Taylor Swift in News

Taylor Alison Swift (born December 13, 1989) is an American country music artist who began her career as a teenager. Signed to the independent Big Machine Records label in 2006, she made her debut on the Billboard country charts with the release of her debut single "Tim McGraw". This song, which peaked at #6, was the first of five singles from her self-titled debut, which was released in late 2006 and re-issued in 2007, and has been certified 3× Multi-Platinum by the RIAA. Following "Tim McGraw" were the #2 "Teardrops on My Guitar", the six-week Number One "Our Song", the #3 "Picture to Burn" and another Number One in "Should've Said No". All five singles from her debut were Top 40 hits on the Billboard Hot 100, as was her song "Change" from the AT&T TEAM USA Soundtrack. Her second album, Fearless, was released on November 11, and its lead-off single "Love Story" has become her highest Hot 100 hit.

Taylor Swift was born in Wyomissing, Pennsylvania and lives with her parents, Scott and Andrea, and her brother, Austin,[1] now in Hendersonville, Tennessee. Swift's influences include her grandmother and LeAnn Rimes.[2] Although her grandmother was a professional opera singer,[3] Taylor's tastes always ran more toward country and she developed a love for Patsy Cline and Dolly Parton at an early age.[4] She also credits the Dixie Chicks and Shania Twain for demonstrating how much impact can be made by "stretching boundaries".[5] At the age of ten, Swift began to perform around her home town, Wyomissing, singing at karaoke contests, festivals, and fairs, and also started writing songs. Her first exposure to the music business consisted of recording demo tapes at a studio. At age eleven, Swift made her first trip to Nashville in hopes of obtaining a record deal by handing out a demo tape she had made of her singing along to karaoke songs. She boldly handed this tape to receptionists at every label on Music Row.[2] Swift faced much rejection, not just from record labels, but also from her peers. When asked how she was able to handle such hurtful rejection from record labels, she responded saying that it wasn't nearly as painful as the rejection she received from the kids around her. One of the first songs she wrote, The Outside, was her expression of feeling that rejection. After Swift returned to Pennsylvania, she was asked to sing at the U.S. Open tennis tournament; her rendition of the national anthem completely moved the crowd. Swift signed to a record label at the age of thirteen, but walked away because it "wasn't where she wanted to be."[citation needed]

Swift began to regularly visit Nashville, where, at age twelve, she wrote songs with local songwriters. Eventually, her family decided to move to an outlying Nashville suburb.[6] Taylor Swift performed at Nashville's premier songwriters' café, The Bluebird Café, catching the attention of Scott Borchetta who signed her to his newly-formed record label, Big Machine Records.

Swift plays a Taylor Grand Auditorium acoustic guitar made of koa wood.

Swift's first single, "Tim McGraw", was released to radio in Summer of 2006 and on October 24, 2006, her self-titled album was released. Swift wrote or co-wrote all of the songs on the album, which debuted at #19 on the Billboard 200 and sold more than 61,000 during its first week. It later peaked at #1 at Billboard Top Country Albums and #5 at Billboard 200. It also spent eight consecutive weeks at the top of the Top Country Albums charts, and has since sold over 3 million copies.[7] Swift has surpassed the 20 million mark for music streams on MySpace. She is currently ranked at 15 for the most MySpace visits for all genres of music, and is MySpace's current top-ranking Country artist.[8]

Regarding "Tim McGraw", Swift said, "I wrote the song in my freshman year of high school. I was dating a guy who was about to go off to college. I knew we were going to break up so I started thinking of all the things that I knew would remind him of me. Surprisingly, the first thing that came to mind was that my favorite country artist is Tim McGraw."[9] "Tim McGraw" peaked at #6 on the Billboard Hot Country Songs charts for the week of January 27, 2007. The song's music video set a record by appearing for 30 consecutive weeks on GAC's fan-voted weekly Top 20 music countdown show,[10] and reached number one on CMT's video charts. The video also won Swift an award for Breakthrough Video of the Year at the 2007 CMT Music Awards. Her pursuit of country music stardom was the subject of "GAC Short Cuts", a part-documentary, part-music-video series airing since the summer of 2006 on the country music channel.

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