor Swift is from Pennsylvania and she made it big in Tennessee,
but the singer has a special connection with New Jersey. Before she moved to Nashville,
the singer would visit the Shore with her family every year.
Swift told the Philadelphia Inquirer,
"I spent my summers at the Jersey Shore from the time I was 2 until we sold the
house in Stone Harbor when I was 14. It was a pretty magical place to grow up."
And while she was by the ocean,
Swift would play her guitar and sing at coffee shops as an unknown performer. The star recalled,
"I used to sing karaoke at Henny's and play acoustic shows for hours on
end at Coffee Talk, a little cafe on 98th Street."
She remembered inviting her friends and family to those early performances,
who would often show up and put money in her tip jar.
And she would try to keep the gigs going for as long as possible. Swift explained,
"When I would run out of material, I'd just start making up songs on the spot."
In a visual for her song "seven" from the album folklore, there was a photo of a young Swift.
As writer Tim Marcin noted on Twitter, she's wearing a sweatshirt that says
"Sea Isle," referencing the shore town in New Jersey.
Before she was a teenager, Taylor Swift visited the city that would change her life.
As an 11-year-old, she went around Nashville, Tennessee, to leave a demo CD at each record label
on Music Row, according to The Telegraph. Part of her reason to visit the city was inspired by a
documentary about Faith Hill. The "There You'll Be" singer was first discovered in Nashville,
and Swift told The Telegraph she thought she needed to go there too, saying,
"So of course I got it in my head that there was this magical land
called Nashville where dreams come true and that's where I needed to go."
She remembered that she began begging her parents constantly to move there.
Swift's first big break happened when she was 14 years old and Sony
brought her on as a writer. And then, another big break happened.
In a video interview with Inc.,
Scott Borchetta, a music producer and founder of the Big Machine Label Group,
remembered receiving a package from Swift with her image and demos when he was still with Universal.
"And it was a very smartly put together package."
He invited Swift, her manager, and her family to his office in Nashville to play some music.
After telling them he planned to leave the company to launch his own label, he said,
"The only promise I can make you tonight, is that if you wait, you have a record deal with me."
And the rest is history.
After a meet-and-greet in Colorado in 2013, Taylor Swift reached out to a local radio station to
tell them that, as Time recalled in 2017, one of their DJs reached under her skirt and groped her,
grabbing her rear end. This led to DJ David Mueller's termination,
which led to Mueller suing Swift for defamation, and Swift firing back with a countersuit.
Swift told Time she, quote, "had to watch this man's attorney bully,
badger and harass my team including my mother" and was accused of lying about the encounter.
The singer took the stand and, as she recalled to the outlet,
"I'm told it was the most amount of times the
word 'a**' has ever been said in Colorado Federal Court."
Swift won the case but only asked for $1. Still, she says she hasn't been paid, telling the outlet,
"I think that act of defiance is symbolic in itself."
Mueller continues to deny the incident.
"What I'm saying is that I didn't do what they say I did."
Years later, the matter was referenced in the Supreme Court.
Justice Elena Kagan brought it up during oral arguments in another case, noting,
"That dollar is going to represent something both to me
and to the world of women who have experienced what I've experienced."
Justice Kagan further pointed out that it was about Swift standing up for herself,
not the money she could have won, saying,
"And it was an unquestionable physical harm. But,
she just asked for this $1 to say that she had been harmed."
Part of Taylor Swift's success is in her ability to vividly detail her experiences in her lyrics.
Swift told The Telegraph,
"I always write songs about my life. And if you're horrible to me I'm going
to write a song about you and you are not going to like it. That's how I operate."
Early in her career, Swift and Joe Jonas were romantically linked,
but it didn't last forever and always. Swift told Ellen DeGeneres that Jonas broke up with
her over the phone in a 25-second call, and she wrote a track about
him for Fearless called "Forever & Always." Talking to People about the tune, she said,
"[It's] a song about watching somebody completely fade away in a relationship
and wondering what you did wrong."
This is one of the many songs penned by Swift that appear to allude to an
ex-beau — some secret boyfriends and others major celebrities.
Rolling Stone wrote in 2016, "Like a new generation's Carly Simon,
Taylor Swift has played fun games with her fans in leaving clues and hints — both ambiguous
and blunt — about the many male muses for her break-up songs."
And Taylor Swift's break-up songs sure have gotten tongues wagging.
There's "Style," which may or may not be about Harry Styles. There's "We Are
Never Ever Getting Back Together," which may or may not be about Jake Gyllenhaal.
There's "Dear John," which may or may not be about John Mayer. And the list goes on.
Ah, yes. Taylor Swift's cadre of celebrity pals. Her high-profile friend group of models
and musicians has included Selena Gomez, Lorde, and Karlie Kloss — and
we're only scratching the surface of Taylor Swift's squad. As E! News reported in 2016,
members of Swift's circle include Dakota Johnson, Cara Delevingne, Suki Waterhouse,
Lily Donaldson, and Martha Hunt. The 2015 visual for "Bad Blood" boasted a
star-studded ensemble that featured Gigi Hadid, Jessica Alba, Hayley Williams, and many others.
