Читать книгу Taylor Swift: The Whole Story - Chas Newkey-Burden - Страница 7

It was actually a singer, not a signpost, who pointed Taylor in the direction of Nashville, Tennessee. As we have seen, one of her earliest country music heroes was the singer Faith Hill. It was only when Hill, who was born in Mississippi in 1967, moved to Nashville that her musical career took off. The heart of country music, Nashville has almost become a byword for that genre.

Known as ‘Music City, USA’, Nashville’s proud musical heritage has been strong since the first half of the nineteenth century. Yet it was during the following century that things really took off in the city. A weekly country music concert, the Grand Ole Opry, was launched in 1925. Over the following decades, so many music labels opened offices in the city that a particular area, just southwest of Downtown Nashville, became known as ‘Music Row’. You could scarcely walk a few yards in the area without bumping into an important figure from the music industry, energetically going about their endeavour.

By the middle of the twentieth century, the city had spawned its own musical genre. Known as ‘the Nashville sound’, this was a combination of country and folk with a hint of pop fun, and it produced some memorably catchy tunes. Decca Records, RCA Records and Columbia Records were the key promoters of this style, which would go on to influence so many, including Taylor. Brenda Lee, Jim Reeves and Dottie West were among the trailblazers. Elvis Presley was also a key figure. Although launched from Nashville and influenced by country, Presley made rock ’n’ roll the flavour of the times.

More recently, the likes of Dolly Parton and Garth Brooks have put country, and Nashville, back on the musical map. By the time Taylor, at 11, was falling ever deeper in love with country music, the city was once more the thriving heart of the movement. Taylor decided that if Faith Hill’s career had taken off when she moved to Nashville, then that was where she needed to go, too. She recalled later how ‘a little bell’ went off in her head, making her decide that she simply had to move there herself. She had felt for a while that Wyomissing was ‘about the most random place in the world for a country singer to come from’. Something had to change.

So she embarked on a relentless, pushy campaign, regularly asking her parents: ‘Hey, Mom and Dad, can we move to Nashville?’ Naturally, Andrea and Scott were surprised and nonplussed at first. They had built such a strong and comfortable family home in Pennsylvania, together with their gorgeous holiday home on the coast, that they were understandably a little shaken at the thought of upping sticks to the heart of Tennessee.

Taylor, though, was fierce and focused. Indeed, if there are two themes that run throughout her life, it is determination and a willingness to be persistent and take risks. Those qualities are particularly pronounced in this chapter. In the face of initial opposition to her Nashville plan, Taylor was determined. She continued to plead with them to make the move that she believed would make her dream come true. She particularly put pressure on Andrea, perhaps hoping that her mother – a determined woman herself – would at least relate to her drive. Andrea eventually gave in – partially. She would sanction a one-off trip as an initial step. Taylor’s mother said that she was particularly impressed by the fact that her daughter never mentioned fame as the thing she hoped to find in Nashville. Unlike the hopefuls who pop up on our screens during reality television contests to state pleadingly that being famous is all they have ever wanted, Taylor took a different angle. Instead, she only said that she wanted to be there to work alongside the artists whom she loved and respected, and that one day, hopefully, she would be able to move people herself in the way they had moved her. As Andrea explained: ‘It was about moving to a place where she could write with people she could learn from.’

Taylor had a double reason to be delighted with Andrea’s movement on the Nashville question. She had been experiencing unpleasant bullying from classmates at school. Unfortunately for her, a number of factors in her life were enough to make classmates jealous of her – her comfortable home life and wealthy parents, to name two. To add to their thinly veiled envy, she was beginning to be written about in the media. This press attention was a mixed blessing for Taylor. While it was flattering and helpful for her career, it tended to prompt spikes in the teasing and shunning she was suffering. When one of her national-anthem renditions was reported in a local newspaper, she knew that the following day would be ‘a bad day at school for me’.

