Indholdsfortegnelse for How Well Do You Know Taylor? i How Well Do You Know Taylor?

Today, she’s the name on seemingly everyone’s lips, the superstar who has successfully captivated the world with her music, artistry and celebrity status, but how well do you actually know Taylor Swift? Inside, we will explore Taylor’s life and career, from her upbringing to her Nashville ambitions and unstoppable climb to music royalty. But that’s not all: at the end of each section we will put your Taylor knowledge to the test. Be sure to keep track of your answers because, at the end, we will reveal how true a dedicated Swiftie you are! In each article you’ll find three questions with a range of difficulties – the harder the question, the more points it’s worth (Bronze = 1, Silver = 2, Gold = 3) – and a maximum of…

Like many American kids who listened to pop music in the 1990s and 2000s, Taylor Swift was bowled over by the music of Shania Twain, the Canadian singer-songwriter who peaked commercially between 1995 and 2003, although she released a whole lot of music before and after those dates too. You’ll know the titles of Twain’s signature songs ‘You’re Still The One’, ‘That Don’t Impress Me Much’ and ‘Man! I Feel Like A Woman’ because they became embedded in the cultural fabric of Western pop culture, thanks to their state-of-the-art production, earworm melodies and mastery of a range of tones, from lovelorn balladry to sly humour at the expense of insecure males everywhere. Taylor was a teenager for most of Twain’s imperial period and placed perfectly for those songs – which,…

The road to fame and fortune is paved with lawsuits, and over the years, Taylor Swift has regularly been a target of controversy. A typical example of the cases Taylor gets pulled into is from 2017, where the songwriters behind 3LW’s 2001 single ‘Playas Gon’ Play’ sued her thanks to the similarity of lines in the song ‘Shake It Off’. Taylor replied, “Until learning about [the] plaintiffs’ claim in 2017, I had never heard the song ‘Playas Gon’ Play’ and had never heard of that song or the group 3LW.” The suit was dropped at the end of 2022. Perhaps a more legitimate criticism of Taylor is the issue of owning a private jet and its concomitant CO2 emissions. When a marketing firm named Taylor as the number-one problem in this…

“Red debuted at the top of the Billboard 200 chart, becoming the fastestselling country album ever” By 2011, Speak Now had set new sales records worldwide, but its creator – and sole songwriter – wasn’t going to sit around and count her laurels. By the autumn of that year, Taylor Swift had 25 new songs ready to go, with the plan this time around to expand and diversify her sound using a range of producers. This was a concept that came with a certain degree of risk, of course, but this was exactly the time to start taking those risks. So what did album four, Red, sound like on its release on 22 October 2012? Well, for the first time, a synth-heavy, electronic pop sound was at front and centre…

To her credit, Taylor Swift has always been aware that supporting other musicians and having them assist her, in turn, isn’t just a decent thing to do: it’s a great way to double exposure and to learn from one’s peers. To this end, she has frequently performed with artists who would normally not cross her path, musically speaking, and everyone has benefited from this. Where do we start? Plenty of the most iconic, fruitful or successful Taylor-plus-everyone-else collabs are coming up, but you can easily dig out more, as the list is almost endless! In 2008, we heard Taylor in an early assist with the country singer Kellie Pickler on the song ‘Best Days Of Your Life’. The same year, singer Colbie Caillat appeared on ‘Breathe’, taken from Taylor’s second…

When the world is watching you, snickering about your every move and seemingly waiting for you to fail, you’d better have people around you that you can rely on. Sure, your family will be there for you when you need them – but do they know about the pressures you face as a famous person, and how to deal with them? No, and nor should they. This is why well-known people tend to connect with other well-known people – and in Taylor Swift’s case, there’s a whole ‘squad’ of trusted loved ones for the singer to fall back on. The original squad from the late 2000s and early 2010s included the singer and actor Selena Gomez, models Martha Hunt and Gigi Hadid, and Taylor’s high-school friend Abigail Anderson Berard. Gomez…

“My parents were very strict about education and hard work, from the time my brother and I were really little kids” Taylor Alison Swift was born on 13 December 1989, placing her squarely among the first cohort of millennials in West Reading, Pennsylvania. Her parents, who named their little girl after the singer-songwriter James Taylor, were Scott and Andrea Swift, and she has a younger brother, Austin, who was born in 1992. An attractive part of Swift lore is that she grew up on a Christmas tree farm, which might sound too pleasant to be true – but it’s accurate. “It was such a weird place to grow up,” she admitted to Esquire in 2014. “But it has cemented in me this unnatural level of excitement about fall and then…

Although 2009 had been an insanely busy year, thanks to her brand‑new superstar status and incidents such as the infamous ‘Kanyegate’, Taylor Swift headed into album number three with renewed energy. The songs came most quickly when she was alone. She later recalled: “I’d get my best ideas at 3am in Arkansas, and I didn’t have a co-writer around, so I would just finish it. That would happen again in New York and then again in Boston, and that would happen again in Nashville.” The subject matter was, once again, based on relationships past and present, but there was little of the teenage fairytale inspiration of the Fearless album. ‘Back To December’ asks for forgiveness, while ‘Dear John’ – supposedly inspired by her former relationship with singer John Mayer –…

