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Taylor Alison Swift (born December 13, 1989) is an American singer-songwriter. A subject of widespread public interest with a vast fanbase, she has influenced the music industry, popular culture and politics through her songwriting, artistry, entrepreneurship, and advocacy. Swift began professional songwriting at age 14. She signed with Big Machine Records in 2005 and achieved prominence as a country pop singer with the albums Taylor Swift (2006) and Fearless (2008). Their singles "Teardrops on My Guitar", "Love Story", and "You Belong with Me" were crossover successes on country and pop radio formats and brought Swift mainstream fame. She experimented with rock and electronic styles on her next albums, Speak Now (2010) and Red (2012), respectively; Red featured her first Billboard Hot 100 number-one single, "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together". Swift recalibrated her image from country to pop with 1989 (2014), a synth-pop album containing the chart-topping songs "Shake It Off", "Blank Space", and "Bad Blood". Media scrutiny inspired the hip-hop-influenced Reputation (2017) and its number-one single "Look What You Made Me Do". After signing with Republic Records in 2018, Swift released the eclectic pop album Lover (2019) and the autobiographical documentary Miss Americana (2020). She explored indie folk styles on the 2020 albums Folklore and Evermore, subdued pop genres on Midnights (2022) and The Tortured Poets Department (2024), and re-recorded four albums subtitled Taylor's Version after a dispute with Big Machine. These albums spawned the number-one songs "Cruel Summer", "Cardigan", "Willow", "Anti-Hero", "Fortnight", "All Too Well", and "Is It Over Now?". Her Eras Tour (2023–2024) and its accompanying concert film became the highest-grossing tour and concert film of all time, respectively. Swift has directed videos and films such as Folklore: The Long Pond Studio Sessions (2020) and All Too Well: The Short Film (2021), and has also acted in films. Swift is one of the world's best-selling artists, with 200 million records sold worldwide as of 2019. She is the most-streamed artist on Spotify, the highest-grossing female touring act, and the first billionaire with music as the main source of income. Seven of her albums have opened with over one million sales in a week. The 2023 Time Person of the Year, Swift has appeared on lists such as Rolling Stone's 100 Greatest Songwriters of All Time, Billboard's Greatest of All Time Artists, and Forbes' World's 100 Most Powerful Women. Her accolades include 14 Grammy Awards, a Primetime Emmy Award, 40 American Music Awards, 39 Billboard Music Awards, and 23 MTV Video Music Awards; she has won the Grammy Award for Album of the Year, the MTV Video Music Award for Video of the Year, and the IFPI Global Recording Artist of the Year a record four times each. Life and career Early life 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, is a former stockbroker for Merrill Lynch; her mother, Andrea Gardner Swift (née Finlay), worked for a time as a mutual fund marketing executive. Her younger brother, Austin, is an actor. Swift's 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's mother is of Scottish and German descent, and her father is of Scottish and English descent with distant Italian ancestry. 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 a 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, Pennsylvania, 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. 2004–2008: Career beginnings and first album 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." Swift became the youngest artist signed by the Sony/ATV Tree publishing house, but left then BMG-owned RCA Records (later bought by Sony Music) at the age of 14 due to the label's lack of care and them "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 M.... Discover the T L Finlay popular books. Find the top 100 most popular T L Finlay books.