Taylor Swift Early Life, Relationships, Politics, Career, Musical Style, Family, Wiki, Age, Songwriting, Awards and achievements

Name: Taylor Swift ( Taylor Alison Swift )

Born: December 13, 1989

Age: 28 years old

Birthplace: Reading, USA

Height: 178

Occupation: singer, actress, songwriter

Tags: actress, singer, songwriter

Relationship Status: single

Life and career

1989–2003: Early life

Taylor Alison Swift was born on December 13, 1989, in Reading, Pennsylvania. Her father, Scott Kingsley Swift, was a financial advisor, and her mother, Andrea Gardner Swift (née Finlay), was a homemaker who had worked as a mutual fund marketing executive. Swift has a younger brother named Austin. The singer spent the early years of her life on a Christmas tree farm. She attended preschool and kindergarten at the Alvernia Montessori School, run by Franciscan nuns, before transferring to The Wyndcroft School. The family then moved to a rented house in the suburban town of Wyomissing, Pennsylvania, where she attended Wyomissing Area Junior/Senior High School.

At the age of nine, Swift became interested in musical theater and performed in four Berks Youth Theatre Academy productions. She also traveled regularly to New York City for vocal and acting lessons. Swift later shifted her focus toward country music inspired by Shania Twain's songs, which made her "want to just run around the block four times and daydream about everything". She spent her weekends performing at local festivals and events. After watching a documentary about Faith Hill, Swift felt sure that she needed to go to Nashville, Tennessee, to pursue a music career. At the age of eleven, she traveled with her mother to visit Nashville record labels and submitted a demo tape of Dolly Parton and Dixie Chicks karaoke covers. However, she was rejected since "everyone in that town wanted to do what I wanted to do. So, I kept thinking to myself, I need to figure out a way to be different".

When Swift was about 12 years old, computer repairman and local musician Ronnie Cremer taught her how to play guitar and helped with her first efforts as a songwriter, leading to her writing "Lucky You". In 2003, Swift and her parents started working with New York-based music manager Dan Dymtrow. With his help, Swift modelled for Abercrombie & Fitch as part of their "Rising Stars" campaign, had an original song included on a Maybelline compilation CD, and attended meetings with major record labels. After performing original songs at an RCA Records showcase, Swift was given an artist development deal and began making frequent trips to Nashville with her mother.

To help Swift break into country music, her father transferred to the Nashville office of Merrill Lynch when she was 14, and the family relocated to a lakefront house in Hendersonville, Tennessee. Swift attended Hendersonville High School, but after two years transferred to the Aaron Academy, which through homeschooling could accommodate her touring schedule, and she graduated a year early.

2008–2010: Fearless and acting

Swift's second studio album, Fearless, was released on November 11, 2008. The lead single, "Love Story", was released in September 2008. It peaked at number four on the Billboard Hot 100 and number one in Australia. Four more singles were released throughout 2008 and 2009: "White Horse", "You Belong with Me", "Fifteen" and "Fearless". "You Belong with Me" was the album's highest-charting single on the Billboard Hot 100, peaking at number two. The album debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 and was the top-selling album of 2009 in the United States. The album received promotion from Swift's first concert tour, the Fearless Tour, which grossed over $63 million. Taylor Swift: Journey to Fearless, a concert film, was aired on television and later released on DVD and Blu-ray. Swift also performed as a supporting act for Keith Urban's Escape Together World Tour.

In 2009, the music video for "You Belong with Me" was named MTV Video Music Award for Best Female Video. Her acceptance speech was interrupted by rapper Kanye West. The incident was the subject of controversy and frequent media attention, resulting in many Internet memes. James Montgomery of MTV argued that the incident and subsequent media attention turned Swift into "a bona-fide mainstream celebrity". Also that year, she won five American Music Awards, including Artist of the Year and Favorite Country Album. Billboardnamed her 2009's Artist of the Year. The album ranked number 99 on NPR's 2017 list of the 150 Greatest Albums Made By Women.

At the 52nd Grammy Awards, Fearless was named Album of the Year and Best Country Album, and "White Horse" was named Best Country Song and Best Female Country Vocal Performance. Swift was the youngest artist ever to win Album of the Year. During the ceremony, Swift sang "You Belong with Me" and "Rhiannon" with Stevie Nicks. Her vocal performance received negative reviews and a media backlash. Jon Caramanica of The New York Times found it "refreshing to see someone so gifted make the occasional flub" and described Swift as "the most important new pop star of the past few years". Swift became the youngest ever artist to be named Entertainer of the Year by the Country Music Association. Fearless also won the Association's Album of the Year award.

