Читать книгу Taylor Swift: The Whole Story - Chas Newkey-Burden - Страница 6

How different it could all have been … Taylor Swift was never meant to be a singer-songwriter; she was supposed to become a stockbroker. Her parents even chose her Christian name with a business path in mind. Her mother, Andrea, selected a gender-neutral name for her baby girl so that when she grew up and applied for jobs in the male-dominated finance industry no one would know if she were male or female. It was a plan that came from a loving place, but it was not one that would ever be realised. Instead, millions and millions of fans across the world would know exactly which gender Andrea’s firstborn was, without ever meeting her.

In Taylor’s track ‘The Best Day’, which touchingly evokes a childhood full of wonder, she sings of her ‘excellent’ father whose ‘strength is making me stronger’. That excellent father is Scott Kingsley Swift, who studied business at the University of Delaware. He lived in the Brown residence hall. There, he made lots of friends, one of whom, Michael DiMuzio, would later cross paths with Taylor professionally. Scott graduated with a first-class degree and set about building his career in similarly impressive style. Perhaps a knack for business is in the blood: his father and grandfather also worked in finance.

Scott set up his own investment-banking firm called the Swift Group, which offered clear, well-informed financial advice under the Merrill Lynch umbrella. He had joined the world-renowned firm in the 1980s and rose quickly, eventually becoming the first vice president. He often travelled with his work and it was on one such trip, to Harris, in Texas, that he met a young lady, six years his junior, called Andrea Gardener Finlay. Like him, she worked in finance, as a marketing manager in an advertising agency, and was a determined and highly driven soul.

Although the two found that they had a great deal in common, Andrea was focused more on her career than thoughts of marriage when Scott first crossed her path. She had needed to work hard to break into the finance industry, which in the late 1970s was an almost entirely male sector. Yet break in she did, and she could afford to feel immense satisfaction at having done so. As Taylor later told a television interviewer, her mother had, prior to meeting Scott, ‘a career on her own and lived alone’ and was financially independent. Taylor’s knowledge of this dimension of her mother’s past has filled her with respect for Andrea and shaped her own approach to work and life.

Having worked so hard and been so strong, Andrea was not in the mood to take her eye off the ball. Yet when she met Scott he melted her heart and they quickly fell in love. They married in Texas on 20 February 1988 but moved to Pennsylvania, settling in West Reading in Berks County. Then, at the age of 30, Andrea found out she was pregnant with her first child. The girl was born on 13 December 1989 in Wyomissing. They named her Taylor Alison, and she showed very early signs of the star quality that would propel her to fame later in life. Within hours of her birth, the baby girl had already made quite an impression on a member of staff at the hospital. A paediatrician told Andrea: ‘She’s a really good-natured baby, but she knows exactly what she wants and how to get it!’ At the time, Andrea wondered what on earth the man was talking about. How could he possibly read the personality of a baby just a few hours old? In time, Andrea would have to agree that his description had been right on the money.

For those who believe in ‘birth order’ – the theory that a significant amount of your character and life experience is determined by the order in which you are born into your family: as first, middle, last or only child – Taylor’s firstborn status is pertinent. Firstborns enjoy uninterrupted attention from their parents until a sibling arrives. Typical characteristics of firstborns are a pronounced eagerness to please, and an increased tendency to conform to rules. However, firstborns are likely to show responsibility or leadership in crisis situations.

They can also be nurturing and caring, but are vulnerable to episodes of self-criticism and jealousy – emotions that were first sparked the day they realised they were no longer the only child of the household, and saw their parents’ attention and affections move in part towards someone else. As for astrologers, they ascribe mixed traits to Taylor’s star sign of Sagittarius. Those born under this sign are said to be, on the positive side, honest, generous and oozing with charisma. Less positively, they can also be reckless, superficial and lacking in tact. Other famous Sagittarians include Nicki Minaj, Jimi Hendrix, Frank Sinatra and Brad Pitt.