The more famous the group became, the more Swift faced more frequent backlash.
Swift told Rolling Stone,
"I never would have imagined that people would have thought,
'This is a clique that wouldn't have accepted me if I wanted to be in it."
Swift said that what started off as a group of successful women
turned into something beyond her original intention, telling the publication,
"I thought it was going to be, 'we can still stick together,' just like men are allowed to do."
And in an article she wrote for Elle, the singer reflected on several of these relationships in
her 20s, calling a few of her connections, quote, "situationships." As Swift explained,
"It's sad but sometimes when you grow, you outgrow relationships.
You may leave behind friendships along the way, but you'll always keep the memories."
After a few high-profile, celebrity relationships, Taylor Swift met British actor Joe Alwyn. Swift
has been pretty quiet about her beau, but that hasn't stopped fans from piecing together parts
of their story, speculating about how the couple met. One guess is that Alwyn and Swift
first met at the 2016 Met Gala, as noted in Elle. At the time of the meeting, the publication said,
Swift was dating Calvin Harris. The outlet also pointed out that Swift's song "Dress"
alludes to first meeting someone with a buzzcut when her hair was bleached,
which lines up with both Swift and Alwyn's hairstyles at the event.
In a 2020 conversation with Paul McCartney for Rolling Stone,
Swift opened up about life with Alwyn just a bit, saying,
"I think that in knowing him and being in the relationship I am in now, I have definitely
made decisions that have made my life feel more like a real life and less like just a storyline
to be commented on in tabloids. Whether that's deciding where to live, who to hang out with,
when to not take a picture — the idea of privacy feels so strange to try to explain,
but it's really just trying to find bits of normalcy."
More than just a world-famous singer, Taylor Swift has tried her hand in acting throughout her
career. One of her most high-profile roles arrived in the 2019 movie adaptation of the musical Cats.
The film was a disaster at the box office — and this even after the CGI that turned Swift and
her co-stars into human-cat hybrid characters was fixed and the film was re-released in theaters.
Less disastrous were a few smaller roles by Swift in movies and TV.
She appeared as an actor in an episode of the long-running series CSI.
"What's your name?"
"Haley."
"What's yours?"
"Nick."
In an interview for Entertainment Tonight, Swift talked about being a part of the show,
telling the interviewer that her character was stabbed and ultimately died.
Swift told the reporter,
"In the beginning when you see the dead bodies, you don't realize that those are people that
are just sitting really still. And holding their breath and having their eyes in one direction."
Sticking with the creepy vibes,
the singer also appeared as a ghost piano player in The Giver with Jeff Bridges.
In a more lighthearted appearance, Swift made a surprise cameo in the TV series New Girl.
"Oh Shivvy, I've loved you since the first grade!"
Taylor Swift is a towering figure in the music industry,
and at 5 feet 11 inches tall, she literally towers over others. The singer revealed
that she used to feel self-conscious about her height, saying in an interview for Girls' Life,
"I didn't like being tall when I would walk up to a group of girls,
and they were all a head shorter than me."
But after some time, Swift began to embrace her stature.
She said in the interview,
"When I can put on a pair of four inch heels and walk into a room and be taller than
everybody else, now I look at it as a good thing."
Swift also said that being tall didn't matter when looking for a significant
other. She explained to Girls' Life that a guy's personality is the most important part,
and that she just wanted someone who sweeps her off her feet. As Swift put it,
"I don't have any height limits. Like, if a guy is shorter than me, that's cool."
As a teenager, Taylor Swift signed with Big Machine Label Group,
and then went on to produce her first six albums. But after she parted ways with the
company to move to Republic Records, it set off a complicated and drama-filled set of events in 2019
involving record exec and manager Scooter Braun. Braun purchased Big Machine — a sale
which included Swift's back catalog of master recordings — for more than $300 million.
In a post on her Tumblr account,
Swift addressed the music producer who had just taken the reins of her life's work, saying,
"All I could think about was the incessant,
manipulative bullying I've received at his hands for years."
And in her speech for Billboard's Woman of the Decade award,
Swift took a moment to call out her former record label, criticizing, quote,
"the unregulated world of private equity coming in and buying up our music as if it was real estate."
"I knew he would sell my music. I knew he would do that. I couldn't believe who he sold it to."
To take a sense of ownership back, Swift vowed to re-record those first six albums. In an interview
for CBS News, the singer explained that her plan was to make new masters to offset the deal.
"Now could you re-record?"
"Oh, yeah.”
“Might you do that?”
“Oh, yeah."
In April 2021, she released her first of these albums, Fearless (Taylor's Version).
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