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Taylor Swift Success Story : part 2
A stellar performance at The Bluebird Café in Nashville helped Swift get a contract with Scott Borchetta's Big Machine Records. She released her first single, "Tim McGraw," in 2006, and the song became a Top 10 hit on the country charts. It also appeared on her self-titled debut album in October of that same year, which went on to sell more than 5 million copies. More popular singles soon followed, including "Our Song," a No. 1 country music hit. "Teardrops on My Guitar," "Picture to Burn" and "Should've Said No" were also successful tracks. Swift also received critical praise for her debut effort. She won the Horizon Award from the Country Music Association (CMA) and the Academy of Country Music (ACM) Award for Top New Female Vocalist in 2007. Swift next released Sounds of the Season: The Taylor Swift Holiday Collection that year. Her renditions of "Silent Night" and "Santa Baby" were modest hits on the country charts. Swift's third studio album, Speak Now (2010), spawned the two-timeGrammy Award-winning single "Mean". Her cross-genre fourth studio album, Red (2012), earned Swift her first Billboard Hot 100 number-one single, "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together". Swift fully transitioned to pop music on her next studio album, 1989 (2014), which made her the first solo female artist to win the Grammy Award for Album of the Year twice. The album included three Billboard Hot 100 number-one singles, "Shake It Off", "Blank Space", and "Bad Blood". Preceded by her fifth U.S. number-one single "Look What You Made Me Do", Swift's hip hop-inspired sixth studio album, Reputation (2017), made her the first artist to have four albums each sell over one million copies in their opening week in the U.S. Its follow-up, Lover (2019), was the world's best-selling studio album of 2019. Swift incorporated indie folk and alternative rock on her eighth studio album, Folklore (2020). The album and its lead single, "Cardigan", made Swift the first artist to have an album and asingle debut at number one on the Billboard 200 and Hot 100 simultaneously.
1. Don’t lose your self-awareness
It was after watching Behind the Music, a documentary series on VH1 that profiled music acts that made Swift realise what kept musicians in the game. “It would always seem like the decline of an artist was always attributed to a combinations of things, but I noticed the top elements were loss of self-awareness and making bad art, and usually one led to the other. When you lose your self-awareness you start thinking, ‘Oh I’m untouchable, everything around me loves everything I do, I have nothing left to prove’. That kind of loss of self-awareness can be so dangerous.” Plus, it helps her writing. “That’s why I have days where I have really healthy self-esteem and things are in a great place, and then I have days where self-doubt is my primary emotion and that’s ok, because that means you’re living a human, emotional, unaffected life... ups and downs as asongwriter are really important because what else are you going to write about if you honestly think you’re the greatest thing on earth.”
2. Rely on your friends
“I think one of my main goals in trying to preserve my sense of reality has been to surround myself with friends who have their own careers, and who don’t need me for any sense of validation or social climbing, or a career statement.”
3. Be prepared to take criticism
“My friends have all solidified themselves in their own careers and so if they think that I shouldn’t put out a certain single as a first single, they’re going to tell me: ‘That wasn’t one of my favourites that you’ve played me Taylor’, and I’m going to respect that opinion. I think it works both ways; your friends have to be confident in your friendship in order to behonest with you, and then you have to be humble enough to accept honesty.”
4. Know when to take a break
Despite the success of her current album, Swift knows that it will come to a time when she will need to step back. “I’ll need to give people a certain breather from me because at a certain point they’re going to get a little sick of hearing about me, so then I’ll need to go away for a while and then depending on my gauge on how sick of me they are I’ll decide when to put out the next album.” She has the same perspective over the rest of her career. “If I were to say, ‘Ok what am I going to be when I hit 40?’ I have no way of knowing but I hope I would still have music in my life. If I were going to give you my best guess I’d say it would be creating music for other people to perform. Writing is always going to be something I need to do in order to stay happy, but you never know what’s going to change. A lot of what I do is based on whatpeople want. We’re people pleasers, that’s why we became entertainers, so if people don’t want you to be on stage anymore in sparkly dresses singing songs to teenagers when I’m 40 then I’m just not going to do it. I’ll write songs for other people or I’ll create an album that hopefully is about what I’m going through at that point in my life. It’s just a goal of mine to not try and be something I’m not.”
5. Remember why you’re doing what you do – and stay excited by it
“There are days when I am so physically exhausted like if I’m playing a bunch of shows and dancing around in high heels for two hours. But my mind rarely gets tired of this whole exciting adventure that I get to be a part of,” she says to Vogue. “I think that enthusiasm is key to continuing to move forward in this business because even if you get knocked back a peg, or you put out something that people don’t like, or you have people sayingstuff about you that’s negative, if you’re an enthusiastic person by nature you take that hit, you feel it, but then you think of a new idea and run towards it. Then, that new idea is all you think about, and you’re just fuelled by this relentless enthusiasm disguised as focus.”