Taylor first lived on the 11-acre Christmas-tree farm that had been the property of Scott’s father in the past. Based in the town of Cumru, it provided a useful additional income for the family and allowed them to live in increasing splendour as Taylor grew up. To her, the place seemed enormous. ‘And it was the most magical, wonderful place in the world,’ she has said. She could run free and let her imagination run riot, which would prove key to her emotional and creative development. While some childhoods squeeze all artistic aspirations out of a youngster, Taylor’s childhood nurtured and encouraged her dreams. In her inspirational book The Artist’s Way, Julia Coleman outlines compellingly how important this is to any young creative. Had Taylor’s dreams been squashed as a child, she might well have ended up working in finance as her parents had originally envisaged; another would-be artist who slipped through the net.

At three years of age, Taylor got a younger sibling in the form of brother Austin, who was born on 4 March 1993. Within two years of his arrival, Andrea decided to set her career to one side and become a full-time mother. Andrea’s influence on Taylor remained profound. ‘She totally raised me to be logical and practical,’ said Taylor. ‘I was brought up with such a strong woman in my life and I think that had a lot to do with me not wanting to do anything halfway.’ Taylor speaks about her parents in contrasting yet balancing tones. Andrea’s rational and down-to-earth nature is balanced by Scott, who, says Taylor, is ‘just a big teddy bear who tells me that everything I do is perfect’. Where Andrea is described as ‘realistic’, Scott is described as ‘head-in-the-clouds’ and optimistic.

Yet he is not all dreamy glass-half-full chirpiness: his sound financial know-how has been of great help to Taylor, particularly since she became famous. ‘Business-wise, he’s brilliant,’ she said. Although her parents had a financial route already mapped out for Taylor in their minds, she had other ideas. At the age of three she began singing, even delivering an impressive rendition of the vocally tricky Righteous Brothers’ classic ‘Unchained Melody’. She enjoyed the feeling of sweetly singing the lyrics of songs, and she found she had a strong memory for words and melodies. When Scott and Andrea took her to see films at the cinema, she would sing songs from the soundtrack on the way home, having somehow been able to commit the lyrics and tune to memory during one listen. Taylor told the Daily Mail that her parents would be ‘freaked out’ by this feat of musical memory. ‘I retained music more than anything else,’ she added.

Where had this magic come from? To find musical deftness in the family tree, we need to hop back a generation to Taylor’s maternal grandmother, Marjorie Finlay. A charismatic and lively lady, Finlay became a successful opera singer, admired in many countries across the world. She had married a man whose work in the oil industry took him around the world. This meant she performed in countries as far apart as America, Singapore and Puerto Rico.

Ten years after giving birth to Andrea, Finlay and her family settled in America. Here, she was handed a host of new opportunities, including membership of the Houston Grand Opera. She appeared in musicals of an operatic bent – such as Rossini’s The Barber of Seville and Smetana’s The Bartered Bride – and in other, more mainstream productions, including Bernstein’s West Side Story. She also became a television presenter, working in Latin America as the hostess of a leading television variety show called The Pan American Show. She was a vivacious and occasionally comical figure. Taylor told Wood & Steel magazine that her grandmother’s Spanish was so bad that she became a joke among some viewers, who found her ‘hysterically funny’.

Yet her charisma passed down the family tree to her granddaughter. Scott has noted several similarities between his mother-in-law and Taylor. ‘The two of them had some sort of magic where they could walk into a room and remember everyone’s name,’ he said. ‘Taylor has the grace and the same physique of Andrea’s mother. Andrea’s mother had this unique quality: if she was going into a room, literally everybody loved Marjorie.’ Taylor, who remembers the ‘thrill’ of hearing her grandmother sing, also noted Marjorie’s charisma – and she liked what she saw. ‘When she would walk into a room, everyone would look at her, no matter what,’ Taylor told the Sunday Times. For young Taylor, the ‘it factor’ she identified in Marjorie gave her something that many children are scanning people for. It made her grandmother, said Taylor, ‘different from everyone else’. The youngster keenly wanted to be the same.

Yet despite this entertainment-industry heritage further up the family tree, Taylor grew up among a wholesome clan. The Swifts are a Catholic family. Taylor attended pre-school at Alvernia Montessori School, which is run by nuns. ‘She always liked to sing,’ the school’s head, Sister Anne Marie Coll, told the Reading Eagle. The family were regulars in church, and these services gave Taylor yet more experience of singing, as she joined in the hymns. When she was six years of age, Taylor began to listen to music seriously. An early artist to grab her attention was LeAnn Rimes, the country/pop singer who became famous at the age of 14.

