The Tragic Triumph Of Taylor Swift - Part 1
While Taylor Swift may be sitting on top of the world right now, her path to this level of success has been far more tragic than most are willing to admit and few may even know.
You would have to live under a rock to not be aware of the global dominance of Taylor Swift right now. Still in the middle of her massively successful ERAS tour, she recently released her 11th studio album, which is absolutely shattering sales records. The 31-track double album is so successful, in fact, that she has completely shed the “female artist” designator and is not just breaking records set by men, she is setting them. In the first week after release, Swift held the top 14 slots on the Billboard Hot 100, not to mention more than half of the top 50.
But many people are asking why Swift is so massively successful. Particularly when her music is presented to the world by critics as merely a woman “whining” about relationships. The truth is, what Swift actually writes about are the constant injustices women are subjected to every day, in both business and relationships. And yet… through it all, Swift still manages to maintain a sweetness, an innocence that deeply belies the legitimate atrocities she has experienced, both personally and professionally. Swift is a warrior that stops on a bloody battlefield to pluck a wildflower from the earth, breathe in its sweetness and pin it behind her ear before heading back into battle. Love her or hate her, she is a woman that is difficult to disrespect - although many still succeed.
Although both fans and critics alike have long pored over her lyrics to try and determine which of the songs she writes are about which of the men she has been attached to, Swift herself has never revealed identities. What she focuses on is not how bad certain men are, but rather how bad their behaviors are. Behaviors which are common to far more than just the ones in Swift’s sphere of influence, which is what makes her music so relatable to so many. And not just women. Swift has actually amassed a legitimate army of male fans as well.
Recently, there has been a discussion sweeping social media as to whether women would prefer to encounter a bear in the woods or a man. Across the board, women prefer the bear and every woman understands exactly why. Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of men reacted in outrage to the conversation. Others, however, actually took the time to thoughtfully consider why women would have this reaction and concluded that, sadly, it is both justifiable and understandable. These are the kinds of men likely to be Swift fans.
While Swift certainly attracts her fair share of misogynists claiming to be “fans”, she appeals even more deeply to men that actually like women. It is perhaps for this reason that she also has an extraordinarily large following of heterosexual men. In many cases, happily married heterosexual men, I might add. Like any great moment in pop culture, there are certainly a number of bandwagon fans. Men jumping on the moment to be part of the “in” crowd, but unable to recite the lyrics to a single song. That being said, she also has more than her fair share of legitimate male fans stretching back decades.
This includes the late Kobe Bryant, who surprised her back in 2015 by making an unexpected appearance on stage during her performance at the Staples center, where he revealed a banner placed in her honor to commemorate her 16th straight sold-out show in the legendary venue. In a 2019 interview, Bryant praised Swift effusively for her achievements, including acknowledging that you can’t reach that level of success without being a “killer.”
In 2023’s smash hit Barbie, American Fererra’s character delivers an unforgettable speech on the impossibility of being a woman, due to the constantly conflicting expectations placed on women. While Swift clearly feels the weight of these impossible expectations, she also seems to have mastered the art of managing and balancing them - at least to the degree that they have not yet managed to destroy her or keep her from achieving success. Although it clearly came at a cost, and often a very high one.
While it might be easy to think that her level of celebrity protects her from the constant barbs of misogyny, you would be wrong - and that is why Swift continues to be so relatable, even in spite of having a level of celebrity and wealth few will ever hope to achieve. She has also chosen to live her life in a way that also keeps her very relatable to her average fan. In spite of the tabloids’ obsession with her beautiful and wealthy friends, she is well known for actually preferring the company of cats and engaging in more domestic activities like baking. She even has a very long history of bringing home-made cookies to interviews.