In addition, her love of country music was also causing her to be picked on. Like many children who take an interest in music beyond the most mainstream of genres, she found that she would be teased for daring to be different. Her classmates were, said Taylor, ‘going to sleepovers and breaking into their parents’ liquor cabinets on the weekend’, whereas she was focusing solely on music. It made her stand out. They even teased her over her sore fingers, which had been worn down by hours of guitar practice. Andrea had taped Taylor’s fingers up for her. To the bullies, this was another reason to mark Taylor down as a ‘weirdo’. One day, a group of girls whom she had been friendly with for some time decided to shun her. As she sat down to join their table at lunch, they suddenly all got up and moved to a different table. On other occasions, schoolmates would shout unpleasant remarks at her. Andrea became accustomed to helping Taylor get over these ‘awful’ incidents. ‘I’d have to pick her up off the floor,’ she said. For her mother, the knowledge that her daughter was in such pain was torturous.

Taylor was, she realised, ‘uncool’ thanks to her individuality. Under the pressure of the teasing and ostracism, Taylor went against her individualist nature and took steps to try to blend in with her classmates. Here, though, she learned a valuable lesson. She discovered that the harder she tried to fit in with the in-crowd at school, the more their respect for her declined. ‘So I found that trying to be like everyone else doesn’t work,’ she said.

On one especially hurtful day, she suggested to some girls she knew that they all meet up together for a visit to the local shopping mall. To Taylor, this seemed like a fun thing to do, so she was disappointed when they all said they had other plans. She chose to go with Andrea instead. When she and her mother walked into the mall, she saw that the group of friends was indeed there. ‘I remember what happened … like it was yesterday,’ Andrea told Elle Girl. ‘Taylor and I walked into a store and these six little girls who had all claimed to be “really busy” were there together.’

Taylor felt enormously shocked and hurt. Andrea gathered her up and they drove to a different mall far away and did their shopping there. Remembering that horrible day, Taylor said the memory of it is ‘one of those painful ones you’ll never fully get over’. She was grateful for Andrea’s lead that day. By travelling to a different shopping mall and having a fun time there, they had given as good a response as they could to those who had spurned her. The King of Prussia mall was a 90-minute drive away, but the trip felt well worth it.

Taylor was not entirely socially isolated, though. She had made friends with a girl called Brittany Maack when they were both mere toddlers, and that friendship continued to blossom during and beyond her childhood. ‘We were more sisters than friends,’ Maack told the Reading Eagle. ‘Taylor’s family was my family.’ Yet this bond was not enough to paper over the cracks of hurt that Taylor felt when kids bullied her. Lots of kids found her ‘annoying’ and ‘uncool’. Among her offences to coolness was the fact that she was not interested in getting drunk. She knew they thought her weird, but she in turn found 12-year-olds getting drunk at parties weird. Once, during a mass sleepover at a friend’s house, it was suggested they decamp to the house of a guy they knew who had access to some beer. Where her friends were excited, Taylor was appalled. She felt like phoning Andrea and asking her to take her home.

With the benefit of hindsight, she can see how all the kids at middle school, popular or not, bullies and bullied, were battling with their own personal insecurities. But back then it hurt. She would arrive at school and not know whom, if anyone, she would hang out with and chat to that day. ‘And that’s a really terrifying thing for somebody who’s 12,’ she said. She described her existence in those difficult times as that of an outsider who was forever ‘looking in’, but hindsight again delivers a healthy perspective on the matter. These painful moments provided vivid creative sparks for her music. The theme of the outsider, which has featured in so many songs across so many genres, was to be rich and fertile ground for her. It was first touched upon in a song she wrote when she was 12 and has, as we shall see, surfaced in several songs since.

Her isolation during her middle-school years also gave her plenty of time to focus on music. Had she still been running with the in-crowd she would have spent more time on normal schoolgirl pursuits, rather than solitary sessions with her guitar and imagination – those two dear friends who have served her so loyally ever since. The fact that she had her guitar to turn to when she was feeling low also prevented her from needing to use alcohol or drugs as a form of escape. ‘Music has always been that escape for me,’ she said.