Swift had to go her own way to discover the charms of Rimes, as that sort of music was not commonplace in the family home. Andrea, for instance, was a fan of rockier sounds, such as Def Leppard. Taylor says that her mother listened to a lot of their music when she was pregnant with her. However, the Swifts were a ‘random family when it comes to musical tastes’, which meant Taylor could find her own place within it all. ‘LeAnn Rimes was my first impression of country music,’ she told The Guardian. ‘I got her first album when I was six. I just really loved how she could be making music and having a career at such a young age.’

She also fell in love with other artists including Shania Twain and Dixie Chicks. Then she explored the history of country music, digging deep enough to discover, to her joy, older acts such as Patsy Cline and Dolly Parton. She became, she said, ‘infatuated’ with the sound and the ‘storytelling’ of the genre. ‘I could relate to it. I can’t really tell you why. With me, it’s instinctual.’ At the age of 10 she was bowled over with admiration for Shania Twain. Taylor was impressed by Twain’s independent nature, and the fact that she ‘wrote all her own songs’. She told Time magazine: ‘That meant so much to me, even as a 10-year-old. Just knowing that the stories she was telling on those songs – those were her stories.’

Meanwhile, Taylor was continuing to show flashes of the same star quality that her famous ancestor possessed. Perhaps it was her grandmother who directly bequeathed Taylor her charisma. Andrea still remembers how, when Taylor was five years of age, she arranged for family photographs to be taken for Christmas cards. Her daughter was, recalled Andrea in an interview with Sugar magazine, ‘really posing’ in the snaps. So much so, in fact, that the photographer suggested that Taylor could have a career as a child model in Los Angeles. Mindful of the potentially seedy elements of that industry, Andrea decided that this was not the path she wanted her girl to follow.

Instead, Taylor continued to tread a more artistic path – but not one that was solely musical. She told the Washington Post that writing became an obsession for her from an early age. ‘Writing is pretty involuntary to me,’ she said. ‘I’m always writing.’ That obsession began with a fascination for poetry, and ‘trying to figure out the perfect combination of words, with the perfect amount of syllables and the perfect rhyme to make it completely pop off the page’. As with music, she found that poems she read would stay with her; she would replay the catchy rhymes she had read and then try and conjure up some of her own. In English classes at school, many of Taylor’s classmates would groan when the teacher asked them to write poems of their own. Not Taylor. Before she knew it, she had written three pages of rhymes. Many of these were strong efforts.

In fourth grade, she entered a national poetry contest with a piece of work she had written entitled Monster In My Closet. She was so excited to compete. It included the lines: ‘There’s a monster in my closet and I don’t know what to do / Have you ever seen him? / Has he ever pounced on you?’ It turned into a long poem and one that Taylor selected carefully from her collection. ‘I picked the most gimmicky one I had; I didn’t want to get too dark on them,’ she said. She was delighted to win and became ‘consumed’ with building on the success to write ever more impressive couplets.

She also loved stories: reading them, including The Giving Tree, a children’s picture book written and illustrated by Shel Silverstein. First published during the 1960s, it is a story about a female tree and a male human who become friends. Taylor also enjoyed the Amelia Bedelia series, which was written by Peggy Parish and, more recently, by her nephew Herman Parish. Stories became a passion for the young Swift; she loved hearing them and telling them. ‘All I wanted to do was talk and all I wanted to do was hear stories,’ she told journalist and talk-show host Katie Couric. ‘I would drive my mom insane,’ she added. She usually refused to go to bed unless a story was read to her. ‘And I always wanted to hear a new one,’ she said. These readings lit a creative spark in the girl. Andrea remembered that Taylor ‘wrote all the time’ as a child. She believes that if her daughter had not made it as a musician she would have tried to become an author or journalist. It is conceivable that she may still take the former path. One summer, during the long holidays from school, Taylor even wrote a novel. It was a 350-page effort that she has scarcely elaborated on. But neither has she ruled out publishing it one day, so Swifties may yet get to read her story. It would be guaranteed plenty of attention and sales.

