Swift’s second album, Fearless, had made her the best-selling musical act in the United States. It was the year “You Belong With Me,” an earworm about an underdog-in-love that helped turn its girl-next-door singer into the closest thing music had to a Disney princess, blasted from car radios no matter which station they were turned to. But 2009 was the year her perky, countrified celebrity solidified into industrial-grade American fame. Ten years ago, Taylor Swift was a 19-year-old Nashville singer-songwriter with a steadily growing fan base, a pair of twangy tween-dream albums and a string of Billboard hits. I turn on the television to watch sports and Taylor Swift is there I go to pick up an Amazon package and her blond, feline face is smiling at me and reminding me I’m absolutely going to listen to her new album, Lover, of course I am, how could I not? Swift has achieved the kind of success that turns a person into an institution, into an inevitability.īut before she felt as inescapable as the weather, she was simply a star in waiting.
Swift’s music isn’t released as much as it is unleashed, the melodies saturating deep into the tissue of contemporary public life whether we like it or not. In the same way that a meteorologist might struggle to predict a whole year’s weather rather than the next week’s rain, it is exceedingly difficult to distill an accurate assessment of Taylor Swift as though she’s an ordinary pop act she is a musical biosphere unto herself.
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