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Teen sensation Taylor Swift is expanding boundaries

By Jon Camamanica New York Times News Service

CHATTANOOGA — By now, Taylor Swift knows how to work all the various digital cameras, all the various camera phones. When surrounded by a group of fans clamoring for pictures, as she was on a Saturday night in mid-October after a sold-out show at McKenzie Arena, she warmly appropriated the camera of each one, struck a cute pose, snapped the picture and then handed it back, usually followed by a hug. All in all it was a fair trade: intimacy for control.

"Intimidation isn't what I'm going for," Swift, 18, said earlier in the day in the Zen-like tour bus that she and her mother, Andrea, designed, from the leather on the sofas to the faux peacock feathers on the bathroom wall. "I don't have big security guards," she said as Fox News played mutely on the television. "I don't have an entourage. I try to write lyrics about what's happening to me and leave out the part that I live in hotel rooms and tour buses. It's the relatability factor. If you're trying too hard to be the girl next door, you're not going to be."

Thus far Swift, who spends much of her free time updating her MySpace page and editing personal videos to upload to the Internet, has found the right balance. She has quickly established herself as the most remarkable country music breakthrough artist of the decade. In part that's because she is one of Nashville's most exciting songwriters, with a chirpy, exuberant voice. But mainly, Swift's career has been noteworthy for what happens once the songs are finished. She has aggressively used online social networks to stay connected with her young audience in a way that, while typical for rock and hip-hop artists, is revolutionary in country music. As she vigilantly narrates her own story and erases barriers between her and her fans, she is helping country reach a new audience.

Swift's second album, Fearless, will be released Tuesday, and like her self-titled 2006 debut, it's full of charming, clean-scrubbed songs about teenage love and heartbreak. Swift writes from her own experiences, names intact, giving her songs an almost radical intimacy, especially in a pop world of plasticized come-ons and impersonal brush-offs.

She has placed the concerns of young women at the center of her songs, subject matter that generally has been anathema in the more mature world of country singers. Most important, though, she sees country music as part of the larger pop panorama. A success on country radio, she has also found homes on pop stations and at MTV, including a gig hosting the MTV Video Music Awards preshow in September, an unheard-of slot for a country singer. This week, an entire episode of The Ellen DeGeneres Show will be devoted to her album-release party. She has proved that there's no reason a country singer can't be a pop star, too.

Just four years ago, when Swift and her family moved from Wyomissing, Pa., to Hendersonville, Tenn., a Nashville suburb, this seemed an impossible proposition. It had been more than a decade since a teenager last made a true impact in town, but that singer, LeAnn Rimes, had been praised for sounding grown-up; Swift's music was unabashedly youthful. When Scott Borchetta, president of Big Machine Records, talked to Nashville insiders about his teenage signee, "people would look at me cross-eyed," he said. "I would feel like they were deleting me from their BlackBerrys as I was telling them."

But Swift had been carefully honing her sound for years. After a trip to Nashville when she was 11, she began writing songs and learning guitar in earnest. (She now often plays a Swarovski crystal-encrusted one.) By the time her family moved, in the summer before her freshman year of high school, she had sung at coffee shops and minor league baseball games.

Swift signed a publishing deal with Sony/ATV Music Publishing, the youngest person the company had ever signed. Every day after school, she would go to one of Nashville's many studios on Music Row for writing appointments.

"I knew every writer I wrote with was pretty much going to think, 'I'm going to write a song for a 14-year-old today,' " Swift said. "So I would come into each meeting with five to 10 ideas that were solid. I wanted them to look at me as a person they were writing with, not a little kid."

Swift honed her songwriting strength by looking in the mirror. Relationships and their failures, the fodder for so much teenage pop, are her primary texts. "I have an obsession with knowing the answers to things," she said. "When I don't know what happened, it just bothers me, gets under my skin, and I need to write about it. For years."

Her mother, Andrea, said: "She simply has to write songs. It's how she filters life." (Andrea, previously a stay-at-home mom, now travels with her daughter; Swift's father, Scott, is a stockbroker.)

Swift's sound began to coalesce. She has an ear for the indelible chorus, but her music is appropriately loose. There are obvious country flourishes in the arrangements, but mainly her vocals, excitable and airy and hardly twangy at all, take center stage.

Whether anyone would accept Swift's sound was an open question. Swift made a series of biographical shorts to air on the GAC (Great American Country) cable network. Then came Tim McGraw, Swift's canny first single, named after the country superstar. Borchetta likened the song's reception to that of "a grenade in a still pond."

Released in late 2006, Swift's debut album sold a modest 39,000 copies in its first week, but as Swift gained attention and released more singles, it did not stop selling. It has now sold more than 3 million copies. Last year, she won the Country Music Association's Horizon Award for best new artist, and this year she is nominated for female vocalist of the year. She also will perform at the event, on Wednesday.

She has willed herself beyond the country music world, too. After landing at No. 2 on the Billboard Hot Country Singles chart, Teardrops on My Guitar, the third single on her first album, became a crossover hit, peaking at No. 13 on the Hot 100. The New York Top 40 station Z100 (WHTZ-FM) played the song in a medium-level rotation last year after it had been broken at Top 40 stations in more country-friendly markets, including Greensville, S.C.; Wichita, Kan.; and Austin, Texas.