So now Taylor looks back with gratitude at those who rejected her, recognising the gift their bullying gave her. Sadness has proved to be the most fertile creative ground for so many artists, but that inspiration comes, by definition, at a price, and being tormented and excluded was the price Taylor paid.

So imagine her huge relief when she learned that Andrea had begun to buckle in the face of her determination to move to the city of her dreams. As we have seen, however, Andrea only agreed to take Taylor to Nashville for a temporary visit to begin with. During a school holiday, Andrea took Taylor and her brother on the 650-mile trip to Nashville. Taylor would distribute her demo tape to the record labels and hope that one of them would snap her up once they heard her music.

Although Andrea sanctioned and organised the trip, she also drew a clear line in the sand over her own role within it. It was one that was supportive but strictly defined. ‘I made it really clear,’ she told TV show Teen Superstar. ‘Okay, if this is something you want, you’ve got to do it,’ she told Taylor. She added that she had never signed up to be Taylor’s manager and she certainly did not see herself as a ‘stage mom’. So she would walk only as far as the front door of the label companies with Taylor. From then on, the youngster would have to walk on alone. Remembering her pride over her own career achievements, Andrea was keen for her daughter to feel the same.

Taylor had given the demo CD a simple design. The front cover had a photograph of her face on it and the words ‘Call me’. On the back cover were her telephone number and her email address. As they drove down the road, Taylor would suddenly shriek as she saw a label. ‘That’s Mercury Records!’ she would cry. ‘Pull over! I need to give them my demo tape!’ When she arrived at the reception desk she would hand over her homemade CD and tell them, ‘Hey, I’m 11, and I want a record deal.’ Then, echoing the slogan printed on the front cover, she would add with a smile: ‘Call me!’ It was a sweet pitch, but not a finely honed one. Later, looking back at this with the advantage of time and experience, she was able to smile. She would say: ‘How did that work out for me? It didn’t!’

In the immediate wake of her trip, she was enormously disappointed when all but one of the labels she had visited failed to contact her. She waited for the phone to ring or the email to ping, but nothing happened. These were crushing days – they felt more like weeks, so slowly and emptily did they drag along. Until, one day, a man from one of the record companies rang her back to tell her that the way she was going about her pitch was unlikely to work. ‘He was so sweet,’ she recalled later.

She had thought she was special, but in time she realised that there were ‘hundreds of people’ also trying to make it in Nashville and that they all had ‘the same dream’. She realised that she was not inherently as special as she had hoped, and that she would have to make a real effort to show how much she could stand out. While this was news to her, she did not take it as bad news. Instead, she stepped up again. Taylor is usually good when there is a challenge on. ‘I thought,’ she told Teen Superstar, ‘you don’t just make it in Nashville. I’ve got to really work on something that would make me different.’

The short trip to Nashville had not reaped the immediate results that Taylor had hoped for. In fact, she would get her first attention from a major label as a result of her being spotted at one of her sporting performances by a man called Dan Dymtrow. He was then managing the career of the pop princess Britney Spears. He approached Taylor and asked if she could provide some more evidence of her talent and personality. Scott decided that the best way to do this would be for them to film a quirky home video, showing Taylor in an interesting light. ‘My dad put together this typical “dad video” type of thing, with the cat chewing the [guitar] neck and stuff like that,’ Taylor told Wood & Steel. This was enough for Dymtrow to invite her to his office, so she showed up with her trusty 12-string guitar and played some music for him.

He was impressed. But the first project he got her involved in was closer to modelling than music. She posed in Abercrombie & Fitch clothes in a shoot for Vanity Fair magazine called ‘Rising Stars’. This promotional gimmick saw the retailer link up with potential stars of the future and drape them in its autumnal range. After Dymtrow had sent them a press kit about Taylor, they invited her to take part in the shoot. In Taylor’s photos, she wore a white top with denim jeans. She portrayed a heartbroken girl, even wiping away a tear from her eye with a handkerchief. She was holding a guitar in the photos, but this was still far away from what she really wanted to do. She also worried that she was not ‘cool’ enough to be in such a position – a legacy of her school experiences, perhaps.

