Surprising decision that changed Taylor Swift's whole life forever
From a Christmas tree farm in Pennsylvania and dreams of being a stockbroker to Nashville and writing songs to deal with the bullies, Taylor Swift’s childhood wasn’t always plain sailing
1989 was a big year in music. Kylie and Jason’s hit the UK top spot, George Michael’s album won a Grammy Award and Madonna caused controversy with her risqué music video. But it was also the year that — on 13th December — Taylor Alison Swift was born to parents Scott, a stockbroker, and Andrea, who worked in marketing.
Growing up on a Christmas tree farm in Pennsylvania with younger brother Austin, Taylor would perform karaoke and sing as much as she could. “She was always singing music when she was 3, 5, 6, 7, years old,” her dad, Scott, has said. “It’s Taylor doing what she likes to do.”
Expecting their daughter to want to succeed in the corporate world, Taylor says her parents chose a deliberately gender-neutral name. “My mom thought it was cool that if you got a business card that said ‘Taylor’ you wouldn’t know if it was a guy or a girl,” she once revealed. “She wanted me to be a business person in a business world.”
Before she decided on music as a career, Taylor wanted to be a stockbroker, admitting, “When I was five. I knew that my dad was a stockbroker but I did not know what a stockbroker was. Yet I walked around telling people: ‘I’m going to be a stockbroker when I grow up.’”
But being musically talented is very much in her blood. Her grandmother Marjorie Finlay was an opera singer and TV personality in the 1950s. Taylor started to sing at local fairs and contests (“I sang every single week for a year and a half until I won,” she’s said) and when she was 11, she sang the national anthem at the Detroit Pistons vs. Philadelphia 76ers game.
She may be a hugely popular star now, but Taylor admits her school days were pretty lonely, saying: “Anything that makes you different in middle school makes you weird. My friends turned into the girls who would stand in the corner and make fun of me.” Having been given a guitar for Christmas, Taylor learned to play (she says the first song she played on the guitar was Sixpence None The Richer’s Kiss Me ) and started to write her own songs.
Heartbreakingly, she used music as a form of therapy when girls at school started to pick on her. “When I picked up the guitar, I could not stop,” she has said. “I would literally play until my fingers bled — my mom had to tape them up, and you can imagine how popular that made me: ‘Look at her fingers, so weird.’”
Refusing to let it get to her and giving us a glimpse into her future writing songs about friendships and fall-outs, she told : “For the first time, I could sit in class and those girls could say anything they wanted about me, because after school I was going to go home and write a song about it.”
When Taylor was 14, she relocated with her family to Hendersonville, Tennessee a suburb of Nashville where they lived in a big house overlooking a lake. The move was made to help the ambitious teen break into the music industry. Taylor started at Hendersonville High School as a freshman where unfortunately, according to one former classmate, her popularity didn’t improve. Jessica McLane has spoken on TikTok about her memories of Taylor at school, saying: “When she first started becoming super successful, most people hated her. Keep in mind, these are her peers, this isn’t just random people on the internet.
“There were not a lot of people in high school who had nice things to say about her ... There were general rumours about her being b***hy. [People would say], “She said this, she said that, she was mean.”’ Thankfully, it wasn’t all bad for Taylor at school. As she sings about in her song Fifteen , on her first day of high school she met her best friend Abigail Anderson. The song lyrics give some insight into what life was like for Taylor in 2003. “You sit in class next to a red-head named Abigail, And soon enough you’re best friends, Laughing at the other girls, Who think they’re so cool, We’ll be out of here as soon as we can.”
She was also a straight-A student and spent some time in class writing songs. Talking about her debut single , she says: “I actually came up with the concept for it in math class. My freshman year.” As Taylor’s career started to take off, she left high school to be home schooled and as she has recalled, did “home school work on the floors at airport terminals” as she travelled around performing.
It’s clear Taylor’s grounded, happy upbringing has been a huge influence on her career. In fact, her family still works closely with her today. “My dad, my mom, and my brother come up with some of the best ideas in my career,” she has said. “I always joke that we’re a small family business.”
Her family has also inspired songs; the song is about her grandmother, Epiphany is about her grandfather Archie Dean and Soon You’ll Get Better is written about Taylor’s mum’s cancer battle. The Best Day is about her mum too (“I wrote this song just compiling these sort of core childhood memories I had of not just her as a mother, but her as a friend,” Taylor has said.)
In 2019, Taylor’s brother Austin showed how close the siblings still are, posting a super cute snap of them as kids on Instagram with the caption: “I have always had a best friend, a role model, and a caring, tireless, dedicated champion in my corner. You have pulled me out of fires and carried me up mountains. The gift of getting to witness you become the wonderful person you are today has been the greatest privilege and honor of my life.”
Behavioural psychologist and relationship coach Jo Hemmings says that this grounded upbringing will have had a lasting impact on Taylor. “Celebrities that tend to succeed or endure are the ones that stay a bit anchored to the time before they were famous,” she tells us. “The fact that Taylor is close to her family and still has a good childhood friend in her life is important. It partly shapes who she is.”
And as we can see, the person Taylor was gradually becoming in those teenage years, was a global superstar…