Readers should not be surprised if her novel turns out to have a dark side to it. As a kid she often dreamt up imaginary conversations and storylines involving the dead squirrels and birds that had been killed near the house by barn cats. These morbid moments suggest a darker side to her character, beneath the blonde-haired wholesome American girl. She also wrote short stories, which impressed her tutors, who felt she had a strong grasp of English far beyond her years. She credits her surroundings at the Christmas-tree farm for her creative imagination. There, as she ran free, she could ‘create stories and fairy tales out of everyday life’, she remembered.

The farm also provided some gainful employment for Taylor during her childhood. She was given a peculiar odd job – picking the eggs of praying mantises off trees. This task was important to avoid local homes becoming infested with the creatures. So she would move between the many Christmas trees and remove as many of the eggs as she could. The importance of this job was highlighted when she forgot to check the trees on one occasion and praying mantises hatched in homes around the neighbourhood. ‘There were hundreds of thousands of them,’ she recalled during an interview with Jay Leno on The Tonight Show. ‘And they had little kids and they couldn’t kill them because that’d be a bad Christmas.’

However, despite mishaps such as this, she was rarely disciplined harshly as a child – mostly because she proved to be her own toughest critic, a self-disciplinarian of sorts. ‘When I was naughty as a kid, I used to send myself to my own room,’ she told the Daily Mail. Andrea was no pushover – far from it, in fact – but she hesitated to discipline Taylor because her daughter was ‘so hard on herself’. Taylor did not know at this stage what she wanted to do for a living when she grew up. She would often tell people she was going to become a stockbroker, but, despite her family heritage in that sphere, she admits that she did not even know what this meant. Friends of hers would say they wanted to become a ballerina or an astronaut. ‘And I’m, like, “I’m gonna be a financial adviser,”’ she said.

Adjusting to the realities of country life had been something of a strain for Scott and Andrea – particularly Scott, whose existence was one of stark contrasts: high-powered financial work in the city by day, and bumpkin duties in the countryside in the evening. As for Taylor, she thrived on rural life. She would ride ponies across trails, take rides on tractors, build forts in the hayloft, roam around the fruit orchards and adopt pets from the plentiful woodland creatures. This earthy existence and love of nature would influence her music in the years ahead. More immediately, though, it had the effect of influencing her appearance: her hair became tangled and messy. Taylor has since said that she is delighted she lived in a ‘space’ where she was free to be ‘a crazy kid with tangled hair’.

As she approached the childhood milestone age of 10, the country-keen Taylor was adding pop to her musical tastes – or trying to, at least. Among the acts she listened to were Natasha Bedingfield, the Spice Girls and Hanson. Hints of these three acts can be heard on her fourth studio album, Red. She also listened to Backstreet Boys and Britney Spears, choreographing dance moves to their biggest hits alongside a friend of hers. Pop was not a lasting flirtation for Taylor, but it was fun while it lasted.

At the age of 10, she decided she wanted to perform. She had already taken parts in small local productions, including a male character called Freddy Fast Talk in one such play. To Taylor, the fact that the character was a guy, and a bad guy at that, made no difference. ‘I was like, “I will dress up like a guy; I want to sing that song,”’ she said. The next push in that direction came when she saw a local children’s theatre, called the Berks County Youth Theater Association, put on a production of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, the Roald Dahl classic. She loved it when she went to watch, and felt drawn to being on the stage herself. Within days she was back at the theatre to audition for a part in a forthcoming production of Annie. She impressed enough to be welcomed into the group. There, she met other youngsters who were, in an important way, like her: they had a hunger to perform and to succeed. There was plenty of competitiveness and sometimes jealousy, too, yet at least the drive of these children would give Taylor a lift, ensuring that she upped her game and remained focused. It was within these walls that Taylor’s ambitions were nurtured.

In time, she would find she had several things going for her at the BYTA: she was tall, for one thing, so she could command the stage as required for lead roles. When she first arrived there, however, she found her height to be a disadvantage – it made her stand out awkwardly among her peers. This only added to the pangs of anxiety she felt in those early days. Fortunately, she still managed to get a part in Annie, albeit a very small one in the ensemble. According to one source, practically everyone who auditioned managed to get a part in the production.

Yet the confidence she drew from her experience in Annie helped her to land her first lead role – in the well-known musical The Sound of Music. She took to the part with aplomb – so much so that, contrary to usual BYTA procedures, she was not rested for half the weekend shows. Instead, she appeared in all of them. She then landed another starring role, as Sandy in the theatre’s production of Grease.

