Taylor Swift

For a while, Taylor thought she would name her debut album A Place In This World. But when the record was released, she had found her artistic identity, balancing diaristic purging with savvy pop craft, chaste romanticism with scolding wit, and amplifying small slights into high drama. She had many occasions to gently correct interviewers who tried to peg her narration as literal reportage.

When pressed about the scenario that inspired her first single, “Tim McGraw,” she redirected: “The song is not about a huge, intense relationship. It’s about an innocent one.” Invoking famous country musician Tim McGraw as the singer of a song that conjured nostalgia was also a very smart use of the contemporary country practice of referencing performers of earlier generations as a way of claiming connection to the genre’s lineage. Taylor wrote “Tim McGraw” in math class during her freshman year, knowing that she and her senior boyfriend, Brandon Borello, would break up at the end of the year when he left for college. Co-writer Liz Rose said Taylor showed up at her job (writing songs for Sony/ATV) after school, “With the idea and the melody. She knew exactly what she wanted”. The nostalgic song describes a summer romance and Taylor’s hope that when Borello “think[s] Tim McGraw” he would “think [her] favorite song” – Tim McGraw’s “Can’t Tell Me Nothin” – and remember her.

For tween and teen girls, Taylor was a defender of feeling deeply and unapologetically. One of the album’s sharpest lines was from “Cold As You,” a parting shot at a callous former love interest: “You come away with a great little story of a mess of a dreamer with the nerve to adore you.”

Taylor penned the autobiographical song “The Outside” as an outlet at age twelve, the year she began writing her own songs. Like many of the other songs she wrote early on, the song describes the unhappiness and loneliness she felt when her love of country music alienated her from her peers.

In “Our Song,” Taylor animated her storytelling with frisky conversational phrasing. She wrote “Our Song” for her freshman year high school talent show with no intentions of including it on the album. She claimed she, “Just knew there was something about it” and chose to include it on “Taylor Swift”. “I wrote it about this guy I was dating, and how we didn’t have a song. So I went ahead and wrote us one.” That was among the album’s sunniest tracks. Beneath her singing, the bright acoustic picking and strumming was goosed by a lightweight, programmed loop, a prescient pop-country update that she achieved with her then-producer Nathan Chapman. “Our Song” is placed at the end of the standard edition of the album due to its closing lyrics, a clever request to “play it again”.