How to be good

Popularity charts

Taylor Swift is not only the biggest pop star on the planet, but also the biggest worrier. Right now she is worrying about this interview — her first major sit-down chat of the year. “I worry about everything, all the time,” she says with a grin. “We could do our entire interview me telling you how many things I’ve worried about since breakfast. ‘The Neuroses of Taylor Swift’ is probably going to be the article headline.”

But then the one thing she doesn’t need to worry about is how that career is going. She is the only artiste ever to sell more than a million first-week US copies of three separate albums — Speak Now in 2010, Red in 2012, and 1989, released last October, which racked up the biggest first-week American sales since 2002 and went to Number One around the world, including the UK, where it was the best-selling album by an international artiste last year.
Being on top

She ponders whether she’ll be the last person ever to sell this many records. “There were so many doomsday theories about the music industry,” she says. “For the last two albums I’d sold one million copies in a week, and I knew people were waiting to see me not hit that number and then diagnose the music industry as dying or dead. Which is a lot of pressure to put on one artiste and one album.”

Does she think future artistes will sell records like this again? “It’s possible,” she says. “We all have to step up and make albums that are good, top to bottom, if selling albums is still important. It is to me, but a lot of artistes have already given up on that. I have friends who just think it’s not attainable, which I feel is a defeatist way to look at life.”

Taylor Alison Swift was born in West Reading, Pennsylvania, on December 13 1989. She spent her early years on a Christmas-tree farm run as a side business by her parents. Her father, Scott, is a wealth management adviser with Merrill Lynch; her mother, Andrea, worked at a mutual fund before becoming a full-time mother to Taylor and her younger brother, Austin. The Swifts moved to Nashville, the home of country music, when their daughter was 15.

Taylor and her mother had four years earlier hawked a demo CD around Nashville’s Music Row, going door-to-door in search of a break. Shortly after the family was uprooted, that break arrived. Swift became the youngest songwriter ever to be signed to Sony/ATV Music Publishing, and a year later a record deal followed with the fledgling label Big Machine, which released her eponymous debut album in 2006. Crucially, she became one of the first country artistes to use the internet to market herself, expanding her reach beyond the genre’s traditional heartlands to recruit an army of teenage girl fans.

By the time of her second album, Fearless, in 2008, Swift was already shifting away from country. Fearless made her the youngest ever winner of the album of the year Grammy (in 2010) and the first country star to win an MTV video award (best female video for You Belong with Me in 2009).

Her subsequent albums Speak Now and Red were progressively a little less country, a little more pop, but she has remained popular in Nashville. In 2013, she became the second ever winner of the Country Music Association’s Pinnacle Award, its highest honour. The previous winner, Garth Brooks, was in his mid-40s when he won — Swift was 23.

Before the release of 1989, Swift moved to New York. She cut her trademark long, blond hair and embraced feminism, although not, she says, as ‘some strategy — being a feminist is just part of my life’. And she made a determined attempt to cause a ‘change in the narrative’ that had portrayed her as some sort of serial-dating bunny-boiler. “There was a bit of a reputation for having a lot of boy-bashing songs,” she says, referring to the likes of ‘I Knew You Were Trouble and Should’ve Said No.’ Which is a sexist way of saying heartbreak songs.

“To trivialise someone who’s heartbroken is really cruel. But people have to simplify things,” she says. “Everybody’s got busy lives, they don’t have time to form a complex opinion of me and my music. I’m in a different place in my life, where love isn’t really a priority. I haven’t dated anyone in years so there’s less chatter about the serial dater thing. I’m just really excited at an awards show when they don’t make some weird joke about my dating life.”

Social media buff

There was a time when Swift would refuse to use the internet for fear of what she might see, but now she spends a lot of time online, interacting with the Swifties, her hardcore fans. “Not in a way that’s like, having sycophantic worshippers,” she stresses. “My fans make fun of me — it’s really cool. They have all these Gifs of me making an idiot of myself or tripping and falling on stage. They bring humour back into it for me. I get too serious sometimes — you can probably tell — and they bring me back to like, ‘OK, I’m not really doing anything that difficult. I just need to calm down.’”

It is impossible to imagine other pop stars spending time doing all this. Can she really be this nice all the time? “No, because that’s annoying, too,” she says, laughing. “And it’s not real if someone appears to never have any issues with anyone. I have my friends, I have enemies. I have bad days when I don’t want to go to a photo shoot, but I’m not going to show up four hours late, I’m going to be there on time. I’m not nice all the time but I try not to be carelessly rude to people who don’t deserve it.”

Swift is concentrating on trying, in her words, “to create a beautiful life”. She likes to “play the tape of her life forward” when she’s making decisions. But ask her what the tape looks like if you fast-forward five years and she seems less certain. “I’ll be 30,” she gasps.
Swift is not even sure she’ll have made another album by the time 2020 rolls around. “I’m not going to put out an album until I’ve made one that’s better than this one and that’s going to be really hard,” she says. And how might her music evolve if she does find love? “If that does happen, I think I could find complexity in happiness,” she says.For now, though, her life is mapped out indefinitely.