As she performed Sandy’s songs, Taylor found that her vocals were sounding distinctly country in flavour. ‘It was all I had listened to, so I guess it was just kind of natural,’ she told the Great American Country channel. It is from this moment that the rest of her story flows: she said she decided right there that ‘country music was what I needed to be doing’.

All the while, she was serious about making a go of it in musicals. She travelled to New York to audition for roles in Broadway and off-Broadway productions. Her voice teacher, Kirk Cremer, became her unofficial manager for such ventures. He had professional-looking headshots taken of Taylor and he would be at her side as she travelled to the Manhattan auditions. She would, she recalled during a chat with Inquirer Entertainment, ‘stand in line in a long hallway with a lot of people’. Later, back in her home town, she took another lead part, in a production of Bye Bye Birdie. In this play she took the role of Kim MacAfee, who has a secret crush on a rock star. This play was less successful than her previous outings and the production was struck with a number of problems. But by now she had decided that country music was her future, so she was able to cope with the disappointment.

From this realisation, she began a process that, in increasingly voluminous form, continues to this day: she sought out opportunities to sing her favourite songs in front of a live audience. This began with karaoke, initially using the theatre’s own karaoke unit. She chose songs she liked and sang them to her fellow cast members at parties, loving the experience so much that it felt like ‘my favourite thing in the world’. She received plentiful praise for her karaoke performances. One evening, as Taylor stood there belting out another country classic, someone approached her mother and said that this was what Taylor should be doing for a living. It was a sentiment that Taylor and her family increasingly felt themselves.

She just needed to get out there and sing to new audiences. One venue she turned up at was the Pat Garrett Roadhouse, where she took part in karaoke competitions. This smoky bar was an incongruous place for a pre-teen girl to be, but her parents understood what it meant to her and allowed her to go and compete, provided they were physically accompanying her every inch of the way. Although one parent at the BYTA reportedly accused Taylor’s mother and father of being that dreaded species, the ‘pushy parents’, Taylor prefers to view their encouragement as ‘empowerment’ rather than pressure.

Speaking to Country Music Television, she expanded on her view of parenting and pressure. She felt that simply telling a child that they can be whatever they want to be and that they should chase their dreams was only half of the process. The other half was for the parents to genuinely believe those sentiments – ‘My parents actually believed it,’ she said. She is clear, however, that her mother and father ‘never pushed’ her. Indeed, she added, had they done so, she would probably have been a lot less, rather than more, successful.

So she continued to turn up at Pat Garrett’s venue every week. Her parents might not have been pushy, but Taylor was – proudly so. ‘I was kind of like an annoying flag around the place,’ she told CMT News. ‘I would not leave them alone. What they would do is have these karaoke contests … I would go until I won.’ She also played her guitar at a wide range of other venues, including coffee shops, and even at Boy Scout meetings.

Her persistence paid off and further success was quickly coming her way. On one significant occasion, she won a karaoke contest singing the LeAnn Rimes song ‘Big Deal’. As part of her victory, she was given a slot opening for the country music legend Charlie Daniels. Having wowed the often-sparse audiences at her karaoke performances, Taylor then began to target larger crowds. High on her target list were sports teams who needed someone to sing the national anthem at their matches. The Reading Phillies, the local baseball outfit, were one of the first teams to invite her to sing. With a handful of performances for them under her belt, she aimed even higher. For her, this was a simple equation. ‘I figured out that if you could sing that one song, you could get in front of 20,000 people without even having a record deal,’ she would tell Rolling Stone later.

She sang at the US Open tennis tournament and then at a Philadelphia 76ers match. It was April 2002. Taylor looked marvellously patriotic as she took to the stage with a top covered in small American flags. When she looked back on the night later, she laughed at how nervous she had seemed. She was indeed ‘nervous’, she said, but she still found it to be an ‘awesome’ experience.

As she left the court after this latter performance, she saw the famous rapper Jay-Z sitting in the audience. As she walked past, he leaned in and gave the youngster a congratulatory high-five. She was so thrilled: she has said that she boasted about that encounter ‘for, like, a year straight’. What a badge of honour for a budding singer to have! Singing the national anthem became easier for her the more she did it, but she admitted that she did feel nerves when she sang at a World Series tie between the Philadelphia Phillies and the Tampa Bay Rays. She said the ‘challenge’ came due to the ‘utter silence that comes over 40,000 people in a baseball stadium and you’re the only one singing it’. Taylor recalled how that first moment of silence would be ‘surreal’. Then she would do what all artists yearn to do, however terrifying it can feel: she would fill the silence with her own sweet voice.

