Taylor Swift

Taylor Alison Swift (born December 13, 1989) is an American singer-songwriter known for her autobiographical songwriting, artistic versatility, and cultural impact. Swift is one of the world's best-selling music artists and has a record seven albums that each sold one million copies first-week in the US. She is the highest-grossing touring artist and the richest female musician, and the first billionaire with music as the primary source of income.

Swift signed to Big Machine Records in 2005, debuting as a country singer with the albums Taylor Swift (2006) and Fearless (2008). The singles "Teardrops on My Guitar", "Love Story", and "You Belong with Me" found crossover success on country and pop radio formats. She incorporated rock on Speak Now (2010) and electronic on Red (2012), later re-calibrating her image from country to pop with the synth-pop set 1989 (2014); the ensuing media scrutiny inspired the hip-hop-imbued Reputation (2017). The albums contained the Billboard Hot 100 number-one singles "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together", "Shake It Off", "Blank Space", "Bad Blood", and "Look What You Made Me Do".

Shifting to Republic Records in 2018, Swift released the electropop album Lover (2019) and explored indie folk styles in the 2020 albums Folklore and Evermore. She experimented with subdued pop genres on Midnights (2022) and The Tortured Poets Department (2024), and began re-recording her Big Machine albums as Taylor's Version due to an ownership dispute with the label. Through the 2020s, she garnered the US number-one songs "Cardigan", "Willow", "All Too Well", "Anti-Hero", "Cruel Summer", "Is It Over Now?", and "Fortnight". She has embarked on six concert tours, including the Eras Tour (2023–2024), the highest-grossing tour of all time. Her films include Miss Americana (2020), All Too Well: The Short Film (2021), and The Eras Tour (2023)—the highest-grossing concert film.

A prominent figure in popular music, Swift has received extensive media coverage and has a global fanbase known as Swifties. Swift has been listed amongst history's greatest artists by publications such as Rolling Stone and Billboard, as well as the only individual from the arts to have been named the Time Person of the Year (2023). Her accolades include 14 Grammy Awards (including a record four Album of the Year wins), a Primetime Emmy Award, and a record five IFPI Global Recording Artist of the Year awards. Swift is the most-awarded artist of the American Music Awards (40), the Billboard Music Awards (49), and the MTV Video Music Awards (30).

Taylor Alison Swift was born on December 13, 1989, in West Reading, Pennsylvania. She is named after the singer-songwriter James Taylor. Her father, Scott Kingsley Swift, was a stockbroker for Merrill Lynch, and her mother, Andrea Gardner Swift (née Finlay), worked as a mutual fund marketing executive. Swift's younger brother, Austin, is an actor. The siblings are of Scottish, English, and German descent, with distant Italian and Irish ancestry. Their maternal grandmother, Marjorie Finlay (née Moehlenkamp), was an opera singer, whose singing in church became one of Swift's earliest memories of music that shaped her career.

Swift spent her early years on a Christmas tree farm in Pennsylvania that her father had purchased from one of his clients, and she spent her summers at her family's vacation home in Stone Harbor, New Jersey, where she occasionally performed acoustic songs at a local coffee shop. She is Christian and attended preschool and kindergarten at a Montessori school run by the Bernardine Sisters of St. Francis before transferring to the Wyndcroft School. When her family moved to Wyomissing, she attended Wyomissing Area Junior/Senior High School. As a child, she performed in Berks Youth Theatre Academy productions and traveled regularly to New York City for vocal and acting lessons. Her early love for country music was influenced by Shania Twain, Patsy Cline, LeAnn Rimes, and the Dixie Chicks, and she spent weekends performing at local festivals and events. After watching a documentary about Faith Hill, she became determined to pursue a country music career in Nashville, Tennessee.

At 11, Swift traveled to Nashville with her mother to visit record labels and submit demo tapes of Dolly Parton and Dixie Chicks karaoke covers. She was rejected by all the labels, which led her to focus on songwriting. She started learning the guitar at 12 with the help of Ronnie Cremer, a computer repairman and local musician who also assisted Swift with writing an original song. In 2003, Swift and her parents started working with the talent manager Dan Dymtrow. With his help, Swift modeled for Abercrombie & Fitch and had an original song included on a Maybelline compilation CD. After performing original songs at an RCA Records showcase, 13-year-old Swift was given an artist development deal and began to travel regularly to Nashville with her mother. To help Swift break into the country music scene, her father transferred to Merrill Lynch's Nashville office when she was 14 years old, and the family relocated to Hendersonville, Tennessee. Swift attended Hendersonville High School before transferring to Aaron Academy after two years, which better accommodated her touring schedule through homeschooling. She graduated one year early.