The irony was that she certainly was cool enough to take part, and by doing so she was showing her bullies that she could be very much the insider after all. To be part of the well-known label’s ‘Rising Stars’ campaign was a significant honour. Among those selected by Abercrombie & Fitch before they became household names were Channing Tatum, Jennifer Lawrence, Ashton Kutcher and Penn Badgley. More recently, the label has chosen Glee star Jacob Artist, American Horror Story’s Lily Rabe, Texas Chainsaw 3D’s Scott Eastwood and a slew of other young talent. Now, Taylor stands tall among this list, but at the time she felt out of her depth.

She worried about all sorts of scenarios, including her photograph being dropped from the publication. So imagine her excitement when, in July 2004, her photo appeared on the news stands in Vanity Fair magazine. There she was, featured in a full-page photograph, alongside a passage of text in which she explained to readers who she was. ‘After I sang the national anthem at the US Open last year,’ she began, ‘a top music manager signed me as his client.’ She went on to describe her love of country music: ‘I love the sound of fiddles and mandolins ringing in my ears and I love the stories that you hear in country ballads. I sometimes write about teenage love, but I am presently a 14-year-old girl without a boyfriend. Sometimes I worry that I must be wearing some kind of guy repellent, but then I realise that I’m just discovering who I am as a person.’ She concluded: ‘Right now, music is the most important thing in my life, and I want to touch people with my songs.’

She was aiming for the top but was not shy of taking on more apprentice-style roles within the country music scene. For instance, she grabbed an intern slot at the four-day CMA Music Festival, held each year by the Country Music Association in Nashville. She was handed a clipboard and set to work in an administrative role. She was entranced as she watched autograph hunters approach the stars she was serving. ‘I remember just feeling like, if there was ever a chance that one day people would line up to have me sign something of theirs, then that would be a really, really good day for me,’ she said.

Another promotional activity at this stage saw her signed-up to a compilation album assembled by the cosmetics firm Maybelline. One of her songs appeared on the album Chicks With Attitudes. Her manager then took her on a breathless tour of meetings with record labels. The tour would pay off – in a way. Meetings such as these come with a wide scale of outcomes. Sometimes, executives cannot contain their excitement for the young act in front of them. Other times, they are summarily dismissive of them. It is also far from unheard of for an act to be turned away before they even get past the receptionist.

Taylor was keen for more musical projects to get involved in and she was, initially, delighted when Dymtrow got her a deal with RCA Records. It seemed to be just what she wanted – recognition from a major label in Nashville. For a while, she felt that she had finally made the big step she had dreamed of. It felt so exciting. ‘I was elated,’ she told CMT Insider later. ‘I was just, “Oh my gosh! This huge record label wants to sign me to a development deal. I’m so excited!”’ There seemed to be, on the face of it, so much to be optimistic about. RCA gave her sponsorship money and recording time.

However, the agreement turned out to be not quite as exciting as she hoped. ‘A development deal is an in-between record deal,’ she told NBC. ‘It’s like a guy saying that he wants to date you but not be your boyfriend. You know, they don’t want to sign you to an actual record deal or put an album out on you. They want to watch your progress for a year.’ At 14 years of age she was being told by the label that they wanted to keep her on ice until she was 18. For a girl in her mid-teens this was unbearable – four years seemed so far away. She felt she was running out of time. For Taylor, her teenage years were not an inconvenience to get beyond before she could become a singer-songwriter. She wanted to be that creature there and then. ‘I wanted to capture these years of my life on an album while they still represented what I was going through,’ she recalled.

Her self-belief would soon be rewarded when her parents agreed to a more fixed move to Nashville in the wake of the RCA development. ‘My father had a job he could do from anywhere,’ she told Blender magazine. ‘My parents moved across the country so I could pursue a dream.’ Put like that, it slightly downplayed the sacrifice Scott and Andrea had made. Taylor was aware of the extent of that sacrifice, despite the fact that her parents went to some effort to minimise it. There was no pressure heaped on her, no guilt trips laid at her feet. Instead, they acted as if this was a choice they had made themselves, on their own terms.