Although her many critics love to paint a picture of Swift having the road to success and stardom laid out perfectly in front of her, it is far from the truth. The trajectory of her career has been a long, steady journey of carefully thought out steps, helping her overcome far more setbacks and obstacles than most people realize. What tabloids love to leave out of the Taylor Swift story is just how hard she has actually had to fight to get where she is - often against those same tabloids and the public that ravenously and eagerly consumes their lies. And that may be the biggest key to her success. Because her fight is every woman’s fight, and she gives voice to both the obstacles and injustices we face every step of the way. But, as fellow country-to-pop star Kelly Clarkson famously sang, “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”
Surviving In An Industry That Breaks People
The number of child stars that actually manage to successfully transition to adult stars are few and far between. In many cases, they literally lose their lives in the process. Even when stardom comes as an adult, there are still very few that have the inner strength and fortitude to survive it for long. Drug addiction, overdose and suicide are painfully common in the world of entertainment, not to mention very clear mental health issues. Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan, Amy Winehouse, River Phoenix and Cory Monteith are just a few of the stars that have very publicly struggled with mental health issues or had their lives cut short almost assuredly due to the pressure that fame and fortune brings. Even Swift has written about being a “functioning alcoholic” and struggling with body image issues, which means she herself has clearly not escaped fully unscathed.
Many critics enjoy chalking Swift’s success up to the sheer luck of being born into a family of means. While her family has certainly played a role in her success, the trajectory of a number of other artists also shows how important families are to those that get an early start in the entertainment industry. While some help them get not just get a leg up, but also not be destroyed by eventual success (like Beyoncé’s mother Tina Knowles), others directly contribute to their demise (like Britney Spears’ father Jamie Spears, or Culkin family patriarch, Kit Culkin). The true value of Swift’s family is not her father’s financial support, but both her parent’s and her brother’s seemingly unwavering support. Like other successful artists whose families are deeply invested in their careers (Billie Eilish, Jennifer Lopez) they seem to come down on the side of guiding and protecting, rather than controlling her career.
While there are so many ways to diminish or dismiss the success of women, I believe Swift’s success stems from following two key pieces of wisdom often promoted by two other very famous women. Michelle Obama’s “when they go low, we go high” and Brené Brown’s scholarship on the power of empathy and vulnerability. While Swift has absolutely done battle with men and misogynistic systems her entire life, she has yet to be accused of being the instigator in any of them, nor has she ever been credibly accused of “playing dirty". Through it all, she has somehow managed to maintain her ability to be deeply vulnerable by exposing even her deepest and darkest pain.
Here is a look back at some of the defining moments of Swift’s career, the choices she made and perhaps the benefits she had that have landed her where she is today - on top of the world.
Step One: Nashville
Swift first went to Nashville at age 11 to distribute cassette tapes of her singing karaoke covers to record labels. Her mom would drive her around to the various labels and she would run in to deliver the tapes in person, hoping to gain a foothold with the personal touch. This extra “personal touch” would actually become a hallmark of her later career and would eventually help her achieve far greater success than her initial efforts did.
When nothing came of early efforts, she returned home to Pennsylvania, learned to play the guitar and began focusing on songwriting. Back in PA she also signed with a talent agent, who got her a few modeling gigs and a song published. When she was 13, she was given an artist development deal with RCA records and began traveling regularly to Nashville. When she was 14, her father transferred to his company’s Nashville office and the family moved permanently to Nashville.
Swift began working with experienced songwriters and soon became the youngest artist ever signed by Sony/ATV records. Although much is made of Swift’s father being a stockbroker (therefore working in and understanding the world of finance) much less attention is paid to Swift’s mother, who worked as a marketing manager at an ad agency. Between the two, they have clearly been helping Swift make smart financial and career decisions from the start. While most artists that young would be thrilled just to have a deal with such a large brand, Swift actually left Sony/ATV because she was anxious to actually put out a record and they showed no signs of moving her towards that.
In 2005, producer Scott Borchetta left his position at DreamWorks Records (Later Universal Music Nashville) to start his own independent record label, Big Machine Records. The first artist he ever signed was Taylor Swift. With the benefit of hindsight, it may be difficult to understand what a huge gamble this actually was. Both Swift and Borchetta left two of the biggest musical powerhouses to strike out on their own together. Swift recorded her first self-titled album in just four months. Although she co-wrote all of the tracks, she wrote three of them by herself. Those three songs in particular centered around themes she would later become most famous for writing about.
The first single she wrote (The Outside), was about the entirely relatable experience of being ostracized by peers. The second should, perhaps, have been taken as a future warning to all men. Just one week before her final recording session, she wrote Should’ve Said No, which was “about a guy who cheated on me and shouldn’t have because I write songs.”