“I leave the genre labelling to other people,” Taylor Swift told The Wall Street Journal in 2015, a genius bit of marketing that both exempted her from commentary about her new musical direction post-Red and reminded readers how pointless such labelling is. It also freed her up from worrying about where to go next with her music, which was just as well because she had plenty to concern herself with – not least a short‑lived and much-chatted-about fling with Harry Styles, then as now the hottest solo male singer in the world. She also relocated from Nashville to New York, a literal as well as artistic step away from her country roots, and hired a powerhouse publicity manager called Tree Paine to handle the endless attention of the media. Paine,…

There comes a point when celebrity life becomes too much for anyone, and for Taylor Swift, that moment came around 2016, thanks to a level of cultural dominance that was almost unhealthy. The 1989 album of 2014 had been such a monstrous success that a certain percentage of her audience began to resent her, with her private life and personal and business dealings being scrutinised for flaws. Her feud with Kanye West and Kim Kardashian had divided pop-culture fans into two camps; the press disparaged her brief relationships with Calvin Harris and Tom Hiddleston; and ‘pap walks’ with her girl squad seemed too good to be true – The Daily Telegraph described them as “impossibly beautiful women flaunting impossibly perfect lives”. Little wonder, then, that 2017’s Reputation album was full…

In early history – on 31 August 2005 to be precise – the 15-year-old Taylor Swift created a Myspace account. This platform, which readers under the age of 25 may have heard of but not experienced, was a fairly primitive social media space that allowed musicians to interact with their fans. It was supplanted by the more widely adopted Facebook later that decade, but by then, Taylor had built an online fan community like no other country musician. Her Myspace community eventually totalled 45 million users, sowing the seeds for today’s vast, and powerful, network of Swifties. The key, then and now, to the loyalty and enthusiasm of Taylor’s fans is that she personally interacts with them. More than just sending out marketing emails or generic social‑media posts – although…

“A six-month headlining tour, Taylor’s first, saw her spreading her message across America into the autumn of 2009” While on the road from 2007 to 2008, Taylor didn’t waste any of her newfound momentum: she knew that the pressure would be on her to surpass her debut album the next time she entered the studio, and so she devoted time to songwriting. The new tracks continued to focus on romance, a wise move: while other newly famous musicians switched lyrical tack and failed as a result, Taylor knew what her fans wanted to hear. Songwriting partners included Liz Rose once again, as well as the musicians John Rich and Colbie Caillat: with their help, Taylor reportedly came up with as many as 75 new songs. The final 13 songs that…

For half of her almost-35 years on this planet, Taylor Swift has been in the public eye – so that’s 17 years of being styled and photographed, with her various looks analysed, critiqued and copied. We would all change our style noticeably over such a long period, but in Taylor’s case, with her look an artistic statement as much as her music, she’s had more reason to change up her appearance than most people. Remember how she looked back in 2006? A fresh-faced country kid whose mission was to win everybody’s hearts, Taylor appeared with tight blonde ringlets, sundresses and cowboy boots. “I wear cowboy boots so that when I walk down the stairs [at awards ceremonies] I won’t fall,” she told Entertainment Weekly in 2007. By the Fearless album, she’d…

From the mid-2000s to 2018, Taylor Swift was signed to the Big Machine record label owned by Scott Borchetta, a deal which evidently included a clause awarding ownership of Taylor’s masters to the label – the masters being the recordings of her songs, not the actual compositions. When her Big Machine deal expired and Taylor signed with a new company, Republic Records, news came of a dispute between her and her former label over that ownership. Now, disputes of this nature have been common over the years, but they’ve never involved a musician whose commercial stature is as vast as Taylor’s. A broadly parallel case had involved the metal band Metallica some years previously, with the outcome being that the group purchased their masters from their label for several million…

Taylor Swift is widely known for expressing pro-LBTQIA+ views since 2018, and indeed she’s received criticism for not being supportive of minority tolerance before that point… but dig deeper and you’ll see evidence of Taylor being an ally since as early as 2011. Her video for the song ‘Mean’, included on 2010’s Speak Now album, included a coded scene of a boy wearing a pastel sweater, surrounded by burly jock sportsmen. See also the song ‘Welcome To New York’, the first track on the 1989 album of 2014, in which she sings “You can want who you want” – and in 2013, she donated to funds for the Stonewall National Monument and presented a Media Award on behalf of GLAAD, the LGBTQIA+ support organisation. She openly stepped to the plate…

How do you measure success – in numbers or awards? In the case of Taylor Swift, both apply in massive quantities. Let’s have a look at the raw data. Taylor has amassed a personal fortune of over a billion dollars, thanks to over 50 million album sales and 150 million single sales, made up of a mixture of physical and streamed purchases. She has sold tickets worth $1.68 billion to date, according to the live music monitor Pollstar, making her the highest-grossing female touring act of all time. According to Spotify, even though she and they underwent a serious difference of opinion a few years back, Taylor is the only musician to have surpassed more than 250 million streams in one day, and the only female artist to have reached…

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