It did not fool Taylor for a moment. She told Self magazine: ‘I knew I was the reason they were moving. But they tried to put no pressure on me. They were like, “Well, we need a change of scenery anyway,” and, “I love how friendly people in Tennessee are.”’ Crucially, they took steps to ensure that as little expectation was placed on Taylor’s shoulders as possible. With the entire family moving hundreds of miles for her, it would be easy for Taylor to feel that she had let everyone down if she were not to hit the big time. But as Andrea told Entertainment Weekly, ‘I never wanted to make that move about her “making it”.’ She feared it would be too ‘horrible’ if Taylor had not succeeded.

As she house-hunted in Nashville, Andrea found a place on Old Hickory Lane that she liked the look of. She arranged for the rest of the family to go and look at it. Scott told the Sea Ray website how quickly he was sold on it. ‘We stopped at the dock on the way to check up on the house,’ he recalled. ‘I looked down the cove toward the lake, imagined my Sea Ray tied up there and said, “I’ll take it.”’ Even the estate agent was shocked: ‘Don’t you want to see the house first?’ she asked.

He felt at home and so did his children. Taylor and Austin joined a local high school called Hendersonville. Here, to Taylor’s relief, her fellow pupils were not suspicious or envious of her musical endeavours. Quite to the contrary – they were impressed by her efforts and delighted to help her make her dreams come true. ‘Everybody was so nice to me,’ she told the New Yorker later. ‘They’re all, like, “We heard you’re a singer. We have a talent show next week – do you want to enter?”’ What a breath of fresh air for her; she could hardly believe how well the move to Nashville was turning out. It felt a world apart from the troubled existence she’d had in Pennsylvania. ‘They were so supportive,’ she recalled of her new neighbours.

She had her first ever kiss at the age of 15. However, it was a subsequent boyfriend, called Brandon Borello, who inspired her to write a song. She was in the freshman year of high school when she was asked to write a song for a ninth-grade talent-show project. ‘I was sitting there thinking, I’ve got to write an upbeat song that’s going to relate to everyone,’ she told AOL. ‘And at the time I was dating a guy and we didn’t have a song. So I wrote us one, and I played it at the show. Months later, people would come up to me and say, “I loved the song you played.” They’d only heard it once, so I thought, there must be something here.’

On her first day at school she sat down next to a girl in English class. They began to chat and quickly became close friends. The girl’s name was Abigail Anderson. They felt an instinctive bond, grounded in the fact that they both felt like outsiders but both had defined ambitions: Anderson’s was to become a professional swimmer. Finally, Taylor had a friend she could relate to on several levels. They were the outsiders who wanted to become, in the widest sense, champions. They also shared an impish sense of humour.

Anderson was not the only good thing about English classes for Taylor. A lover of words and writing, she often enjoyed these lessons enormously. Among the books that they studied in these classes was that staple feature of so many youngsters’ education: Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird. This classic American novel inspired her greatly. ‘You know, you hear storytelling like in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird and it just … it makes your mind wander,’ she has said. ‘It makes you feel like it makes your world more vast. And you think about more things and greater concepts after you read something like that.’

After studying like any other schoolgirl during the day, in the evening she would enter a much more adult world, as she teamed up with established songwriters for creative sessions. She later described the curious duality of these days as ‘a really weird existence – I was a teenager during the day when I was at school, and then at night it was like I was 45. My mom would pick me up from school and I’d go downtown and sit and write songs with these hit songwriters.’

She told American Songwriter magazine that she realised what an opportunity these sessions were for her. Yet she was also aware that it was important for her to appear as confident as possible. ‘I knew that, being a 14-year-old girl, anybody would – understandably – think, I’m going to have to write a song for a kid today.’ She was determined that this would not happen. ‘So I would walk in with 10 or 15 almost-finished melodies or choruses. I just wanted to make sure that everybody knew I was serious about it.’

