On an unseasonably pleasant day last summer,
however, the artist sitting dead center in front of the imposing
60-channel mixing board was
erstwhile teen queen of country-pop music who has dominated sales
charts and captured the ears of her generation as firmly as any of her
celebrated predecessors.
To Swift’s right is
On the other side of the glass partition separating
the control booth from the studio, leading an orchestra of 28 string
players, is
It’s the first time Swift has used an orchestra on a
record, and she sounds thrilled with what she’s hearing as the
violinists, violists and cellists bow edgy accents and dramatic
countermelodies on two tracks — “Haunted” and “Back to December” — from
her highly anticipated third album, “Speak Now,” released Monday
worldwide.
“I couldn’t sleep last night I was so freaked about
this,” Swift, 20, whispers nervously to a visitor seated next to her.
“You should have seen me all geeky when I saw the names of the new
songs on the sheet music out on their music stands. I was like, ‘Oh my
God, it’s happening.'”
“Speak Now” represents a big musical step for Swift.
It’s one she’s taking with a confidence that’s made her a favorite of
millions of teen girls as well as many of their parents, just as it’s
bred a legion of skeptics who argue that no one could remain so
genuinely thrilled every time she or he steps in front of a TV camera.
music executive who signed her at age 16 to his nascent Big Machine
Records label, is impressed at how she’s handled the success she’s
achieved in the last four years, becoming the biggest-selling act in
all of pop music.
Her debut album was a left-field hit many saw as a
fluke. Then “Fearless” came out and proved Swift’s appeal was anything
but happenstance. Now, Borchetta recognizes the high expectations.
“We’re not sneaking up on anyone with this one,” he
said. “For the first time in her career, we’re not the underdog. All
eyes are on her.”
Case in point: the new album’s first single, “Mine,”
leaked on the Internet ahead of its scheduled release date, kicking the
campaign leading up to the album release into high gear early. It
quickly rose to No. 3 on Billboard’s Hot 100 singles chart and has sold
more than 1.1 million digital tracks, pushing her total digital track
sales above 30 million.
“In one breath, you could say everything is on the
line,” Borchetta said. “But when you really step back, it’s just record
No. 3, and this is not going to be her last record, whether it sells 5
million copies or a million and a half. That’s for her fan base to
decide.”
Back in the studio, Swift is wearing a light blue
flower print miniskirt and a white top under a long, lightweight white
sweater that dangles below the hem of the skirt. Her waist length brown
hair is woven into a single braid that falls over her left shoulder,
far enough into her lap that she often fiddles with it during the
session with the orchestra.
The strings, however, aren’t there simply to add
musical sweetness; Swift and Chapman, who share production duties as
they did on “Fearless,” want them to add sonic bite and palpable
emotion. The use of the orchestra is one indication of how Swift,
pegged as the young singer and songwriter who created a niche for
age-specific pop-country music and quickly came to own it, is growing
up.
Another was her recent arena concert tour, a
conceptually ambitious production that presented not just a cavalcade
of her hits and album tracks to tens of thousands of fans each night,
but a show that took them inside the head, heart and imagination of a
typical teenage girl, warts and all. (She’ll headline a tour next year
scheduled to include 85 shows in 18 countries.)
Where she’d worked on her first two albums with
various writing partners, this time the songs are hers and hers alone —
a source of pride for Swift, who views herself first and foremost as a
songwriter.
“It was a great move for her,” said
program director for KIIS-FM, L.A.’s leading Top 40 station. “I can’t
tell you how many times on the last two records I heard people say ‘She
couldn’t have possibly written this; it had to be the other writer.'”
She’s won other fans in high places with her ability to tell stories that ring true.
“She blows me away,” 74-year-old country music veteran
“It’s amazing to me that someone so young is writing such great songs,”
Kristofferson said. “She’s got a great career ahead of her.” Performing
alongside Kristofferson put her on a plane with another songwriter who
etched out a career more in spite of, than as a result of, his
technical skills as a singer.
In December, Swift turns 21. The
that she’s decorating herself, a step toward independence that her
success is allowing her to take on a scale few of her fans can possibly
relate to. She focuses instead on the emotional complexities of her
transition on the new album in “Never Grow Up.”
Swift quickly established a strong public persona as
a typical teen wrestling with many of the issues her fans face. She’s
let them watch and listen in as she has navigated her way through life,
first through the hyperdramatic waters of teenhood, and now into the
onset of adulthood. She’s tackling more sophisticated themes now than
the ones that occupied her attention while she was just another high
school student whose biggest worry was whether she’d have a date for
the prom.
KIIS-FM’s Ivey suggests Swift’s transition from teen
idol to adult pop star is developing far more organically than those of
many other female singers who found fame early. He credits it to the
songs she’s written out of her own experience.
“She’s different than poor Hilary, Miley, Christina
or Britney,” Ivey said. “Britney and, to some extent, Miley…. I love
them both, but they had to go from being kids to humping a pole. It was
a jerky A-to-B. This isn’t.”
In “Mine,” Swift offers her side of dialogue with a
boyfriend in which they wrestle with paying bills and their uncertainty
over life and love. “Mean” is a biting and witty retort to critics who
have skewered her singing ability, most vocally after her rocky duet
with
ballad “Dear John” elucidates the hard choice of cutting ties with a
love interest whom she discovers has “a sick need to give love and then
take it away.” She lets her inner brat show in the title track, which
takes the theme of her hit “You Belong With Me” to the next level as
she sings of interrupting the wedding of a beau she thinks is marrying
the wrong girl.
Another example of her expanding choice of subject
matter comes in “Innocent,” which she introduced at the recent MTV
Video Music Awards.
“This is a song I wrote about somebody who came into
my life in the most freakish, unexpected, abrupt way,” she told a
visitor while listening to some rough mixes in a black Lincoln
Navigator parked in the Capitol lot. In the song, she describes a
person as “32 and still growing up/Who you are is not what you
did/You’re still an innocent.” Writing the lyrics, says Swift, “taught
me a lot about being able to step back from a situation you don’t know
what to do with, and put yourself in somebody else’s shoes.”
year’s infamous VMA incident in which he grabbed the microphone from
Swift’s hand after she’d won the award for best video. Was “Innocent”
indeed her reaction to that situation? She answers obliquely.
“These songs are about different people in my life,”
she said. “Every song is about someone, and that person is going to
know who they are.” (Last week she acknowledged to Billboard that the
song is about West.) The question remains whether writing songs about
incidents that happen on national television will resonate with her
fans like those about first loves and high school disappointments.
She’s tried her hand at acting, with a guest appearance earlier this year on
at age 11 to a certified country-pop star to a merchandising brand that
has included a line of inexpensive sundresses she designed for
“When we get into a room to make music, it’s pretty
much like the first day we worked together,” producer Chapman said in a
separate interview. “As far as her writing and her art, she’s just been
getting better and better.
“She’s got the (songwriting) craft down,” he said.
“She’s constantly editing the lyric as we’re working on the song,
trying to make every line feel right. She’ll write herself into a
corner, then write herself out pretty quickly. It’s pretty fascinating
to be around her when she’s in that mode.”
“She’s still the same Taylor I met when we first
started working together,” Chapman added. “If I haven’t seen her change
as a person, then she’s handling this massive success pretty well.”
———
(c) 2010, Los Angeles Times.
Visit the Los Angeles Times on the Internet at http://www.latimes.com/.
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.
