Taylor Swift is an American singer-songwriter. She has written or co-written all of her eleven studio albums, and many singles, as well as songs for various soundtracks and other artists. Her music has crossed genre boundaries and spawned multiple chart-topping hits. She has won 23 AMAs, including Artist of the Year in 2018.
Taylor Alison Swift was born on December 13, 1989, in West Reading, Pennsylvania. Her father is a stockbroker, and her mother is a homemaker who previously worked in fund marketing. She began taking singing and acting lessons at age nine, but soon shifted her focus to country music, inspired by Shania Twain and the Dixie Chicks.
By the time she was 14, she had relocated to Nashville, Tennessee, with her family in order to pursue a career as a country music singer. She entered and won a talent competition at the Bluebird Cafe in 2005 and became the youngest artist signed to Big Machine Records, despite her family’s lack of financial means.
In the decade that followed, Swift released four more albums and toured extensively. By the end of her Red Era, she had sold over 100 million tickets worldwide. The era also saw her go head-to-head with two of the biggest streaming services, Spotify and Apple Music, in an effort to improve the way the industry paid artists.
With the release of her fifth album, 2014’s 1989, she re-introduced herself as a pop musician. This new sound excited fans, and the album spent 11 weeks atop the Billboard 200. The record set a number of new records, including the most weeks atop the charts for a female artist in history and the highest sales for an album by a woman in the first week of sale.
On her seventh album, 2021’s Reputation, Taylor continued to deftly traverse country, pop, and adult alternative genres. The “Los Angeles Times” noted that Reputation was a record of exploration and growth, featuring more nuanced relationship issues than its predecessors and proving that pop music didn’t cater exclusively to shorter attention spans. The album debuted at the top of the Billboard charts, and “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” became the longest No. 1 in the survey’s history.
In 2020, Taylor surprised fans with the release of her ninth album, folklore, and its lead single, “willow”. The album featured collaborations with songwriters like Aaron Dessner and Jack Antonoff and incorporated new artists into the folklore universe, such as The National and HAIM. Both folklore and its sister album, evermore, became the first releases to debut at the top of both the Hot 100 and the Billboard 200 simultaneously, a feat that no other artist had accomplished. In the same year, she also became the youngest person to win two Grammys for Song of the Year and Best Country Solo Performance. These wins solidified her place as one of the most versatile and successful musicians in history.