Throughout her waking hours she was on the hunt for new inspiration and for the opportunity to record it. When moments of lyrical inspiration struck she would scribble down the words on whatever came to hand: her school exercise books, a tissue. This sometimes caused awkward moments. Teachers would sometimes call in a random notebook check and they would be surprised to find Taylor’s scribbled lyrics of anguish alongside her schoolwork. ‘But they learned to deal with me,’ she said. Other times a melody would come into her head. She would record it by humming it into her mobile phone. It was not unheard of for her classmates to spot – and hear – her in the toilets, humming a rough tune into her phone.

Here, we turn to a crucial difference between her new school and her old one. Previously, her fellow pupils gave her inspiration only via the cruellest and most unintentional of routes. By excluding her and bullying her, they sent Taylor into such pits of unhappiness that she would compose her way out of them. Now, however, her schoolmates offered deliberate and positive inspiration. Groups of them would join Taylor around a campfire at night and listen to her singing her songs as she strummed her guitar. These youngsters were of the age that Taylor wanted to appeal to, so they were the perfect test audience for her songs and ideas.

This obsessive documentation and regular road testing meant that Taylor turned up to her writing sessions with plenty to put on the table. There would be no question of her being a young passenger, incomplete without the patronage of those older and wiser. For instance, she wrote with a fellow composer called Liz Rose. ‘I think she ended up just writing with me because I didn’t change what she was doing,’ Rose told American Songwriter. ‘I tried to make it better and mould it and hone it, and [said] “hang on there” and “write it down”; that’s why it worked with us. I really respected her and got what she was trying to do, and I didn’t want to make her write in the Nashville cookie-cutter songwriting mould.’

Rose was impressed with her young collaborator. In time, she felt that she was little more than Taylor’s editor. ‘She’d write about what happened in school that day,’ Rose told Blender. ‘She had such a clear vision of what she was trying to say. And she’d come in with the most incredible hooks.’ The two found they complemented one another well in these sessions. Out of them came the song that would launch Taylor’s career properly – ‘Tim McGraw’. The earliest origins of the song came during a maths class. She began to hum a new melody in the lesson and then, Taylor said, it took her just a quarter of an hour to write the basic structure of the song. When she got home she smoothed it out and improved it a bit, adding some piano melody. Then she was ready to take it to a session with Rose.

The song, which was originally going to be entitled ‘When You Think Tim McGraw’, is a bittersweet affair in which Taylor looks back on a real-life relationship she had with a boy, who is widely believed to be her ex-boyfriend Brandon Borello. The lyrics take the form of a letter written to her former partner. Borello was a senior when he dated Taylor, who was then still a freshman. This leads to the month of tears in September in the song when they were parted.

Explaining what she felt was the power of the song, Taylor said: ‘It was reminiscent, and it was thinking about a relationship you had and then lost.’ She added: ‘I think one of the most powerful human emotions is what should have been and wasn’t. That was a really good song to start out on, just because a lot of people can relate to wanting what you can’t have.’ She knew what made a good song, intellectually as well as instinctively. ‘Tim McGraw’ would be track one on her debut album – and it had all started in a maths class.

Taylor soon felt that she was on a roll. She told the Washington Post that she could ‘draw inspiration from anything’. She expanded on what this meant for her. ‘If you’re a good storyteller, you can take a dirty look somebody gives you, or if a guy you used to have flirtations with starts dating a new girl or somebody you’re casually talking to says something that makes you sooooo mad – you can create an entire scenario around that.’

Another early track she wrote was called ‘Lucky You’. ‘It was about this girl who dares to be different,’ she said. The autobiographical parallels are clear. ‘At that time I was describing myself,’ she added. Following that and ‘Tim McGraw’, she then wrote a song about a guy called Drew Hardwick, on whom she had a ‘huge crush’, but an unrequited one. Speaking to Country Standard Time, she added: ‘[He] would sit there every day talking to me about another girl: how beautiful she was, how nice and how smart and perfect she was.’ It was as if she was back in her younger years, with her unrequited crush of her summer holiday. Again, she would do her best to fake smiles for him as he told her all about other girls, and wonder if he knew that she would think about him all night.