The third single, Our Song, was about the sweet side of love, which Swift has continued to cling to even amidst the deepest and darkest pain of love-gone-wrong. And that, perhaps, more than anything else, is what keeps fans coming back for more, more, more. Swift continues to give fans going through heartbreak hope that somewhere, out there, is the light at the end of the tunnel, if we just keep chugging along. The same way she has done for more than two decades now.
It wasn’t just the songs she wrote that would echo later in her career, but also how she went about making the album itself. Swift started off working with a demo producer to create initial lower-quality recordings of songs that would eventually be perfected by a big name producer. Swift then worked with a number of these big name producers, but didn’t like what they were doing to her songs nearly as much as what her demo producer, Nathan Chapman, was creating.
This may be in part due to the likelihood that Chapman was actually listening more to Swift and trying to recreate songs the way she wanted them to sound, versus more established producers, who were more likely to simply create what they believed would sell the best. From the very start, Swift was fighting for the right to create her own art, versus simply '“pop” music that followed a very specific formula designed to sell the most albums.
This is a battle that female artists have fought since time immemorial and why Swift has risen to the heights she has. Very few people can really understand just how many different people it takes to create works like albums, movies and television shows. In fact, there are actually six stages to creating an album, which generally involve different teams at each step. The producer is the person who ushers the work through each of the different stages. Each stage also involves people who are all trying to put their own “mark” on the work, which sometimes even includes the producer.
Most artistic works involve a constant battle between the artist themselves and the teams of people creating the work, most of whom are men. In fact, the majority of songs performed by women are almost always written by men, produced by men and marketed and distributed by men. While it was still a man that produced Swift’s first album, she had the good sense to fight to work with a man who was very likely listening to her. A relationship she would later also develop with producers Aaron Dessner and Jack Antonoff. In the end, Chapman produced all but one of the final cuts and it was very clear from the start that Swift’s efforts on behalf of her own music and her own voice paid off in spades. Even if the men involved still claimed the credit.
The album produced five singles. Our Song and Should’ve Said No reached number one on the country charts, while Teardrops on my Guitar reached No. 15 on the Billboard Hot 100. The album spent 24 weeks at number one on country charts and was nominated for Album of the Year at the 2008 Academy of Country Music awards. On the Billboard 200, it peaked at number five and became the longest-charting album of the 2000s decade. Eventually, it would be certified seven times Platinum, making Swift the first solo female country artist to write or co-write every song on a platinum debut album.
Although Swift got her start in country music, her first album already contained a number of pop and pop rock elements that actually made her more of a crossover artist from the start. That being said, getting her start in country perhaps helped her to avoid some of the pitfalls of other young pop stars like Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera and Miley Cyrus, who were presented in a highly sexualized manner right from the start.
Although they frequently claim that being presented that way was their own idea, it’s not hard to imagine that they were simply led to believe that by older and wilier male managers and producers, who chose to exploit them rather than protect them. Although Swift’s parents are often viewed as contributing mostly to her career financially, the truth is, their greatest contribution was in helping to guide her career from an early age and provide some level of protection from a highly predatory industry.
What many people do not understand is that Nashville is not just the capital of country music, it is also the capital of contemporary Christian music and a key locale in Evangelical Christianity. A factor that will come heavily into play both early and later in Swift’s career. Perhaps due to coming in from the country side of things and perhaps due to her parent’s involvement, Swift was branded and marketed as fresh and wholesome, which also appealed to the Evangelical audience she was also a part of. Although this may have offered some benefits from the start, it would also present a major obstacle later in her career, when it was time to make the transition from being a young, innocent girl to a fully aware, grown adult woman. A transition that was perhaps fully cemented in her most recent release The Tortured Poet’s Department.
As a singer-songwriter at such a young age, Swift wrote and sang about her experiences, which largely revolved around relationships and the highs and lows and heartbreak they often entail. In 2008, she very publicly dated pop star Joe Jonas, which led to her allegedly writing four of the seven songs she wrote for her second album about him. In 2009, however, an event occurred that would dramatically change not only her life, but also the types of life events she wrote about.
This is the first in a 3-part series about Taylor Swift.