6. Write down your ideas in a notebook
You never know when an idea will come in handy. She tells Vogue how lines from Blank Space came to her months before she started writing the song. “I’ll get these lyric ideas and I’ll jot down a line in a notebook. When I’m writing an album in six months I’ll open up the notebook and pull out these clever lines. I had written those lines over the course of two years and I had just pulled them out when it came time to write the song. ‘I’m a nightmare dressed as a daydream’ – I remember coming up with that seven months before – let’s put that in right before the second chorus.”
. Don’t forget to forgive yourself
“I always have to work on being easier on myself because I overthink things... like when something doesn’t work out you think it’s my fault, or that I shouldn’t have done this or shouldn’t have done that. Overthinking is my greatest adversary. Some days you’re exhausted and some days you’re in a bad mood and that’s okay. I’ve been a little bit better lately at taking it easier on myself and realising when I’m having a really low self-esteem day that’s because of how I’m wired not because everybody hates me. Sometimes you have the best intentions but you make mistakes.”
1. Don’t lose your self-awareness
It was after watching Behind the Music, a documentary series on VH1 that profiled music acts that made Swift realise what kept musicians in the game. “It would always seem like the decline of an artist was always attributed to a combinations of things, but I noticed the top elements were loss of self-awareness and making bad art, and usually one led to the other. When you lose your self-awareness you start thinking, ‘Oh I’m untouchable, everything around me loves everything I do, I have nothing left to prove’. That kind of loss of self-awareness can be so dangerous.” Plus, it helps her writing. “That’s why I have days where I have really healthy self-esteem and things are in a great place, and then I have days where self-doubt is my primary emotion and that’s ok, because that means you’re living a human, emotional, unaffected life... ups and downs as asongwriter are really important because what else are you going to write about if you honestly think you’re the greatest thing on earth.”
2. Rely on your friends
“I think one of my main goals in trying to preserve my sense of reality has been to surround myself with friends who have their own careers, and who don’t need me for any sense of validation or social climbing, or a career statement.”
3. Be prepared to take criticism
“My friends have all solidified themselves in their own careers and so if they think that I shouldn’t put out a certain single as a first single, they’re going to tell me: ‘That wasn’t one of my favourites that you’ve played me Taylor’, and I’m going to respect that opinion. I think it works both ways; your friends have to be confident in your friendship in order to behonest with you, and then you have to be humble enough to accept honesty.”
4. Know when to take a break
Despite the success of her current album, Swift knows that it will come to a time when she will need to step back. “I’ll need to give people a certain breather from me because at a certain point they’re going to get a little sick of hearing about me, so then I’ll need to go away for a while and then depending on my gauge on how sick of me they are I’ll decide when to put out the next album.” She has the same perspective over the rest of her career. “If I were to say, ‘Ok what am I going to be when I hit 40?’ I have no way of knowing but I hope I would still have music in my life. If I were going to give you my best guess I’d say it would be creating music for other people to perform. Writing is always going to be something I need to do in order to stay happy, but you never know what’s going to change. A lot of what I do is based on whatpeople want. We’re people pleasers, that’s why we became entertainers, so if people don’t want you to be on stage anymore in sparkly dresses singing songs to teenagers when I’m 40 then I’m just not going to do it. I’ll write songs for other people or I’ll create an album that hopefully is about what I’m going through at that point in my life. It’s just a goal of mine to not try and be something I’m not.”
5. Remember why you’re doing what you do – and stay excited by it
“There are days when I am so physically exhausted like if I’m playing a bunch of shows and dancing around in high heels for two hours. But my mind rarely gets tired of this whole exciting adventure that I get to be a part of,” she says to Vogue. “I think that enthusiasm is key to continuing to move forward in this business because even if you get knocked back a peg, or you put out something that people don’t like, or you have people sayingstuff about you that’s negative, if you’re an enthusiastic person by nature you take that hit, you feel it, but then you think of a new idea and run towards it. Then, that new idea is all you think about, and you’re just fuelled by this relentless enthusiasm disguised as focus.”
6. Write down your ideas in a notebook
You never know when an idea will come in handy. She tells Vogue how lines from Blank Space came to her months before she started writing the song. “I’ll get these lyric ideas and I’ll jot down a line in a notebook. When I’m writing an album in six months I’ll open up the notebook and pull out these clever lines. I had written those lines over the course of two years and I had just pulled them out when it came time to write the song. ‘I’m a nightmare dressed as a daydream’ – I remember coming up with that seven months before – let’s put that in right before the second chorus.”
. Don’t forget to forgive yourself
“I always have to work on being easier on myself because I overthink things... like when something doesn’t work out you think it’s my fault, or that I shouldn’t have done this or shouldn’t have done that. Overthinking is my greatest adversary. Some days you’re exhausted and some days you’re in a bad mood and that’s okay. I’ve been a little bit better lately at taking it easier on myself and realising when I’m having a really low self-esteem day that’s because of how I’m wired not because everybody hates me. Sometimes you have the best intentions but you make mistakes.”
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