In Nashville, Swift worked with experienced Music Row songwriters such as Troy Verges, Brett Beavers, Brett James, Mac McAnally, and the Warren Brothers and formed a lasting working relationship with Liz Rose. They began meeting for two-hour writing sessions every Tuesday afternoon after school. Rose called the sessions "some of the easiest I've ever done. Basically, I was just her editor. She'd write about what happened in school that day. She had such a clear vision of what she was trying to say. And she'd come in with the most incredible hooks." At 14, Swift became the youngest artist signed by Sony/ATV Tree Music Publishing. She left RCA Records due to the label's lack of care and their "cut[ting] other people's stuff". She was also concerned that development deals can shelve artists and recalled: "I genuinely felt that I was running out of time. I wanted to capture these years of my life on an album while they still represented what I was going through."

At an industry showcase at Nashville's Bluebird Cafe in 2005, Swift caught the attention of Scott Borchetta, a DreamWorks Records executive who was preparing to form an independent record label, Big Machine Records. She had first met Borchetta in 2004. She was one of Big Machine's first signings, and her father purchased a three-percent stake in the company for an estimated $120,000. She began working on her eponymous debut album with Nathan Chapman. Swift wrote or co-wrote all album tracks, and co-writers included Rose, Robert Ellis Orrall, Brian Maher, and Angelo Petraglia. Released in October 2006, Taylor Swift peaked at number five on the US Billboard 200, on which it spent 157 weeks—the longest stay on the chart by any release in the US in the 2000s decade. Swift became the first female country music artist to write or co-write every track on a platinum-certified debut album.

Big Machine Records was still in its infancy during the June 2006 release of the lead single, "Tim McGraw", which Swift and her mother helped promote by packaging and sending copies of the CD single to country radio stations. She spent much of 2006 promoting Taylor Swift with a radio tour and television appearances; she opened for Rascal Flatts on select dates during their 2006 tour, as a replacement for Eric Church. Borchetta said that although record industry peers initially disapproved of his signing a 15-year-old singer-songwriter, Swift tapped into a previously unknown market—teenage girls who listen to country music.

Following "Tim McGraw", four more singles were released throughout 2007 and 2008: "Teardrops on My Guitar", "Our Song", "Picture to Burn", and "Should've Said No". All appeared on Billboard's Hot Country Songs, with "Our Song" and "Should've Said No" reaching number one. "Our Song" made Swift the youngest person to single-handedly write and sing a Hot Country Songs number-one single, and "Teardrops on My Guitar" was Swift's breakthrough single on mainstream radio and charts. Swift released two EPs, The Taylor Swift Holiday Collection in October 2007 and Beautiful Eyes in July 2008. She promoted her debut album extensively as the opening act for other country musicians' tours in 2006 and 2007, including those by George Strait, Brad Paisley, and Tim McGraw and Faith Hill.

Swift won multiple accolades for Taylor Swift. She was one of the recipients of the Nashville Songwriters Association's Songwriter/Artist of the Year in 2007, becoming the youngest person given the title. She also won the Country Music Association's Horizon Award for Best New Artist, the Academy of Country Music Awards' Top New Female Vocalist, and the American Music Awards' Favorite Country Female Artist honor. She was also nominated for Best New Artist at the 50th Annual Grammy Awards. In 2008, she opened for Rascal Flatts again and briefly dated the singer Joe Jonas.

Swift's second studio album, Fearless, was released in November 2008 in North America, and in March 2009 in other markets. On the Billboard 200, Fearless spent 11 weeks at number one, becoming Swift's first chart topper and the longest-running number-one female country album. It was the bestselling album of 2009 in the US. Its lead single, "Love Story", was her first number one in Australia and the first country song to top Billboard's Pop Songs chart, and its third single, "You Belong with Me", was the first country song to top Billboard's all-genre Radio Songs chart. Three other singles were released in 2008–2010: "White Horse", "Fifteen", and "Fearless". All five singles were Hot Country Songs top 10 entries, with "Love Story" and "You Belong with Me" topping the chart. In 2009, Swift toured as an opening act for Keith Urban and embarked on her first headlining tour, the Fearless Tour.