‘It was a little scary at first,’ she told Elle Girl magazine. What she would learn in time was that the best answer for nerves was simply to keep performing. ‘Every time you play another show it gets better and better,’ she added. This worked better for her than other coping strategies. When she tried the technique of imagining each member of the audience wearing just underpants, she found it did not work for her – ‘at all’. News of her nerves will be a surprise for some who knew her back then, as she portrayed an air of utter confidence on the surface.

Her de facto manager Kirk was so impressed with her continued progress that he arranged for her to record some tracks at the studio owned by his older brother Ronnie. Among the songs she recorded were cover versions of those by some of her favourite artists, including: ‘Here You Come Again’ (Dolly Parton); ‘One Way Ticket’ (LeAnn Rimes); ‘There’s Your Trouble’ (Dixie Chicks) and more. She loved being in a recording studio, standing at the microphone with her headphones on, and when she saw the banks of controls at the mixing desk she wondered what they all did; but, most of all, she felt as if she was becoming a professional artist, much like her heroes.

Those heroes influenced her in different ways. She had taken inspiration and guidance from three different stars, as she would later explain during an interview with Rolling Stone magazine. ‘I saw that Shania Twain brought this independence, this crossover appeal; I saw that Faith Hill brought this classic old-school glamour and beauty and grace; and I saw that the Dixie Chicks brought this complete “We don’t care what you think” quirkiness. I loved what all of those women were able to do and what they were able to bring to country music.’ She was being inspired as a musician and a female; this was girl power, but with a country drawl.

Her existence was proving exciting on the road, and her family life was pleasant and comfortable, too. Her parents’ hard work in business had paid off and delivered a wonderful life for the Swifts. The family’s new six-bedroom home was a comfortable and enviable building in a grand location, at 78 Grandview Boulevard, Reading, Pennsylvania, 19609. It had, according to reports, an elevator and an inside pool, complete with hot tub. The classical-revival building was large and spacious, measuring 5,050 square feet. A later listing of the property described a ‘bright study’, where Taylor would play guitar. When it hit the market in the summer of 2013, it was listed at $799,500. Back then, she was given the attic. Given the stature of the house, this effectively meant she had an entire floor to herself, comprising three rooms, including one bedroom. It was almost as if she had her own apartment at the age of 11. Indeed, when her friends and colleagues from the theatre group visited the house there was a lot of shock and a fair amount of envy among them as they saw the splendour she lived in. The theatre group included kids from a broad range of social backgrounds – some of them barely knew that people could live in such luxury.

Taylor had it good, and did her best to shrug off the envious glances. In the summer, the family would move to their gorgeous holiday home in Stone Harbor, New Jersey. Americans flock there on vacation from several east-coast regions and beyond. The New York Times describes the area as featuring ‘block after block of gleaming McMansions and elegant shops’, and it is among the richest towns in the United States. It has now gained wider recognition thanks to its place on the trashy and fun reality television show Jersey Shore. For Taylor, it proved to be a pivotal part of her upbringing: ‘That’s where most of my childhood memories were formed,’ she has said.

Taylor – who once told Sea Ray magazine that she had ‘lived in a life jacket’ since the age of four – loved this seaside resort, where the family first bought property the year she turned two. She found Stone Harbor ‘magical’ and loved to swim in the sea as well as take part in water-sports, including jet-skiing and sailing, even though, in general, she was not a natural at sport. Sometimes they would see a dolphin and it felt so wonderfully life-affirming to be near such natural beauty. ‘There were so many places to explore, whether it was finding a new island in the inlet or walking to 96th Street for ice cream,’ she said. As she entered Springer’s, the ice-cream place she so loved, she would be struck by indecision. As she gazed upwards at the long list of flavours, it was so hard to choose just one. However, cookies ‘n’ cream became a flavour she would regularly settle upon. The outlet, run proudly by the Humphreys family, was a firm favourite for Taylor. She also enjoyed visiting an Italian restaurant on the same street, where she would devour Caesar salad and pizza. She says that, thanks to the Swifts’ long summers in Stone Harbor, ‘I could not have had a cooler childhood.’