The song, which would namecheck Drew directly, would be called ‘Teardrops On My Guitar’. She began composing this track on her way home from school one day. Given its power, maturity and poise, it’s remarkable that the song was conjured out of this circumstance. In the song, she yearns for Drew’s flawless looks, which take her breath away. Taylor can only hope, with a slice of bitterness, that Drew’s perfect girl will look after him properly. The imagery of a guy being the song she sings in her car gives this track a universal appeal of the sort that drive-time radio shows adore. When the listener truly connects with Taylor’s lyrics and the emotions they describe, they will find themselves shedding a few teardrops, too.

Her songs were proving to be rich little numbers. Word soon spread around town about this incredible kid who was writing with such aplomb and deftness. Soon, she would be contacted by the mighty Sony. They snapped her up as a songwriter to compose potential tracks for their existing artists. She agreed and duly became the youngest staff songwriter ever hired by the esteemed Sony/Tree publishing house. The significance and symbolism of this is stark: a girl in her mid-teens was signed by one of the world’s biggest record labels to compose songs for artists many years older than her.

So came the bold move: Taylor decided to leave RCA and go in search of a label that would truly believe in her. This was a difficult decision and one she only reached after much soul-searching. What courage and self-belief it showed to reject a major label’s interest in her. However, the fault line between artist and label was significant: she felt she was ‘good to go’ right then. The label felt she needed time and development, not least because it was the country music market she wanted to move into – complete with its world-weary lyrics and ageing fanbase – rather than pop, which is far more geared for teenage stars.

But Taylor was quite sure. ‘I figured, if they didn’t believe in me then, they weren’t ever going to believe in me,’ she said. She took a deep breath, walked away and continued to prepare for the day when she would make it big. She even spent ages practising her autograph, filling a notebook with her scrawl in preparation for the day when she would be famous enough to sign her name for fans. Even though the humble autograph would have been surpassed by the smartphone photograph as the favoured proof of a celebrity encounter by the time she made it big – particularly for Taylor’s generation – these signature rehearsals showed that she was determined to be an authentic star.

Again, her courage was rewarded. The moment soon came that changed everything: enter Scott Borchetta, the man who would make her a queen. For him, the decision to sign her would be a no-brainer. ‘I fell in love with her,’ he said. ‘It’s really that simple.’ Born in the 1960s, Borchetta was always a competitive and driven soul. In middle school he competed in car races with friends. He found, he told Forbes later, that he had a ‘race devil’ inside him. After school he decided to try to make it in the music industry. He took a job in the mail room of his dad’s independent promotion company. He was not the first record company executive to have joined the industry via the mail room – the famed Simon Cowell took a similar route. Borchetta moved from California to Nashville and took a job working for the promotional department of Mary Tyler Moore’s MTM record label. He then ran his own independent promotions firm for a while before joining MCA Records.

Then he joined Universal Music Group, under whose umbrella he launched DreamWorks Nashville. Here, he was part of one of the planet’s biggest record labels. However, in 2005, his division was closed down. He was looking for a new star to really launch his next label. Taylor, who would be the perfect person, crossed his path at the famous Nashville showcase, the Bluebird Café. This regular event was an exciting prospect for Taylor, who would get to play in front of an audience of local record industry talent hunters. The institution had its success stories, and none – prior to Taylor’s arrival – came bigger than Garth Brooks. He was spotted there in 1987 and signed up to Capitol Records. The rest is history.

History would be made the night that Taylor showed up for her own slot. She carried her guitar onto the stage and performed an acoustic set. By now she was comfortable with live performance, but she was also aware that this was no usual audience. Somewhere out there, she hoped, would be a record label figure able to make her dreams come true. Borchetta, meanwhile, had turned up with a corresponding dream. He wanted to find a talent he could turn into an international star.