Swift contributed backing vocals to John Mayer's "Half of My Heart", a single featured on his fourth album, Battle Studies (2009). She co-wrote and recorded "Best Days of Your Life" with Kellie Pickler, and co-wrote two songs for the Hannah Montana: The Movie soundtrack—"You'll Always Find Your Way Back Home" and "Crazier". Swift also provided vocals for Boys Like Girls' "Two Is Better Than One". She contributed two songs to the Valentine's Day soundtrack, including "Today Was a Fairytale", which became her first number one on the Canadian Hot 100 chart. While filming her cinematic debut Valentine's Day in October 2009, Swift began a romantic relationship with co-star Taylor Lautner, but they broke up later that year. The romantic comedy, released the following year, saw her play the ditzy girlfriend of a high school jock, a role in which Los Angeles Times found "serious comedic potential". In a scathing review, the critic for Varietydeemed her "entirely undirected", arguing that "she needs to find a skilled director to tamp her down and channel her obviously abundant energy".

Swift made her acting debut in a 2009 episode of CBS's CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, playing a rebellious teenager. The New York Times noted that the character allowed Swift to be "a little bit naughty, and credibly so". Later that year, Swift both hosted and performed as the musical guest for an episode of Saturday Night Live. Entertainment Weekly described her as "this season's best Saturday Night Live host so far", noting that she "was always up for the challenge, seemed to be having fun, and helped the rest of the cast nail the punchlines". Later in 2010, she briefly dated actor Jake Gyllenhaal.

Musical style

Swift's music contains elements of pop, pop rock and country. She described herself as a country artist until the 2014 release of 1989, which she described as a "sonically cohesive pop album". Rolling Stone wrote: "[Swift] might get played on the country station, but she's one of the few genuine rock stars we've got these days." According to The New York Times, "There isn't much in Ms. Swift's music to indicate country—a few banjo strums, a pair of cowboy boots worn onstage, a bedazzled guitar—but there's something in her winsome, vulnerable delivery that's unique to Nashville". The Guardian wrote that Swift "cranks melodies out with the pitiless efficiency of a Scandinavian pop factory".

Swift's vocals were described by Sophie Schillaci of The Hollywood Reporter as "sweet, but soft". The Los Angeles Times identified Swift's "defining" vocal gesture in studio recordings as "the line that slides down like a contented sigh or up like a raised eyebrow, giving her beloved girl-time hits their air of easy intimacy". Rolling Stone, in a Speak Now review, wrote: "Swift's voice is unaffected enough to mask how masterful she has become as a singer; she lowers her voice for the payoff lines in the classic mode of a shy girl trying to talk tough."In another review of Speak Now, The Village Voice wrote that her phrasing was previously "bland and muddled, but that's changed. She can still sound strained and thin, and often strays into a pitch that drives some people crazy; but she's learned how to make words sound like what they mean." The Hollywood Reporter wrote that her live vocals are "fine", but they do not match those of her peers. In 2009, Ken Tucker of Entertainment Weekly described Swift's vocals as "flat, thin, and sometimes as wobbly as a newborn colt". However, Swift has received praise for refusing to correct her pitch with Auto-Tune.

In an interview with The New Yorker, Swift characterized herself primarily as a songwriter: "I write songs, and my voice is just a way to get those lyrics across." A writer for The Tennessean conceded in 2010 that Swift is "not the best technical singer", but described her as the "best communicator that we've got". Swift's vocal presence is something that concerns her and she has "put a lot of work" into improving it. It was reported in 2010 that she continues to take vocal lessons. She has said that she only feels nervous performing "if I'm not sure what the audience thinks of me, like at award shows".

Songwriting

Swift uses her life experiences as an inspiration in her work. In her songs, Swift often addresses the "anonymous crushes of her high school years" and celebrities. Swift frequently criticizes ex-boyfriends, an aspect of her songwriting downplayed by The Village Voice: "Being told What Songs Mean is like having a really pushy professor. And it imperils a true appreciation of Swift's talent, which is not confessional, but dramatic." However, New York believes the media scrutiny over her decision to "mine her personal life for music ... is sexist, inasmuch as it's not asked of her male peers". The singer herself has said that not all her songs are factual and that they are sometimes based on observations. Aside from her liner note clues, Swift tries not to talk about song subjects specifically "because these are real people. You try to give insight as to where you were coming from as a writer without completely throwing somebody under the bus".

