Label: Big Machine Sound/Style: Tuneful and accessible youth-geared country-pop
By Steve Morley
Teenage performers are usually the property of the pop world, only rarely appearing on the country scene where the focus has traditionally been on courting an adult audience. But today’s more pop-oriented country industry is spawning a crop of increasingly younger stars. The youngest is Taylor Swift, who was 16 when her now-triple-platinum debut album was released in 2006. Unlike teenage hitmakers like Billy Gilman and LeAnn Rimes, whose appeal to country fans was based on their unusually mature vocal abilities and material written by established adult songwriters, Swift is a self-contained artist who sounds her age. Her voice is unremarkable but her delivery is confident, and her songwriting buzzes with engaging melodies and the giddy confusion of adolescent infatuation, most of it drawn from first-person experience. Her second album, Fearless, finds the recent graduate still in touch with matters of the high-school heart.
On “You Belong With Me,” a frustrated Swift wonders why her fondness for a male friend whom she finds effortlessly compatible is so easily eclipsed by a temperamental but more popular classmate. (“She wears short skirts/ I wear T-shirts/ She’s cheer captain/ And I’m on the bleachers/ Dreaming about the day when you wake up and find/ That what you’re looking for has been here the whole time/ If you could see that I’m the one who understands you/ Been here all along so why can’t you see/ You belong with me.”) On several tracks, she deals honestly but wisely with romance gone awry, learning—as well as passing along—useful lessons about the hard realities of relationships. On “Forever & Always,” she finds out that such declarations of love are often spoken too hastily, while “White Horse” chronicles the painful realization that her hoped-for storybook ending isn’t going to happen. (“My mistake, I didn’t know/ To be in love you had to fight to have the upper hand/ I had so many dreams about you and me/ Happy endings—well, now I know/ I’m not a princess, this ain’t a fairy tale/ I’m not the one you’ll sweep off her feet, lead her up the stairwell…”)
While her tireless search for romantic bliss might worry conservative parents, Swift models integrity and considerable purity while remaining realistic about the fluttering emotions of most teenage females. On “Fifteen,” which skillfully portrays the rite of passage from middle school to the scary and exciting new world of the ninth grade, she sings knowingly about untested affections. (“When you’re fifteen and somebody tells you they love you/ You’re gonna believe them/ When you’re fifteen and your first kiss makes your head spin ’round/ But in your life you’ll do things/ Greater than dating the boy on the football team/ But I didn’t know that at fifteen.”) The lyric carries a valuable message for young people whose identity and goals are still developing, offering a thoughtful warning about the preciousness of virginity. Swift admits in retrospect that she wasn’t mature enough at that age to choose a lifetime mate, and sadly confides that her best friend “gave everything she had to a boy who changed his mind.”
While Swift keeps her themes as varied as possible, the sameness of her subject matter can wear thin at times, making her work perhaps unsuitable for the steady diet of a mature music fan. Still, her commercial savvy and refreshing transparency result in a broader appeal than most teenage artists could expect to generate. Swift’s music will probably speak loudest to members of her own peer group. But any fan of well-written and smartly produced country-pop will find something to appreciate about Fearless—especially if they can recall being a scared ninth-grader.
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