Has anyone ever made more of the sparkly little dress? “I just love them,” says Taylor Swift from her parents’ kitchen in Nashville. “Especially onstage, because I think it’s kind of fun when the spotlight hits you and your dress, for a millisecond, blinds people.”
For two years Swift has been dazzling, if not blinding, people with her astonishingly grown-up knack for crafting sublime pop songs about high school subject matter—boys, being sixteen—that somehow everyone can relate to. It doesn’t hurt that those gems come from such a dreamy package: She is tall, beautiful, and poised, with that fairy-tale cascade of curls. In a pop-cultural landscape where vulgarity and controversy are the coin of the realm, she dares to be a young lady.
Swift calls herself a “spillover artist”—her music fills up country radio until it spills over into pop, and then up and over again into adult contemporary. Because of this, she’s had the best run at the top of the charts of any artist in a decade. At 20, she is the youngest person ever to win the Grammy for Album of the Year. But 2010 is going to mark something of a turning point for the singing phenom, whose success has launched a million wannabes (“They seem to be a lot like me,” she says with characteristic modesty). A new album will arrive this fall, she is finally moving out of her parents’ house, and in December she’ll turn 21. She is in the midst of renovating her own place in Nashville. Big? “It’s not giant. I didn’t want to have to MapQuest to get to the kitchen.”
Like her last album, the new one will be very personal, but it will be about being 20, not sixteen. “I don’t think I could put on a new character for two years of my life if it wasn’t really what I was going through. I have these formulas for making music; they’re almost mathematical: Who are you today? What did you write about in your diary? What idea hit you at 4:00 A.M.?”
She is working very hard to not let success change her essential Taylor Swift-ness, a girl who, at the end of the day, still eats at Cracker Barrel and shops at Urban Outfitters. “Looking back on what these past two years have been for me, it feels like this magical dream of, Really? We toured all over the world? We played an arena in London? This is happening? Readjusting my goals and dreams has been something I’ve had to do a lot lately.”
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