The family’s home was opposite a bird sanctuary, meaning that Taylor could enjoy the sights of our feathered friends without even leaving the house. She would just open her window, put her binoculars to her eyes and delight in the birds. Some days she did little else but this, so entranced was she by them. On other days she got up to mischief, chiefly at the annual boat parade that she watched on Independence Day. ‘We used to all gather together on the dock when the boat parades would go by on 4 July and we’d shoot water balloons at them,’ she told Philly.com. She also found renewed creative inspiration during these summers, though. Many artists feel that being near water is a magical, creative experience, and it certainly seemed to work for Taylor. ‘I was allowed to be kind of weird and quirky and imaginative as a kid, and that was my favourite part of living at the Shore,’ she said.

Some of this creative energy showed itself in the form of musical experiments and literary endeavours, including the aforementioned novel. She was moved to write it because she was missing her friends. Putting them on the page made her feel closer to them. ‘I would send them back chapters of it,’ she said. However, some of it was more domestically orientated. Taylor showed early signs of being a homemaker. She took over the room above the garage and turned it into her own private den, a sanctuary in which she could reign. ‘I painted the whole room different colours and used to spend all day in there, just doing nothing but sitting in my little club,’ she said, ‘because it was mine.’

There was one thing – or, to be precise, one person – that she could not consider hers, however badly she wanted to. A boy who lived next door to the Swifts’ holiday home had captured her imagination. He would spend a lot of time in the Swift household, as his parents were friends with Taylor’s parents. Soon, she felt strong yearnings for them to become an item. In fact, she decided she wanted to marry him. While Taylor wished that he would ask her out, he instead would tell her at agonising length about other girls he had his sights set on. The rejection she felt over this unrequited crush was the creative spark that led to one of her first songs. ‘I felt, well, invisible,’ she said. ‘Obviously. So I wrote that song about it.’ As we shall see, this made it onto her first album, albeit as a bonus track. She also wrote a second track, called ‘Smoky Black Nights’. She describes that song, about life at the Shore, as ‘a little demo I made when I was 11’.

Despite this heartbreak and the sad song that it spawned, she was relaxing and having lots of fun, but her hunger for new opportunities to perform in front of an audience did not dissipate during the summer breaks. She found fine venues on Third Avenue and 98th Street. ‘I used to sing karaoke at Henny’s and play acoustic shows for hours on end at Coffee Talk, a little café on 98th Street,’ she said. ‘I used to drag my parents into those places all the time, and all of their friends would show up and put dollars in my tip jar.’ She played really long sets on occasion, and would run out of songs after a while. Not wanting to leave the spotlight, she would make up new songs on the spot. Live performances, dolphins, pranks and an unrequited crush: these were idyllic summers for the Swifts, and Taylor truly basked in the fun and drama of it all.

By now, she had also improved at guitar playing. She had been given her first guitar, an electric, when she was eight years of age. However, she had initially abandoned her attempts to learn the instrument, as she felt baffled and discouraged by it. Much later, a man came to fix the family’s computer one day. Seeing the guitar, he offered to show Taylor a few chords. She quickly grew in confidence with the instrument, and the man returned to teach her some more chords. Soon, Andrea noted, Taylor was practising so much that the strings would crack her fingers. ‘She was driven beyond anything I had ever witnessed,’ her mother observed. The determination of her ancestors, particularly on her mother’s side, was really burning brightly in Taylor.

She began to like the idea of playing on a different type of guitar: an acoustic 12-string. When a teacher told her that she would never be able to master such an instrument, there was only one thing Taylor wanted to do – prove him wrong. ‘I actually learned on a 12-string, purely because some guy told me that I’d never be able to play it, that my fingers were too small. Anytime someone tells me that I can’t do something, I want to do it more.’ This stubborn ‘I’ll-show-them’ determination has served Taylor well ever since.

When she returned home to Pennsylvania, she would feel so refreshed and inspired that she became even more determined to make her dream come true. She wanted to become a country music singer. But for that to happen, she realised she would need to convince her family to move hundreds of miles away from home. Easier said than done for a child of 11, but Taylor can be a pushy customer.