For a female to write about her feelings, and then be portrayed as some clingy, insane, desperate girlfriend in need of making you marry her and have kids with her, I think that's taking something that potentially should be celebrated—a woman writing about her feelings in a confessional way—that's taking it and turning it and twisting it into something that is frankly a little sexist.

— Swift in response to criticism of her songwriting

The Guardian has praised Swift for writing about teenage years "with a kind of wistful, sepia-toned nostalgia" over the course of her first two albums. New York has remarked that many singer-songwriters have made great records as teens, but "none made great records so explicitly about their teens". The magazine has also compared her work to Brian Wilson. In Fearless, Swift featured fairy tale imagery and explored the disconnect "between fairy tales and the reality of love". Her later albums address more adult relationships. In addition to romance and love, Swift's songs have discussed parent-child relationships, friendships, alienation, fame, and career ambitions.Swift frequently includes "a tossed-off phrase to suggest large and serious things that won't fit in the song, things that enhance or subvert the surface narrative".

Rolling Stone describes Swift as "a songwriting savant with an intuitive gift for verse-chorus-bridge architecture". According to The Village Voice, she uses third-verse point of view reversals frequently. In terms of imagery, repetition is evident in Swift's songwriting. In The Guardian's words, "she spends so much time kissin' in the rain that it seems a miracle she hasn't developed trenchfoot". Slant Magazine adds, "to Swift's credit, she explores new lyrical motifs over the course of [her fourth] album". Although reviews of Swift's work are "almost uniformly positive", The New Yorker has said she is generally portrayed "more as a skilled technician than as a Dylanesque visionary".

Politics

During the 2008 presidential campaign, Swift promoted the Every Woman Counts campaign, aimed at engaging women in the political process, and was one of many country stars to record a PSA for the Vote (For Your) Country campaign. She stated: "I don't think it's my job to try and influence people which way they should vote." Following Barack Obama's inauguration, she told Rolling Stone that she supported the president: "I've never seen this country so happy about a political decision in my entire time of being alive. I'm so glad this was my first election."

In a 2012 interview, Swift remarked that in spite of keeping herself "as educated and informed as possible", she does not discuss politics, fearing that it might influence other people. Writing about media pressure on Swift to publicly take political stances, Politico called Swift "studiously apolitical". Swift has spent time with the Kennedy family and has spoken of her admiration for Ethel Kennedy. Swift is also a feminist. She has spoken out against LGBT discrimination. Following the 2008 murder of Larry King, she recorded a GLSEN PSA to combat hate crimes. On the first anniversary of King's death, Swift told Seventeen that her parents taught her "never to judge others based on whom they love, what color their skin is, or their religion". The music video for Swift's anti-bullying song "Mean" deals in part with homophobia in high schools; the video was nominated for an MTV VMA social activism award in 2011. The New York Times believes she is part of "a new wave of young (and mostly straight) women who are providing the soundtrack for a generation of gay fans coming to terms with their identity in a time of turbulent and confusing cultural messages".

Awards and achievements

List of awards and nominations received by Taylor Swift
Swift has received many awards and honors, including 10 Grammy Awards, 19 American Music Awards, 23 Billboard Music Awards (the most wins by an act), 12 Country Music Association Awards, 8 Academy of Country Music Awards, one Brit Award, and one Creative Arts Emmy Award. As a songwriter, she has been honored by the Nashville Songwriters Association and the Songwriters Hall of Fame, and has been listed in Rolling Stone's 2015 list of the 100 Greatest Songwriters of All Time.

By the beginning of 2016, Swift had sold more than 40 million albums, 130 million single downloads and was one of the top five music artists with the highest worldwide digital sales. Swift's studio albums Taylor Swift, Fearless, Speak Now, Red, and 1989 have all sold over 4 million copies in the US. She is the third best-selling digital singles artist in the US with a total of 106.5 million equivalent units certified according to Recording Industry Association of America.

Discography

Taylor Swift discography, List of songs recorded by Taylor Swift, 

and Taylor Swift videography

Taylor Swift (2006)
Fearless (2008)
Speak Now (2010)
Red (2012)
1989 (2014)
Reputation (2017)

Tours

List of Taylor Swift live performances
Fearless Tour (2009–2010)
Speak Now World Tour (2011–2012)
The Red Tour (2013–2014)
The 1989 World Tour (2015)
Taylor Swift's Reputation Stadium Tour (2018)